Cohn saw us to the door of his office and as we were leaving, he decided to cap the hour gaily by telling a joke. “Say, listen,” he said, “Did you hear this one? Jessel told it to me. You’ll get a belly out of it. Listen. These two little Jews get into a rowboat, see—” That was as far as he got. My wife turned away abruptly and disappeared. “What’s a matter with her?” asked Cohn. “Nothing,” I said. “She just doesn’t like that kind of comedy.” “What kind of comedy? Jew comedy?” “That’s right.” “I don’t get it,” said Cohn. “She’s not even Jewish.” “That’s right.” “So why should she care?”
Garson Kanin (writer)1
Sometime in the mid-1940s, the Broadcast 41’s Ruth Gordon (Figure 2.1) walked out of a meeting with Columbia Pictures’ president Harry Cohn, refusing to listen to his joke. Cohn’s question—“why should she care?”—gives a sense of how puzzling Gordon’s response was to purveyors of anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist humor. Gordon left a meeting with a powerful Hollywood mogul to discuss a script because she understood that a joke that began with the words “These two little Jews” could only end in the disparagement and disrespect of Jewish people, regardless of whether the listeners and tellers were themselves Jewish. With Hitler’s genocide of Jews very much on the minds of progressives, Gordon simply could not bear to listen. Since she was not going to change Cohn’s mind—the man was notorious for such slurs—she did the one thing she could do: she left.
The Broadcast 41 shared similar forms of refusal and resistance when it came to media images that denigrated groups of people. Anti-communists, in contrast, maintained a narrow notion of what they called Americanism, one rooted in an unshakeable conviction of their superiority. For them, Americans were white and conventionally male or female. Americans were born in the U.S. and if they had ever been poor in the past, they no longer were because they had seized hold of the American Dream. In opposition to these forms of thinking, the Broadcast 41 refused to accept the belief that whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity meant that some groups of people were biologically superior to others, and thus that others could be blamed by virtue of race, ethnicity, gender, or economic class for being disadvantaged. Instead of an Americanism that saw in all those considered other to it cause for hostility and fear, the Broadcast 41’s sensibilities were shaped by what blacklisted actress Gale Sondergaard described as a love of “the complexity of our people, their complex freedoms.”2
They were complex people themselves, this generation of women who lived in question marks and scrutinized the values and norms of the worlds around them. How they were drawn to complexity rather than the white supremacist certainties of anti-communists is key to understanding the threat they posed to the new medium of television in the middle of the twentieth century. It would be easy to say that they looked at the world differently because they were women who came of age in a society that made certain that they knew their subordinate place in it. But gender, as we will see, was only one part of their stories. Being assigned the gender identity of female at birth did not automatically lead to respecting a range of perspectives other than one’s own and advocating for these. After all, conservative white women like Elizabeth Dilling, Hester McCullough, Ayn Rand, and others who followed in their footsteps wholeheartedly embraced the racist and nativist logic of anti-communism, serving as foot soldiers in Cold War conflicts over gender, race, and migration.
Of course, the Broadcast 41 had either experienced discrimination in their personal histories or were members of racial, ethnic, or economic groups that had suffered at the hands of white supremacy. Progressive women often had direct experiences of multiple forms of discrimination: as workers, women of color, Jewish women, immigrants, lesbians, and people who loved and worked alongside members of these groups. These experiences shaped their perspectives, causing them to be alienated from the stories anti-communists told about America, because those stories so pointedly excluded people like them, as well as people they loved.
Perhaps the sense of simply not appearing in any meaningful way in either American political life or the stories that American culture was telling about real Americans was what drew the Broadcast 41 and other women to media industries in the years between the wars. They recognized the vast divide between their everyday lives and what they were allowed to write and perform about those lives. They realized that changing the narrator of a story changes what that story tells us. Tell the story from the point of view of the dog and perhaps carrying the master’s slippers around in their mouth did not look so appealing. Tell the story of domestic service from the point of view of the maid and not the woman who paid her and white family life was far less idyllic than sitcoms like Beulah and Hazel let on.3 Tell the story of the FBI from the perspective of deportees and African Americans, and the G-Man looked more like a predator than a protector.
This chapter describes the forces that led the Broadcast 41 to question the totalitarian belief that the story of America had a single narrator, perched godlike above the messy business of living, and that there were simple solutions (be they capitalist or communist) for the world’s complex problems. They questioned and dissented, even within their own progressive circles. There was much that progressive women did not agree on in the uncertain days of the 1930s and 1940s. Many enjoyed advantages unavailable to others and took these for granted. Although private and public histories of exclusion disposed them to identify not with the centers of power but with those who were excluded from them, their experiences of the world were not interchangeable.
In order to get to where they were in media industries, the Broadcast 41 had to be immensely competitive survivors. In the creative ferment of the early days of television, these survivors saw new and potent opportunities to speak for themselves and thus to defy misrepresentations and stereotypes. The forces that impelled them toward defiance rather than capitulation—the forces that shaped their perspectives and the stories they wanted to tell through literature, radio, film, dance, music, and television—were intensely personal, professional, and political.
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“No son, those cabs won’t carry colored folks. We got to go outside and wait till a colored cab comes.” That was my introduction to Washington.
Lena Horne (singer, actress)4
My grandfather said [Frederick] Douglass had a superb voice and stage presence, but small humor.… [He] cited a Republican rally, in the seventies perhaps, where a white orator, after the fashion of the time, told several very humorous “darky stories.” When he was finished, the tall Douglass, with his leonine mane, was introduced. He said, “Those stories were funny, very funny, but I felt each of them to be a foot pressing upon my mother’s grave.”
Lloyd Lewis (biographer, in a review of Shirley Graham’s There Once Was a Slave)5
The Broadcast 41 knew that they were living in singular times. Most were born in the first two turbulent decades of the twentieth century. A few outliers like Mady Christians and Hilda Vaughn (both born in 1892) and Madeline Lee Gilford (born in 1923) bookended the group. Despite some differences in age, they shared sensibilities born of a crisis-prone era that had called into question many conventional convictions about American identity.
