I remember as a kid living in Southern California and every TV show was set in that typical East Coast high school. And I remember seeing a high school near me that looked like that and thinking, “Oh, a real high school!” That’s not feeling marginalized. Now, if I thought about the way my school looked, imagine being a Filipino person who’s like “I’m not a real American because I’m not on TV.” We’re a nation of immigrants. That’s what being an American is.
Rachel Bloom (producer, director, writer)1
There is an antagonistic context toward images of women by women, images by black people, brown people, indigenous people, that are outside of dominant culture. And the way that things are—they’re run by men, there’s a comfort level there.
Ava Duvernay (director)2
Fast forward to 2016. Writer, director, producer, actor, and web series creator Issa Rae’s Insecure, about the experiences of an African American woman living in contemporary Los Angeles, premiered on HBO, five years after her web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, underlined the existence of what media scholar Aymar Christian described as an “untapped market.”3 Media producers and critics understood the show’s revolutionary role in creating “art—from television and film to paint canvases—[that] is giving platforms to Black women to tell their honest stories.”4 “Rae,” one journalist observed, “is proud of Insecure’s diverse writers’ room.”5
Also in 2016, Rachel Bloom, writer, producer, and actor in a feminist-inspired television show with the unlikely name Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, won a Golden Globe award for best actress. The show’s multiracial cast of recurring characters grew out of Bloom’s sense that she had “never seen a show that took place in Southern California and portrayed people the way it is in Southern California. The prom king in my high school was Chinese and the prom queen was Japanese.” The romantic lead was a Filipino American man. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had little patience with television’s tired conventions of gender and race. Not surprisingly, the networks’ responses to it were reminiscent of the industry’s longstanding discomfort over programs suspected of being subversive. In an interview, Bloom described the frustration she experienced shopping the show to networks. “All of the rejections,” she recalled, “were different,” ranging from “it’s not edgy enough” to “Oh, we wish you were younger.”6
It has taken decades for shows like Insecure and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to appear on American television. Opportunities like those provided by Insecure—for black women to create and perform in their honest stories—were what Lena Horne, Fredi Washington, and other progressives had been fighting for in the 1930s and 1940s. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend satirized romance in ways that would have made Vera Caspary and Dorothy Parker proud. Both shows defied old genres: comedy became warmedy and dramedy, and the romantic comedy was upended and then blended with the musical.7
Despite decades of pressure by fans and organizations representing people of color, women, and children, network television resisted changing its representational practices and patterns. The stories that television has told about America, Americans, and American “values that nothing could change,” as Leave It to Beaver once put it, shaped how American culture thinks about past, present, and future based on a vision of the past purified of all those elements that rightwing ideologues identified as subversive and un-American.8 The so-called traditional family is still most frequently depicted by reference to images from television: “the Ozzie and Harriet family with a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother.”9 In 2014, more than sixty years after the publication of Red Channels, a journalist referred to “The iconic 1950s family of the breadwinner father going off to work and caregiving mother taking care of the homefront” as if this was a reality all (or even most) Americans had shared, adding that this family continues to be “described by economists as the most efficient family structure.”10
More recently, fights over history and the memorialization of white supremacy in popular culture and everyday life alike have intensified under the toxic tutelage of G-Man masculinity’s current disciples. As communities try to undo the institutionalization of white supremacy that took place in the American South after Reconstruction, by removing monuments to the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, a backlash not dissimilar to the one described in the pages of this book has been unfolding. When a white supremacist protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 turned violent, resulting in a counter-protestor’s death, U.S. President Donald Trump refused to hold racist protestors accountable, telling reporters, “I think there is blame on both sides.”11 White House Chief of Staff John Kelly backed his boss up, telling an interviewer, “You know, 500 years later [sic], it’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then. I think it’s just very, very dangerous. I think it shows you just how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is.” 12
Kelly’s assertion, “that you would take what we think now and apply it back then,” is the boilerplate response of institutionalized white power, one that assumes that there was consensus about slavery “back then” and that resistance is not something that had been there all along, for those white people who chose to acknowledge it, but a contemporary breakthrough. Kelly’s sloppy and inconsistent historical thinking not only gets tradition off the hook, it sanitizes the past by suggesting a historical consensus in which historical figures simply did not have access to the ideas and information we have in the present.
