Naturally, men scared to make pictures about the American Negro, men who have only in the last year allowed the word Jew to be spoken in a picture, men who took more than ten years to make an anti-Fascist picture, those are frightened men and you pick frightened men to frighten first. Judas goats; they’ll lead the others, maybe, to the slaughter for you.
Lillian Hellman (playwright, author)1
The reason no one would hire me was because my name was in Red Channels. No one whose name was in Red Channels was hired, for, as everyone now knew, that little booklet was “the bible of Madison Avenue.” Soon there were others beside me hit and hit hard: Philip Loeb, J. Edward Bromberg, Madie [sic] Christians. Madie Christians had avoided Hitler’s concentration camps by sheer blind fortune, had come to America, where people were free, and here was persecuted, for she could find no job at all, not even in the theatre. She died a broken woman, of a heart attack.
Jean Muir (actress)2
As the 1940s ended, burlesque artist and author Gypsy Rose Lee, actress Jean Muir, musician and actress Hazel Scott, and radio show host Ireene Wicker were optimistic about their future in television. Lee’s quick wit made her a popular guest on radio and television quiz shows. Her success had translated into a more permanent gig as host of What Makes You Tick?, a program scheduled to expand from 15 to 30 minutes when she took over in fall 1950.3 At the beginning of 1950, encouraged by Hazel Scott’s critical and commercial success on a sponsored program on WABD-TV, the upstart DuMont television network signed her to star in a new series, slated to be broadcast during prime time beginning in July 1950. The Hazel Scott Show would be the first television show to star an African American.4 Like Gypsy Rose Lee, Muir had been building a reputation in television after a career in film, appearing in anthologies like the Philco Television Playhouse, Boris Karloff Presents, and the Actor’s Studio. When she was cast in spring 1950 as Henry Aldrich’s mother in the televised version of radio’s popular sitcom about an awkward teen, The Aldrich Family, Muir considered her career in television secure. As for Wicker, the Kellogg Company, sponsor of her children’s radio show for nearly twenty years, had just signed a contract for the televised version of the show.
With three new contracts in broadcasting and a starring role in a popular sitcom to their credit, Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker had every reason to imagine that their futures in television would be bright. They had overcome numerous obstacles in order to build careers in male-dominated media industries. Television was about to take off, and new opportunities for creativity and employment seemed boundless.
Unbeknownst to most progressives in the industry, however, a storm was brewing. In early July 1950, fresh from their successes in the McCullough and Sweets case and with the wind of the Korean War at their backs, the American Business Consultants laid the groundwork for a series of attacks on “coddled” progressive personnel in broadcasting.5 Unlike CounterAttack, which cast a wide net to catch those “who have aided Stalin by supporting his US fronts,” Red Channels focused on broadcasting alone, listing progressives whom the book had identified as Communists or, more often, the many “dupes or innocents who, for one reason or another, will support” the Communist Party’s fronts.6 Not all of those listed in Red Channels had ever worked in broadcasting, although all had participated in the progressive cultural and political life of New York City.
Gypsy Rose Lee, Jean Muir, Hazel Scott, and Ireene Wicker were seasoned performers in 1950, who had enjoyed significant successes in media industries over the course of long careers. Lee had performed in a few films in the 1930s and 1940s, but was better known as a self-identified exotic dancer. In 1950, she was single mother to a young son (Erik, born in 1944), and she found the settled routines of television more appealing than life on the road.
Jean Muir had enjoyed some Hollywood fame. Discovered by a Warner Brothers scout while starring in the Broadway play Saint Wench in 1933, the tall, blonde Muir went on to make over twenty films for Warner Brothers. She was best known for playing ingénues in films like Desirable (1934), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and The Constant Nymph (1943). In 1950, Muir was living in White Plains, raising three young children with her husband, labor lawyer Henry Jaffe.
Hazel Scott lived outside Manhattan as well, in Mount Vernon, New York, with husband Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., minister and U.S. Congressman, whom she had married in 1945. They had a young child, Adam Clayton Powell III, born in 1946. Despite the fact that she was the youngest of these four women, Scott already had the longest career in broadcasting. When she was aged fifteen, Mutual Insurance had signed her for six months of sustaining programs, and by the late 1940s, she was a frequent guest on variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s The Talk of the Town.7
Ireene Wicker was the oldest and least politically active of the first four targets. Wicker got her break in radio soap operas in the 1930s. She later gained fame as “Kellogg’s Singing Lady,” telling stories and singing songs on the popular children’s radio show that bore her name. After divorcing her first husband, Wicker married painter and sculptor Victor Hammer, brother of industrialist Armand Hammer, and the couple settled in New York City.
In 1950, the FBI was already maintaining classified files on Muir and Scott. Muir had a file because she had been identified by ex-communist John Leech as a member of the Communist Party in 1940 (a false charge, as the FBI later noted in its correspondence). Scott’s file originated in a report she made to the FBI about a telegram she had received in 1944 from someone impersonating J. Edgar Hoover. The subsequent investigation turned up her association with the integrated nightclub Café Society and Scott too became a person of interest. Lee and Wicker only became subjects of FBI investigation after they were listed in Red Channels.
Although neither the American Business Consultants nor the Bureau ever stated that they singled out these four women because of their gender, it was no coincidence that their first targets were women. The former G-Men had been trained to exploit people’s vulnerabilities for political gain by the master of that brutal art, J. Edgar Hoover. When it came to cultivating informants, for example, G-Men used a word that referred to the conversion of gentiles to Judaism: they “proselyted” informants, seeking to win them to the anti-communist cause. But theirs was more of a stick than a carrot approach. To convert people, they used information about people’s private lives—their sexualities, sexual practices, and intimate relationships—to threaten ruin if they did not comply. Certainly, Kenneth Bierly—who “proselyted” FBI informant Angela Calomiris and many other informants—used Calomiris’ sexuality to pressure her to inform on progressives. And, as former television star and scholar Eric Bentley showed in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947–1958, anti-communists had no reservations when it came to coercing those they identified as fellow-travelers into giving up the names of others.8 G-Men had reason to believe that women would be more easily converted and persuaded than men.
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What are you going to do about your girl, she’s in the book, you know?
Advertising agency executive9
While she [Dorothy Parker] was living in Bucks County she was considered by the people there to be the “queen of the Communists.”
FBI Special Agent in Charge (Philadelphia Field Office)10
The first instances of blacklisting followed swiftly on the heels of the publication of Red Channels in June 1950. In July, when network ABC announced that Gypsy Rose Lee had been signed to appear as the “regular femsee” on their game show What Makes You Tick?, the American Business Consultants and the American Legion launched a campaign to protest her appearance.11 Brandishing Red Channels as evidence of Lee’s subversive record, the American Legion labeled her “a dear and close associate of the traitors of our country” and demanded that she be immediately removed from the airwaves.12
Wicker’s troubles began soon after. In early August, less than six months after it had renewed her contract, the Kellogg Company reversed course and fired her with no explanation. Wicker was left to assume that she was terminated because Red Channels had made her a “controversial” person. By the time the DuMont television network cancelled The Hazel Scott Show in September, just a week after Scott had appeared before the HUAC, the network did not bother to use a consumer boycott as justification, as they had in the other cases. Instead, the network fired Scott in anticipation of a protest, explaining, “It was just that we felt we could more easily sell the time if somebody else was in that spot.”13 But the case that signaled the end for progressives was yet to come. The blacklist really took hold in late August, with the campaign against Muir signaling the beginning of the industry’s capitulation to anti-communist activists.
