Leave It to Beaver

Leave It to Beaver, a television series that ran from 1957 to 1963, in many ways typifies post–World War II media images of white middle-class family life. The show was set in the suburban town of Mayfield and featured the Cleaver family: father Ward (Hugh Beaumont), mother June (Barbara Billingsley), teenage son Wally (Tony Dow), and younger son Theodore, or “Beaver” (Jerry Mathers). Focusing predominantly on the two boys' relationships—with each other, with their father, and with their friends—the show represented and broadcast postwar American ideals concerning boyhood, adolescence, and manhood to a national audience.

At the time the show first aired, the United States was gripped by the anxieties and aspirations growing out of the Cold War. Conventional definitions of American middle-class manhood, grounded since the late nineteenth century in the ideal of the married suburban breadwinner and family man, were reinforced by concerns that the nation was threatened by a variety of “deviant” male beliefs and behaviors—particularly communism, homosexuality, and juvenile delinquency. Many Americans believed that such threats could be counteracted by socializing boys in a setting of “family togetherness” that would encourage appropriate and conformist male behavior. The firm yet affectionate discipline of fathers—whose absence during World War II had been blamed by many for male deviance—was deemed crucial to this process.

[Page 269]Leave It to Beaver—like Father Knows Best, which aired from 1954 to 1963—was devoted to conveying this postwar family ideology. Ward Cleaver, an accountant, is the sole family income earner. His profession suggests the rationality associated with manhood in American culture, and his business suit symbolizes the corporate environment in which he and many middle-class suburban men worked. Yet the show rarely depicts him in his office; instead, the emphasis is on his domestic life. Every episode pivots on the moral problems of boyhood—problems particularly epitomized by Wally's untrustworthy and insincere friend Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond)—and the gentle yet wise discipline Ward applies when Beaver or Wally encounter trouble. June, meanwhile, is a contented housewife and nurturing mother, though only occasionally a disciplinarian or a source of moral wisdom.

Most of Ward's moral lessons convey the value of those traits that postwar Americans deemed essential to healthy boyhood and manhood: hard work, fairness, self-discipline, business acumen, morality, conformity, getting along with others, and positive relationships with girls. For example, episodes such as “Wally's Test” (1960), and “Beaver's Poster” (1961) teach the importance of doing one's own work; “Wally, the Businessman” (1960), “Eddie Quits School” (1962), and “Stocks and Bonds” (1962) examine the pitfalls of business activity, spending, and investing; “Wally's Haircomb” (1959) involves Wally's troubling experimentation with a faddish hairstyle introduced by Eddie; “The Perfect Father” (1958), “Beaver's Hero” (1959), and “Substitute Father” (1961), offer lessons in ideal fatherhood; “Nobody Loves Me” (1962) explores Beaver's desire to fit in; “The Shave” (1958) and “The Pipe” (1958) show that manhood is achieved gradually; and “Wally's Girl Trouble” (1957) and “Party Invitation” (1958) focus on Beaver's and Wally's awkward relationships with girls.

The ultimate lesson of Leave It to Beaver for its insecure national audience was that American life—and American manhood—was firmly grounded in paternal authority, moral principle, corporate business activity, suburban domestic life, and conventional definitions of gender and sexuality. The show went off the air in 1963, as growing numbers of Americans were beginning to question the conformist ideology it represented.

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