Communication Currents

In June 1950, an organization called American Business Consultants published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a slender volume that would become known as the bible of the broadcast blacklist. In New York City, then center of broadcast production, the publication of this volume received little attention, overshadowed as it was by the onset of the Korean War less than a week later. The first two casualties of the broadcast blacklist that followed its publication were professional women who were politically active -- white actor Jean Muir and African-Caribbean musician Hazel Scott – whose involvement in civil rights was seen as evidence of their communist sympathies. By remembering the lives and work of women who, in the words of blacklisted writer Shirley Graham DuBois, have been “wiped out of history” the purpose of this research is to restore the accounts of a generation of politically active professional women to broadcast history.

Until very recently, women working in broadcasting in the first half of the twentieth century have remained dim and shadowy figures. Yet women worked in a variety of roles in radio and television in the 1930s and 1940s.Bertha Brainard and Judith Waller worked in production during the early days of broadcasting; writer, producer, director, and actor Gertrude Berg was one of the most influential figures in broadcast history; radio host Mary Margaret McBride enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. Many such women held progressive and in many cases feminist views about gender, race, and class. As working mothers, for example, neither Gertrude Berg nor Hazel Scott saw anything unnatural in combining careers with raising children. White women like Vera Caspary and Jean Muir fought against racism both professionally and in their personal lives. Ruth Gordon and her husband Garson Kanin shared screenwriting credits for Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, romantic comedies starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that featured women in the kind of strong, non-traditional roles that would disappear after the blacklist.

Conservative ideologues had some cause to be concerned about the possibility that the viewpoints of progressives might appear on the new medium of television. With its ability to reach large audiences, television had the potential to affect the course of civil rights, especially in the north where criticisms of southern racism would eventually find more receptive eyes and ears. As the images that began to appear on news programs (a form of television content less directly controllable than entertainment) in the 1950s would prove, desegregating television content could effectively challenge white supremacist ideologies by publicizing the struggles of those engaged in civil rights activism.

Red Channels ensured that these views never made it into entertainment programming. Distributed free to advertisers, sponsors, and network executives, the book consisted of an introduction and a list of alphabetized names, which were accompanied by an inventory of Communist and Communist “front” organizations to which the named individuals were said to have belonged. In many cases, the information was at least a decade old; in just as many cases, the evidence was simply a positive mention in the pages of the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker. Although few of those listed in Red Channels were current members of the Communist Party, nearly all had been involved in either civil rights or immigrants’ rights.

Neither Jean Muir nor Hazel Scott, the first two casualties of the blacklist, were writers or producers who created content. But both women had used the prestige conferred upon them by their modest stardom to advocate for civil rights. Their public records of civil rights activism caused their names to appear in the lists of progressive cultural workers prepared by anti-communists groups and organizations. In a postwar culture in which attitudes toward women were becoming increasingly conservative, Muir and Scott’s political activism was understood to be further evidence of their un-Americanism. Although anti-communists publicly demonized Jean Muir’s political activities as these related to the Communist Party, the fulcrum of Muir’s political activities was civil rights, understood by anti-communists to be evidence of communist sympathies.

The Hazel Scott Show was doubly offensive in the eyes of anti-communists. At a point in time when variety shows were being censured for even featuring African American men as guests, The Hazel Scott Show not only had the temerity to feature a black woman, the black woman in question starred in her own show. Scott’s variety show made history: it was the first television show to star an African American (Nat King Cole’s equally short-lived variety show did not appear until 1956). The program premiered on July 2, 1950 to critical acclaim, but was very quietly cancelled just a few months later, on September 29, a little over a week after Scott had appeared voluntarily before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Featuring black performers on a new medium aimed at white audiences was a virtual violation of segregation, allowing images of African Americans into homes understood to be exclusively white. The significance of this variety show would not have been lost on anti-communists in the early 1950s.

One of the goals of the blacklist was to promote conformity by making political activism itself suspect and by creating a climate of fear and paranoia. The message sent by these cases was that performers who used their celebrity status to promote progressive causes were and would be forever vulnerable, despite the fact that those who wore their conservative politics on their sleeves would be lionized and rewarded. Few dared argue that programs like I was a Communist for the FBI or domestic sitcoms featuring happy white people in their native habitat of the suburbs were conservative propaganda for fear of retribution from anti-communist institutions, organizations, and individuals. Ironically, shows attempting to even depict or feature people of color (even the gardener in Father Knows Best, played by the talented Hispanic actor Natividad Vacío, was named Frank Smith), immigrants, and the working-class, much less convey progressive messages about gender, were dismissed as heavy-handed instances of red propaganda.

In her book Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Schrecker suggests, “it is possible that the main impact” of the red scare “may well be in what did not happen rather than in what did . . . the books that were never written and the movies that were never made.”  Had Hazel Scott’s short-lived television show survived, for example, postwar representations of African Americans might have actually challenged the racist stereotypes that would persist. The blacklist chilled the speech of writers, producers, actors, and other broadcast workers interested in pushing the political boundaries of the new medium. Writer and producer John Markus later observed that networks’ oversensitivity to “special interest groups” emerged during the blacklist era.

But Markus’ overlooks the fact that the blacklist institutionalized an “oversensitivity” to complaints lodged by conservative groups. In the years that followed the blacklist, it was perfectly acceptable to offend women, people of color, immigrants, and thoughtful people as a whole. The blacklist made it unacceptable to offend the finer sensibilities of racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and other supporters of hatred and intolerance. The toxic blend of racism and misogyny that informed the practices of anti-communists would be built into the very structure of the industry, so much so that sixty years later, the representations that progressive writers, producers, and actors fought for in the 1950s – of women who were not punished for their independence and autonomy, of proud people of color who were not criminals, of immigrants understood to be fully American – still rarely appear on network and cable television.