Progressive women realized that they were living through historic changes, particularly in terms of gender and race. The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote in 1920. Their generation of women remembered what it was like to be prevented from voting. They were daughters and granddaughters of women who had mobilized for women’s right to vote, like Lena Horne’s grandmother. Despite the suffrage, the black women among them continued to live in a country where African Americans were still prevented from voting. Disenfranchisement was fresh in the minds of all these women; the right to vote new and far from universal. All shared the sense, as author Vera Caspary put it in an interview toward the end of her life, that “This has been the century of the woman, and I know myself to have been a part of the revolution.”6
But the right to vote was only one of the many changes in women’s lives, less influential perhaps than others. Birth rates had declined precipitously between 1910 and 1945; the average age of marriage for women increased; and women’s educational levels were on the rise. These changes made women’s lives markedly better than those of the generation that had preceded them. Because of these changes, the Broadcast 41 could see how very different their lives were from those of their mothers’ generation. Gertrude Berg described the ceaseless labor that characterized her mother’s life in her autobiography:
My mother was divided into three parts. Or, even worse, she was three people—a wife, a worker, and a mother. I’m a wife, I’m a mother, and I’m also a worker but at least I have washing machines—one for the dishes and one for the clothes. To be a wife and a mother is a pleasure—to be a worker around the house I can do without. You want to know why? Because it never stops! If it’s not the dishes, it’s the beds, after the beds it’s the floors, and then the windows, then the furniture, then the clothes. And when you stop it’s only to rest up so you can start all over again in the morning. If that sounds like complaining, it is.7
Actress Madeline Lee said that her mother was “an early feminist” who was determined that her daughters would “have an education and careers so they wouldn’t end up as housewives whose only life was in the kitchen,” with its endless drudgery.8
But as Berg’s description of her mother’s labors emphasizes, the Broadcast 41’s thinking about gender was profoundly influenced by the class-consciousness of their era. For some, this consciousness stemmed from personal experiences of deprivation and class struggle. Many grew up in poor families, finding work in entertainment industries as child laborers to supplement meager family incomes. Madeline Lee (years later listed in Red Channels along with musician Hazel Scott) recalled that when she took voice lessons, the rehearsal pianist was none other than the eleven-year-old Scott.9 Gypsy Rose Lee (née Rose Louise Hovick) began performing with her sister June in vaudeville at the age of four; actress Pert Kelton (the first actress to play the role of Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners before being fired because of the blacklist) worked steadily from the age of three. Like Ruth Gordon, they came “from hard-working people” and it never occurred to them not to work.10
Because of the disastrous consequences of the 1929 stock market crash, even the most privileged among the Broadcast 41 were aware of the country’s pervasive economic inequalities. Writer Dorothy Parker, raised in affluence on the upper West Side of Manhattan, attributed the origins of her class-consciousness to an exchange with her “rich aunt—a horrible woman”: “I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shoveling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over my shoulder, said, ‘Now isn’t it nice there’s this blizzard. All those men have work.’ And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.”11
Vera Caspary began her life in similarly affluent circumstances, but when her father’s attempt to establish a department store ended in bankruptcy, her family’s economic status changed overnight. She spent her adolescence torn between poles of despair. On one hand, her mother and sister indulged in “self-pity and subterfuge” as a result of their diminished circumstances but thought that work was beneath them. On the other hand, her father experienced considerable guilt “because he could not provide the luxuries to which his women were entitled.”12
Experiences like these imbued this generation of progressive women with a class-consciousness that anti-communism helped eliminate from popular culture. Throughout her long career, Caspary remained a trenchant critic of romances because the genre treated women as “golden” creatures, “heaped about with costly and useless things that prove a woman has captured a man and he is willing to give his life to her adornment.” Capitalism, Caspary maintained, sold these fantasies to women “every day, on celluloid and airwaves and coated paper, and it makes wealthier the procurers of permanent wave lotions, furs and silks, percale sheets, nylon, motor cars, cleaning tissues, moving pictures and laundry soap.”13
Where anti-communists’ strain of populism viewed education as the playground of elites, most of the Broadcast 41 grew up in communities that valued culture and education. Anti-communists regarded education with equal measures of misgiving and contempt. Intellectuals were elitists, in their minds, who did not know the value of a day’s work. Worse still, education corrupted the purity of American youth, causing them to question authority and disrespect their elders, who unquestionably knew better about everything. Anti-communist crusader Elizabeth Dilling left the University of Chicago, resentful for the remainder of her life that “Red” educators had caused her to question her certainties about American culture and history. Fearful of losing control over their children and young adults, insecure in the belief that their ideas could stand up to questioning, and defensive in the face of challenges to their authority, anti-communists had good reason to worry that exposure to progressive ideas might make people question anti-communists’ version of Americanism.
In contrast to anti-communists’ homespun anti-intellectualism, many of the Broadcast 41 were raised in communities of artists and intellectuals. Actress Meg Mundy’s mother was Australian opera singer Clytie Hyne and her father, British cellist John Mundy. Actress Uta Hagen’s father founded the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, while Gale and Hester Sondergaard’s father was a professor of agriculture at the University of Minnesota.14 Judy Holliday’s uncle was noted Jewish-American writer Joseph Gollomb, her mother taught piano in New York City, and her father was a journalist for the Yiddish-language press. Actress Aline MacMahon’s father edited Munsey’s Magazine.15 Their communities embraced culture and learning as essential elements of citizenship, rather than despising them.
Even households that enjoyed substantially less privilege valued education. Education was the means by which their children could avoid being “condemned to work in the needle trades and sweatshops,” as Madeline Lee’s parents put it.16 The Reverend David Graham’s household prized literacy: he read the novels of Charles Dickens and The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), aloud to his children. The young Shirley Graham encountered some of the country’s most prominent intellectuals in her childhood home.
Encouraged by their communities of origin, those of the Broadcast 41 who could afford to do so eagerly took advantage of new educational opportunities for women. Graham graduated from Oberlin and later took graduate courses at Yale and New York University, writing part of a dissertation on the Gullah people (descendants of West Africans who settled in the low-country region of South Carolina and Georgia). Radio children’s show host Ireene Wicker attended the University of Illinois, patrician actress and labor activist Anne Revere (a descendant of American patriot Paul Revere) went to Wellesley, actress Aline MacMahon graduated from Barnard, Hellman from New York University, and Hilda Vaughn from Vassar. Betty Todd studied for three years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later at Columbia University.
Despite often ambivalent experiences of an educational system in which institutionalized racism and sexism abounded, the Broadcast 41 passionately believed in the ideals of public education, sharing utopian beliefs about its democratic potential and devoting considerable energies throughout their lives to expanding access to education. Shirley Graham was educated in “mixed schools” in segregated cities like Colorado Springs and Seattle (where black history was suppressed) and “separate schools” in the south (where black teachers taught black history).17 That contrast instilled in her a lifelong commitment to literacy and education. In addition to her biographical fiction for young adults, Graham and her husband W.E.B. Du Bois supported the Communist Party’s Jefferson School of Social Science before it was forced by the U.S. government to close its doors in 1956. After the blacklist, dancer Maria Margarita Guadalupe Teresa Estella Castilla Bolado y O’Donnell (or Margo, as she was known on stage) co-founded and built Plaza de la Raza (Place of the People), a cultural center for arts and education in East Los Angeles.
The Broadcast 41’s perspectives were further shaped by one of the worst anti-immigrant backlashes in U.S. history, a legacy which subsequent anti-communists periodically revived. They were immigrants and the children of immigrants, whose experiences of migration and the backlash against immigrants that led to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 gave them unique insights into what anti-communists really meant by Americanism. Fredi Washington fled the violence of the American South during the Great Migration, an experience as formative as those of people who migrated across oceans. News commentator and writer Lisa Sergio was forced to leave her native Italy in 1937 because of fascism. Mady Christians (Austria), Uta Hagen (Germany), concert pianist Ray Lev (Russia), Margo (Mexico), actress Meg Mundy (England), actress Minerva Pious (Russia), musician Hazel Scott (Trinidad), and Margaret Webster (England) understood historical events and politics through international lenses. Others grew up in immigrant or diasporic communities, maintaining long-lasting attachments to war-torn countries of origin. Stella Adler, Vera Caspary, Judy Holliday, and Madeline Lee were children and grandchildren of immigrants and participants in ethnic cultures that kept memories of migration alive through vaudeville and the Yiddish theater and press.
Their experiences of dislocation and nativist hostility showed them that the language of the melting pot was a ruse of power, extended when immigrants provided cheap labor but revoked during times of crisis, when nativism proved politically expedient and anti-communists required scapegoats for broader structural problems. These experiences further disposed the Broadcast 41 to sympathize with and respect the experiences of other outcasts, recognizing that the language of 100 percent Americanism was meant to exclude them all.