Following the pattern favored by G-Man masculinity, anti-communists asserted a public mandate for campaigns of their own devising. Muir’s firing from The Aldrich Family did not result from a spontaneous viewer protest. Just as they had in the McCullough libel trial and the firing of William Sweets, the American Business Consultants initiated the sequence of events that led to Muir’s dismissal. The day before The Aldrich Family’s final taping, Theodore Kirkpatrick called anti-communist stalwarts Bill Cunningham at the Boston Herald, Hester McCullough, and Rabbi Benjamin Schultz (the last two members of a new anti-communist organization called the Joint Committee Against Communism in New York).
Would they “organize a protest” against suspected communist Jean Muir’s appearance on The Aldrich Family, Kirkpatrick asked.14 McCullough launched into action. She quickly called one of the regional leaders of the Catholic War Veterans (another member of the Joint Committee Against Communism). Then she called NBC and Young & Rubicam (the advertising agency representing sponsor General Foods) to alert them to what she described as a groundswell of public sentiment against Muir’s appearance (Figure 5.1).
Source: Permission of the University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, Eugene, OR
When the unsuspecting Muir drove to what she thought would be the last rehearsal before the show was taped on Sunday afternoon, August 27, 1950—with her celebratory cake—she discovered that the sitcom’s final rehearsal had been cancelled.15 The next day, program sponsor General Foods Corporation issued a formal statement to the press. They had fired Jean Muir, the statement read, because she was “‘a controversial personality’ whose presence on the show might adversely affect the sale of the advertiser’s product” and “provoke unfavorable criticism and even antagonism among sizable groups of consumers.”16
Muir’s prior Hollywood fame helped the American Business Consultants boost attention to the alleged problem of communist influence in broadcasting. Although the American Legion’s campaign against Lee and the cancellation of Wicker’s contract had begun a month before Muir was fired, the attack on Muir galvanized the Joint Committee Against Communism, whose Rabbi Schultz made a statement to the press, claiming “the support of 2,000,000 members of various patriotic and anti-Communist organizations” for a possible Muir boycott and threatening that his organization had “a full-scale program” worked out “to ‘police’ the radio and television networks, producers and entertainers trying to ‘sell’ Communist ideas.” The firing of Muir, he added ominously, was “Only the beginning.”17
The “thorough housecleaning” Counter Attack promised anti-communists thus began in the summer of 1950 by singling out these four women for attack. How did these women improbably become the lightning rods for a campaign that purported to eliminate threats to Americanism in the broadcast industry? Unlike the Hollywood Ten, a group that included influential directors, producers, and writers, these women exercised little control over the content they performed. As one contemporary journalist observed, Muir’s upcoming role as “Mother Aldrich” would have given her “no opportunity to say anything but the innocuous lines put in that harassed lady’s mouth by the program’s author.”18 Lee was an exotic dancer, moreover, with an already tenuous position in the industry. Wicker was a children’s show host, who sang songs about pussy cats and owls, firemen and rabbits, hardly the stuff of anti-communist conspiracy theories. Scott enjoyed the very limited fame available to black women working at the intersections of music and broadcasting who refused to portray mammies, maids, or hypersexualized objects of white male desire.
Moreover, none of the women had ever been a member of the Communist Party.19 In the pages of Red Channels, the evidence for Muir’s and Scott’s Red record rested on their membership in the nine organizations listed next to each of their names. Red Channels’ cases against Lee and Wicker were flimsy, even by the American Business Consultants’ dubious standards for identifying fellow-travelers. Where Lee had four organizations associated with her name, Wicker had only one. She was listed in Red Channels solely because she was alleged to have signed a petition to reelect African American Communist Party Councilman Benjamin J. Davis.
Anti-communists found these women more attractive public targets than the men who were listed in Red Channels for a number of reasons. To begin with, professional women were sitting ducks for anti-communists. Because they were successful in male-dominated professions, they were immediately considered subversive. The ever-more-conservative political and cultural climate ensured that women who had enjoyed new forms of independence in the 1930s and 1940s would be politically suspicious to the men and women policing gendered behaviors during the first years of the Cold War. Earlier that fateful year, Senator Edwin C. Johnson (a Democrat from Colorado) denounced Ingrid Bergman on the Senate floor, describing her as “a powerful influence for evil,” because the out-of-wedlock birth of her son “had perpetrated an assault upon the institution of marriage.”20
By anti-communist standards, Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker were similarly powerful and evil influences. Lee and Wicker were divorcees. Lee and Scott had had extramarital relationships. In addition to the reputation that came along with being an exotic dancer, Lee had given birth to a son, whose father (director Otto Preminger) was married to someone else at the time. Scott’s husband had divorced Isabel Washington in order to marry her.
None of these women represented proper American womanhood in the eyes of anti-communists. Where men in media industries continue to be allowed to sexually harass women with few repercussions, for women, the slightest transgression has always had the power to ruin careers. As women who depended on respectable public images, the Broadcast 41 were ideal targets for what Hazel Scott described as “the smear artist with a spray gun.”21
In addition to personal lives that transgressed anti-communist norms of gender and race, Lee, Muir, and Scott’s records of progressive civic engagement showed that these women were politically as well as morally impure. All three were active members of unions seen as nests of communist activity.22 In 1950, Lee was the newsletter editor for the American Guild of Variety Actors (AGVA), an organization that had just announced plans to establish a national wage agreement for its members, as well as a campaign to fight bias against black entertainers.23 She was also AGVA’s representative on the board of the newly formed Television Authority (TvA), the group assigned to sort out existing unions’ jurisdictional claims over television.24 Like AGVA, TvA had recently adopted an “Industry Statement of Policy” that sought to “secure representation of Negroes on television matching their role in everyday life and providing opportunities for the employment of the many qualified Negro artists,” a statement at odds with anti-communists’ goals of keeping African Americans off-screen and economically and politically disenfranchised.25
Like many of the Broadcast 41, Muir had been criticizing Hollywood’s racism publicly since the late 1930s, appearing at public events around the country and, on at least one occasion, sharing the stage with Eleanor Roosevelt.26 Like Lee, Muir actively participated in Actors’ Equity, the union in which actor Philip Loeb (also listed in Red Channels) had long been a leader.27
Scott’s record of outspoken political engagement had garnered headlines and anti-communist attention throughout the 1940s. In October 1945, Scott was barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from performing in Constitution Hall, as singer Marian Anderson had been just six years before.28 Later that year, Scott refused to play for the all-white National Press Club.29 And in early 1950, Scott filed her landmark civil rights lawsuit against the Spokane restaurant that refused to serve her and her companion.
Of the four women, Ireene Wicker had the most tenuous link to politics, progressive or otherwise. Wicker—a talented voice actor, dialectician, and writer—worked with a pianist, acting and singing songs to audiences estimated in the millions.30 A recent transplant from Chicago, “the Lady with a Thousand Voices” was much loved, but left no record of political activism. Red Channels’ allegation that she had once signed a progressive petition was all the evidence anti-communists provided for blacklisting her.
Regardless of their politics, the four women were attractive targets for anti-communists for an additional reason: they were married to well-known men who had their own reputations and careers to worry about. Muir’s husband, Henry Jaffe, was general counsel for the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (AFTRA) and a key player in the TvA. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Scott’s husband, was the first African American to represent New York in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lee was married to visual artist Julio de Diego, while Wicker was married to businessman and philanthropist Victor Hammer, whose art and business dealings with the Soviet Union made him a person of interest to anti-communists as well. Jaffe and Hammer were Jewish, Julio de Diego was an immigrant who opposed Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and Powell was African American. None of these husbands conformed to the G-Man’s narrow racial formula.
