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Abstract
Scholarly accounts of gender, race, and television in the 1950s have mainly focused on the ideological content of programming that ultimately made it onto the air. This research has played an important role in reckoning with the political and cultural legacies of 1950s television. But the focus on ideology and content has prevented us from fully understanding the repressive nature of anti-communist thought and action, both in terms of the powerful ways in which the broadcast blacklist made the production of progressive themes and images impossible, and in terms of how the fear that followed from the blacklist repressed the memory that such alternatives had ever existed. Counter to the images of white suburban women we have inherited from the 1950s, the first two casualties of the broadcast blacklist were professional women who were politically active—white actor Jean Muir and African American musician Hazel Scott—whose involvement in civil rights was deemed evidence of their communist sympathies. This essay builds on earlier research on gender and 1950s television not by analyzing the absence of strong women, people of color, immigrants, and working-class families from the televisual landscape, but by looking at the elimination of the very cultural workers writing, agitating, and fighting to broadcast these representations.
Keywords:
Acknowledgement
A project that takes this long to write accrues many debts along the way. Thank you first to Jon Sterne for encouraging the author to chase an ort of an idea; to Rachel Ida Buff for her enthusiasm for this project; to David Price for fielding her many FOIA questions; to the fantastic research assistants who helped her along the way—Mary Erickson, Zach Sell, Eric Lohman, Sarah Mick, Stephanie Schuessler, and Janine Zajac; to Lynda Leahy and Caitlin Stevens of the Schlesinger Library; to support from the Morris Fromkin Memorial Lectureship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as generous funding from the University of Oregon.
Notes
1. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (New York: American Business Consultants, 1950), 5–6.
2. The traffic between the FBI, other governmental branches and agencies, and private anti-communist organizations constituted a complex anti-red network. The authors of Red Channels were former FBI agents, veterans of the Bureau's New York City Red Squad, who had access to classified information about progressive activities. The coalition that organized the first attacks on broadcasting included Theodore Kirkpatrick, of CounterAttack and Red Channels, who emphasized his legitimacy by citing his status as a former FBI agent, bragging about his close work “with the House Un-American Activities Committee” (Jack Gould, “‘Red Purge’ for Radio, Television Seen in Wake of Jean Muir Ouster,” New York Times, August 30, 1950, 33). The author of Red Channels' introduction, Vince Hartnett, corresponded frequently with the FBI, as did anti-communist and white supremacist Elizabeth Dilling. Hartnett, Dilling, and the American Legion all provided information to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
3. Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader (London: Open University Press, 2007); Mary Beth Haralovich, “Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker,” Quarterly Review of Film and Television, 1, no. 1 (May 1989): 61–83; Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990/2008); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); and Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Post-War America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).
4. Shirley Graham DuBois, “As a Man Thinketh in His Heart, So Is He,” in The Parish News: Church of the Holy Trinity (Brooklyn, NY: Vol. LVII, No. 4, February 1954), Shirley Graham DuBois Papers (Box 27, Folder 3), 1–5.
5. See Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); David Everitt, A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist (Chicago: Ivan R., 2007); and Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (Boston, MA: St. Martin's Press, 1999) for scholarship specifically on the broadcast blacklist. Mainly, accounts of the blacklist era appear in autobiographical and biographical writing about the era. See Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: An Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Nation Books, 2004); Howard Blue, Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (New York: The Scarecrow Press, 2002); Karen Chilton, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); John Henry Faulk, Fear on Trial (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Glenn D. Smith Jr. “Something on My Own”: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929–1956 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007) for some of these. There is a voluminous body of literature on the Hollywood blacklist.
6. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See Chapter 4 in particular.
7. A good number of them also did not neatly conform to ideals of heterosexual monogamy. Unmarried writer and actor Ruth Gordon traveled to Paris in 1929 to have her son and later married Garson Kanin, a man who was 16 years her junior. After living with her partner openly for seven years, Vera Caspary finally married him at the age of 47. A number of the women also wrote about affairs with women in their fiction and memoirs, although none identified as lesbian.
8. Both Muir and Scott's FBI records are accessible at http://cstabile.wordpress.com/.
9. “Testimony of Hazel Scott Powell,” Hearing Before the Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, September 22, 1950), 3619–20.
10. Spigel, Make Room for TV.
11. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), 89.
