MACARTHUR DAY IN CHICAGO

MACARTHUR DAY IN CHICAGO

The ticker-tape reception given to General Douglas MacArthur on his return to the USA in April 1951 was an opportunity to revive the custom of honoring returning heroes, last practiced six years before when other military leaders back from World War II were given enthusiastic welcomes by a population still jubilant over their victories. Times had changed. American troops in Korea, after a forced retreat from advanced positions near the Chinese border, had managed to organize an effective defense near the thirty-eighth parallel, the originally agreed-upon boundary between South and North Korea. For several months, the two armies had been facing each other in an apparent stalemate, leaving Americans divided over the wisdom of Truman’s policy to fight a limited war. MacArthur from his position as supreme commander in the Far East had, on

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several occasions, publicly spoken out in harsh criticism against presidential policy.

It is against this background that we need to understand the rush by the mayor of Chicago, along with those of other cities, big and small, to extend an invitation for a hero’s welcome. There were obvious political overtones to the general’s triumphal return. In the two weeks between the dismissal and the reception in Chicago, MacArthur dominated the news. Statements of support and expressions of public indignation at the treatment meted out to him were prominent. Our own open-ended study of MacArthur Day (Lang and Lang, 1953) was designed above all as a first-hand exploration of outbursts described by some as bordering on hysteria. We used some thirty-one observers, and two persons monitored the TV coverage to supplement observations made on the streets.

Our first, and perhaps most dramatic, finding was that MacArthur Day as experienced by participants differed from MacArthur Day as it appeared to those who watched the live coverage on television. This finding was entirely serendipitous. Our study had not been planned as a quasi-experimental comparison of a sample of participants with a control group of television viewers limited to vicarious participation. We had included the home screen only because we wanted the fullest picture. Using the reports to seek the reasons for the unanticipated contrast between the two perspectives came only as an afterthought. Our first hint that the television perspective gave a less than authentic view of reality came from a telephone conversation right after the event between an observer and one of the television monitors. It was sustained and sharpened by systematic content analysis of all observer reports and of that section of the audio tapes of the television available to us. (There were as yet no VCRs, and our incomplete audio tapes were borrowed.)

Our analysis led us to identify three factors in the television coverage responsible for the creation of an image of the event which was profoundly different from that of the people in the crowds lining the streets of Chicago. These factors were: the consistent pointing of cameras toward the most spectacular, dramatic, and “interesting” aspects of the welcome; a commentary that raised expectations even when ostensibly nothing was happening; and “reciprocal effects” in the form of crowd responses to the television cameras. The televised spectacle, as seen from the perspective of mobile cameras and roving

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reporters, stood in sharp contrast to the more mundane experience of those lining the streets. They had a long wait with little to do. Reaction to MacArthur, when he finally showed up, was remarkably restrained.

Tabulation of “overheards” and conversations with observers showed us that a plurality of attenders had been looking forward to something wild, even mildly threatening. These allusions, taken together with those that emphasized spectacular aspects of the event, made up well over half of the remarks relevant to our assessment of why people had come. A still more encompassing tabulation of every suggestion in the records, including badges and behavioral cues, about what had brought out the crowds, yielded the following rank order: interest in seeing a celebrity like MacArthur turned out to have been the prime attraction with “interest in the spectacle” a close second. Only a minority of the statements coded as evidence pointed to such other motives as “rendering homage to MacArthur personally” or “support of his political cause.”

That observers no less than spectators were reacting to expectations derived from the media build-up, is evident from information elicited before the event. Both groups had been more or less primed by the press to expect something dramatic, and so drama it had to be, at least for television, even if the reality did not quite live up to the billing. This inference was backed up by interviews with TV producers. The welcome was depicted almost entirely in terms of unifying patriotic rather than potentially divisive symbols. The coverage steered clear of any reference to the political controversy that was coming to a head. Expressions of dissent, such as a critical banner that greeted the parade as it passed near the campus of the University of Chicago, were passed over lightly. Nothing was allowed to mar the occasion. But given the background of controversy, the picture of the public response conveyed by the coverage, intentionally or not, left an impression that the public had rallied behind MacArthur against the President who had dismissed him.

It is hard to exaggerate the prominence that the press had given MacArthur in the short two-week interim between word of the abrupt dismissal and Chicago’s red-carpet welcome, thereby establishing the framework for the interpretation of the day’s events. Content analysis of the three major Chicago dailies revealed that preparations for MacArthur Day, together with reports of the tumultuous crowds that

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had turned out in other cities, enjoyed nearly uninterrupted front- page attention during the entire period. Newspapers were also filled with expressions of support for MacArthur in his confrontation with the President and of indignation that he should have been fired quite so unceremoniously.

Although these and other media-built expectations remained unfulfilled, we later learned from other, partly anecdotal, sources that some of the disappointment experienced by spectators on the streets was compensated when they were made aware that they had been present at an event recognized by the media as extraordinary. No matter how much this distorts their actual experience, the media image survives in the collective memory, reinforced by the occasional news story commemorating the dismissal on one of its anniversaries. Of these we have two clippings.

The inferences we drew from mass observation about the temper of the time belie the picture presented by television. The media coverage, with tacit assistance from a temporarily inarticulate opposition, had produced a “landslide effect,” an impression of a massive turning-out to support the general against the President, who was deliberately lying low for a time. In fact, there had been a mass exodus from the city by employees given a half-holiday; rush hour had been moved up, as shown by statistics from the local transportation authority.

Our interpretation is consistent with the way that MacArthur quickly “faded away” from the political scene (like an “old soldier,” as he himself had predicted). It also receives some support from the polls (Gallup, 1972).