Suppressing the Broadcast 41’s efforts to change media representations and industries allows for a similarly depoliticized view of the present, a view whose refrains typically appear as “those were different times,” “everybody did it,” or “that’s just how things were back then.” And it minimizes injustice in the present by suggesting that we have come so far from the past. Insofar as American culture suppresses the presence of people who fought for a democracy of images even when the cost of doing so was high, it denies a historical place to women who fought against racist stereotypes, sexual violence, and other forms of discrimination in media industries, dismissing the virulent misogyny of Hollywood’s studio system, to take a stark example, as being just part of the way business was conducted back then.
As much as anti-communists persuaded themselves and their followers that the Broadcast 41 were totalitarians of the airwaves, intent on installing a monolithic version of reality on screens in homes around the nation, historical evidence shows they were not. Constitutionally critical of anti-communism and its insistence on a narrow, overarching narrative about an American past, present, and future, the Broadcast 41 valued the power of diverse and conflicting traditions. They wanted to transform popular culture to reflect the heterogeneous experiences of many Americans and not just a few, and to confront the trauma that underlay many Americans’ experiences. As writers, musicians, performers, and artists, the Broadcast 41 insisted understanding could be encouraged by a plurality of voices rather than the fearfulness promoted by their anti-communist adversaries.
The radical distance described in the previous chapter between what progressives imagined for the future of television as a medium and what appeared on television screens after 1952 hints at the sweeping impact of the broadcast blacklist. Before the blacklist, the Broadcast 41 worked to remedy their exclusion—as women, people of color, immigrants, and queer people—from the narratives that dominated American culture. Anticipating the rise of a new medium that, like the internet, promised to forever alter the global nature of culture and communication, they challenged traditions that either excluded them or narrowed their visibility to a swath of stereotypes that made their continued subordination seem natural and eternal. Against the grain of traditions invented by white men, Shirley Graham and other progressive women uncovered traditions that valued the perspectives and contributions of heterogeneous communities. Graham wrote operas, plays, and novels to show “the contributions of our people to American history and development, because I knew not only didn’t our young people know anything about it but the whites certainly knew nothing about it.”13
In order to create a lineage of struggles in which they participated, progressive women were drawn to stories about those like them who previously had defied restrictive definitions of Americanism. For Gertrude Berg, Vera Caspary, Lena Horne, Dorothy Parker, Lisa Sergio, and many others, movements for women’s liberation had made their independence and careers possible in the first place. They wanted to know, document, and share the lives of those who had preceded them in struggle. Lisa Sergio wrote one of the first biographies of Anita Garibaldi, partner and comrade-in-arms of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. After she was blacklisted, Sergio completed a biography of Lena Madesin Phillips, a twentieth-century American feminist and early critic of the gender gap in wage equality.14 Sergio continued to give speeches around the country, invoking tradition in the service of social change. “If we can’t live equality, we’ll lose,” she told an audience at Madison College. “If we don’t really believe that all men are created equal we should strike that phrase from our Declaration of Independence.”15
Vera Caspary, whose career spanned advertising, journalism, film, and fiction writing, looked to the history of vaudeville for forerunners, proposing a dramatization of vaudevillian Texas Guinan’s life for British television. Like the Broadcast 41, Guinan had defied norms of gender and sexuality. She was the first female emcee in a New York City club and the first silent-era movie cowgirl, known as the “Queen of the West.”16 During the Depression, Guinan built a reputation for scandal, claiming to have been turned away at every port of entry because of her uncensored representations of female sexuality. Undeterred, Guinan created a hugely popular revue based on her experiences, titled Too Hot for Paris. Guinan was a touchstone for female power, a reminder that earlier women had also asserted agency in the face of patriarchal sexual norms. A Guinan fan herself, actress Mae West’s first screen appearance was in Night After Night (1932), in a role based on Guinan. Frank Butler directed a 1945 musical biography of Guinan’s life—Incendiary Blonde—starring Betty Hutton as Guinan.17 Comedian Martha Raye toured in a 1969 musical based on Guinan’s life named after Guinan’s signature line, “Hello, Sucker!” In the late 1980s, the character Guinan (played by actress Whoopi Goldberg) on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation paid tribute to this predecessor.