Given their backgrounds, it made sense that the Broadcast 41 were perhaps most passionate in their commitment to civil rights. Many of them were raised in families and communities where discussions of civil rights were part of the air children breathed. Lena Horne’s grandmother, Cora Calhoun, was her political role model. Calhoun had been “active in the Urban League and the NAACP, the Suffragette movement, and all kinds of social-work activity.”18 Horne’s first media appearance was as a two-year-old in the pages of the NAACP’s Branch Bulletin.19 “The part of me,” Horne wrote, “that responds to causes or to injustices, or issues fighting statements on all kinds of issues, that part of me is the creation of my proud, activist grandmother, who never seemed to be afraid of anything.”20
Vera Caspary inherited her anti-racist politics from a family member as well. Her father had been raised in an abolitionist family in Wisconsin. During her childhood in Chicago, anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her husband, Judge Ferdinand Barnett, moved into the second unit of their double house, the first African Americans to move into their Chicago neighborhood.21 Caspary’s father stood up to his white neighbors when they tried to force the Barnetts to move. Nearly fifty years later, his daughter Vera followed in his footsteps, resisting racist neighbors who tried to drive Lena Horne and her children from their neighborhood on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.22
The work of anti-racist resistance was rough and inconsistent on the part of white women, then as now. On one hand, the Popular Front’s trenchant analysis of capitalism’s failures as an economic system and the links between economic exploitation and white supremacy in the U.S. provided a powerful lens through which white women and men began to understand racism. Progressive writers frequently voiced this connection, as Vera Caspary put it, in the context of “the rise of Hitler in Germany, the stories of concentration camps, persecution of Jews, the aggressions of Mussolini, starvation persisting in the United States, union organizers thrown into prison, radicals manhandled by sheriffs’ deputies, [and] poor people and Negroes deprived of justice.”23
Still, Jewish women like Caspary sometimes conflated their struggles with those of African Americans, not fully cognizant of the advantages they enjoyed by virtue of their own whiteness. In order to succeed professionally, they were able to conceal their ethnic origins in workplaces that valued whiteness and Christianity. They often adopted, or were forced to adopt, pseudonyms to do just this: Eli Strouse’s daughter became Hilda Vaughn, Hilda Vaughn, ironically naming herself after a New Orleans claiming race in which all the horses were for sale; Shaindel Kalish took the stage name of Ann Shepherd; Judith Tuvim became Judy Holliday; and Louise Riekes disguised her Orthodox roots by taking the name Louise Fitch.24 These were terrible and humiliating experiences, but they did not prevent these women from escaping other, even more destructive forms of discrimination.
In the families they grew up in, the schools they attended, and the theaters, stages, and studio lots where they performed, the Broadcast 41 participated in vibrant conversations about class, race, national identity, and—to a lesser degree—gender. But one aspect of their lives was not up for discussion: their sexualities. Few of them spoke openly about their sexualities, even in letters and memoirs, a silence that reflects American culture’s toxic blend of homophobic and sexist attitudes toward women who desired other women or did not understand themselves to be women in the first place. The Communist Party criticized racism and capitalism, but sexism and homophobia were rampant in the movements associated with the Popular Front. Feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker, for example, remembered “an older comrade” who years later confided in her that in the early 1950s, “she had been instructed by the Party leadership to question women in the Party about their sexuality.” Those who admitted to having had “a homosexual liaison” were asked to resign from the Party or face expulsion.25 While anti-communism may have forced gay male New Yorkers into hiding, as historian George Chauncey says, for lesbians and those who may have identified outside the gender binary, the combined forces of misogyny, homophobia, and heteronormativity meant that being open about their sexualities was never an option in the first place.26
Despite the widespread condemnation of gay, queer, and non-conforming lives across the political spectrum and the tremendous risks queer women incurred, the perspectives of lesbian, bisexual, and other women who did not conform to the sexual and gender identities of their day shaped the Broadcast 41’s work in subtle and coded ways. Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour recounted the fatal consequences of acknowledging same-sex desire. Theater owner Lee Shubert acknowledged the very real danger of even writing about lesbianism, warning Hellman when the play opened in 1934 that its content “could land us all in jail.”27 Vera Caspary’s disdain for heteronormative expectations was a constant theme in the dozens of novels she wrote, many of which recounted intimate relationships among “girls who had read Freud and Havelock Ellis” and who were, in her words, “the end of the explorer generation, a decade or so after the discovery that sex was also for women.”28 Caspary’s scathing depictions of heterosexuality and her contempt for romance (combined with the fact that she did not marry until she was in her forties) fueled rumors that she was a lesbian.
Despite the dangers, the Broadcast 41 moved in communities that tolerated (even if they did not accept) a broader range of sexual identities and practices than other spheres of American society. Many progressives dwelt in “a very bohemian, eclectic atmosphere,” in which, as Gertrude Berg’s daughter recalled, “Jews, non-Jews, Blacks, Whites, gays, non-gays—all kinds of people were in and out.”29 Judy Holliday had a relationship with a woman in the late 1930s when she was working in theater because “there was no stigma attached to homosexual or bisexual behavior” and, as Holliday’s biographer observes, “a goodly portion of the first ladies and gentlemen of the American and English stage were known to be (in the slang of the period) ‘double-gaited.’”30 In the more liberal environs of theater, lesbians, bisexuals, and progressives who—a generation or two later—might identify as queer or transgender found small but vital communities of support and resistance.
Lesbian and bisexual women built yet-to-be-documented support networks in broadcasting, of which influential radio show host Mary Margaret McBride was a main hub. McBride, who was targeted by the blacklisting publication CounterAttack but not listed in Red Channels, lived with her business manager and longtime companion, Stella Karn.31 McBride was close friends with Ann Batchelder, Good Housekeeping’s food editor.32 Although the FBI spread rumors that radio news host and Broadcast 41 member Lisa Sergio had been Benito Mussolini’s mistress, Sergio was intimately involved with Batchelder. Batchelder adopted Sergio in 1944, a strategy that gay men and lesbians used in the decades before marriage equality to gain access to some of the legal protections enjoyed by married heterosexuals.33
Just as McBride was central to lesbian communities in broadcasting, so blacklisted director Margaret (Peggy) Webster participated in queer networks in theater. In 1933, Webster cast actress Mady Christians—whom she described as “blonde, distinguished, and opulent”—as Queen Gertrude in her production of Hamlet, and the two became close friends and likely lovers.34 Webster co-founded the American Repertory Theater in 1946 with another former lover, Eva Le Gallienne, and lesbian producer Cheryl Crawford.
Working-class, middle-class, black, white, Latina, Jewish, and queer progressive women working in the whirling occupations that later coalesced into television in the 1950s tried to reflect the complexities of American identities in their work. Unlike Communists, the Broadcast 41 were not concerned with class or economic exploitation alone, although unlike the generations that followed, even the most privileged among them found economic oppression impossible to ignore. Nor did they consider economic oppression in isolation from race. Black left feminists like Shirley Graham, Fredi Washington (who had spent part of her childhood in a convent school for orphaned black and Native American children in Pennsylvania), and Claudia Jones, author of “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”, imprisoned and then deported in 1955 for her political beliefs, powerfully articulated the relationship between race and class in their social criticism and creative work alike.35 Indeed, black women pushed all progressives to recognize that the experiences of black women under capitalism were singular in intensity, governed by forces of white supremacy and misogyny.36
At the same time, black women remained more attuned to the nuances of identity categories. They were suspicious of being lumped into a single category of class or race, understanding how these categories were used to stereotype and scapegoat them. Shirley Graham’s membership in the Communist Party and criticism of the black middle class distanced her from other African Americans of her era. Lena Horne credited Trinidadian-born Hazel Scott with teaching her “a new sense of pride” in her race and told Ebony magazine that she was “fighting for a better world … where her daughter Gail will never be called ‘N----r’ and where all races can live in dignity.”37 But Horne also observed that Scott had “a superiority that can be infuriating to an American Negro,” because she came from a place where “no one ever taught the Negroes they were inferior.”38
Light-skinned women of color like Horne, Scott, and Fredi Washington were caught between rocks and hard places when it came to their work in entertainment. On one hand, media industries eroticized them because their skin color allowed white audiences to understand them “in ways that upheld the racial status quo.” On the other hand, they faced criticism from African American communities critical of Hollywood’s fascination with “white mulattoes” and the black actresses who played them.39 Literary scholar Shane Vogel describes how early in her career, Horne fought against this bind, seeking “to transcend the obligations of racial representation—imposed by both white audiences and black uplift elites—even as she actively fought for civil rights.”40 For years after playing the character of Peola (a light-skinned woman who passed as white) in Imitation of Life (1934), Washington had to defend herself against charges that she had also tried to pass as a white woman in her everyday life.41
In 1945, the Broadcast 41’s embrace of the multifaceted lives of Americans formed part of a great river of resistance that threatened to erode the narrow channels of anti-communist Americanism. Anti-communists bitterly fought progressive attempts to expand rights and democracy for groups they considered naturally subordinate to them, fearing the changes that would follow. The Broadcast 41 embraced the possibilities of postwar social change. Without the changes that had happened during the years between the two World Wars, they would not have achieved their still-precarious positions within media industries. Additional social changes held out the promise of advances in equality they wholeheartedly believed in. Their personal histories had shown them the importance and value of progressive struggles. Their struggles to represent the presence, values, and desires of diverse Americans as workers in those industries deepened their commitment to initiating and leading change.
