I do not assume the right of the authors of Red Channels to smear and defame people. Who are they to say what the American people shall read or hear or see? This is the very dictatorship which America professes to despise.
Shirley Graham (musician, writer, civil rights activist)1
On August 27, 1950, American actress Jean Muir picked up a cake on her way to the premiere of the new televised version of the popular radio sitcom The Aldrich Family on NBC. The cake was meant to be a surprise for the cast and crew of the television series, a celebration of Muir’s comeback after a decade devoted to being a wife and mother. Muir stowed the cake beneath her dressing table and joined the set for a final rehearsal before the live taping at 7.30 p.m. The rehearsal went smoothly and the seasoned cast returned to their dressing rooms for a short break. In an unexpected turn of events, they were immediately called back to the set, where a nervous young assistant producer informed them that he had an announcement to make. “There can’t be any questions afterwards,” he added, “I’ve been instructed to ask you not to talk about it.” He continued, “The announcement is this: the show tonight has been cancelled.”2
Muir was stunned and confused. As she later recalled, “Television was still a relatively new medium, but it had a long enough history, and I knew enough about it for me to be aware that the cancellation of a show, and particularly only an hour before airtime, was utterly unheard-of.” Despite her growing sense of unease, Muir insisted on sharing the cake that she had had lettered, “Long Live Henry Aldrich.” She then returned home, only learning much later that evening that the cancellation had “something to do with that Red Channels outfit.” New York Times journalist Jack Gould told Muir’s husband that anti-communists had made a handful of telephone calls and sent two telegrams: “They’ve whipped up some sort of protest on your appearance.”3
According to Muir, this incident marked “the beginning of the infamous television blacklist” launched by what she described as “misguided, or foolish, or vicious people who called themselves ‘patriots.’” Muir’s name was among those of forty-one women identified in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television as “members or sympathizers” of the Communist Party. The authors of Red Channels were self-described anti-communists and patriots, few in number, but—as Muir put it—making up “for their lack of numerical strength through paranoiac zeal and funds they were able to obtain first from their richer cohorts and then from the very industry they were attempting to control.”4 The only way to clear their names, those accused would learn as the blacklist in broadcasting unfolded, lay in seeking out the editors of the book and, as musician, writer, and civil rights activist Shirley Graham (also listed in the pages of Red Channels) put it, “groveling in the dust before them.”5
This book recounts what happened to this small but potentially powerful group of women, many poised to move into influential positions in broadcasting in the 1950s. I refer to them in the pages that follow as the Broadcast 41 in order to draw attention to how—in a powerful backlash against progressives in media—they were excluded from the industry because of their inclusion in a blacklist engineered by Cold War anti-communists. These women had worked hard to get to where they were by the late 1940s. As we will see, they had ideas that could have transformed the medium. In 1950, they were denied the means to do so. As a similar backlash against women unfolds today, in industries that have long remained hostile to their presence, the stories of the Broadcast 41 have much to tell us about resistance, repression, and resilience.
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We are living in a changing world. Our teacher was talking to us about all the different cultures—new ideas are really old ones made new. You’d be surprised, Uncle David. There are many places in the world where the men stay at home and the women are the bread-winners. It’s just not new with us.
Gertrude Berg (actress, director, producer, writer)6
American television had plenty to say about women and work in the 1950s, even if women were not allowed to say much for themselves. Late in the decade, the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour—the successor to the iconic sitcom I Love Lucy—featured an episode titled “Lucy Wants a Career.”7 In a formula familiar to fans of the show, actress Lucille Ball pouts her frustration with the dull, daily routine of being a housewife, hatching one of her trademark, screwball schemes to shake things up. After convincing neighbor Ethel Mertz to be her housekeeper, Lucy hops the train to Manhattan to interview for a “Girl Friday” position with character actor Paul Douglas, the host of a fictional “Early Bird Show.”
