The DuMont Television Network

Allen DuMont & Color Picture Tube

2,594 words

Long ago, there was, believe it or not, a fourth American TV network in addition to the Jewish-owned CBS and NBC, and smaller rival ABC.

The fourth, forgotten, network was the DuMont Television Network, founded by a white television pioneer named Allen B. Du Mont. (His name is variously spelled DuMont and Du Mont, but never Dumont. I’ve used Du Mont for the man and DuMont for the names of his companies.)

The DuMont Network survived precariously from its founding in 1946 until its ultimate demise in 1955.

The racial dynamics of the post-war US, in which Jews rose to dominance over the native white inhabitants, was a major factor in DuMont’s failure, despite Allen Du Mont’s apparent philo-Semitism (a native New Yorker, he employed some Jews in top positions).

Indeed, to grasp the duration of anti-white propaganda to which the American populace has been subjected via the all-pervasive medium of television, check out this propaganda spot [1:09 mins.] from DuMont’s popular Captain Video and His Video Rangers TV show in 1949. Note how the anti-white message is framed in reverse, or “positive” terms.

A careful examination of radio programming and motion picture content from the time of their inception would reveal a similar pattern.

In the Beginning

Allen Du Mont, was born in Brooklyn, New York and lived just outside New York City (in northern New Jersey) his entire life. He became intensely interested in the technology of early radio as a boy, and developed into an accomplished electronics technician, scientist, and businessman. A brilliant inventor, Du Mont was credited with perfecting the cathode-ray tube. His long-lasting tubes ultimately made television broadcasting feasible.

After producing radio tubes at Westinghouse, Du Mont became a vice president at De Forest labs, working with company founder Lee De Forest, the legendary radio engineer and inventor.

When De Forest sold the firm to David Sarnoff’s RCA in 1931, Du Mont quit and founded his own company, New Jersey-based Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, Inc., during the depths of the Great Depression.

37-year-old Allen Du Mont Examines the "Big Bertha" of Cathode-Ray Tubes, 1938

At DeForest, Du Mont had been exposed to the mechanical television system of C. Francis Jenkins, and participated in the first television transmissions from W2XCD in Passaic, New Jersey. But, rejecting mechanical in favor of electronic television, Du Mont turned his attention to improving the cathode-ray tube.

Initially, DuMont Labs built and sold high-quality tubes for use in oscilloscopes, devices for showing waveforms that produce a visual record of an electrical current on a fluorescent screen. Oscilloscopes were used to test electronic equipment.

The cathode-ray tube became a core component in television sets, leading to Du Mont’s involvement in TV manufacturing and network broadcasting.

Pioneer in a Cutthroat Industry

In 1937, DuMont applied for its first permit to build a television station. The next year it began manufacturing television receivers.

In November 1940 DuMont inaugurated its first television station, New York City’s experimental W2XWV (later WABD and WNEW). At the time, the city had only one other TV station. DuMont continued to own and operate its New York station as WABD Channel 5 after WWII. This, plus two stations in Washington, D.C. and Pittsburgh, served as the foundation for a nationwide network with affiliates in most major markets from New York to Los Angeles.

"Are You Ready for Television?" DuMont Labs, 1944

In 1946 DuMont launched the DuMont Television Network. The same year the company and NBC simultaneously aired the first regularly-scheduled television broadcasts, consisting of a few hours of programming three or four nights a week.

Allen Du Mont ultimately created and oversaw three separate businesses: DuMont Laboratories, a television manufacturing business, and the DuMont Television Network.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, such DuMont programs as Captain Video and Cavalcade of Stars—the variety show on which Jackie Gleason introduced The Honeymooners—were notable offerings. The popular Life is Worth Living featured Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a strong anti-Communist and critic of Freudianism. The Ernie Kovacs Show, not well-liked in its day, is now considered a classic by many.

Economic Reasons for DuMont’s Failure

Despite its pioneering role in commercial broadcasting, by 1955 the DuMont network was out of business and its founder and namesake forced to relinquish control of the company he’d spent a quarter century creating.

Historical accounts indicate that the limited supply of advertising dollars and entertainment talent (actors, writers, producers, directors) created an oligopolistic market structure capable of supporting only three television networks.

In addition, the three Jewish networks, unlike DuMont, developed more or less naturally out of pre-existing, solidly-entrenched, massive broadcasting companies created by TV’s predecessor entertainment industry, the Golden Age of Radio.

The industry’s behemoths were CBS, owned by William Paley, and NBC, run by David Sarnoff—both Jews—leaving DuMont and Leonard Goldenson’s ABC to fight for third place.