The American Business Consultants hoped to use their spray guns, to borrow Hazel Scott’s turn of phrase, to cast aspersion not only on the women listed in the pages of Red Channels, but on the men to whom they were married as well. Their time in the FBI had taught Bierly, Keenan, and Kirkpatrick invaluable lessons about how people’s intimate relationships could be used to coerce them. Historian David K. Phillips writes about how the Bureau recruited gay men and lesbians as informants because they viewed them as being already alienated from their families and communities and thus free of emotional ties that could be used to blackmail them (except, ironically, of the fact that they were gay, which the Bureau used to coerce them). FBI informant Angela Calomiris recalled that at their first meeting, agents Kenneth Bierly and William South “doggedly” and repeatedly asked her, “Miss Calomiris … do you have any marriage plans?”31
The FBI had taught the American Business Consultants’ founders how to use family ties to coerce reluctant informants. The FBI files of the Broadcast 41 contain extensive evidence of the Bureau’s acts of retaliation against the families of progressives they were targeting. For example, not only did the Bureau surveil Madeline Lee’s home, they also admonished her to think about what she was doing to her children. In actress Louise Fitch’s case, the Bureau used her husband Jerry D. Lewis—a writer for the radio program This is Your FBI—as a wedge to force her to name names. Alerted by his contacts in the HUAC that they might subpoena Fitch, FBI public relations head Louis B. Nichols wrote to Clyde Tolson, “I had a rumble the House Committee might check into Louise Fitch, and I had learned that her name had appeared in Red Channels. (I used this as a basis to open the discussion.)” Producer-director Jerry Devine, Nichols added, “was very much concerned about the matter and he suggested that a good way to bring this thing to a head would be for him to tell Jerry Lewis that he had had a tip from ABC about his wife’s name appearing in Red Channels and that the House Committee might be checking on her.”32
When Academy Award-winning actress Judy Holliday proved reluctant to cooperate with the Bureau (instead providing a sworn statement that she had never been a member of the Communist Party), Hoover initiated a “security investigation … of Judy Holliday’s mother and uncle, Helen Gollomb Tuvim, aka Mary Tuvim, and Joseph Gollomb.”33 Anne Revere’s defiance of the HUAC and her support for the Hollywood Ten earned her husband his own FBI file. Louise Fitch’s listing in Red Channels caused the FBI to initiate a file on her brother, Vernon.
Consequently, the blacklist placed unimaginable pressures on intimate relationships. Not all of the Broadcast 41 were married to supportive, progressive men. Some of the Broadcast 41 were married to men who were ambivalent about their wives’ careers to begin with but were willing to tolerate them as long as they were making money. In addition to dealing with storms of negative publicity, these women had to manage the impact of anti-communist attacks on their relationships.
In fairness, the husbands of the Broadcast 41 had reason to be concerned. As Jerry D. Lewis discovered, their own careers suffered because of their relationships with women who had been blacklisted. He and wife Louise Fitch had three young children in 1952. Fitch had been unemployed since the blacklist began, two years earlier. In an effort to save her husband’s career, Fitch agreed to be interviewed by the FBI, providing the names of more than two dozen other progressives (six of them members of the Broadcast 41). In a separate interview, Lewis told the FBI agent assigned to interview him “that had he known she was a member of the party he would never have married her.”34 These rituals of humiliation did not succeed in protecting Lewis’ job: he was fired from This is Your FBI in 1952.
As Joanna Rapf, daughter of blacklisted screenwriter Maurice Rapf, put it, those who had been blacklisted in media “risked a great deal, including their families’ security, to stand up for what they believed was right.”35 The FBI and the American Business Consultants knew how to use family ties to intimidate progressives into compliance. For progressive women already juggling careers and family in an era where this appeared not just wrongheaded, but downright un-American, the cost of these risks was considerable.
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She [Uta Hagen] then analyzed her own position and realized this publicity would also hurt her career which, she said it has. She cited the example that in 1951, she was offered an acting commitment on a nation-wide television program from which the company later tried to relieve her. When the rest of the cast refused to appear without her, she was reluctantly allowed to appear. Since that time she has not been asked to appear on television. As a result of this experience in 1951, subject stated she ceased all such activity and proceeded on the premise that an actor should confine his activity to the arts and not politics.
FBI Special Agent in Charge (New York City Field Office)36
You think you’re going to be brave and noble. Then you walk in there and there are the microphones, and all those senators looking at you..., it scares the shit out of you. But I’m not ashamed of myself because I didn’t name names. That much I preserved.
Judy Holliday (actress)37
Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker fought back against the blacklist as best they could. But their options for defense were few and rapidly narrowing as a hostile Cold War climate closed in around them. Anti-communists promised those who were blacklisted clearance and industrial redemption if they fully cooperated with the FBI and anti-communist organizations in answering questions about their political affiliations. In a pamphlet later published by the blacklisting organization AWARE, Inc., The Road Back, anti-communists summarized the road to redemption. Those who had helped or appeared to help the communist cause in the past, but had broken with the “party line,” could “perform deeds indicative of this change and thus clear themselves of suspicion and return to normal employability.”38
The only way to effectively do this, according to the FBI, the American Business Consultants, the American Legion, and AWARE, Inc. was to appear before the HUAC, answer questions about any involvement with the communist movement and its front organizations, and—most importantly—provide the names of others who had been involved as well. Actress Anne Revere summarized these options as follows. A person could choose “To deny membership and face a charge of perjury (for which of us did not belong to some of these organizations?); to refuse to answer and face a contempt citation with a fine and a year in jail; or finally to admit membership and inform upon all others that we might have known as members, thus subjecting them to the degradation of being summoned before the committee with the consequent loss of livelihood.” And if you admitted that you had been a member of the Communist Party or a front organization, but refused to inform on others (which many considered morally appropriate), Revere added, you could still be cited for contempt.39
Progressive women did not want to name names and subject friends and colleagues to the danger and degradation of being blacklisted.40 Some, like Lillian Hellman and Judy Holliday, took an approach known as a “diminished Fifth,” and refused to answer questions about anyone but themselves.41 Others simply refused to cooperate. Caspary was advised that unless she “wrote a letter to Mr. Nicholas Schenck, then head of the company, humbly asking forgiveness and confessing that I was not and never had been a Communist,” she would be fired.42 “I wrote a letter,” Caspary later noted, “minus the confession.” Progressives who wanted to avoid the fate of the Hollywood Ten, whose refusal to answer questions earned them contempt charges and jail time, pled the Fifth, like radio director Betty Todd, even as they understood that, in historian Milly Barranger’s words, this was “tantamount to an admission of guilt.”43
Few of the Broadcast 41 had the stomach to publicly disavow their political beliefs. They understood that those who had smeared them were extortionists—men who were “on the take.”44 They resented being bullied into hiring the services of unsavory anti-communist clearance officers and columnists like Kenneth Bierly, J.B. Matthews, Victor Riesel, Howard Rushmore, and George Sokolsky or having to curry favor with gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper. For women who had overcome so many obstacles in their efforts to succeed in media industries, the abject penitence demanded by anti-communists—and the concessions to racism this required—were pills too bitter to swallow.
In the face of the adverse publicity that followed their listing in Red Channels, Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker tried to get their side of the story out to the press, issuing public statements that told the truth: they had never been members of the Communist Party. Lee denied the charges the American Legion had leveled against her. She was, she said, “the victim of accusations and every one of them is a lie.”45 Wicker gave a public statement that proclaimed: “The fundamental doctrine of Communism is abhorrent to me. It is in direct opposition to the American principles I have always held and advocated.”46 Counter to claims the network could not sell air time for her show, Hazel Scott told the press, “her DuMont TV show had been building steadily, had attracted considerable sponsor interest, was right on the verge of being sold, until Red Channels became the book of the industry.”47 Muir’s statements after her firing played up her role as wife and mother, downplaying the political commitments she had publicly supported throughout the 1940s and projecting a star image that hewed closely to dominant tropes about middle-class, middle-aged, white femininity. Ultimately, the blacklist also gave networks justification for firing people who—however bankable—had histories of challenging the industry’s racism, misogyny, and treatment of workers.