12. “Hysteria and Civil Liberties,” The Survey, October 1950, 458–9.
13. Red Channels, 5.
14. “Testimony of Hazel Scott Powell,” 3613.
15. Joanne Rapf, “In Focus: Children of the Blacklist,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 77. See additional accounts in Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980); McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades; and Rapf, In Focus.
16. Elizabeth Dilling, The Roosevelt Red Record and its Background (Kenilworth, IL: Chicago, The Author, 1936), 144, original emphases.
17. Qtd in Horne, Race Woman, 106.
18. “Investigation of Communist Activities New York Area—Part I,” Subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, June 15, 1953), 15.
19. Muir's subsequent testimony before the HUAC in 1953 contains a lengthy series of questions about a Hollywood cocktail party she attended in 1936, supposedly hosted by Communists.
20. Paul Rhome, “Around Boston,” Chicago Defender, September 13, 1941, 21.
21. Langston Hughes, “Here to Yonder,” Chicago Defender, June 10, 1944, 12.
22. “‘Salute to Troops’ Will be Big Affair in New York December 3,” Chicago Defender, December 27, 1941, 19.
23. “Lincoln U., Pa. Conference Studies Status of Negro in a Democracy,” Chicago Defender, May 10, 1942, 4.
24. “Hastie, Jean Muir to Talk at NAACP Student Meet,” Chicago Defender, national edition, September 11, 1943, 13.
25. “5,000 At Bronx Rally Hit ‘Hate,’” Chicago Defender, August 7, 1943, 20.
26. “Mrs. FDR Speaks at Testimonial for Walter White,” Chicago Defender, June 3, 1944, 11; “White Color No Criterion of Superiority—Mrs. FDR,” Chicago Defender, November 13, 1943, 3.
27. Report on the Congress of American Women (Committee on Un-American Activities: US House of Representatives, October 23, 1949).
28. Jack Gould, “‘Aldrich’ Show Drops Jean Muir; TV Actress Denies Communist Ties,” New York Times, August 29, 1950, 1.
29. Everitt, A Shadow of Red, 60.
30. Gould, “‘Aldrich’ Show Drops Jean Muir; TV Actress Denies Communist Ties,” 1.
31. Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 1933–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 269; and Everitt, A Shadow of Red, 150.
32. “Hit Ban on Jean Muir,” Chicago Defender, September 23, 1950, 21.
33. “Our Dingy Underwear is Changing Colors,” Chicago Defender, September 23, 1950, 66.
34. In a suggestive parallel with the fledgling Fox Network in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the DuMont network took risks the established networks were reluctant t o gamble on. In addition to The Hazel Scott Show, DuMont also featured The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951), starring Chinese-American actor Anna May (Wong Lui-Tsong), who played the owner of a chain of art galleries caught up in webs of international intrigue and mystery. See Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford, 1999) for more on the “revolution” at Fox.
35. Qtd in Athan Theoharis and J. S. Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 57.
36. See Steven Classen's Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi Television, 1955–1969 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) for examples of such policing in broadcasting in the US South.
37. In contrast, after a controversy following his booking of Paul Draper, Ed Sullivan worked closely with Theodore Kirkpatrick of CounterAttack and Red Channels to ensure that those who appeared on Toast of the Town had been politically vetted. See Merle Miller, The Judges and the Judged (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1952), 174.
38. The consistently brave Cantor was also alone in issuing a statement of public support for Jean Muir in 1950, calling her blacklisting “one of the most tragic things that ever happened in show business.” See “Cantor Backs Miss Muir,” New York Times, September 6, 1950.
39. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 85.
40. Chilton, Hazel Scott, 34.
41. Qtd in Chilton, Hazel Scott, 72.
42. Chilton, Hazel Scott, 73.
43. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2001), 125.
44. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2001), 122.
45. Qtd in Chilton, Hazel Scott, 138.
46. “Hazel Scott Attorneys Score in Initial Round,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, April 17, 1950, 1.
47. Dwayne Mack, “Hazel Scott: A Career Curtailed,” Journal of African American History, 91, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 160.
48. The Road Back (New York: Aware, Inc., 1955), 3.
49. The community of progressive cultural workers in New York City was a closely-knit one. It is likely that Muir and Scott knew one another, but aside from the Chicago Defender's linking of the two cases, and the fact that each was connected with the NAACP, I could locate no evidence that they corresponded regarding their blacklistings.
