How the White House Discovered Television

Coinciding as it did with the partition of Palestine, the drafting of the Marshall Plan, and the birth of the Cold War, President Harry Truman’s speech on October 5, 1947, urging Americans to save wheat made little impression on the history books. And Truman didn’t even mention it in his memoirs. But it began something that shapes American politics to this day: It was the first televised Presidential speech ever.

And wheat was actually a crucially important issue. Truman took to the airwaves because he feared the fragile peace won just two years earlier was about to be lost. Europe, not yet recovered from World War II, now suffered from the cruelty of nature. A glut of rain during the planting season had preceded a drought at harvest time, leaving France and Italy’s grain fields barren and Europe on the brink of famine. Experts estimated that the continent would need at least a hundred million bushels more wheat than the U.S. could supply that year. Truman’s administration, still in the midst of framing the Marshall Plan, knew if he didn’t do something fast his allies might collapse into chaos.

To come up with strategies, Truman appointed a 26-member Citizens Food Committee, headed by the president of Lever Brothers (and future architect of Madison Square Garden and the Kennedy Space Center), Charles Luckman. The committee decided that any rationing in America must be voluntary, and that raising food prices was too painful a solution. After more than a week of round-the-clock work, Luckman joined Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson, and Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman in unveiling the Committee’s plan in a radio and television simulcast.

The President asked farmers to feed their livestock less grain, and distillers to shut down for 60 days. Then he appealed to the American public. Declaring that “the battle to save food in the United States is the battle to save our own prosperity and to save the free countries of Western Europe,” he urged his audience to waste less, eat no meat on Tuesdays and no poultry or eggs on Thursdays, and forgo one slice of bread every day. Mrs. Truman had already instituted that program at the White House, he said, and he had instructed the armed forces to do the same. “Hungry people in other countries look to the United States for help,” he declared. “I know that they will be waiting with hope in their hearts and a fervent prayer on their lips for the response of our people to this program.”

Of course the admonishment to think of the starving children in Paris while eating dinner never really caught on. Two months later, Truman submitted the proposal to Congress that would become the Marshall Plan, codifying a lasting solution for Europe’s recovery. By that time, Luckman had already resigned from his post. According to Time, his “razzle-dazzle promotions had counted for little in actual food savings[,] but [his] noisy rousing of public interest had helped get promises from distillers, bakers, poultrymen and others to cut grain consumption by 100 million bushels.”

Even if it didn’t save Europe, the October 5 broadcast did have a large effect on the free world, just not in a way Truman, or anyone at the time, could have predicted. The TV simulcast was clearly an afterthought for the administration, and Time’s article on the speech didn’t even mention that it had been televised; The New York Times devoted less than a sentence to the fact. It’s impossible to say how many people watched Truman that night, as TV ratings weren’t calculated until 1948, but considering that in 1947 only 14,000 sets were in use in the United States, compared with tens of millions of radios, the news media’s oversight is understandable.

Nevertheless, all Truman’s future addresses were televised, as was his inauguration in 1949. A month after the speech on the food program, the Senate allowed a committee hearing to be televised for the first time, and the networks even broadcast Cabinet meetings starting in 1950.

Truman used television to inform the public about specific problems rather than as an overarching public-relations tool. It’s hard to imagine a President on the eve of a reelection campaign today uttering into the camera the phrase ”our self-denial will serve us in good stead,” as he did in that first speech. But as the first of the television (and last of the radio) Presidents, he entered a relationship that would change the face of the Presidency. A year to the day after his speech on food conservation, he made the first-ever paid political TV appearance by a presidential candidate. And through Eisenhower’s farewell address, the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and the constant news footage from Vietnam that helped sway public opinion against Johnson and the war, and on to the 24-hour news channels’ coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and all the TV news since, the mutual dependence of television and the executive branch has grown ever stronger.

So the next time President Bush and his aides are grilled on a Sunday-morning talk show, they can thank—or blame—Truman and the Citizens Food Committee.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.