When conventional public relations efforts proved unsuccessful, Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker turned to social connections to try to clear their names. Muir asked NAACP head and family friend Walter White to set up a meeting with the FBI, where on two separate occasions she presented the case for her loyalty. Often unaware that the FBI had been monitoring them for years, other members of the Broadcast 41 sought the assistance of the very institution that was helping to ruin their reputations. Singer Ella Logan, for example, whose activities had been carefully monitored since 1945, wrote to her friend “John” Edgar Hoover, asking for assistance in clearing her name and inquiring after the health of “Clyde T.” Unbeknownst to her, Hoover harbored suspicions about Logan’s loyalties, adding the following comment to her FBI report: “I fear she has brought upon herself any form of communist stigma by her certainly indiscreet actions.”48
Because progressives knew that the Catholic Church was a powerful backer of anti-communist activities in New York City, some turned to Catholic leaders in their efforts to clear their names. Wicker contacted prominent anti-communist Cardinal Francis Spellman to plead her case. When that proved futile, she and her husband visited the Pope in Rome.49 Gertrude Berg also unsuccessfully sought the aid of Spellman in her efforts to defend blacklisted actor Philip Loeb.
For her part, Wicker directly confronted the American Business Consultants, telling CounterAttack, “I emphatically declare that I am not, never have been, could never be a Communist or Communist sympathizer, in any sense of these terms.”50 She then paid a personal visit to the American Business Consultants’ office on West 42nd Street, where she told Theodore Kirkpatrick that the single listing next to her name in Red Channels was a lie. She could not have sponsored the Committee for the Re-Election of Benjamin Davis in 1945 because she had not even been in New York City when the petition for Davis’ campaign was circulating.
Redirecting the conversation—a tactic anti-communists frequently used when held accountable to the inconvenient nature of facts—Kirkpatrick demanded that she show evidence of public opposition to communism. Wicker told him that in 1940, she had permitted her son to join the Royal Air Force to fight Hitler, at a moment in time when the Communist Party opposed the war. Her son was subsequently killed in action.51 Kirkpatrick was unmoved. When Wicker’s lawyer later showed that her signature had never appeared on any of the petitions supporting Davis, Kirkpatrick blamed the error on the source he had used, the Communist Party’s newspaper the Daily Worker.52 CounterAttack eventually printed a retraction. But by then, it was too late. The damage to Wicker’s reputation could not be undone.
A few among the Broadcast 41 hired the services of those who had smeared them in order to clear their names. When William Randolph Hearst’s Journal-American tried to prevent Ed Sullivan and the Ford Motor Company from hiring Lena Horne, the singer and actress took a two-pronged approach to the problem. Her longtime manager, Ralph Harris, verified “reports that the Negro singer has ‘made her peace’ with Theodore Kirkpatrick, the ex-FBI agent who puts out the anti-communist gossip sheet, ‘CounterAttack,’ and published ‘Red Channels,’ the compendium of alleged ‘subversives’ in the entertainment industry.” According to Harris, Horne met with Kirkpatrick in order to “clean up once and for all the propaganda emanating from CounterAttack charging her with having been associated with ‘subversive’ causes.” Kirkpatrick gave Horne a “clean bill of health,” although Harris emphasized that this clearance would “not change Miss Horne’s outspoken opposition to Jim Crow and oppression, even though it was this antipathy which led her into disfavor with Hearst and Kirkpatrick.”53 Horne also threatened to sue the newspaper if her contract was breached, warning them that she intended to “sue for the limit,” which may have helped convince the Journal-American to back down.54
Across the country, in Hollywood, Columbia Pictures hired the services of Kenby Associates to clear blacklisted actress Judy Holliday. Kenby Associates had been founded by Kenneth Bierly after he quit the American Business Consultants in 1951 in order to clear film “actors and actresses who have been previously charged by ‘CounterAttack’ with being involved with subversive organizations.” Although Bierly’s report to Columbia was preoccupied with Holliday’s potentially “subversive or unpatriotic” friendship with lesbian police officer Yetta Cohn, his advice to the brilliant actress reflected his recognition of the narrowing constraints within which progressive women now had to maneuver to preserve what was left of their careers.55 Having fought being typecast as a dumb blonde throughout her career, Holliday was told to play the dumb blonde for all it was worth. Still, as writer Garson Kanin observed, “Of all those who were harassed in the ugly days of Red Channels and blacklisting, no one was more steadfast or less craven than Judy. Her behavior under pressure was a poem of grace.”56
Alone among the first four targets, Hazel Scott directly approached “the House Un-American Activities Committee … to ask for the opportunity of appearing and stating her case.”57 Scott would have known that the members of the HUAC, which included future President Richard M. Nixon and John S. Wood—a senator from Virginia and chairman of the HUAC, who was rumored to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan—were unlikely to be sympathetic.58 But Scott wanted to ensure that her version of events was written into the historical record. Over the objections of committee members, Scott insisted on reading her prepared speech in its entirety, fervently denying that she was “ever knowingly connected with the Communist Party or any of its front organizations.” Scott also criticized Red Channels’ strategies and anti-communists’ integrity, describing herself as “one of the victims” of Red Channels’ “technique of half-truth and guilt-by-listing”59 (Figure 5.2).
But nothing those accused could say mattered in the topsy-turvy universe of Cold War anti-communism, where the facts could always be made to conform to anti-communists’ version of “factual information.” Although Dorothy Parker denied ever having been a member of the Communist Party during an FBI interrogation, the agent observed that she “appeared to be a very nervous person” and thus unreliable.60 As one FBI informant later said of blacklisted actor Philip Loeb, “During the interview Fillmore [Clyde Fillmore of the Hollywood Athletic Club] recalled that he had accused Loeb of being a Communist once and Loeb vehemently denied it, although Fillmore stated from his experience that it is just what he had expected him to do.”61 Often damned for political actions they had not engaged in and then damned again when they denied the false charges made against them, those who were blacklisted found it all but impossible to clear their names.
As for their allies, to defend someone who had been accused of being a fellow-traveler, to challenge these techniques of half-truth and guilt-by-listing, was almost certainly to become a target oneself. Few individuals and institutions, even those charged with defending civil liberties, proved willing to risk their necks in defense of those who had been blacklisted. After all, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, under the leadership of lawyer and co-founder Morris Ernst, had purged communists from its own membership rolls in 1940.62
Male-dominated unions also refused to go out on a limb for women like Gypsy Rose Lee, Madeline Lee, and Muir, regardless of the many contributions these women had made to their unions during World War II. In September 1950, the New York Times reported that the New York local of the AFTRA adopted a motion “asking for reinstatement of Jean Muir,” but the motion had no force behind it.63 Fighting their own battles with anti-communists in their ranks, unions were loath indeed to risk being associated with women who had been smeared. Some of the men involved in trade unionism at the time hoped to continue to work in the lucrative new television industry; crossing the FBI was not the way to achieve their career goals. In Muir’s case, her husband—AFTRA counsel Henry Jaffe—(who was also giving her legal advice) had his own promising career prospects in television to worry about.64 These men were not likely to risk their professional necks to defend progressive women. By 1955, AFTRA considered a ballot measure, specifying that if an AFTRA member refused to answer Senate or House questions about Communist Party membership, “said member shall be subject to the charge that he is guilty of conduct prejudicial to the welfare of AFTRA.”65
As for the press, anti-communism turned many of these proverbial watchdogs into Hoover’s lapdogs. Fearful of being blacklisted themselves, few journalists were brave enough to challenge anti-communists’ claims. A rare few did, however. The New York Times television critic Jack Gould and John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune penned articles protesting the firing of Lee and Wicker and objecting to General Foods’ treatment of Muir. Both noted the threat to civil liberties these cases posed, as well as the ludicrous nature of the charges that had been leveled against these women. Like other progressives across media industries, journalists had reason to fear anti-communist retaliation. In response to their criticism, the Bureau began to monitor the activities of both Crosby and Gould, seeking ways to ruin their careers as well.66
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Obviously, no advertising agency wants its clients to become targets of the barrage of public-opinion dead cats to which General Foods has been subjected since. And their answer will be simple: No controversial figures will be hired for any job.