The Squeeze on TV Set Manufacturing

DuMont Laboratories also manufactured DuMont-brand TV sets, the best receivers money could buy. In fact, television manufacturing long remained the company’s primary profit center.

As one source noted, “Among over 100 manufacturers of television sets, DuMont was highly ranked, providing a high-priced product to a luxury market in the early years of television. Its slogan, ‘First with the Finest in Television,’ reflected a commitment to quality.”

The company’s print ads from the 1950s declared, “Du Mont laboratories build television’s finest instruments . . . the Du Mont receivers. The new Du Mont television receivers, in hand-crafted cabinets, incorporate the latest Du Mont electronic advances from the laboratories that introduced television to America.”

Norman Rockwell ad for DuMont

But by the mid-1950s DuMont’s highly successful manufacturing line—DuMont TV sets were considered the Cadillacs of the industry—declined as a source of revenue as the company succumbed to high-volume, low-profit sets produced by competitors like GE, RCA, and Westinghouse, with which DuMont could not successfully compete.

Racial Dynamics

Du Mont, a born scientist, was deeply absorbed in the technical aspects of television broadcasting and receiver (TV set) design, development, and manufacture, but displayed virtually no interest at all in programming, which he left entirely to others.

It is very strange that whites are so often completely oblivious to or uninterested in such crucial matters, displaying no evident desire to manipulate or control others, but instead focus their fascination upon the minutiae, mechanics, or technical aspects of things, while Jews instantly and tenaciously seize upon any characteristic that will enable them to dominate others.

For it is programming that shapes, and ultimately controls, the mass mind and society. Of course, programming never exists in isolation from the technological, business, political, racial, and legal infrastructure that makes it possible.

From a psychological and behavioral perspective, Allen Du Mont was far more reserved and private than the Jewish executives at other networks, which doubtless hobbled him in the cutthroat TV industry.

He was also too trusting, as a network chronicler notes:

Many friends and colleagues described Allen Du Mont as gentle and naïve, suggesting that these qualities may have hindered the entrepreneur, especially in dealing with his business partners at Paramount Pictures. “If anything, his problem was trusting people and taking them at their word,” said his daughter Stelle.”He gave his word and it was always good, and he expected other people to be the same, and they’re not.” (David Weinstein, The Forgotten Network: DuMont and the Birth of American Television [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004], p. 5)

While not all whites are as honest as the day is long, it is true that as a group they tend to display traits similar to Du Mont’s, whereas Jews more closely resemble Du Mont’s network competitors. Moreover, Jews follow a dual moral code: one set of rules for themselves, and another for us. Governments and elites follow suit.

This creates a grim dilemma not only for white businessmen, but for mainstream politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and white nationalists as well.

Arabs and Muslims are nowhere near as brutal and violent as Jews. But Jewish animosity, self-centeredness, injustice, and recalcitrance inevitably drives all but the most determined and unyielding from the field. Non-Jews who exhibit fairness, justice, or honesty are brutally and unceremoniously stomped into a bloody pulp.

As a consequence, there is probably no “nice” way for whites to assert their right to survive. Jews, utterly self-absorbed, will never permit free discussion, association, or peaceful democratic change. It is not in their nature.

That is why morally unscrupulous, ruthless, and frequently dishonest characters like Adolf Hitler, George Lincoln Rockwell, and William Pierce are the most likely to succeed if anyone does.

Jews choose, through careful selection and rejection and rewards and punishments, the personnel of government, academia, and the media. But they also choose the character and tactics of their foes.

Any who are “nice,” fair, trusting, naïve, or attempt to live by the rules are mercilessly crushed by the hate-filled “children of G-d.” Eventually men come along who simply face the fact that the rules are not being obeyed and never will be obeyed, that justice is not done and never will be done, that the truth does not matter and never will matter—and engage the enemy on his own terms.

Unfortunately, that is the only hand whites have been dealt—”To Be, or Not to Be:”

That was the question faced by the Rhodesians, and they did not have the strength of character to choose to be and then to accept all of the implications of that choice. They did not want not to be, but they could not accept what the choice to be entailed, and so now they will perish. The country they and their forefathers worked and sacrificed for will fall into the hands of creatures such as [Nicholas] Hoogstraten [a ruthless Jew] and [Robert] Mugabe [Rhodesia’s Negro dictator], who chose to be, and who accepted all of the implications of that choice. (William L. Pierce, American Dissident Voices, April 29, 2000. Audio here.)

I devoutly wish that it were not so, but, as John Adams observed in defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials:  “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

It did not matter that Allen Du Mont harbored (apparently) no animus against Jews or other non-whites. He was crushed anyway, in part because he was white.