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In short, the modern woman, if she wants both marriage and a career, must compromise a bit with the one to preserve the other. But compromise, heaven knows, is nothing new to her. For generations she has had to practise it, and surely she hasn’t forgotten how, even though she travels new paths and engages in battles of her own.
Mary Margaret McBride (radio show host, writer)42
Marilyn [Monroe] would have been a terrible problem, though I am crazy about her. The studio is beginning to view her as Marat must have regarded the lethally-poised Charlotte Corday. Of course, Marilyn can’t help her behavior. She is always in terror. Not so different from you and me, only much prettier!
Dorothy Parker (writer)43
Of the generation of women that came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, literary scholar Lisa Yaszek wrote, they “were living the dream that first-wave feminists had worked so hard to secure for themselves and their daughters.” In return for this hard work, they “expected the same rights and privileges as American men.”44 After the end of World War II, these daughters became more insistent in demanding rights due to them as citizens and workers. An FBI informant reported that at a luncheon to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1946, Uta Hagen gave what the Bureau deemed a subversive talk from “the viewpoint of the professional woman, stressing that they are not living in a world of their own but rather are more than unusually interested in what is going on in the world.” Hagen then proceeded to cite “instances of the great work which the women of the theater have done toward a liberal and more progressive attitude in public thinking.”45
This great work that women were doing, as Hagen put it, came at a cost. Even before the blacklist took hold of the industry, the Broadcast 41 had all encountered glass ceilings of varying heights. Veterans of stage and screen, experience had shown them that successful careers in theater, music, and film demanded sacrifices of women workers that were not expected of men, while at the same time presenting uniquely dangerous obstacles. As single parents and primary caregivers to their children, Ruth Gordon, Lena Horne, Gypsy Rose Lee, and others understood all too well the nature of these sacrifices. Life on stage and in the studio alike was not easily combined with raising children. The industry, moreover, viewed women with children as nuisances and financial liabilities. For those who wanted to raise their children outside the glare of Hollywood, commuting to New York City from Los Angeles was disruptive and exhausting.
Women who did not wish to have children, or who wanted to limit the number they had, faced risks associated with newfound sexual and economic freedoms, particularly in an era when birth control and abortion were illegal. Ruth Gordon recalled that it was hard to figure out what to do when a woman got pregnant.46 Gordon, Lillian Hellman, and others had illegal abortions. Some who became pregnant and wished to have children, but avoid scandals that could ruin careers, gave birth in secrecy or got married in a hurry. Ruth Gordon chose to conceal her pregnancy, leaving New York in 1929 to give birth secretly to her son in France, while the child’s father, theater producer Jed Harris, continued to work—professionally unaffected by scandal—in New York City. When actress Rose Hobart became pregnant in the 1940s, she quickly wed the father of her child.
Those who chose not to (or could not) have children were treated as deviants in sexist cultures that continued to see women’s role as Americans in strictly reproductive terms. More than half of the Broadcast 41 did not conform to the procreative mandates of Cold War culture and never had or raised children. As Americanism became equated with fecundity, women like these were thought un-American, for what woman would not want to fulfill her biological destiny? A studio head rebuked the childfree Vera Caspary when she wrote a scene in which a teen mother refused to look at the baby she was giving up for adoption.47 Such an act was, in his eyes, “unnatural.”
Working women’s economic independence was also viewed as unnatural, making men in the industry alternately fretful and indignant. For many men, independent women who were not “crazy about men,” or did not wish to devote their lives to husbands and families, as Caspary put it in one of her trademark critiques of romance, had “got too far from the harem. You earn your living and enjoy it. I have an income and live quite adequately alone. Men aren’t our lords and masters. And they resent us.”48 In entertainment industries, this resentment intensified abundant workplace dangers. Women who worked in entertainment were considered vulgar and promiscuous, stereotypes that men used to justify predatory behaviors. When Ruth Gordon announced her decision to go into acting, her family responded in terms shared by many in American culture: “‘For Ruth to go to be an actress is like being a harlot.’”49 Lena Horne was also raised to believe that being on the stage was only slightly more respectable than being a prostitute.50
These stereotypes gave men license to behave as if their female co-workers formed a vast preserve of sexually available dames and broads. Far from being a metaphor, the casting couch was a way of life.51 The Broadcast 41 regularly experienced sexual violence—unrelenting, traumatic reminders that they were subordinate in all ways to men. Gordon recalled one audition in which the director told her to read from a script he had specifically prepared for her: “‘We’ll read from this. Stand here.’ He pointed to a space beyond his desk. ‘It’s with your husband in Act One.’ He gently put his lips to mine. I had to have the part. ‘You’re sweet. Shall we begin?’ He leaned over and covered my mouth with his lips. His tongue went slowly in, out, in.”52 In her autobiography, actress Jean Muir remembered working on a film in which “Two prominent actors in the cast, Ned and the before-mentioned Martin, tried to make love to me, using whatever place was available, taxis, for instance, and odd corners.… both Martin and Ned were persistent. Week by week I repulsed their advances, as first one, then the other attacked.”53 Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox, “had the reputation of exercising droits de seigneur over his indentured lady players,” as Judy Holliday’s biographer put it, meaning that he expected new starlets to have sex with him.54
The risk of sexual violence was worse for women working in music, theater, or on location, since travel made them particularly vulnerable. Life on the road required erratic working hours and a combustible mix of alcohol and unpredictable lodgings. Women were isolated from networks of protection and support. Managers intent on cutting costs often booked the cheapest and least reputable hotels available. Rose Hobart recalled being “kept awake all night” in Atlantic City, “crouched behind all the furniture which I had piled in front of the door—I didn’t trust the key—while drunken guys kept banging on the door telling me to ‘come on out and have a little drink.’”55
The combination of sexual and racial violence made life on the road especially perilous for black women and the performers and musicians who accompanied them. As music historian Sherrie Tucker documents in her history of 1940s all-girl bands, black bands had limited employment opportunities in the North, leaving them no choice but to tour the South to make ends meet. Unless touring companies and bands owned their own buses, musicians and performers were forced to rely on public transportation that put black bands and integrated bands, whose presence threatened Jim Crow laws, at grave risk of violence.56
In 1941, producer, director, and actress Eva Le Gallienne, who was not one of the Broadcast 41 but shared their sympathies and worked closely with many of them, toured thirty-eight states, covering over 30,000 miles in a six-month period. During the time the company spent in the South, their black co-workers were forced to “live in rooming houses for Negroes, under conditions that no human being should be asked to tolerate” and were refused service in “even the cheapest and dirtiest lunchrooms.” Although she had been warned that traveling with an integrated company would mean that they would “have a difficult time,” with the limited perspective of even the best-intentioned anti-racist white people, Le Gallienne admitted, “we none of us believed it could be as bad as it turned out to be.”57
Not all women had the resources to cope with these climates. Some women internalized this culture’s norms, encouraging one another to use sex as a bargaining chip. “Make ’em think you’d go to bed with them, but! You will, but! And don’t lay down on the desk when the stenog goes home,” Gordon was advised, “unless they sign a ten-year starring contract at umpteen dollars!”58 Others (including many who had already experienced sexual violence) did what they thought they had to in order to succeed. In the postwar era, aspiring actresses eager to make it big hit the Hollywood party circuit—“a brutal, degrading, sometimes dangerous business”—where women “in exchange for dinner and the chance to meet some of Hollywood’s most important players … were expected to make themselves available” to rich and powerful film industry executives and their guests.59 Some, like Marilyn Monroe, did not survive the systematic sexual violence that still flourishes in Hollywood in the twenty-first century, as high-profile allegations of rape and sexual harassment against prominent producers, actors, and journalists have demonstrated.60
