46 pages • 1 hour read
Rod SerlingThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street
Fiction | Play | YA | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Socio-Historical Context: The McCarthy Era
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” aired in the wake of the Second Red Scare (1940s-1950s), also known as the McCarthy era. Named for Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), McCarthyism was a countersubversive anti-communist movement that swept through the American government. Though the stated aim of McCarthyistic intervention was to protect the United States from the threat of Soviet espionage and American treason, the result was the widespread repression of and persecution of innocent civilians.
Victims of countersubversive anti-communist inquest included entertainers, gay men and lesbians, journalists, academics, and outspoken leftists. The vast majority of these victims were innocent of treason. When one was suspected of Soviet sympathy, disloyalty to the US, or otherwise “unamerican activity,” they might face any number of consequences. These consequences included blacklisting, professional termination, imprisonment, and even execution. It is difficult to pinpoint how many innocent people were affected by the Second Red Scare, but hundreds were imprisoned, and thousands lost their jobs.
Rod Serling was politically outspoken throughout his life and tended toward social progressivism. Along with his antiwar activism and support for racial equality, Serling was also strongly anti-censorship. His political messaging and beliefs hinged on social liberty, making him a natural enemy of the isolationism and social conservatism that motivated McCarthyism.
When one reads “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as an allegory for McCarthyism and the second Red Scare, Steve takes on the cache of Cold War liberalism: a philosophy that opposed both Soviet Communism and McCarthyism. Likewise, Charlie becomes an avatar for countersubversive anti-communism, a philosophy that valued security and aggressive anti-communist action over civil liberties and privacy. In keeping with this allegory, the alien invaders represent “real” Soviet Communists, the true threat Americans leave themselves vulnerable to when they persecute each other.
Cultural Context: Midcentury Broadcast Television
The television was first invented in 1927; however, they were not widely available to the average American household until the 1950s. By 1955, roughly half of American homes had a television set. By 1959 (the year The Twilight Zone debuted), broadcast television was dominated by three major networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Prime time network programming ran daily from 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. The most popular programming at that time included Westerns, sitcoms, dramas, and gameshows; however, The Twilight Zone was poised on the cutting edge of the sci-fi boom of the 1960s. The Twilight Zone typically aired at 10:00 p.m. on Fridays and ran on CBS for five seasons.
The Twilight Zone was not Rod Serling’s first project in the entertainment industry. He began his career in broadcasting at WNYC radio in 1947. This led to a series of writing, directing, and acting positions at various radio studios throughout the 1940s, during which he also attended college. His career in radio began to flag in the early 1950s, so he transitioned to television. His career began to take off in the mid-1950s when he earned critical praise for his screenwriting on shows like Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theatre. However, Serling clashed with the culture of corporate censorship that pervaded 1950s network television, which saw the removal of overt political and social messaging from his scripts. When creating The Twilight Zone, Serling was careful to produce episodes that would be uncontroversial in an attempt to maintain creative control.
Many visual elements in The Twilight Zone were cribbed directly from earlier science fiction films and TV shows. B-roll footage, costumes, and props from Forbidden Planet (1956) were repurposed in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” for example. Another prop from Forbidden Planet that appeared in multiple Twilight Zone episodes is Robby the Robot, a prop that frequently cameoed in sci-fi films and shows throughout the 20th Century.
