This Video of the Month is from the May 18, 1954 broadcast of Calvacade of America, a television show sponsored by the DuPont Company. The ad featured DuPont's president Crawford Greenwalt discussing the company’s research accomplishments in connection with Chemical Progress Week, a nationwide initiative coordinated by the Manufacturing Chemists Association, a trade organization that began in 1872 and currently operates as the American Chemistry Council.
In the three-minute address, Greenewalt speaks directly to the camera from an office -- likely a staged set in a New York studio -- that includes a picture of DuPont founder E.I. du Pont hanging on the wall. He begins by talking about the industrial research at DuPont, started in 1928, that led to the discovery of Nylon. Greenwalt details how this "chemical progress" led to better products for consumers as well as new jobs and businesses for the American worker and entrepreneur.
He concludes his speech by touting the benefits of free enterprise: "As long as American Industry is free to plan for the future - to build and to grow - I am very certain that the progress of the future will far surpass the progress of the past."
On May 19, 1954, The Morning News in Wilmington, Delaware published a front page story under the headline "DuPont Head is Confident of Free America's Future." The article announced that the commercial aired during the previous night’s Calvacade and quoted extensively from Greenwalt's address.
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Kevin J. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at Hagley Museum and Library.