In addition to endemic sexual violence, women also had to perform their debasement onscreen, in roles that provided justification for their subordination in the workplace. Harassed and degraded as workers, they were forced to write and perform in roles that reaffirmed the stereotypes used to justify sexual violence against them. If progressive women were keen critics of stereotypes in film and television, it was because they understood all too well that their experiences of discrimination as workers in media industries were linked to the images and ideas that appeared in media content. In 1953, writer Sylvia Jarrico (wife of blacklisted screenwriter and producer Paul Jarrico) wrote, “When women of independence and purpose are consistently presented not only as subject to anguish and neurosis (as in the past), but as degraded and murderous, the complacent theme that submission is the natural state of women has given way to the aggressive theme that submission is the necessary state of women.”61
Still, white female neurosis was an improvement over the degradation awaiting black women in Hollywood. Considered too “controversial” by studio heads and moneymen harboring white supremacist viewpoints, black women found little in the way of work in film or radio. When they did, they were relegated to stereotypical roles as domestic servants, exotic natives, and hypersexualized entertainers.62 This made some actresses even long for the less restrictive stereotypes applied to white women. Actress Dorothy Dandridge described how stereotypes shaped cultural understandings of black women. “America,” she observed, “was not geared to make me into a Liz Taylor, Monroe, or a Gardner.… My sex symbolism was as a wanton, a prostitute, not as a woman seeking love and a husband, like other women.”63 Lena Horne worried that her MGM contract “would force me to play roles as a maid or maybe even as some jungle type,” roles “that most Negroes were forced to play in the movies at that time.”64 “From Birth of a Nation,” Hazel Scott wrote, “to Gone with the Wind, from Tennessee Johnson’s to My Old Kentucky Home; from my beloved friend Bill Robinson to Butterfly McQueen; from bad to worse and from degradation to dishonor—so went the story of the Black American in Hollywood.”65 Brilliant actresses like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen had to play racist caricatures in Gone with the Wind, a film celebrating the white supremacist myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Black women were further caught between the racism of producers and the racism attributed to white audiences. Producers used the bottom line to justify their racism. White audiences, they maintained, would boycott films featuring African Americans in roles that defied racist stereotypes. When Garson Kanin refused to accept an advance on a script, studio head Harry Cohn admonished him, “Listen, I know if you take my hundred thousand, you’re going to write me somethin’ good, somethin’ I can use and nothin’ controversial, like n-----s or God!”66 An RKO executive told Orson Welles that his proposed “mixing of the blacks and the whites” in The Story of Jazz “cannot be accepted by Iowa, Missouri, not to mention all the people on the other side of the Mason/Dixon line.”67
Even when African Americans were cast in film or television, their roles were strictly policed. “MGM didn’t want blackness in those days, except in the role of being some native in the jungle or a loving, confidential maid,” Lena Horne told a reporter, “Mississippi wanted its movies without me.”68 Black performers frequently had the humiliating experience of performing in musical numbers meant to be easily cut from films when local distributors decided audiences in their towns would object to seeing black performers on screen.69 When Lena Horne appeared on the Charlie McCarthy Show for twelve weeks in 1945, the scripts were written so she “did not figure in a single conversation with any of the principals. The idea was to avoid addressing me by full name, and having me speak to other people—white people—as an equal.”70
Of course, very few actresses had much say over the lines they spoke and the narratives in which they figured. Even white women found few opportunities to include their perspectives in scripts.71 A handful, like Vera Caspary, Lillian Hellman, Anita Loos, and Dorothy Parker, muscled their way into screenwriting, but once there, they quickly discovered that their ideas were at loggerheads with the film industry’s jaundiced views of female audiences. Caspary, for example, was dropped from consulting on the adaptation of her novel Laura because she and director Otto Preminger disagreed about having the storyline focus on the title character. Preminger thought that the focus on a female character was misguided. For her part, Caspary considered Preminger unable to represent women as full and complex characters. Because Preminger (a philanderer with a reputation for sleeping with his leading ladies) knew so “little about women,” in Caspary’s estimation, he reduced her complex title character to “the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.”72
Caspary also repeatedly fought with studio head Harry Cohn over scripts: “He always denigrated you, trying to get you to feel low, so you knew he was a big shot,” she said. According to Caspary, Cohn once “called together all the creative people on the studio payroll. In a fighting mood, he made a brief address. Things weren’t going well, and it was time to get down to basics. ‘Lemme tell you what this business is about. It’s about cunt and horses! … Oh, excuse me, Miss Caspary’”.73 By calling attention to her presence first by reducing women to “cunt,” and then condescendingly emphasizing her singular presence in a room full of men, men like Cohn ensured that women would never forget their position as sexualized objects of desire, as marginalized workers, and as audience members often not even considered worth addressing.74
Although work in Hollywood was more lucrative than work in most other media industries, the writers among the Broadcast 41 (Caspary, Gordon, Hellman, and Parker) resented working in an industry whose representations of women were demeaning and whose treatment of them as workers was even worse. Progressive women made money when they could in Hollywood, but they fled the film industry for New York City as soon as possible. One actress complained that when she “went out to Hollywood, the first thing they did was fit me with falsies that went out to here.” In New York, in contrast, she said, “there was always a sense that what was important was the work and the performance.”75 Actress Ethel Waters turned down two film roles in Hollywood in order to star in the play Mamba’s Daughters in New York City, alongside a cast of actors of color that included several others who would later be blacklisted (José Ferrer, Canada Lee, and Fredi Washington).76 When Washington left Hollywood for good during World War II, she began working for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. at his Harlem newspaper, The People’s Voice, where she wrote her own theatrical column, “Headlines/Footlights,” which later became “Fredi Says.”77
For her part, Jean Muir quit film because she had grown “very tired of learning and saying awful lines of dialogue, written mostly by cynics or idiots or hacks” and because, as she grew older, “the quality that had made me a star in the beginning was disappearing.”78 The best that Lillian Hellman had to say of Los Angeles was, “it’s unbearable to any civilized person as a mere visitor, but with something to do it’s no worse than being in jail.”79 Dorothy Parker was characteristically blunter. “I can’t talk about Hollywood,” she wrote, “It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. Out there, I called it.”80
The Broadcast 41’s experiences in media industries confirmed that to be a woman who wanted to change the treatment of women on and off screen in the 1930s and 1940s was to struggle constantly against incredibly rigid and powerful institutional norms. Along with Dorothy Parker, the Broadcast 41 “dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.”81 They resented having to be good sports when confronted with sexism and racism. They complained that when they lobbied “for an acknowledgment of black humanity,” as did Fredi Washington, they were ostracized and censored.82 Because of their increasingly public criticisms of the entertainment industry, they gained reputations for being intractable, difficult, or vicious. In the words of Lillian Hellman (one of the most famously difficult of the Broadcast 41), “You’re always difficult, I suppose, if you don’t do what other people want.”83 Where stubbornness and iconoclasm were praised in male colleagues, the personal, professional, and political experiences of the Broadcast 41 reminded them time and again that traits considered virtues in men were fatal character flaws in women.