Lucy arrives at Douglas’ office, only to be quickly surrounded by a bevy of younger, far more glamorous starlets. In a brilliant display of the physical comedy Ball was known for, she tries to shorten her hemline, lower her neckline, and primp her hair. Dissatisfied with the manic effects of these efforts, she takes another tack, whispering to each of the women in turn that Paul Douglas is a sexual harasser—or “wolf”—of such predatory proportions that even his middle-aged, bun-haired secretary has to keep him at bay with a letter-opener. Overhearing this, Douglas demands that Lucy leave his office immediately, but the sponsor of the program overrules him. “The one thing a housewife likes to look at is another housewife,” the sponsor exclaims, and hires Lucy on the spot.
Naturally, Lucy soon learns that she cannot have it all. Having a career means sacrifices and Lucy finds that she “doesn’t have much time to spend with her family.” When son Little Ricky calls Ethel “Mommy,” Lucy bursts into tears, wailing to Ethel, “things aren’t working out the way I planned. I miss my family!” Desi agrees to help her get out of her contract and the couple celebrate. On her way to bed and “a pill” that will allow her “to sleep until noon,” she exclaims: “Oh, and isn’t it wonderful! Now I can cook the meals and do the dishes and dust the house!”
At roughly the same time that “Lucy Wants a Career” aired, blacklisted film producer and screenwriter Adrian Scott, writing under the pseudonym Richard Sanville, was shopping a more unusual script to television producers. The script, variously titled Ellie, Pay-Day, or The Wayward Wife, recounts the discontent of a young woman who suspects her emotionally distant husband Al of cheating on her. Also fed up with cooking the meals and doing the dishes and dusting the house, Ellie packs her bags and leaves Al and their two children to fend for themselves, determined to make her way in the paid economy. She stops first at the unemployment office, where she discovers that her experience as a wife and mother counts for nothing because “The government doesn’t recognize housewife as a category.”8 The short-suffering Ellie chastises the unemployment office clerk, “The government better get wise, that’s all! It’s hard work being wife and mother! If they don’t know that in Washington, someone oughta tell ’em!”9 In the meantime, Al tries to hire someone to cover Ellie’s household duties. Much to his chagrin, he discovers that the long hours, poor working conditions, and low pay are unappealing to workers with options.
After learning that Al was not having an affair, Ellie finally returns home on her own terms: 75 dollars a week (a discounted price, she tells Al, because they are her children, too) and two nights off so she can take courses at the local college. Al agrees to one additional demand: he must pay into social security so she is eligible for benefits. The couple fully reconcile after Al loses his job and, as Ellie puts it, he finally understands what it is like to be on the bottom “with somebody sittin’ on you.”10
These two conflicting stories about women’s domestic roles highlight the divergent post-World War II beliefs about gender and class that are at the heart of this book (other stories described in the pages that follow more obviously foreground race and nation). These beliefs appeared in the stories postwar American culture told about curious norms of social behavior in which what was good for the gander, so to speak, was distinctly not good for the goose. In the years following the end of World War II, when relations of gender, race, and nation were in flux, political forces in the United States competed for control over the stories the new medium of television would feature. The stakes were high: the struggle involved nothing less than the ability to define and represent America and Americanism for millions of viewers. The Americanism that resulted from this conflict reflected not so much the spontaneous desires of the millions who watched the new media as it did the common sense of groups of men who had historically dominated American politics and culture. Their Americanism expressed a worldview shaped by their powerful interests and then delivered to audiences in a manner that suggested that these images were what viewers had been demanding all along.
This book does not assume that gender alone determines perspective, although it acknowledges gender as a powerful shaper of standpoint. While both were written by white men, for example, “Lucy Wants a Career” and Ellie reflected vastly different points of view, reflective of the very different experiences, beliefs, and values of their writers, and the political aims these writers advanced. Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, the screenwriting team who shared credit for the script for “Lucy Wants a Career,” established themselves during the first decade of television and continued to write scripts for sitcoms, variety shows, and prime-time dramas for decades. Writers like them mastered formulae and perspectives featuring women in subordinate relationships to men. People of color—when they wrote parts for them at all—appeared in roles subservient to white people. Writers who succeeded in television either agreed with anti-communist beliefs about race and gender, or learned not to rock any boats, instead reproducing images and stereotypes undisturbing to viewers who found anti-racist images distasteful. Men (and a few women) taught these formulae to new generations of writers, producers, and directors. As for women, these writers spoke about them, but they did not speak to them, and their scripts betrayed their lack of knowledge about women’s everyday lives. What middle-class housewife with small children, after all, takes a pill that makes her sleep until noon?