50. The Road Back, 1.
51. The Road Back, 3.
52. Both Muir and Scott had come to the attention of anti-communists before 1950. Muir's name had been referenced several times in HUAC investigations of Hollywood. Scott had been the 1944 target of a con involving a telegram purportedly sent by J. Edgar Hoover. The telegram claimed that its writer had information about “dope traffic around you” that is “hindering our war effort by passing drugs among our negro and white servicemen” (Hazel Scott Powell FBI Files, “Western Union Telegram,” 1944).
53. Jean Muir FBI Files, “FBI Office Memorandum,” 1950.
54. Jean Muir FBI Files, “FBI Office Memorandum,” 1950.
55. Jean Muir FBI Files, “FBI Office Memorandum,” 1950.
56. Jean Muir FBI Files, “FBI Report,” 1951, 20.
57. Jean Muir FBI Files, “Air Tel,” 1953.
58. “Investigation of Communist Activities New York Area—Part I,” 5.
59. “Investigation of Communist Activities New York Area—Part I,”, 8. In 1955, the FBI discovered they had made an error. In the 1950 memorandum that accompanied Muir and Jaffe's request for a meeting, Special Agent Charles Michael Noone had erroneously cited evidence that an informant had seen Jean Muir's Communist Party membership book, when the informant in question had in fact testified that he had not seen Jean Muir's Communist Party membership book. “It appears,” Agent Belmont wrote without a trace of irony, that “Noone bears sole responsibility for error” (Jean Muir FBI Files, “Office Memorandum,” 1955). Muir's file was subsequently “changed to indicate the subject's true full name, Jean Fullarton Jaffe” and “placed in a closed status” (Ibid, 1956, 1–4). No one outside the FBI was alerted to this error.
60. Smith, “Something on My Own”, 152.
61. Smith, “Something on My Own”, 152–3.
62. Smith, “Something on My Own”, 152.
63. “On the Air: Trial by Sponsor,” New Republic, September 11, 1950, 22–3.
64. “A.B.C. Puts Off Jean Muir Blacklist Interview,” New York Times, December 25, 1965, 29.
65. “Testimony of Hazel Scott,” 3621.
66. Hazel Scott Powell FBI Files “Memorandum,” April 22, 1954.
67. “Testimony of Hazel Scott Powell,” 3620.
68. “Testimony of Hazel Scott Powell,”, 3617.
69. “Testimony of Hazel Scott Powell,”.
70. “Hazel Asks Boycott in Red Whirl,” Chicago Defender, national edition, October 7, 1950, 21.
71. Chilton, Hazel Scott, 158, 176.
72. Smith, “Something on My Own”, 153.
73. See Susan M. Carini, “Love's Labors Almost Lost: Managing Crisis During the Reign of ‘I Love Lucy,’” Cinema Journal 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 44–62 for an excellent account of the attempt to blacklist Lucille Ball and the public relations coup that saved Ball's career.
74. Marie Jahoda, “Psychological Issues in Civil Liberties,” American Psychologist 11, no. 5 (May 1956): 234–40.
75. Everitt, A Shadow of Red, 29.
76. Navasky, Naming Names, 54.
77. Erik Barnouw, The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 35.
78. Erik Barnouw, The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 34.
79. Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 209.
80. Adrian Scott, “Ellie,” Adrian and Joan Scott Papers (Box 13, File Folder 5, n.d). A member of the Hollywood Ten, Adrian Scott had served prison time for his refusal to testify about his political activities. “Ellie” was submitted under the name “Richard Sanville,” one of the pseudonyms Scott used.
81. Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1994), 92.
82. David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press), 45.
83. “From the Goldbergs to 2005: The Evolution of the Sitcom,” Museum of Television and Radio Satellite Seminar Series (New York: Museum of TV and Radio, 2005).
84. Although it is not within the scope of this essay to address the blacklists’ anti-immigrant elements, certainly one of the most intransigent effects of the blacklist has been a longstanding antipathy on the part of network television to featuring immigrants (exceptions include: comic figures from fictitious countries, as in Perfect Strangers's Balki Bartokomous or Taxi's Latka Gravas; or aliens as immigrants, as in Mork and Mindy, Alien Nation, or the remake of V).