In spite of the many hardships they endured, the Broadcast 41 loved their work. Years later, Vera Caspary wrote “work made my life what it has been.… everything came through working … independence to live and love and travel; joy in work; heartbreak in work; survival through work.”84 But they were candid about the challenges. When asked what two characteristics a woman had to have to succeed in show business, Ruth Gordon replied, “imagination and indestructibility.”85 In order to survive work in media, women needed to be indestructible, in Ruth Gordon’s estimation, or, in the words of one of Gordon’s twenty-first-century descendants, “unbreakable,” like producer, writer, and actress Tina Fey’s sitcom character Kimmy Schmidt. Lena Horne could have been speaking for all of them when, years later, she modestly told the audience for her one-woman show, “I’m just a survivor.”86
Survivors they were, in an industry that destroyed many talented, independent, creative, and supposedly difficult women. In the years before the blacklist, the Broadcast 41 not only managed to survive, they developed resources, support networks, and strategies of resistance. At the end of World War II, they looked forward to enjoying some of the fruits of these labors, recognizing that their struggles to be included in media industries—in workplaces and on screens alike—were part of wider efforts to achieve full democracy and social justice. They had no intention of backing down from those fights.
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Now, I was determined not to be a symbol. I wanted my responses to be determined not by the symbolic me—and the protection of the same—but by the real me. Unconsciously I think I wanted to act now as I knew my grandmother would have acted. I wanted, at last, to be my own woman, to be as sure of my motives, my place in society, my rights and privileges, as she had been.
Lena Horne (singer, actress)87
Should an actress or actor become politically involved? I have never found a good reason for anyone who has eyes to see with and a brain to think with to blind himself or herself to the realities of the world we live in. I lived in a period when hate was made manifest by such as Father Coughlin, with his dimly veiled anti-Semitism and fascistic ideas, when the Nazi Bund freely functioned, in uniform no less, on the streets of cities, when the horrible crimes of Nazism made Europe a stinking heap of corpses.… I refused to wear blinkers.
Jean Muir (actress)88
When questioned by the FBI about her political activities, the Broadcast 41’s Uta Hagen told the special agent who was interviewing her that “she had always considered herself a liberal and progressive American and the activity of these organizations appealed to her because they appeared to operate for the benefit of the people of the United States.”89 By “organizations,” Hagen was referring to the array of progressive political organizations that had sprung up from the dusty and resistant earth of the Great Depression, organizations that claimed to operate for the benefit of all Americans.
A vibrant and energized labor movement was part of the array of progressive social movements that proliferated in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the Broadcast 41 came of age as workers after the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act) made it possible for private-sector workers to organize. Poor working conditions in media industries encouraged them to join the struggle to remedy abuses. Gypsy Rose Lee took up the cause of child laborers in entertainment, recalling the abuse she and her sister suffered at the hands of their cruel stage mother.90
For actress Rose Hobart, working conditions in Hollywood transformed her into an ardent supporter of the eight-hour day:
On my first three pictures, they worked me 18 hours a day and then complained because I was losing so much weight that they had to put stuff in my evening dress.… When I did East of Borneo (1931), that schlocky horror I did, we shot all night long. They started at 6 o’clock at night and finished at 5 in the morning. For two solid weeks, I was working with alligators, jaguars and pythons out on the back lot. I thought, “This is acting?” It was ridiculous. We were militant about the working conditions. We wanted an eight-hour day like everybody else.91
Jean Muir took a job as an “organizer for the newly legal vaudeville and nightclub performers union, AGVA” in 1939, acting on her conviction that “whether she was a girl working the bar-rail as well as the floor-show, or whether she was a top-name performer earning thousands a week, my job was to make sure she belonged to her union.”92
Progressive women like Hobart, Lee, and Muir found leadership opportunities in the labor movement, especially during World War II, when the scarcity of men forced reluctant unions to open up these positions of power to women. Hobart, Muir, and Anne Revere took advantage of these opportunities, directing progressive efforts in the Screen Actors Guild until anti-communists (led by Ronald Reagan) forced them out after the war. Radio director Betty Todd ran for secretary of the Radio and Television Directors’ Guild (RTDG) in 1949, before being fired for her communist ties.93 Several members of the Broadcast 41, including Mady Christians, Rose Hobart, Lena Horne, Gypsy Rose Lee, Madeline Lee, Anne Revere, Selena Royle, Betty Todd, and Margaret Webster, actively participated in unions representing workers from the many professions and occupations that comprised the television industry.
Most of these trade unions had historically excluded African Americans. As the leftwing Hollywood Review put it, “There is an older and larger blacklist that also has a significant influence on the pictures Hollywood makes—the blacklist of Negro artists and film craftsmen.”94 In order to counter this exclusion, African American performers and musicians had been organizing their own guilds and unions. In response to their exclusion from these organizations, Fredi Washington, along with tap dancer and actor Bill Robinson and bandleader Noble Sissle, helped found the Negro Actors Guild in 1937.95 By 1945, the situation seemed ripe for change. Progressive members of Actors Equity and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists began mobilizing to protect the rights of African American workers in the entertainment industry.
A groundswell of related anti-racist activity in New York City media during and after World War II enveloped progressives. Nearly all of the Broadcast 41 supported the rights of African Americans as workers and as citizens, lending their often-substantial star power to the advancement of civil rights. Black women like Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, and Hazel Scott led the fight against racism in entertainment industries. During the war, Washington was active in the Double V campaign that lobbied for victory overseas and victory over racism at home. Horne and Scott used their contracts to fight segregated performance venues by including provisions that stipulated that they would not perform before audiences that were segregated by race.96 Scott’s refusal to perform before such an audience in Austin, Texas resulted in her being escorted from town by Texas Rangers. She used the resulting publicity to ask a Time magazine reporter, “Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro, and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?”97
African American performers further used their fame to draw attention to racism in American society. Horne filed a complaint with the NAACP when she performed for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kansas, only to discover that German prisoners of war were seated in front of black soldiers.98 In 1950, Scott brought a successful lawsuit against a restaurant near Spokane, Washington, where she and a traveling companion had been denied service, the waitress told them, “because they were Negroes.”99 Historian Dwayne Mack says that Scott’s victory not only helped African Americans challenge racial discrimination in Spokane, but that it inspired civil rights organizations “to pressure the Washington state legislature to enact the Public Accommodations Act” in 1953.100
White progressives followed the lead of black progressives. Reflecting shared concerns about the impact of racist propaganda in media industries, Jean Muir joined Fredi Washington in campaigning throughout the early 1940s to compel “the movie industry to abandon its old stereotypes of Negro caricature.”101 From the 1930s until her career was curtailed by the blacklist, producer, director, and actress Margaret Webster cast black actors as leads in theater productions.102 In 1947, actress Selena Royle told her peers in the Hollywood Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions that they had the choice of being “good citizens or bad citizens,” the last defined as people who could “overlook racial intolerance” and “forgive lynchings in the South.”103
Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, Judy Holliday, Ray Lev, Dorothy Parker, Minerva Pious, Hazel Scott, Lisa Sergio, Gale and Hester Sondergaard, and Fredi Washington were identified as communists because of their support for the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that campaigned internationally to defend African Americans convicted of crimes, especially in cases involving the death penalty. Hagen was repeatedly cited by the FBI for supporting efforts to enforce voting rights in the South and ensure a fair trial for the Trenton Six (six young black men who were convicted of killing a white shopkeeper and sentenced to death by an all-white jury), and her public opposition to deportation (especially attempts to deport African American communist Claudia Jones). Ruth Gordon was investigated by the FBI merely for signing a pledge to boycott Washington theatres that barred African Americans from attending performances.104 One FBI report condemned Lena Horne’s columns in The People’s Voice for “glorifying Negro womanhood.”105
The Broadcast 41’s support for civil rights at home was shaped by social movements and political conversations that in the first place understood domestic racism to be connected to Nazism and, in the second, saw global capitalism as the source of exploitation. More than a quarter of the 41 (Stella Adler, Edith Atwater, Mady Christians, Ruth Gordon, Uta Hagen, Lena Horne, Dorothy Parker, Hazel Scott, Lisa Sergio, Helen Tamiris, Margaret Webster) worked on behalf of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, recognizing that the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the backlash against immigrants were part of a larger mobilization of white supremacists.106 Even in the face of considerable censure and attack, the Broadcast 41 remained united in defending the rights of immigrants and refugees, believing that struggles for racial justice and for the rights of the foreign-born were parts of a broader battle against injustice.
