ing points of its CBS rival. Cole later noted that his summer program was the top-rated show in New York City, and that it was eighth in the Los Angeles area."
The insurmountable problem for Cole, however, was his failure to attract a national sponsor. Despite improved popularity, with no advertiser willing to buy the series, NBC was compelled to sell the time slot to the Singer Sewing Machine Company for The Californians, an adult western which premiered in the fall.
In defense of NBC, the network tried to salvage the program. It had sustained the series throughout the summer, and beginning September 17, it carried the half-hour Nat King Cole Show on Tuesday evenings at 7:30 P.M. (EST). Now the show was offered as a cooperatively sponsored feature. By this arrangement a local business, or a national advertiser wanting only single-market exposure, could purchase the show in a given city. Thus, Regal beer sponsored the program in New Orleans; Coca-Cola paid for it in Houston; in San Francisco its underwriter was Italian Swiss Colony wine; Rheingold beer handled it in Hartford and New York City; and in Los Angeles it had two sponsors, Gallo wine and Colgate toothpaste. Still, the program attracted only thirty sponsors nationwide.
As far as the network was concerned, the cooperative arrangement was not as profitable as having a single national underwriter. During the summer NBC had sustained the series in seventy-six cities. With a low number of co-op advertisers in the fall, the network demanded that the show be rescheduled in January to a less expensive time slot—Saturdays at 7:00 P.M. This move, however, was unacceptable to Cole. Given the day and time (6:00 P.M. in the Midwest and 5:00 P.M. in some areas), a time when "most people are eating or shopping," Cole accepted the cancellation of his series. The last telecast of The Nat King Cole Show was on December 17, 1957.
Nat Cole’s was not a failure. For fifty-nine consecutive weeks it appeared on NBC. During that span, the network acted responsibly toward the singer. Unlike Robeson's assessment of the network, Cole praised NBC for maintaining "democratic and wise public relations" in backing his efforts. According to Cole, his cancellation by NBC was a function of TV reality: "They wanted me on the network; they wanted to keep me. But they had to shift me around because I didn't have a network sponsor and shows with single, network sponsors get preferential treatment."
Cole, however, did name a culprit in his television demise. The focus of his animosity was the advertising industry which, he claimed, never really tried to sell his program to a national account. For a man with a reputation for reserve and gentility, he was vitriolic when he wrote in Ebony that "Madison Avenue, the center of the advertising industry, and their big clients didn't want their products associated with Negroes." Cole asserted that he never found a sponsor because "Madison Avenue said I couldn't be sold, that no national advertiser would take a chance on offending Southerners."
Ironically, experience with television led him to a position remarkably similar to that of Robeson, the leftist activist who approved of the classless Soviet Union and its Marxian social and economic arrangement. "It's not the people in the South who create racial problems," Cole argued, "it's the people who govern the South." According to him, most Southerners "are fine people. But those who govern isolate the people by advocating a rigid policy of discrimination; whether the people want it or not, they are not allowed to participate in mixed audiences because of their laws."
As Cole saw it, bigotry was purposely nurtured by an influential minority, "those who govern and those who incite others through organizations such as the White Citizens Council. Significantly, he dismissed most white Southern bigots as small-minded people who worried about lesser matters such as "the mixing of the races." But he attacked "the big men" who exploited the situation.
In Cole's quasi-Marxian analysis, "the big men" were those "who cont