The Broadcast 41’s efforts to document the lives of people of color and women who had preceded them—to represent them with dignity and complexity—were acts of political resistance. As Shirley Graham put it, “Men have written the great historical chronicles and they turn out to be records of the deeds of men.” But, Graham continued, “we, too, live in crucial times, we, too, are privileged to make stirring history … we have Mrs. Ingram, and the legacy left by Ethel Rosenberg and the memory of how the mother of Emmett Till faced that courtroom of savages in Mississippi.”18
Like Graham, the Broadcast 41 knew all too well the cost of being misrepresented in the memory of a culture. Marginalized by whiteness and masculinity, rendered inferior, such misrepresentations normalized bigotry by suppressing resistance to it. The Broadcast 41 valued being able to see the presence and accomplishments of people who looked like them in history because they realized how histories of struggle against oppression fueled futures of resistance. By creating traditions documenting the historical presence of those who had fought for democracy before them, they honored those struggles and created foundations for criticism and political struggle in the present.
The work of progressives like the Broadcast 41 shows how the themes of recent television programs about immigrants, people of color, and queer people—including Atlanta (2016–), Black-ish (2014–), Empire (2015–), Fresh Off the Boat (2015–), The Get Down (2016); How to Get Away with Murder (2014–), Insecure (2016–), The Mindy Project (2012–17), Queen Sugar (2016–), She’s Got to Have It (2017–), Transparent (2014–), and Underground (2016–17)—were very much on the minds of progressives long years before these were finally able to make their way onto screens.19 The work of the Broadcast 41 seems so contemporary in its attention to gender, race, sexuality, and nation because the blacklist suppressed alternative forms of storytelling that showcased Americans in all their historicity and heterogeneity. In 2015, journalist James Hibberd wrote that “networks struck gold when they started letting those actors play characters who authentically capture the experiences of a diverse America.”20 Progressives knew that this might also have been possible in 1950.
Progressives and anti-communists also knew that the new medium of television had the potential to allow people to identify with characters and topics outside their personal frames of reference. Where progressives perceived in this potential hope for democracy, anti-communists saw only a threat to the strain of Americanism they were dead set on protecting. Controlling televisual forms of storytelling was something that anti-communists in the FBI dedicated decades to, realizing that when given options, significant numbers of people might choose compassion over fear.
The dogmatic belief that 1950s televisual representations of the social world resulted from “a consensus ideology”—the desires of a newly massive audience—remains a powerfully racialized and gendered one, driven by the television industry’s own penchant for anchoring its accounts of history in images it had created in the first place.21 These images, as this book has shown, resulted from what feminist theorist Rosemary Ndubuizu powerfully describes as the “curation of the illusion” of consent, one in which the voices of a few were in her words, “lifted up,” while voices of criticism and dissent were elided or actively suppressed.22
In the case of television, the voices of anti-communist white supremacy were lifted up, while those of progressives were marginalized and then suppressed. Television critic David Zurawik identified this process, observing of Gertrude Berg and the blacklist, “I think the founders of the networks were uncomfortable with that history,” as well as “their role in it and so she sort of became a story they didn’t want to tell because it brought up the narrative of the blacklist.”23 A version of Berg’s The Goldbergs appeared on ABC in 2013, but Berg and the work of so many of the Broadcast 41 remain—in the words Graham chose to describe the historical figures she wrote about—“outside of history.” As Graham went on to put it, “It is not only the Negro, it is not only the Indian, who is dropped out of history—it is also the dissenter, the person who didn’t go along with the majority!”24 That Graham’s many groundbreaking achievements—from her early work in the Federal Theatre Project to her fictionalized accounts of the lives of prominent people of color—are scarcely mentioned in any of the overlapping media fields to which she contributed is powerful evidence of the continuing effects of this silencing.25 In the face of the suppression of the diverse perspectives that attended television’s birth, documenting the lives of the Broadcast 41 and other progressives remains a crucial political task.