The perspectives that successful television writers learned to voice in the 1950s embraced white male fantasies about family life, where women uncomplainingly raised children, managed households, and volunteered in their communities. They did all this with grace and alacrity during the day. At night, they catered to their husbands’ social and sexual needs, with fresh energy and ready smiles. In the world that appeared in most family sitcoms until the 1970s, no one suspected that Margaret Anderson’s obsessive cleaning might be a symptom of a problem that had no name, as Betty Friedan was to put it less than a decade later. Instead, entertainment programming on television presented a world in which white people lived in a redlined landscape populated by white people like themselves, in leafy suburbs from which all the tensions simmering around them had been deleted.
Ellie shared elements of this 1950s vision, but the script was shaped by screenwriter and film producer Adrian Scott’s own experiences as a single parent, responsible for raising a son with serious mental health issues, which increased his awareness of the backbreaking nature of caring for other human beings. Scott was a member of a writing team as well, but with his wife, Joan LaCour Scott. Citing “the distant sounds of revolt … emanating from this oppressed majority” of women, Scott understood how much perspective mattered. In a letter to his agent, Scott remarked on the importance of perspective: “I don’t know whom you’ll be talking to at Warner’s—I assume a man—who is likely to be less sympathetic than a woman to this subject.” He told his agent not to emphasize the “wildly radical aspects of this subject matter,” but instead focus on the possibility that “such a program might steal audiences” from other, less intelligent programs. Scott, who had been blacklisted by anti-communists because of his political beliefs, shopped this script to producers for years, with no success. In 1960, he told gray-listed director Joseph Losey that he had withdrawn Ellie from the market, but would “continue to prepare projects, Ellie included, for some amiable change in the climate.”11 Ellie was never produced, although nearly thirty years later, actress and writer Roseanne Barr fought networks, advertisers, and other writers to create a sitcom that raised similar concerns.
However much I Love Lucy and the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour were unique in co-starring an immigrant who spoke accented English, the content of these shows reflected the perspective of the era’s Cold War manhood, or what this book refers to as G-Man masculinity, the form of American masculinity popularized by anti-communists in the first half of the twentieth century. Popularized by acolytes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an arm of the state that played a decisive role in the blacklist, G-Man masculinity advocated for the return of women to the domestic sphere, where they could devote themselves to their natural role in society: cooking the meals, doing the dishes, and dusting the house. Women who did not obey this mandate they considered unnatural, perennially conflicted, and bitterly unfulfilled. Lucy fit their bill. Ellie did not.
Why did scripted television on the new medium of American television eschew the drama and complexity of Ellie’s point of view, instead embracing the universalizing point of view of G-Man masculinity? As a rule, when this question comes up, it gets answered in ways that make what appeared on American television screens seem the inevitable outcome of historical forces.12 Whether viewed as the result of a commercial media system or the reflection of a postwar consensus about American values, the “containment culture” that appeared on American television, and its procession of prime-time nuclear families and Cold War genres like Westerns and police procedurals, is understood to have been a straightforward reflection of postwar American desires.13 But it takes a real stretch of the imagination to believe that “Lucy Wants a Career” reflected actress and producer Lucille Ball’s perspective. After all, Ball was one half of the husband-and-wife team that produced her show; she was an ambitious entrepreneur who had made I Love Lucy a success, despite studios’ initial reluctance to gamble on it. She went on to become a high-powered studio head. Ball was not a housewife or stay-at-home mother or, for that matter, the kind of woman who wanted nothing more than to cook the meals and do the dishes and dust the house. But she knew what it took to survive within the stereotypes comprising television’s Cold War narratives of American identity and she worked within those constraints.
