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Consumer Reports, Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center

Fallout Shelter Fallout

Post contributed by Joshua Larkin Rowley, Reference Archivist, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

The January 1962 issue of Consumer Reports, the flagship publication of the consumer education and advocacy non-profit of the same name, included a much-anticipated article titled “The Fallout Shelter: A review of the facts of nuclear life and the variables that bear on the effectiveness of a shelter.”  Cold War consumers were eager for guidance from a trusted source of product evaluation.  However, Consumer Reports essentially took a pass.  According to the organization, all the variables that might make a shelter effective or ineffective were simply unknowable and unpredictable.  While the organization side-stepped recommending specific shelters, the Technical Department, the unit responsible for creating testing procedures, methods, and reports, retained forwarded letters documenting reader reactions to the article.  For a moment, the fallout shelter article became a flashpoint for the hopes, fears, and anxieties of Cold War citizens.

Front cover of the January 1962 Consumer Reports magazine. The cover is blue and features article titles including "the fallout shelter" and "new compact cars" along with images of several small cars.
Consumer Reports cover, January 1962

Some readers applauded the article as the most objective and thorough review of the facts regarding the effectiveness of fallout shelters.  Others were not so complimentary.  A professor of architecture at the University of Florida and self-described instructor in “Fallout Shelter Analysis,” accused the organization of using the same tactics as cigarette advertisers, “arguing from a conclusion using pseudo-technical jargon.”[1]  Another agreed that Consumer Reports had not “..lived up to its own standards in discharging the awesome responsibility…of giving advice that might mean life or death to large numbers of people.”[2]  Some took an optimistic something-is-better-than-nothing stance.  “You apparently cannot admit that a partial solution is better than no solution at all,” wrote one subscriber.[3]  Yet another reader relays that he is often asked by friends and acquaintances whether he is afraid that the shelter he is currently constructing might not work.  His reply, he shares, is always: “No—My greatest fear has been that it (nuclear war) might happen, and I would be faced with the knowledge that I hadn’t even tried or made the effort.”[4]

Other readers felt the article reinforced their own principled stance concerning nuclear armament.  A letter from a couple from Bellaire, Ohio included their own vision of Civil Defense titled Civilization Defense: A Creed, in which they lay out a list of principled teachings that they plan to instill in their children amid the omnipresent threat of nuclear war which concludes: “This creed is the only shelter I will build for my children.”[5]  A research psychologist at the University of Michigan argued that the greatest threat posed by the fallout shelter fad was not their inadequacy, but their “psychological and political consequences during a time when an attack might still be prevented.”  He goes on to argue that shelter programs are but “a step in the long chain of events” that could actually provoke a nuclear war.  Lynn and Michael Phillips of Berkley, CA, agreed, commending the article’s importance in “preventing people from making the deadly mistake of accepting nuclear war” as a means to rid the world of Communism and survive.  In the mind of the Phillips’s the only way to protect a nation’s people from nuclear war was disarmament.

Typed document on white paper showing "Civilian Deference: A Creed" with the handwritten signature of Milton and Charlotte Levine near the bottom of the page.
Civilization Defense: A Creed, 1962

Consumer Reports was also critical of companies eager to leverage the demand for fallout shelters.  In an article titled “Enter the Survival Merchants,” the magazine characterized the “survival business” as a natural home for “fly-by-night operators, high pressure salesman, and home improvement racketeers” and accused the industry of preying on people’s fear as well as their patriotism.  A letter from an executive at KGS Associates, later to be revealed as a civil defense merchandiser, accused the publication of intentionally setting out to discredit the civil defense industry.  In the case of a nuclear attack, the writer wondered “how fast the Consumer Reports staff…will run for the shelters, eat the food, and drink the water provided by the men they have described as hungry, callous, and even a bit shady.”  Another shelter defender pointedly stated, “your implication that all shelter designers are out to fleece the public is untrue and not up to the high standards I have always looked for in Consumer Reports.”[6] The organization did not let large corporations off the hook either.  General Mills, the processed foods manufacturer, also came under fire for their marketing of Multi-Purpose Food (MPF), a shelf-stable nutritional supplement designed specifically to stock fallout shelters and meant to be mixed with other foods.  Brochures for the product were often displayed alongside fallout shelters at civil defense trade shows, piggybacking on the shelter craze.

Two pages from the Multi-Purpose food brochure. The pamphlet is yellow with red text and features images of canned foods and information about the product.
Multi-Purpose Food brochure, General Mills, September 1961.

Looking back on the controversial issue two years removed from its publication, Consumer Reports staff took time for an LOL moment.  In an internal memo, a staff member noted an article published in the New York Post that day about fallout shelters that cited a local company “…buying up prefabricated fallout shelters for conversion to hot dog stands and cabanas. ‘Swords into plowshares’” he quipped.[7]

 

[1] King Royer to Consumers Union, 12 January 1962.  Consumer Reports. Technical Department Records, Box 54

[2] Jack Hirshleifer to Irving Michelson, Director of Public Service Projects, 15 March 1962, Ibid.

[3] John F. Devaney to Dexter Masters, Director, Consumers Union, 11 January 1962 Ibid.

[4] Thomas McHugh to Consumer Reports, 8 April 1962.  Consumer Reports. Technical Department Records, Box 54.

[5] Charlotte Levine to Consumer Reports, 14 January 1962, Consumer Reports. Technical Department Records, Box 54.

[6] McHugh to Consumer Reports.