Fighting against the redaction of these women also highlights the heterogeneity of progressive women’s political views. The Broadcast 41 were rebellious and opinionated people. However much they may have shared views on the social issues of the era, as well as the belief that art and culture had a responsibility to help inform and educate audiences about these issues, their work did not add up to some feminist consensus. Instead, they disagreed—vehemently and sometimes acrimoniously—about art and politics. Like later generations, the Broadcast 41 had principled and divergent views of gender’s primacy in people’s lives. Caspary, Lillian Hellman, Horne, Madeline Lee, Dorothy Parker, and others described themselves as feminists, but they heatedly disagreed about the nature of women’s oppression. White women’s attitudes toward race were not consistently self-reflexive and they struggled, with varying degrees of success, to be effectively anti-racist.
Class was uppermost in many progressive women’s minds, moreover, in ways that would disappear from white women’s consciousness as the twentieth century wore on. Lillian Hellman, for example, acknowledged that it is “very hard for women, hard to get along, to support themselves, to live with some self-respect,” but she saw women’s liberation as “diversionary” insofar as it took people’s eyes “off the problems in our capitalist society.”26 Shirley Graham convincingly criticized capitalism in plays like It’s Morning and Coal Dust, while at the same time maintaining that race was inseparable from class and, to a lesser degree, gender. While debates like these remained alive in black left feminist circles, they were denied the broader audiences Graham once dreamed of for them. The Broadcast 41 had principled and important disagreements about the limits of gender, race, and class as isolated categories of analysis. This chorus of dissent shows just how wrongheaded were anti-communists’ portrayals of progressives as thought police, intent on imposing a monolithic party line.
The breakdown of the network system and the concomitant rise of cable and the internet over the past twenty years have undermined some of the blacklist’s dogmatic beliefs about audiences. But with the exception of television production taking place outside domains of traditional power, even so-called quality television remains unrepentant about its representations of women and people of color and extraordinarily resistant to transforming work cultures that might encourage diversity in media industries.27 At the time of this writing, much of what’s deemed quality television continues to rely on tired plot lines that begin with the sexualized murders of young white women or feminized men (True Detective, American Crime Story, The Night Of, The Killing, to name only a handful). These pathetic, bloodied victims are a far cry from Caspary’s savvy career girls—with their talk of sexual agency, their progressive racial politics, and their status as live agents; a reflection of the continued legacies of a G-Man social world in which white men alone are powerful and safe.
The Broadcast 41 and other progressives longed for a postwar world where generosity and compassion were virtues and not signs of subversion, where the rights of women and men of all colors and political affiliations were respected, and where the government served the interests of people and not corporations, to paraphrase blacklisted actress Rose Hobart.28 What was once said of blacklisted screenwriter and producer Adrian Scott—“He was one of the most decent men I have ever met”—was not a statement that applied to anti-communists, past or present.29 Instead, these titans of intolerance continue to whip modern day G-Men into a frenzy with chants of “lock her up” at rallies (a reference to political rival Hillary Clinton), in scenes of misogyny and white supremacy that look chillingly like the dystopian future of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.30
In this vein, playwright and theater historian Loften Mitchell wrote of Paul Robeson that he “was a devastating challenge to a society built on hypocrisy, greed and profit-seeking at the expense of common humanity. A curtain of silence had to be brought down on him. He had to be kept off TV, maligned and omitted from the history books.”31 Sexism and racism feed on historical amnesia like this. Just as white supremacists created and tended the hideous gardens of white supremacy in the monuments that littered the landscape of the American South, so the anti-communist blacklist in television generated representations of race, gender, and nation that fueled nostalgia for an era in which they controlled the images that would be broadcast to millions.
The invisibility of people like the Broadcast 41 from historical view ensures that successive generations of producers, critics, and viewers approach social justice struggles without the benefit of a history that emphasizes how intransigent media industries have been in terms of addressing the white supremacist and sexist practices that the blacklist helped institutionalize in the new medium. By eradicating progressive voices and ideas from television and thus from history, the blacklist denied the existence of persistent and principled opposition to racial and sexual violence, suggesting that no alternatives to what appeared on screens ever existed before protests suddenly erupted in a contemporary moment rendered unexpectedly progressive by the barbarism of the past. The work of the Broadcast 41 provides a rich testament to the creativity American television lost because of the alliance between anti-communists and the FBI and, at the same time, a bracing reminder of just how far media industries need to go to address their bigotry.