Du Mont’s ethnic odyssey paralleled Lee De Forest‘s (p. 12) in radio and Philo Farnsworth‘s in television. Secret anti-white animus and distrust, plus absolute refusal to share power, played a major role in sealing the fate of all three men.

The demise of the DuMont Network was ultimately caused by a stab in the back from its Hollywood partner, Paramount Pictures, and key adverse decisions by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC. An Amazon.com reviewer of Weinstein’s book stated,

The two major networks, NBC and CBS, had powerful lobbyists who would walk right into the offices of the FCC or the halls of Congress and unashamedly dictate regulations or rulings or legislation that openly favored NBC and CBS, while making it difficult for ABC and impossible for DuMont to expand. ABC survived by forging strong ties to Hollywood studios, but an earlier alliance between DuMont and Paramount was nothing but complete disaster for DuMont.

In 1953 Goldenson’s ABC merged with United Paramount Theaters (not to be confused with DuMont’s problematic partner Paramount Pictures), and the resulting infusion of cash revitalized the rival network. DuMont, already losing ground to CBS and NBC, was further hamstrung by ABC’s resurgence.

It was at this point that Leonard Goldenson approached Allen Du Mont and his Jewish factotum Ted Bergmann to propose a merger—in effect, a takeover of DuMont by ABC—so that the two networks could more successfully compete against CBS and NBC.

Goldenson offered to pay $5 million dollars, acquire all of DuMont’s network commitments, and use the name ABC-DuMont for at least five years in order to provide advertising for DuMont’s set manufacturing business.

With Allen Du Mont’s approval, Bergmann worked out a deal for ABC to acquire the network, but DuMont’s Hollywood shareholder, Paramount Pictures, vetoed it.

The economic pressure on DuMont ratcheted up enormously, precipitating a crisis. As two broadcast historians noted,

Paramount [Pictures] staged a coup d’etat in August, 1955, and at last took complete control of DuMont. By teaming up with the [Wall Street] investment firm of Loeb & Rhodes (another major DuMont stockholder), Paramount obtained a working majority of stockholders and instituted immediate changes. Dr. Allen DuMont was kicked upstairs to the meaningless position of chairman of the board, and Bernard Goodwin (a Paramount man) was installed as president. Soon thereafter, DuMont announced that it no longer considered itself a national television network.

DuMont executive Ted Bergmann recalled,

When all of this was going on, I remember sitting in [Dr. DuMont’s] study in his house, just the two of us. It was all coming apart at that point. We were having a drink before dinner, and he started to sob and said, ‘I can’t let them take my company away from me. I can’t let them do this.’ Then he recovered his composure, but they did take it from him.

The new controllers spun off DuMont’s television stations into a separate entity, DuMont Broadcasting Corporation. In 1958 Jewish media mogul John Kluge purchased the firm, renaming it Metromedia. In 1986, Kluge was named America’s richest man by Forbes magazine.

That was the year Kluge sold Metromedia to Rupert Murdoch, who used Metromedia’s stations as the nucleus for what would become the Fox Broadcasting Co., the first new American network since DuMont’s demise three decades previously.

DuMont’s demise triggered a 68% rise in advertising revenues at ABC the year DuMont went out of business.

DuMont’s television manufacturing business was sold to Emerson in 1958, and DuMont Laboratories merged with Fairchild Camera and Instrument in 1960. Some TV sets and other products bearing DuMont’s name continued to be manufactured by Emerson and Fairchild into the 1970s.

Dr. Allen B. Du Mont served as group general manager and senior technical consultant at Fairchild until his death in 1965.

The demise of the DuMont Network and the concurrent rise of ABC established once and for all the CBS-NBC-ABC television oligopoly that ruled the United States for the next thirty years.

The Forgotten Network

Today, DuMont truly is the “forgotten network.”

In the 1940s and ’50s, prior to the advent of videotape, the only way of preserving television programs was by means of kinescope recordings. Kinescopes were made by placing a motion picture camera in front of a television monitor and recording the image off the screen while the program aired.

The fuzzy, grainy, distorted films so created were then shipped to TV affiliates in cities and locales outside the reach of the original station’s antenna, which in the early days was typically located in New York City, where most programming originated. In addition, kinescopes were retained for archival purposes.

Many DuMont shows were originally preserved on kinescopes. These kinescopes were stored in a warehouse until the 1970s. Reportedly, so little value was given to the films that the stored kinescopes were eventually loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay. Although nearly the entire DuMont film archive was thereby destroyed, an estimated 400 kinescopes did survive, some of which have been released on DVD.

Though now long-forgotten, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the name DuMont was synonymous with the new medium of television.