[7] Memoranda, 17 July 1963, Consumer Reports. Technical Department, Box 54

Consumer Reports, Featured, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Students and Interns

Color Television on Fire

Post contributed by Blake Beaver, a graduate student intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

A decade-plus institutional battle occurred between United States television networks, set manufacturers, and governmental agencies over implementing a technical color standard for TV. The National Television Standards Committee (NTSC)’s second standard, implemented in 1953, included color, allowing color television to compete with black-and-white in manufactured sets and programming. Finally, in the early 1970s, color television sales overtook those of black-and-white sets, and all three major television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) produced and aired color programs. However, several scares about the safety of color television sets from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s complicated the technology’s hard-won prominence. The radiation levels of color TV sets formed one primary concern. As Susan Murray documents in her history of color television, the panic was “likely exaggerated in its scope and potential dangers,” yet:

It succeeded in bringing to the surface anxieties about the connection between vision problems and television screens, a more general concern over the possibility of radiation leaks from everyday technological objects, a growing mistrust in science toward the decade’s end, and an underlying fear of nuclear war (Murray 2018, 247).

The Rubenstein Library’s recently acquired Consumer Reports Archives shed light on a second safety scare that plagued color television, previously undocumented in Murray and other scholars’ histories: fires.

image showing television set on fire
Product testing for a 19-inch color television set from the Consumer Reports Iconographic materials collection.

 

Relevant manuscripts from the Technical Department include correspondence with parties as diverse as television consumers, set manufacturers, government agencies, and legal firms, in addition to enclosed reports and ephemera like the National Commission on Product Safety’s press release from January 27, 1970, which publicized the color TV fire hazards. These manuscripts extend our understanding of cultural anxieties about color television beyond the radiation problem.

The collection’s first mention of the fire hazard controversy appears in a letter from consumer Frederick P. Schmitt to the Consumers Union on October 16, 1969. Schmitt attached a clipping of a Newsday article, “U.S. Is Checking TV Fire Danger,” published the same day, which reported on a presidential commission to investigate the fire hazards of color TV sets.

Newsday article on color TV fire hazards from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

 

Schmitt complained to the union that the government protected “the alleged culprits” by omitting the manufacturers’ names and inquired whether the union knew of “these potential killers” so he might prevent the “risk” of “danger” and “possibly death” from his color set. Unfortunately, per the response from Monte Florman, Associate Technical Director at the Consumers Union, the presidential commission refused to release information to the union and the public.

The National Commission on Product Safety’s release on the matter advised that “approximately 22 million color TV sets” were in use at the time and provided a staggering statistic about the disproportionate flammability of color television sets compared with their black-and-white counterparts: “a smoke and fire incident ratio” of “about 40 to 1.”

National Commission on Product Safety press release header from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

Although the commission’s press release applauded “the industry for its efforts” to ameliorate the hazards, not all television set manufacturers handled the controversy in this manner. We observe this fact in the collection’s most extensive exchange about the fire controversy, a series of letters from 1970 between consumer Melvyn L. Marks of Silver Springs, Maryland, Sylvania Entertainment Products, and the Consumers Union. Sylvania’s lackluster response to Marks, whose 21LC 28 M set experienced a fire in its “high voltage flyback transformer,” speaks to manufacturers’ inconsistent approach to such a crisis.

Melvyn L. Marks’s letter to Sylvania Entertainment Products from the Consumer Reports Technical Department records.

 

After repeatedly reaching out to Sylvania about their intentions to “correct or pay for correction of these faulty units,” which “other companies have publicized that they will,” Sylvania subjected Marks to the rigamarole of numerous follow-up communications and a comprehensive service history. Marks signs off in a particularly zesty follow-up, “Awaiting your long overdue reply.”

In addition to consumers, insurance companies and their legal representatives communicated with Consumer Reports. In a letter dated June 3, 1970, San Francisco-based attorney Warren Sullivan wrote the union on behalf of his client, Balboa-Newport Insurance Company, seeking the union’s assistance in “[recovering] [a] loss of $11,000, which occurred by reason of a fire to [their] assured’s home” and which they claim was caused by the client’s Sears & Roebuck “colored television set” catching fire or exploding “in the middle of the night while the set was in the ‘turned off’ position.”

These concerns over the flammability of color television sets continued into the mid-1970s. Tragically, some of these fires proved fatal. In 1973, a memo from the newly formed United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), launched a year prior by the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA), announced “a possible fire hazard in 12,000 Zenith 19-inch table model color television sets,” in one instance causing the death of “several members of the family.’

This brief glimpse into an overlooked scandal in U.S. television history is just one example of the diverse research trajectories that the Consumer Reports Archives facilitate. In addition to consumer electronics, the Technical Department records collection includes materials on testing procedures, methods, data, and evaluations for appliances, automobiles, chemicals, foods, public services, special projects, and textiles. The collection is available at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, and the finding aid can be found here.

References

Consumer Product Safety Commission, memorandum. September 13, 1973. Washington D.C. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Melvyn L. Marks to Sylvania Entertainment Productions Division, letter. February 16, 1970. Silver Springs, M.D. Consumer Reports, Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Melvyn L. Marks to Sylvania Entertainment Productions Division, letter. May 18, 1970. Silver Springs, M.D. Consumer Reports, Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Susan Murray. 2018. Bright Signals: A History of Color Television. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

National Commission on Product Safety, press release. “Commission Releases Information on Color TV Hazards.” January 27, 1970. Washington D.C. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Warren Sullivan to Consumer Reports, letter. June 3, 1970. San Francisco, C.A. Consumer Reports. Technical Department records, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.