Rather than looking at programs that, like I Love Lucy, were actually produced, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist studies television’s origins by directing attention to what was deliberately and strategically excluded from the new medium by the political forces converging on it in the late 1940s. Looking behind and beyond the bland homogeneity of 1950s television families, it details the repressive war over popular culture that accompanied the new medium’s birth. This war was initiated by conservatives in the United States who called themselves anti-communists, but who were arch-white supremacists, defenders of segregation and sexism, vehemently opposed to immigration. In the late 1940s, these political forces set out to cleanse (their word) the airwaves of what they defined as subversive influences. The resultant struggle yoked the power of the Cold War security state to the retrenchment of racial and gender norms unsettled by World War II. The struggle over how America defines and represents itself via massively influential new media continues today as the G-Man masculinity born of the Cold War era reasserts itself amidst contemporary new-media systems.
The sets of narratives that resulted from the blacklist influenced American television content for many decades. B-movie actor and liberal turned anti-communist crusader Ronald Reagan played a key role in attacks on progressives, smearing the reputations of Hollywood rivals in order to undermine their careers and work. From the early 1960s onward, Reagan used the phrase family values to attack groups that did not conform to anti-communists’ preferred version of Americanism: welfare moms, people of color, immigrants, students, and his progressive critics. During his 1986 State of the Union address, Reagan told his listeners, “despite the pressures of our modern world, family and community remain the moral core of our society, guardians of our values and hopes for the future. Family and community are the costars of this great American comeback.”14 Presumably having been made unpopular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the traditional American family, according to conservative politicians like Reagan, was staging a comeback in the 1980s. Respect for white male authority and conformance to its directives, conservatives argued, resulted in a cornucopia of economic and social blessings. Family values would “let us make America great again.” Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, American conservatives spoke reverentially about “family values” whenever they wanted to condemn those who did not agree with anti-communist values.
Curiously, when white men like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Donald Trump spoke about American families, or when media felt that they needed some visual example for a piece on family values, they turned not to images of their own or other actual families, since these were often hardly bastions of the family values they prescribed for the economically disadvantaged. Instead, politicians, pundits, and media used images of television families from the 1950s to anchor their words. In 1992, NPR’s Morning Edition hinted at the fictive nature of this practice: the phrase family values “conjures up images of ‘Leave it to Beaver’ or ‘Father Knows Best,’ families featured in TV shows from the 1950s.”15 An article in Business Week on family values included a still from Father Knows Best, featuring the show’s patriarch Jim Anderson in the loving embrace of wife Margaret and their progeny, Bud, Princess, and Kitten.16
During a segment of CBS’s The Osgood File, commentator Charles Osgood facilely blurred the boundaries between television and reality, declaring that, “Family values are back in the United States and not just on the 1950s sitcoms running on cable TV. The number of nuclear-style families, the kind with a man, his wife, and their kids, has been growing all decade, according to the Population Reference Bureau … But Ozzie and Harriet might not feel so at home anymore.” Osgood continued, “On a typical day back in 1950s TV land, June Cleaver of ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and Margaret Anderson of ‘Father Knows Best’ would send the kids off to school and their husbands off to work and then the ladies would get down to serious housekeeping and talking on the phone.”17 In the hands of politicians and commentators, images like those invoked by Osgood functioned as yardsticks against which a dystopian present was measured: a present in which single mothers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people; people of color; and immigrants threatened the sanctity of the family values that had once been enshrined on television screens and, presumably, in the nation.
Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign (“Let’s Make America Great Again”) and Donald J. Trump’s 2016 revival (“Make America Great Again”) drew on sexist, isolationist, and white supremacist visions of the past rooted in the television narratives anti-communists had created in the 1950s. Decades later, journalist Seth Rosenfeld documented Reagan’s intimate relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and Reagan’s role as an FBI informant, a gig that began during the Hollywood blacklist. Reality show host and real estate developer Donald Trump was groomed by prominent anti-communist Joseph McCarthy’s henchman, lawyer Roy Cohn. Well versed in the art of bullying and bravado wielded by anti-communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, in 2016, Trump reenergized a base that shared his devotion to projecting and protecting legacies of white supremacy and masculine domination.