The Broadcast 41’s experiences and political beliefs led them to be forceful critics of the media’s role in fomenting bigotry and discrimination. As fledgling artists and workers in the 1930s, most of the Broadcast 41 did not yet fully understand how media industries worked. Nor did they have the confidence or power to criticize and rebel. But by the 1940s, things had changed. They were veterans of stage, studio, and screen, savvy, powerful, and far less likely to suffer indignities in silence. Lena Horne delivered a fierce critique of broadcasting in her short-lived People’s Voice column: “Radio in the US is afflicted with racism in a bad way. It is time for us to start a campaign to clean racial discrimination out of the radio industry. Radio is now super-big business, employs thousands, and reaches millions. But the Negro is all but left out in the cold by this gigantic industry which, as a medium of public information and entertainment, has a legal as well as moral responsibility to practice the principles of democracy.”107 As the 1940s wore on, women like Horne became even more outspoken in their disapproval of how media treated women, people of color, and immigrants.
In these efforts, the Broadcast 41 were motivated not by personal gain—to the contrary, their political activities cost them dearly—but by the belief that their visibility gave them an ethical responsibility to serve as role models for American citizenship. In the years between the wars, they embraced their responsibilities as global citizens, agreeing with Horne that “Anyone who is a performer … does have a power that is more than that of a private citizen.”108 Although this is hardly an exhaustive inventory of the political activities of these women, the examples above show that in the years before the blacklist proved that progressive political activism could be used to destroy careers and lives, the Broadcast 41 idealistically and passionately worked to change the world.
The range of their political work confused and angered anti-communists who believed that all Americans were motivated by narrow self-interest. The Broadcast 41 provided living proof that anti-communists were dead wrong when they said that people only cared about the rights of their own kind, whether their kind was defined by race, class, or ethnicity. Jean Muir lent her star power primarily to the fight against racial stereotypes in Hollywood, but as a trade unionist, she supported the rights of the economically diverse groups of women, men, and children working in vaudeville. Shirley Graham fought against the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and served as a trustee for their two young children, while at the same time fearlessly participating in the civil rights organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice, opposing a criminal justice system that meted out death sentences to black people, while allowing white murderers to escape punishment.
Despite the diversity of progressives’ backgrounds and beliefs, anti-communists painted them as robotic Stalinist minions who mindlessly repeated the Party line. But the Broadcast 41’s political commitments were far more diverse than the politics of those who destroyed their careers. The majority of the Broadcast 41 cared more about economic and civil rights than they did about building the Party and working toward proletarian revolution (a phrase that was probably not in many of their vocabularies). Although few of them had qualms about working with the Party until such a time as it became clear that they would be persecuted for this work, only a small minority were members. As actress Anne Revere later explained, “I had always refused to accept a Party card … because of the reservations that abraded me when I joined. In fact … I considered myself a liberal reformer who had joined the Communist Party in order to bring about desirable social ends that would make this the best of all possible worlds.”109 Of those who had joined the Party in the 1930s, many held private reservations but overcame them because, like Revere, they considered the Communist Party to be the only political party fighting against racism and economic exploitation. For African Americans, the Party, unlike trade unions, other political parties, or the U.S. government, offered them dignity and respect they rarely received from either Democrats or Republicans.
Vera Caspary, Revere, Betty Todd, and Shirley Graham were part of a small group of documented Communist Party members among the Broadcast 41. Caspary’s sympathies for the Party’s anti-racist politics were evident as early as 1932, when she penned an article for the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender about the nine young men accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama.110 But in The Rosecrest Cell, a novel she later described as “a confession disguised as a novel about my two and a half years in the Party,” Caspary complained angrily about the Party’s abysmal treatment of female members, especially lesbians.111 She left the Party along with a wave of other people in media industries in 1939, when Stalin signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, pledging not to take military action against Hitler.
Like Caspary and Revere, radio director Betty Todd’s relationship with the Communist Party began in the late 1920s, when she was working at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company.112 Todd was a trade union organizer, married to a member of the Communist Party. The FBI never confirmed her membership in the Party (meaning that they had found neither a signed membership card nor a witness willing to attest that she was a member). Todd too had drifted away from the Party by the mid-1940s, although that did not prevent her from being subpoenaed by the HUAC in June 1950, where she pled the Fifth Amendment forty-six times during her interrogation.113
Shirley Graham’s involvement with the Communist Party was unique among the Broadcast 41. She joined the Party after membership was in steep decline around 1945, in the wake of “the greatest tragedy” of her life, the 1944 death of her son Robert, denied medical treatment at a segregated hospital.114 Graham remained a member even after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, a point in time when the Party’s decline became terminal. Despite her commitment to the Communist Party, Graham balked at the idea that the Party exercised a form of total mind control over members, bristling when another writer suggested that she had written a positive review of a novel at the behest of the Communist Party. “I can’t be either for or against his last BOOK,” Graham wrote to T.O. Thackeray, editor of the leftwing Daily Compass, “I am, however, for a writer writing what he dam [sic] pleases. Maybe he’ll do it well, or maybe he won’t. That’s up to him.”115
By the late 1940s, Communist Party membership hardly mattered. The Communist Party of the United States of America was no longer a threat to the American political system, if indeed it ever had been. But communism remained a compelling trigger for white Americans’ fears about the challenges to white supremacy that were coalescing in the postwar era. It was clear that anti-communists wanted, in Paul Robeson’s words, to shut up “every Negro who has the courage to stand up for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers.”116 To do that, anti-communists, like the ideologues who would follow them into the twenty-first century, wanted to unsettle and undermine Americans’ belief in government, education, and culture. They did so by discrediting political positions they deemed “synonymous with radical liberals, bleeding-heart leftism, New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier programs, and Democratic politics in general,” as actor Robert Vaughn (ironically best known for his starring role in the Cold War TV thriller, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) put it in a doctoral dissertation he wrote about the blacklist.117 Regardless of whether they were members of the Communist Party or could even remotely be considered threats to security, women, people of color, and immigrants posed a threat to anti-communists’ goal of imposing representations that recentered and celebrated white masculinity.
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They cut out my favorite character, Patty, and all the nice mother-daughter scenes because (Siegel told me long before Lana Turner was thought of for it) the mother of a sixteen year old daughter would not seem sexy and appealing enough to the younger generation of picture goers. At that time they were waiting for Cary Grant and it would be impossible, they said, to have him in love with a woman in her thirties.