Business Week67
Real Americans like their country. They are proud of it. They think it is a good place to live.… There are those who would chip away our confidence so that their special brand of tyranny might creep into America. They must not succeed.
Sigurd S. Larmon (Chairman, Young & Rubicam)68
Behind the scenes, the television industry was confused and panicked about how to respond to the first cases of blacklisting. Many disliked the blacklist; some as we have seen because it was costing them money, others because it was ethically and legally unjust. But to oppose the blacklist was surely to get caught in its web. As television producer Bob Bendick candidly put it, “Management’s line was, if you’re in Red Channels, you’re a communist. It was a terrible wrong, and I suppose I considered saying, ‘If he goes I go,’ but I was not that dedicated to valor.”69 Harvey Matusow (communist turned anti-communist turned anti-anti-communist) was blunter in his assessment: “Madison Avenue people are cowardly.”70
Advertisers like Liggett & Myers and agencies like Young & Rubicam broadly shared anti-communist beliefs, but they did not want to lose talented and lucrative writers, producers, and actors. According to a CBS executive, networks were concerned that Red Channels would wind up costing “the industry fifty, maybe a hundred million dollars and God knows how many ulcers and gray hairs and broken hearts and shattered careers and suicides. Plus, a lot of public respect—and good shows.”71 In the early days of the blacklist, they had additional concerns about its impact on creativity in the industry: “The trouble with people who’ve never joined anything and therefore are ‘safe’ for us to use,” this executive added, “is that they usually aren’t very good writers or actors or producers or, hell, human beings.”72
Despite the forces arrayed against them, industry opposition to the blacklist seemed both possible and imminent in early fall 1950. As cultural historian Cynthia B. Meyers points out, sponsors and advertising agencies in New York City “were for the most part corporate liberals” who were by no means unified in how to respond to anti-communist charges of subversion.73 There were powerful instances of resistance. Network ABC, for example, defended Gypsy Rose Lee (Figure 5.3) throughout the summer and fall of 1950, maintaining that Lee had demonstrated her loyalty by signing both a loyalty oath and “an affidavit denying any Red ties.”74 Facing down the American Legion’s threats of consumer boycotts, ABC president Robert E. Kintner demanded that the American Legion provide evidence to prove their allegations or cease their otherwise libelous accusations against Lee. Edward Clamage, chairman of the Illinois American Legion’s anti-subversive commission, quickly backed down. Clamage “had based his statements on the inclusion of Miss Lee’s name in ‘Red Channels,’” he told the press, adding that the “entire matter could be easily clarified and the answer should come from the publishers of ‘Red Channels.’” The American Business Consultants responded by saying that they were merely reporting “facts … based on public documents.” Once again, anti-communists dodged accountability by blaming their sources for lies they continued to promote as truth.75
Source: New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Although ABC’s refusal to give in to the American Legion’s boycott of Gypsy Rose Lee won Kintner a Peabody Award three years later, the network was an outlier. CBS’ actions in the wake of the blacklist set the standard for industry responses, sending a clear message to the entire industry: organizations that did not toe the G-Man line would be punished.
The FBI’s hostility toward CBS predated the blacklist. The network had a reputation for independence of thought, intellectualism, and criticism, characteristics Hoover disliked. CBS also criticized anti-communist practices, further adding fire to Hoover’s antipathy and causing him to irritably complain about the network in the pages of the FBI’s correspondence. In 1950, Hoover directed agents in the Bureau’s New York City Field Office to conduct a pretext interview with CBS officials to document CBS’s purportedly un-American attitudes toward the Bureau. Pretext interviews referred to an interview technique the Bureau “used when it is necessary to accomplish an investigative end without disclosing the Bureau’s interest in a matter and/or the true purpose of the inquiry.”76 Pretext interviews were, in short, fishing expeditions. Hoover resented the comparative independent-mindedness of CBS’s cosmopolitan news division and its refusal to concede to his demand that media conform to the Bureau’s perspectives. And he was a man who harbored a grudge.
The American Business Consultants shared Hoover’s negative view of CBS. Indeed, more CBS employees were listed in Red Channels than those from any other network. “CBS,” CounterAttack declared with typical lack of evidence, “is the most satisfying network for Communists.… it’s plain that NBC and Mutual are LEAST satisfactory to Communists [and] … that American Broadcasting Co is about at halfway point between most satisfactory and least satisfactory.”77 The pages of CounterAttack were full of diatribes against reporters like William Shirer and Howard K. Smith, writers and producers Himan Brown, Norman Corwin, Leo Hurwitz, and William N. Robson (producer of the 1943 documentary Open Letter on Race Hatred), all of whom, the newsletter warned its readers, were traitorous fellow-travelers.78
In the case of Muir, the American Business Consultants had a more personal axe to grind with both CBS and longtime sponsor General Foods. Both had rejected the American Business Consultants’ business overtures in no uncertain terms. In 1949, the American Business Consultants contacted “a representative of the General Foods Company in connection with the General Foods Company radio programs, and advised this representative that Philip Loeb was a member of the Communist Party and that they had written about him in ‘CounterAttack’ magazine.”79 Theodore Kirkpatrick took the additional step of contacting a General Foods representative. Loeb “was a member of the Communist Party” and “they had written about him in ‘CounterAttack’ magazine,” Kirkpatrick said, threatening General Foods with a boycott if the corporation did not immediately discontinue sponsorship of The Goldbergs (the show Loeb starred in with Gertrude Berg).
In response, General Foods not only refused to hire the American Business Consultants, but an indignant advertising executive also complained to the Bureau about these attempts at extortion. After Kirkpatrick’s visit to their offices, David Jacobson of Young & Rubicam told the FBI that “he regarded Kirkpatrick’s conversation as a mild threat as his statements could be considered an intimidation in that he said they should subscribe to CounterAttack, and that possibly if they didn’t subscribe, Kirkpatrick had in mind running a story on Phil Loeb and General Foods.” The company, he continued, “was very much irked at the approach of Kirkpatrick and has, in effect, told Kirkpatrick and CounterAttack to go to [sic].”80 General Foods’ peremptory rejection of the American Business Consultants’ services, and the company’s subsequent appeal to the Bureau, added to the former G-Men’s hostility toward the sponsor and the network.
After the publication of Red Channels, the American Business Consultants were in a position to retaliate against CBS. For its part, the FBI also made it clear that the Bureau would not interfere with the American Business Consultants’ red-hunting business, as an incident from 1951 shows. E.H. “Dutch” Ellis of Newell-Emmett Advertising, who represented General Foods, reached out through the networks that connected media industries to the FBI to complain about the American Business Consultants’ activities. During a telephone conversation with the Bureau’s New York City Field Office, he told a special agent that he was “having a great deal of difficulty in regard to people scheduled to appear on programs” because of the American Business Consultants’ campaigns against personnel.