As the contemporary climate once again becomes more aggressively hostile toward women, people of color, immigrants, and the poor, the links between the white supremacy and misogyny that appeared on American television in the 1950s and their contemporary manifestations have become more evident. After the 2016 election, for example, Ku Klux Klan member James Zarth mourned the betrayal of white America in a conversation with New Yorker journalist Charles Bethea. The terms he used to describe the moral decline of the nation underscore the enduring influence of the anti-communist narratives that originated in the 1950s and the inspiration these provide today for those following in the footsteps of G-Man masculinity. “‘I noticed something was going wrong in America decades ago,’ Zarth told me. He mentioned the TV shows ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘The Brady Bunch,’ and ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ‘Usually, those shows had a Christian moral,’ he said. ‘But now that the Jews own the majority of the media stations, they’re showing things that are against God’s law, like race-mixing and homosexuality.’”18
With its attacks on “race-mixing and homosexuality,” and its anti-Semitism, Zarth’s statement could have been lifted directly from anti-communist media of the 1950s (although the 1950s version would have blamed these on the contaminating influence of communism). His words offer an alarming reminder of how the stories shaped by the anti-communist blacklist created a tradition that for generations has nurtured the perspective of people who reviled all those things they considered to be against God’s law: civil rights, Judaism, feminism, homosexuality, socialism, peace, and equality.
This book also shows how the anti-communist perspective was generated, funded, and promoted by powerful corporate and governmental entities. What conservative billionaires like the Koch Brothers or the Mercer family are up to in the contemporary moment can be difficult to discern (although courageous and dogged journalists and historians like Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean have done much to document the plans the radical right has for America, as well as the progress they have made on these).19 The extent to which contemporary critics and dissenting cultural producers are being monitored by institutions like the FBI, the National Security Administration, and others is equally hard to assess, although recent reports that the FBI continues to monitor “black identity extremists” speaks to the terrible tradition of state surveillance and harassment of black progressives that began in the first decades of the twentieth century.20
The anti-government libertarianism of Trump’s base has poisonous, twisted roots in the bigotry of the anti-communist movement. Evidence from the blacklist era helps us piece together the alliances among wealthy capitalists eager to pour billions of dollars into anti-communist causes, powerful government forces like the FBI, and the private security industry that emerged in the years after World War II. Studying this era provides grim evidence of the lengths to which white supremacists and their allies have been willing to go to maintain control over representations of race and nation.
By restoring to view the blacklist that anti-communists used to cleanse the television industry of viewpoints they found distasteful, subversive, and thus un-American, this book dwells, with much anxiety, on the possible futures of this past in a contemporary world of fake news, alternative facts, and white supremacist calls for free, hate-filled, and violent speech. Those sharing progressive dreams of social and economic equality—who wish to appeal to the best in publics rather than the worst—must make no mistake: this political regime intends nothing less than the reimposition of ideologies their role models created in the 1950s. Like the anti-communists of the blacklist era, what has been alternately described as white nationalism, the alt-right, or, simply, the Base, fears the power of an emergent progressive resistance. In the service of a similarly violent and hateful rhetoric, they intend to use the banner of Americanism to police, disparage, and ultimately suppress the views of all who disagree.
Anti-communist suppression of progressive perspectives in the 1950s, however, is only one part of the picture. The Broadcast 41 reclaims and represents the story of a group of women who were smeared, harassed by the FBI and the privatized security forces of the anti-communist movement, and rendered historically and politically invisible by the blacklist. But rather than narrating a story only of struggle and defeat, this book also recounts what might have been for women and people of color who worked in front of, and behind, the cameras that recorded televised entertainment programs. Their stories of resistance and resilience emphasize that television narratives that reduced white women to smiling wraiths milling around suburban homes were not inevitable in the U.S. Nor were representations that censored images of people of color, working-class people, and immigrants the only possible future for American television. As the chapters that follow reveal, there were many possible futures for television in the 1940s and 1950s, and not merely the one that won out.
How we remember the past matters, especially when those memories are based on industrial products like television programs. What happened in the television industry in 1950 is a critical moment in the history of American media, a moment when television was struggling to find its footing. It is also a textbook example of how political forces used a new medium to impose their viewpoints, in the process encouraging a country to swiftly betray its citizenry and fostering conditions that allowed restrictive and unjust images and hostile climates for women and people of color to flourish across media for decades. As a resurgent wave of G-Man masculinity sweeps American media and politics, we must listen carefully to what this past can tell us.