Vera Caspary (writer, novelist)118
She should be the kind of a girl who is so in love with her husband she continually does the wrong thing.… She should be small town all the way through and always struggling to please the man she loves, and yet always fumbling the ball.
Darryl Zanuck (producer)119
Having been denied freedoms themselves, the Broadcast 41 had little patience for people who would deny freedom to others, especially the freedom to represent dissenting standpoints and perspectives. In all their work in the years before anti-communists made progressive politics synonymous with treason, the Broadcast 41 worked to expand the category of American, redefining it to represent and value the beliefs and traditions of diverse groups of people. In the late 1940s, the Broadcast 41 thought that the emerging medium of television would provide rich openings for this work, hoping to do nothing less than change the way Americans thought about the world at a moment when the prospects for full democracy had never seemed brighter.
Of course, television was no newcomer to the cultural scene. The medium had been on the horizon since the 1930s, developing in fits and starts, but its ascendance was interrupted first by the Depression and then by World War II. By the mid-1940s, it was ready to take off. Both anti-communists and progressives realized that television was going to be the most influential mass medium in history. The new medium’s content was going to have widespread and unpredictable effects on U.S. culture and politics. Television, Shirley Graham observed, was “the newest, the most powerful, the most direct means of communication devised by Man. Its potentialities for Good or for Evil are boundless.”120 Jean Muir, whose husband Henry Jaffe was general counsel for the American Federation of Radio Actors (AFRA), noted with some irritation: “I hardly needed to be told by Henry that ‘nothing bigger has ever happened to this country,’ and that its benefits and opportunities for the entertainer were incalculable.”121
The question of whether television would reproduce existing ideas about gender, race, and nation or transform them had been the subject of debate among progressives for years. As early as 1939, the Chicago Defender speculated about the new possibilities television might provide for “sepia actors” (African American performers) and artists alike: “Though television is going through its experimental stages the Race is playing quite a big part as seen by the broadcasts of several groups of Race entertainers.” Understanding the rhetorical power of the specter of “southern whites” who might not “want to see them brought into their homes,” the Defender was concerned about how the new medium would portray African Americans: “Will he be made to cut up and act like a fool or shall he portray himself as he is in every day life?”122 Will television provide “a new day for the Race,” the Defender asked, or will “the fate of the colored artist be the same in television as it is now in radio”?
The Broadcast 41 and other progressives fervently hoped the new medium would foster better conditions for artists of color. In New York City, the center of broadcast production, these hopes were buoyed by the Popular Front’s optimism about creating culture belonging to all people. Art and popular culture, progressives were convinced, could hold a mirror up to society and expose social inequalities, ultimately giving people powerful tools for social change.123 Harry Belafonte, who shared progressive politics, followed actor Paul Robeson’s lead in believing, “If art was not political, to me it wasn’t even art. It was Paul Robeson who once said to me, ‘The purpose of art is not just to show life as it is but to show life as it should be.’”124
The contrast between the lives of the Broadcast 41 and those of their mothers had proved that political transformations—or life as it should be—were possible. That women like them had achieved successes in media industries held out the promise of further social change. And the creative ferment surrounding the new industry was another beacon for progressives like the Broadcast 41. According to historian Erik Barnouw, many in the industry felt that “something new was developing; many an artist had an exhilarating sense of finding and sharpening new tools.”125 As television drew on the creative energies of literature, theater, and radio while at the same time opening up new horizons, the future seemed full of possibility. Gertrude Berg recalled the enormous excitement people in the industry experienced at the prospect of inventing this new medium: “Television was still a baby. The studio was being built around us as we rehearsed and there were no experts who knew what some other experts told them a survey said the public wanted.”126
Television held out the hope that in an era following so much devastation, uncertainty, and violence, Americans might learn from the past and create art and culture that promoted understanding, liberal forms of tolerance, and a renewed commitment to democracy for everyone. The Broadcast 41 identified with economically and symbolically dominated populations and wanted to represent their perspectives. Like Shirley Graham, they wrote plays and novels about the struggles of people of color in the Americas, slavery, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. Like Graham, Hagen, Lev, and many others, they cheerfully raised money at hundreds of events for the unemployed, for children, refugees, and victims of an unjust criminal justice system. They were citizens of their communities and the world, imperfect in their own ways, who loved their country and dreamed of democracy. Actress Gale Sondergaard spoke to the contrast between the perspectives of those who were blacklisted and those who conducted the blacklist in her testimony before the HUAC in Washington, DC in 1951. She had been criticized, she told them, for being “a Jew-loving, Negro-loving, Red-loving, culture-loving, peace-loving, un-American woman.” It was, she added, “incredible to be hated for loving so much and so many and so well.”127
However much the Broadcast 41 suffered from their own forms of myopia, they sincerely believed that seeing the world from different standpoints was vital to raising consciousness of bigotry and hate. Lena Horne’s description of how perspective affected perception during her courtship with her white husband, Jewish pianist, conductor, and composer Lennie Hayton, offers a compelling instance of this. As they traveled together, Horne wrote, Lennie “just quietly began to learn … to think as I did.” In order to adopt her standpoint, Hayton had to “efface a certain amount of himself”—to view the world instead from the standpoint of the person he loved, whose position in society and experiences were dramatically different from his own: “He just quietly began to think as a Negro. He had to become aware of everything I was aware of.” Changing his optics meant, in turn, that the way Horne “saw the world became the way we both saw the world. It had to be so, because my problems were the hard ones to solve”128 (Figure 2.2).
Source: Carl Van Vechten, Courtesy Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Anti-communists built worlds of fiction, policy, and law in which a whole host of others threatened the purity of their conceptualization of identity, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the fascism they claimed to despise. It was small wonder that anti-communists favored genres—like the Western and the police procedural—that allowed them to create worlds in which they protected their own privilege under the guise of protecting women, children, and the nation, endlessly producing stories about their own mastery and control. Anti-communists did not want to change the way they saw the world. In fact, they saw efforts to see the world through different lenses as evidence of communist contamination. Dead-set on protecting the industry and audiences from content defying their bigoted worldviews, they had good reason in the postwar era to fear progressive perspectives’ capacity to undermine their authority.
Against the fear-mongering and paranoia of anti-communists, in the late 1940s, the Broadcast 41 tried to claim Americanism for purposes of full democracy. As Shirley Graham wrote: “I am an American, proud that our Declaration of Independence lifts itself like a beacon for all mankind, proud that our Constitution is conceived as a living instrument, capable of growing and expanding, proud that to our shores has come the oppressed and persecuted, believing that in spite of all our short comings we are moving forward toward ideals and aspiration worthy of great sacrifice.”129 Likewise, on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, Jean Muir surveyed Oklahoma’s “immense dustbowl and all its human tragedy,” expressing the hope that “the promise” of America would “not be betrayed, that the greatness be made manifest.”130 Gertrude Berg embraced a more sentimental if nonetheless genuine faith in an American Dream in which immigrants “crossed strange oceans and vent vhere a strange lengwidge is talking; because dey know vhatever de lengwidge, dere is only vone longing, vone lengwidge of de human heart, and dat is—liberty and justice!”131
Few of them knew that their presence in an industry that despised them and their individual and collective acts of resistance to white supremacy, xenophobia, and misogyny had set them on a collision course with anti-communists intent on reasserting their power to determine who would count as an American. Appalled by the changes progressives promoted in the postwar era, anti-communists marshaled their resources, activated their extensive national networks, and set about the work of forcibly imposing a monopoly over Americanism that would deny the plural perspectives of progressives like the Broadcast 41 had ever existed.