Ellis summed up his quandary. While he agreed with anti-communists in principle, he did not like the American Business Consultants’ approach. Specifically, he resented being forced to “subscribe to the services of ‘Counterattack’ in self-defense.” By way of an alternative, and in a display of anti-communist solidarity, he asked the Bureau if there were other “organizations or individuals in New York which the Bureau could recommend to him for employment so that investigations could be made of all persons they planned to have on television or radio in order to determine definitely whether or not they were Communists or Communist sympathizers?”81 The special agent told Ellis in no uncertain terms that the FBI could not help him with this problem.
Frustrated by this response, Ellis appealed to a higher power, in this case, his friend, assistant FBI director and public relations head Louis B. Nichols.82 During a visit to Nichols’ home in Virginia, “Dutch” Ellis told Nichols that Liggett & Myers’ president, Benjamin Few, was “exercised” about the communist presence he had read about in CounterAttack, but he did not want to hire the services of the American Business Consultants to address the problem.83 Nichols reported these concerns to associate FBI director Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s second-in-command.84 He offered “Dutch” the following advice about how the industry should handle the presence of these “questionable persons” on television: “I told Dutch he might try giving some thought to trying to find a spot in each program where a message on Americanism of a minute or two might be used; that [variety host Arthur] Godfrey was a master at such and I mentioned how Godfrey in years gone by has defended the FBI vs. Communist smears and attacks. He thought this was a good idea and would try to work out something.”85
Nowhere did the Bureau disavow a relationship with the American Business Consultants. Nor did Nichols comment on Ellis’ original concern: that the blacklisting of talent in television was costing him money. Instead, Nichols suggested that Liggett & Myers might promote Americanism and, by defending the reputation of the FBI, ensure the Bureau’s continued support and respect.
This anecdote sums up what the FBI described as the “gentlemanly approach” they ultimately forged with their former agents, an approach that they reached in fall 1950.86 This approach required that in response to questions about the American Business Consultants’ relationship to the FBI, the Bureau would refuse to comment. Sometimes they said just that; on many other occasions, they told those inquiring that they had no control over former employees. This gentleman’s agreement among white anti-communist men gave the American Business Consultants an extraordinarily powerful tactical advantage over progressives in media industries. From the perspective of those in the industry, it was clear that the American Business Consultants were actively collaborating with the Bureau and with the HUAC as well.87
Whatever the truth of the relationship between the Bureau and its former agents, the publication of Red Channels marked a turning point in the anti-communist campaign against progressives in broadcasting. Although the American Business Consultants denied that they were in the blacklisting business, claiming instead that communists were discriminating against them on political grounds, the FBI knew that the American Business Consultants were creating a blacklist. “The book ‘Red Channels,’” an FBI report concluded, “is very controversial as it is a blacklisting of persons with leftist backgrounds in the entertainment field.”88 Publicly, and despite the additional fact that the Bureau knew CounterAttack and Red Channels were publishing false information, the Bureau eagerly capitalized on the “facts” included in both texts. However unethical and illegal the American Business Consultants’ behaviors may have been, the organization was very useful indeed to J. Edgar Hoover.
With the blacklist appearing to have the full approval of the FBI, television networks, advertisers, and sponsors capitulated to its terms. Worried about angering Hoover, understanding themselves as vulnerable to the damage that anti-communist campaigns backed by one of the most powerful men in the country could inflict, sponsors chose to fire people whose names had been touched by the blacklist.89 With the blacklist thus institutionalized, people in the industry quickly fell into line. By 1951, Ellis had turned informant himself, writing to the FBI that “the producer of the Bob Hope show had signed a contract with Judy Holliday but that Liggett & Myers is taking a firm stand that they do not want her on their program even though she issued a statement denying that she had ever been a member of the Communist Party.” In a move no doubt intended to mollify the Bureau and to affirm his commitment to the anti-communist cause, Ellis told the Bureau that he had “taken this stand on the basis of a recent House Committee report linking her with the Peace Crusade program.”90
Networks, advertisers, and sponsors knew how dangerous it was to criticize the FBI, Hoover having proved more than willing to use the resources at his disposal to retaliate against his critics and ruin reputations and lives. For their part, the men who created Red Channels understood that once progressives had been linked to communism, however specious the charges or however far into the past that association stretched, the damage would prove difficult to undo. After Muir was listed in Red Channels, for example, one advertising executive remarked that he just could not “sell her. At the agencies they say all people will remember is that she’s been in some kind of trouble and the trouble had something to do with communism. That’s enough.”91 As another television executive put it, a performer who had been charged with communism was like “a bruised apple … the brown spot remains.”92 At the outset of the Cold War, networks felt they could ill-afford to protect damaged goods.
The industry also needed to conceal the extent to which their fear of powerful anti-communists in government was guiding their decisions. They knew that the blacklist targeted individuals as a means to control the stories the new medium of television would tell, but they had to generate a plausible scenario to account for their concessions to a private anti-communist group like the American Business Consultants without revealing Hoover’s reach into media industries. To do so, they invoked the specter of pitchfork-wielding audiences enraged by the presence of progressives on the new medium, and the damage these audiences could inflict on their businesses.
Consequently, the networks blamed their concessions to anti-communism on audiences, even as they knew no populist backlash against humanitarian themes was imminent. When Wicker appeared on an ABC show from 1953 to 1954, the network received only one letter of protest.93 Musicians who performed in Europe and the United States found their popularity—and their bookings—outside American mass media industries largely unaffected. In some cases, they even continued, like Hazel Scott, to appear sporadically on television variety shows like Cavalcade of Stars.
General Foods said they had fired Muir in response to protests by angry anti-communist consumers, even though the company knew the American Business Consultants’ Theodore Kirkpatrick orchestrated the telephone calls that got Muir fired.94 When General Foods commissioned a survey in 1952 to assess the impact of the Muir case, 40 percent of those surveyed had never heard of the incident. Of those who had heard of Muir’s firing, less than 3 percent could link General Foods or the product involved (Jell-O) to Muir’s name. When surveyors followed up with sales offices across the country to ask how “the Muir publicity affected our sales” the answer they repeatedly received was, “Muir? Who’s Muir?”95
By the end of 1950, the elimination of Lee, Muir, Scott, and Wicker showed that progressives were not going to be able to mount significant opposition to anti-communism in television. CBS was forced to go even further in demonstrating their submission to the anti-communist agenda. In addition to the “loyalty questionnaire which is the same as that signed by Federal Civil Service employees” that CBS implemented in December 1950, the network hired its own former FBI Special Agent (Alfred Berry) to screen employees.96 Berry provided the “clearance” necessary to convince anti-communists the network’s efforts to cleanse the airwaves of communists and fellow-travelers were sincere and not merely ‘taffy’ meant to placate the Bureau.97 Berry’s unmarked office on the eighth floor came to be known as “CBS’s spook department,” where networks sent employees suspected of being reds to visit a mysterious “former FBI guy.”98 Advertising agencies soon followed suit. As Meyers observes, by 1954, advertising agency J. Walter Thompson compiled a “Master List” of over 1,000 names to be checked before individuals would be hired for any of Thompson’s programs.99
Although the blacklist was unprofitable and illegal—an insidious violation of progressives’ constitutional rights—none of the first four targets of Red Channels pursued legal action. Actress Pert Kelton, her husband Ralph Bell, and Selena Royle—all listed in Red Channels—unsuccessfully sued the American Business Consultants for more than 2 million dollars for libel.100 Writer Joe Julian sued Red Channels as well, but the suit was dismissed by notorious anti-communist judge Irving Saypol in 1956. Only radio personality and AFTRA member John Henry Faulk proved successful. In 1957, he sued anti-communists Vincent J. Hartnett (then working as a “talent consultant,” based on his association with Red Channels) and Laurence Johnson of AWARE, Inc. for libel in the only victory progressives won over the television blacklist (awarding Faulk what was then the largest libel settlement in history).101
But Faulk’s suit, filed in 1957, dragged on until 1962, mainly through the stalling tactics of AWARE’s lawyer, anti-communist attorney Roy Cohn, a man who later schooled reality show host and U.S. President Donald Trump in the finer points of G-Man masculinity. Lawsuits merely drew people even deeper into the mud of anti-communist publicity, solidifying the connection between their names and un-American activities. As journalist Oliver Pilat put it in an article from 1953, lawsuits constituted “A special category of ‘slow death’” for those who were blacklisted: “It takes years for such suits to reach trial, and meanwhile the noose tightens from month to month around the neck of the person seeking vindication in the courts.”102
By 1952, blacklist critic John Cogley observed, “blacklisting was generally accepted in the industry. The frantic days of the Sweets case, the headlines of the Muir affair, the editorials written about Ireene Wicker were a thing of the past. The industry’s solution to the problem was firmly institutionalized: don’t hire controversial performers and you won’t have to fire them.”103 In courtrooms and courts of public opinion alike, those who were blacklisted found little justice.
