Was Charles Kuralt a Modern Alexis de Tocqueville (2008)

Undergraduate: Brooke Ericson

Faculty Advisor: Donald Shaw
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across America and observed the American people and American democracy. He wrote down what he found in his book, Democracy in America, which continues to be studied today. Years later, in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Charles Kuralt traveled America to film segments of his On the Road pieces for CBS. On the Road was a five-to-ten-minute episode series about people across the United States. This study qualitatively analyzes the works of Tocqueville and Kuralt and compares what the two found a century apart from one another. Looking at Tocqueville’s work and Kuralt’s Bicentennial episodes that aired beginning in July 1975 and ending in July 1976, I compared how they both defined democracy. Then I looked at Tocqueville’s work again as a whole, and compared it with available episodes of On the Road from 1967-1969 and 1977-1979 and noted how each placed an emphasis on either individuals or communities. This study asks: Was Charles Kuralt a modern Alexis de Tocqueville? Ultimately, I found that Tocqueville and Kuralt defined America in the same way. On a broader scale, both agreed on the same components that made up democracy in America, which included class distinctions, the American experiment, American laws, American historical figures, the American dream, minorities, and the press. On a more focused scale, Tocqueville and Kuralt both saw individualism on the rise, but emphasized the importance of communities in their works