Restoring the Broadcast 41 to television history reminds us that people of conviction and principle fought against racism and sexism from the beginnings of this mass medium. Blacklisted actresses Jean Muir and Fredi Washington, for example, would recognize their concerns about racist roles in Hollywood in early twenty-first-century controversies over films like The Butler (2013) and The Help (2011), as well as the continuing dearth of roles for people of color in film reflected in the 2016 Twitter hashtag campaign #OscarsSoWhite. If she had lived to see them, blacklisted writer Vera Caspary would have applauded series like Broad City (2014) and Girls (2012–17), insofar as they focused on the lives of young women who worked, even though she probably would have preferred Issa Rae’s more nuanced understanding of race and gender in Awkward Black Girl and Insecure. Remembering the Broadcast 41 helps us to think differently about the history of women’s resistance across the twentieth century, not as some mythic post-Cold War awakening to a white, suburban problem that had no name, but as a persistent dimension of the lives of a diverse group of progressive women, who found themselves politically and professionally abandoned in 1950.32
At a moment when powerful forms of collective storytelling on social media have been challenging the G-Man’s old monopoly over America and Americanism, recalling that this is not the first time progressives have challenged repressive representations and practices in media allows us to understand the aggressive misogyny and racism of traditional media and online cultures alike in historical context. Current controversies about social justice warriors’ alleged stifling of free speech and feminists’ efforts at “mind control” and imposing a “matriarchy” are reviving anti-communist tropes used to marginalize and demonize people like the Broadcast 41. Inheritors of G-Man masculinity have been increasingly strident as resistance in the shape of alliances between activists and powerful actors, athletes, producers, and politicians begin to demand the social transformations progressives like the Broadcast 41 dreamt of in the long-ago summer of 1950.
These fears crystallized around Oprah Winfrey’s 2018 acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globes. Winfrey told the audience what it meant for her as a young black girl, seeing Sidney Poitier—a black man—celebrated on television. She spoke about the power of the women’s movement that had emerged in the wake of G-Man Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, emphasizing “that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.” Recognizing that for too long American media have deprived publics of the stories reflective of realities G-Man masculinity repressed, Winfrey took this opportunity to tell a different kind of story about what the movement against sexual violence in Hollywood meant:
In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never prosecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.33
Winfrey’s speech located activists at the end of a long line of oppositional storytellers—Taylor herself; Rosa Parks, who investigated and documented the crime for the NAACP; historian Danielle McGuire, who in 2011 published a history of black women, rape, and resistance in which Taylor’s story was centered; Nancy Buirski, who directed a 2017 documentary about Taylor.34
The response to this speech from prominent Republican strategist, Breitbart News founder, and contemporary G-Man Stephen Bannon was swift. Bannon called Winfrey’s speech “a definitional moment in the culture,” warning that a puritanical “anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.”35 In the late 1940s, anti-communists found themselves similarly threatened by a rising tide of anti-racist sentiment and incipient feminism. Today, white supremacists invested in traditions of exclusion are desperate to reestablish their dominance over American culture, in opposition to the force of social movements against racial and gender-based violence that are taking advantage of the new affordances of social media to speak their truths.
The moment a person leaves an abusive relationship is the most dangerous moment of all: it’s when abusers turn desperate to restore control, violent in their attempts to cling to previous forms of power and privilege. The Americanism the G-Man reimposed on American television in the middle of the twentieth century was the product of abusive relationships in which demeaning portrayals of women, people of color, and immigrants helped normalize bigotry and discrimination. Creating a tradition that includes the stories of the Broadcast 41 helps us understand what happens when these narratives of abuse are institutionalized, as well as what the world might look like freed from representations of repression and disrespect and viewed from wide-ranging perspectives. Remembering the lives of women whose political beliefs and convictions were at odds with the forms of Americanism the blacklist institutionalized reminds us of the persistence of these struggles, our own position within a broader chain of resistance, and the still urgent need to reimagine more radical possibilities for media in our own eras.