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In many fields of American life people who have aided Stalin by supporting his US fronts are coddled and publicized. The radio and moving pictures are used to spread Communist propaganda. Fellow travelers are defended and appeased.
CounterAttack104
Philip Loeb died of a sickness called “the blacklist.” So did Mady Christians and John Garfield and other well-loved members of the theatre calling. The direst and obvious effects of this disease, the blacking out of employment in the entertainment industries, are well-known. But this is not the whole of it, nor in Phil’s case, I think, the worst of it. He was submerged by a wave of fear and mistrust which swept most all of us. His motives and public actions were rendered suspect. Even in Equity, which he had so belligerently and passionately served, he was besmirched and maligned.
Margaret Webster (writer, director, producer)105
For the Broadcast 41, the blacklist closed doors to opportunities, ended most of their careers, and, in some cases, contributed to early deaths. As we have seen, being listed in Red Channels intensified already ongoing harassment and surveillance by the Bureau. At least seven of the Broadcast 41 were placed on the Bureau’s Security Index.106 In the wake of Red Channels, for example, the Bureau ramped up its existing investigation of Dorothy Parker in order to determine whether this “queen of the communists” should remain on the Security Index.107
While the FBI had been monitoring the activities of a handful of the Broadcast 41 for years, for most of them being listed in Red Channels brought them, for the first time, to the attention of the Bureau, facilitating the Cold War security state’s intrusion into their lives. Louise Fitch, Judy Holliday, Lena Horne, Jean Muir, and many others had no FBI files until after they were listed in Red Channels, a listing the Bureau used as rationale for initiating investigations. The effects of Bureau surveillance were substantial. Years later, the indomitable Madeline Lee told a reporter, “You have no idea of the impact on personal lives, on families. Divorces, suicides, illnesses, heart attacks.”108 Lee had in mind the effects of anti-communist bullying on actress Mady Christians. In the fall of 1951, the FBI ramped up their surveillance of Christians in order to extract additional names and information about communist activities in theater, interviewing her twice at her home, where they questioned her political allegiance to the United States. Christians died after suffering a stroke in late October that her friends attributed to constant worries about employment, exacerbated by the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of her.109
The toxic effects of the blacklist extended to other members of the Broadcast 41. Depressed and out of work, Jean Muir struggled with alcoholism throughout the 1950s. Hazel Scott suffered a nervous breakdown in 1951 and again in 1957.110 For Muir and Scott, the blacklist combined with their husbands’ infidelities in devastating ways. They both divorced their husbands in 1960. Muir went on to play a handful of roles on television and stage in the early 1960s, before pursuing a career teaching drama at Loyola Marymount, the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the University of Missouri, and, finally, at a more permanent teaching position at Stephens College.
Anti-communist retaliation against African Americans was deeply entrenched in media industries; its intent, as we have seen, was to halt the progress of civil rights in political, cultural, and economic life. In media industries, those who challenged the industry’s racism became lightning rods for controversy. Shirley Graham lost jobs in theater and government because of anti-communist attacks on the Federal Theatre Project and the YWCA. Red Channels cut short her burgeoning career as a novelist, resulting in demands “that my books be withdrawn from the schools and libraries” of Scarsdale, New York.111 Other calls to ban Graham’s books soon followed—from upstate New York, a hotbed of anti-communist activism, as well as Wheeling, West Virginia, where Joseph McCarthy had made his infamous speech about communist infiltration of the U.S. government just six months before Red Channels was published.
Suddenly, publicity appearances for Graham’s award-winning novel Your Most Humble Servant were cancelled with no explanation, never to be rescheduled.112 The manuscript Graham had completed in the late 1940s—about the life of early American journalist Anne Newport Royall (another repressed figure in American history)—was rejected by multiple publishers. As Graham told a lawyer investigating the blacklist, “No publisher has criticized the manuscript as a piece of writing. This we could understand and accept. Novels are always worked on after being accepted by some publisher. But these refusals have each time been vague and in certain cases obviously reluctant.”113
The FBI’s harassment campaign against Shirley Graham and her husband intensified during the 1950s, a collaboration that included the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the State Department. Du Bois was listed in the Security Index. Shirley Graham’s son David was denied a passport, and Graham later received a subpoena from the HUAC signed by Joseph McCarthy for her to appear on July 15, 1953.114 To heighten fear and paranoia, the FBI cultivated the couple’s friends and employees as potential confidential informants. Some, like Harry Belafonte, refused to cooperate. According to FBI records, many other friends and employees did. Unemployable, their movements and activities scrutinized by the FBI, their mail constantly tampered with, suspicious of even those close to them, and with the elderly Du Bois in failing health, they moved to Ghana in 1961 after Du Bois was finally issued a passport.
Other traumas inflicted by the blacklist remained hidden within the files of the FBI. Classical pianist Ray Lev, for example, was not a subject of Bureau investigation until after her name appeared in the pages of Red Channels. The FBI’s subsequent surveillance (mainly preoccupied with Lev’s support for the American Committee for the Foreign Born) landed Lev on the Bureau’s Security Index. Around the time the FBI started monitoring her movements, performances began to dry up. The FBI worked with the State Department to prevent Lev from traveling to Europe, where she could still find work. Lev turned to teaching to eke out a living, while the FBI continued to spy on her, eventually compiling a file that amounted to over 400 pages of information about her life and activities. Lev was finally removed from the Security Index in 1968. The last entry in her FBI file cryptically reported her suicide: she had been found dead in her New York City hotel room, the agent wrote, “by means of asphyxia by smothering with plastic bag over her head.”115
For those who survived, the pain of the blacklist era persisted for decades. In 1997, nearly fifty years after the publication of Red Channels, blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky shared the stage at then-Museum of Television and Radio with blacklisted writer Joan LaCour Scott, widow of the Hollywood Ten’s Adrian Scott. In response to a discussion about Walter Bernstein’s humorous treatment of the blacklist in the film The Front (1976), Scott said, “It wasn’t funny. Lives were broken. You know, hideous stuff.… We lived in almost perpetual fear.” At the end of the broadcast, Polonsky reached across to clasp Scott’s hand in his own. “And I am very sorry about your husband, who was a sweet friend of mine.” “That was really terrible,” he told her. “You have a right to be angry at the others.”116
The impact of the blacklist was everything anti-communists had hoped for. In the new industry of television, fear of being linked to those considered controversial and thus ideologically impure changed the industry. The events of the early 1950s communicated a clear message to those who continued to work in television, a message that would be taught to those who entered it in the years to come: avoid even casual references to themes, ideas, and images that might be construed as controversial by anti-communists. If performers who had little control over content could be so easily ruined, writers and producers were left to imagine what would happen to those who wrote content celebrating black and immigrant lives; or series that grappled with the contradictions women experienced between work and family; or raised any of a range of liberal to left-leaning issues anti-communists had decided were off limits.
Consequently, the blacklist taught those who wished to continue working in television to self-censor content that might raise anti-communist hackles. When writer Rod Serling was working on a script based on the lynching of teenager Emmett Till, he understood that a black victim would not be acceptable to sponsors. He “dropped the idea of a Negro victim and changed it to an old pawnbroker.” But this change was not enough: “The southern location had to be changed. An unspecified location was not good enough; it had to be New England.”117 In a similar incident, writer Reginald Rose was told the black family in his Thunder on Sycamore Street, a drama based on the real-life attempts of a black family to move into suburban Cicero, Illinois, “Would have to be changed to ‘something else.’ A Negro as beleaguered protagonist of a television drama was declared unthinkable. It would, they said, appall southern viewers.”118 Of the impact of the blacklist on Hollywood, one studio executive observed that film was experiencing a new sort of self-censorship. “It’s automatic, like shifting gears,” a writer told him. He now “read scripts through the eyes of the D.A.R. … Why, I suddenly find myself beating my breast and proclaiming my patriotism and exclaiming that I love my wife and kids, of which I have four, with a fifth on the way. I’m all loused up. I’m scared to death, and nobody can tell me it isn’t because I’m afraid of being investigated.”119
In television, in a last-ditch attempt to save The Goldbergs from the axe, Gertrude Berg finally agreed to a move she had been resisting for years: she moved the Goldbergs to a suburban enclave called “Haverville,” where Molly became an outcast, ashamed about her size and her working-class ways.120 In an episode that aired shortly before the television series was cancelled, Molly visits a “fat farm” in order to lose weight. In one of the saddest moments in sitcom history, the episode concludes with a shot of the previously loquacious Molly standing alone in her suburban kitchen, furtively shoveling spaghetti into her mouth from a pot on the stove.
Writers who survived the purge either quickly internalized the need to avoid subjects that might be considered “controversial” or quietly left an industry that was becoming ever more hostile to progressive ideas. In an interview published nearly twenty years after the events of 1950, Lena Horne avoided naming the problem, instead saying, “Sure, I’m politically aware, but you know what happens. They find something wrong about you, they make a scandal and you’re finished.”121 The need to avoid “controversy”—that amorphous, “something wrong” shorthand for content anti-communists found politically distasteful—made progressive depictions of race and immigration too Red-hot for networks to handle. With content critical of segregation, or sympathetic to the struggles of immigrants ineluctably linked to communist influence, on one hand, and, on the other, Southern-style white supremacy too evocative of Nazi white supremacy for a postwar prime time priding itself on democracy, the solution was to avoid featuring African Americans or immigrants on television at all. Representations of American cultural life were thus limited to the most bland, homogeneous ones possible, as producers and writers trod on eggshells in order to avoid even a whisper of controversy. The industry, as historian Ellen Schrecker puts it, became “so timid that … virtually everything from pregnancy to freedom of religion is considered a controversial subject, leaving almost nothing except homicide as a fit topic to enter our houses.”122
More than anything else, anti-communists wanted to ensure their perspectives would flourish, unchallenged by criticism, questions, or alternative points of view. The now familiar conservative refrain about “liberal media” had its origins in the blacklist, as anti-communists attacked the politics of progressives, casting them as threats for attending meetings where, according to actress Louise Fitch, they discussed “how to rid radio programs of racial caricatures—the tightwad Scotchman, the razor-toting Negro, the Italian gangster, etc.”123 Maintaining that progressives were diabolical communist masterminds, intent on nothing less than undoing America and all it stood for, anti-communists represented themselves as white cowboys in white hats, intent not on personal or ideological gain, but patriotic protection of the American family that was the foundation for their vision of the nation.
By the end of 1950, advertisers, networks, and sponsors had persuaded themselves to adopt rhetoric suggesting that suppression of progressive viewpoints was in the public interest. In December, CBS—the network long reviled by the FBI as a hotbed of communist organizing—adopted a stringent loyalty act that required each of their employees to answer the infamous question “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party, U.S.A., or any Communist organization?” They had done so, according to executive vice president Joseph Ream, “to make certain that Columbia enjoyed the continuing confidence of both radio listeners and television viewers.”124 Despite anti-communists’ claims that their actions were in the country’s best interests and, contradictorily, that they were merely doing the public’s bidding, people in the industry knew these claims were not true.
What happened to the Broadcast 41 and other progressives in the wake of the blacklist shows that women—and men—were driven from television in the 1950s not because of some populist revolt, as anti-communists argued, but because of concerted efforts by the anti-communist right to establish control over television. Far from being traitors to their country, those who were blacklisted had worked diligently on behalf of civil rights and economic justice. Opposed to anti-communist racism and misogyny, they wanted to ensure that television included representations of the heterogeneity they considered the unique strength of the country they loved. Progressives in broadcasting hoped to use television to convey the message that—as Gertrude Berg put it—“to be different … wasn’t such a sin.”125 As Stefan Kanfer observed in his chronicle of the blacklist, writers like Berg claimed for themselves something “the right could not—abiding humanity and tolerance.”126
Anti-communists, in contrast, insisted on conformance to their rigid norms of race, gender, nation, and sexuality. To be different in the eyes of the American Business Consultants and the Bureau alike was a sin against American identity. The loathing they directed at those who disagreed with them was violent and unshakeable. Anti-communist journalist Westbrook Pegler (notorious for his invectives against Eleanor Roosevelt), for example, in a moment of rare self-reflection, observed, “My hates [have] always occupied my mind much more actively than my friendships.”127 When anti-communists attacked actress Lucille Ball in 1953, Pegler’s invective against communists like her reveals much about the racialized sentiments that motivated anti-communists: “I hate Communists. I wish it were possible to round up all those who are reasonably known to be Communists, including all who have invoked the 5th Amendment and put them into concentration camps as austere as the Arizona state prison, or the Louisiana state horror camp at Angola, where a lot of wretches cut their heel tendons to disable themselves for work and advertise their condition to the outside world.”128
Voices like Pegler’s were by no means the most extreme of this intolerant choir—he was, after all, a syndicated newspaper columnist. Joined as Pegler’s voice was with the American Business Consultants, the HUAC, the FBI, the American Legion, and other anti-communist forces, this chorus created an intensely hostile climate in the broadcast industry, one in which discrimination based on sex, race, national origin, and sexuality thrived.
This climate reduced the memory of the events that culminated in the blacklist to a mere footnote to television history, if these events were mentioned at all. Even more than a decade after the publication of Red Channels, the industry was reluctant to permit discussions of the blacklist on television. When Jean Muir was interviewed on television in 1968, for example, the names of the advertisers, sponsor, and network responsible for firing her were “blooped” out of her account.129
By first eliminating those likely to have perspectives incompatible with the authoritarianism of anti-communism, and then ensuring that progressive content would be censored as being insubordinate and politically pink (if not thoroughly red), anti-communists won what turned out to be the unprecedented ability to control the stories the powerful new medium of television would tell about American identity. Had they not, the content of television might have looked very different. Indeed, the medium might have become a source of creativity, inspiration, and inclusion based on representing a variety of perspectives decades before themes and topics considered “controversial” by anti-communists began to resurface in the “quality” television of the final years of the twentieth century. The presence of women, people of color, immigrants, and progressive writers might also have made media industries—over the years it would have taken for change to occur—less horrible places for women and people of color to work. The work the Broadcast 41 had done, and dreamt of doing, before the blacklist ended those hopes, the types of stories that might have emerged from that work, and the climate they might have ushered in, are the subjects of the next chapter.