No Way Out

I’ve been putting off writing about the impact of the Red Scare on radio. It is very important, but also it feels like there is not a lot new or surprising to add, since many actual historians have written about this era when, from the late 1940s to early 1960s, anti-Communist paranoia ruled the land and wrecked countless careers. But then I found one story so weird, so convoluted and strange, that I couldn’t stop wondering about it. And that’s what you’re getting today.

But first, a confession about last week’s post, which involves a break-up talk on a cross-country train in 1948 between radio’s prestigious “poet laureate” Norman Corwin, and the head of CBS, Bill Paley. I would go back and read that post, if you haven’t. Because here’s the confession: I didn’t include the parts of that conversation that involved what would later be called the Red Scare.

As Corwin recounts, he sat with Paley in the train’s dining car, listening to him describe his dream for a new, improved post-War radio network that could — but probably wouldn’t — include the guy across the table. “He was simply describing the new look,” Corwin later said, and then continued:

Red rap

“Reaction” referred to anti-Communist crusaders that were coming for broadcasting. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and Nevada Senator Pat McCarran led the charge, and they had geopolitics on their side. Americans had just watched in alarm as the Soviet Union, their erstwhile ally against Nazism, blockaded Western-controlled sectors of Berlin. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was making aggressive moves all over the world, and espionage within the US nuclear program was a real (and, as it soon turned out, valid) concern. Any American who had at any point shown sympathy for, or even too much curiosity about, the Moscow regime was now in potential trouble. And that included Norman Corwin.

To back up a couple of years: Corwin had been in Moscow in 1946 as part of an epic reporting trip, which I wrote about for Transom here. His documentary series One World Flight aired on CBS over thirteen weeks in the first few months of 1947. It brought new production techniques to the network — how to record and use actuality field tape — but it also brought the network political woes. Because of the Moscow program, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed all of the series’ scripts.

CBS handed over the scripts, but Congress could find nothing particularly damning about Corwin’s reportage. But meanwhile, Corwin would not be silenced about the way Congress was now bullying his fellow writers in radio and film. He took part in a program called Hollywood Fights Back, a short-lived attempt to win over the public and defy intimidation. That day in 1948 on the train, Bill Paley gave him a warning. 

“CBS was known as a liberal network, I as a liberal writer, and now he had said ‘no place is safe for liberals.’” Corwin later wrote. He knew that both because of his non-commercial bent and his liberal convictions, he was not going to be a part of the network’s future.

But that was just the beginning of his Red Scare travails. Corwin kept finding his name smeared by anti-Communist lawmakers, as historian Thomas Doherty writes.

And then Corwin’s name appeared, right after composer Aaron Copland’s, in one of the most damaging books in US radio history.

I’ve checked out Red Channels from the Harvard Library. It’s a dossier, a slim volume that’s damning in its simplicity. After a brief preamble, it simply lists 151 names in alphabetical order, along with sub-lists of the supposedly sketchy affiliations for each person. Red Channels was compiled by a group of former FBI agents who’d gone private under the anodyne name “American Business Associates.” ABA’s newsletter Counterattack had been warning about Communist subversion since 1947. As it turns out, they really liked that hand image. I guess ol’ Lefty has many sizes of menace.

Radio targets

There was an actual reason why these guys fixated on the radio business, as they explained in a June 1950 edition of Counterattack:

IN AN EMERGENCY (at any given time)

IT WOULD REQUIRE ONLY THREE PERSONS (subversives) —

One engineer in master control at a radio network

One director in a radio studio

One voice before a microphone

TO REACH 90 MILLION PEOPLE WITH A MESSAGE

Two days after they published those words, the Stalin-backed North Korea attacked South Korea and the US mobilized for war. It was not a good time to appear on any kind of list — and now 151 radio and television figures (including Orson Welles) were accused of, if not collaborating with, at least having shown sympathy, for the enemy.

Endless mind games

That “emergency scenario” for radio control is something I found in a 2007 book, David Everitt’s A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television. It’s an interesting read, because it tries to be even-handed about the motivations driving the former G-men who published both Red Channels and Counterrattack. All men had been part of FBI teams investigating Soviet influence operations in the US. 

In truth, the Soviet Union was highly committed to fucking around in the affairs of other nations, and its agents took a particular interest in US radio starting in the 1930s. They won more than a few converts in the industry through their proxy advocates in the Communist Party USA. And that wound up doing a ton of damage.

Everitt looks into Counterattack’s research into the New York-based Radio Writers Guild (RWG), which I’ve written about previously. In a professional guild that basically served a bunch of soap-opera and comedy hacks, a left-wing cadre started to pull all kinds of bullshit.

Maybe because I grew up in Texas, studied Russian and visited the USSR, and then went to Oberlin College — where I heard various romantic ideas about life under Communism — I just have no patience for leftist brigading. And it seems that with the RWG, the main impact of the union’s iron-buttockery was to attract hostile media and lawmaker attention, making the guild a far less effective advocate for its membership on practical matters.

As Everitt and other historians like Clay Risen point out, the vast majority of those victimized by the Red Scare were not media folks or movie stars, but rather government employees. Amongst entertainers, those who suffered the most were Black women (see this incredible doc from American Experience, The Disappearance of Miss Scott, for one such story).

There was also an unmistakable strain of anti-Semitism in the campaigns, and it arguably led to the suicide of some cancelled performers. It’s not clear what either Stalin’s little minions or their enemies hoped to accomplish with all this in the end. But what is clear as that in commercial broadcasting, Red Channels set off a cancellation frenzy that achieved more than its creators could have hoped.

The fact that it was so easy to score hits, hits that had nothing to do with their original mission of defending radio stations, even caused some of the counterattackers to quit and voice regrets. 

It worked because sponsors and broadcast managers engaged in what Everitt calls “stampede behavior.” But when it came to performers that were making a lot of money for the networks, people like TV comedian Lucille Ball, the networks did fight back. And they faced little consequence for doing that. In the end, Everitt writes with accurate cynicism: “They had no compelling reason to buck the blacklist. Even with a certain percentage of talent banned from the airwaves, there were always more creative people available than there were jobs to fill.”

Ugh!

Meanwhile, by 1953 Norman Corwin decided to lawyer up and clear his name with the FBI in person. Although he had a hard time in this era, he never had to stop writing under his own name, as truly blacklisted writers had to do. Corwin did probably lose out on some jobs and gigs, Doherty writes. But true to his nature, Corwin would always deflect questions about this time by pointing out how much worse others had it.

Howdy wayback

But I promised you weirdness. Here it comes. To me, the most fascinating figure of this era in radio is someone utterly familiar to a person of my age and my background, though I never knew his name. That’s Texas-born radio guy, storyteller and — if you take David Everitt’s word for it — crypto-Commie John Henry Faulk.

I recognize Faulk not from the horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which actually is too scary for me to handle. But I do remember his face as a regular on one of my grandparents’ favorite TV shows, the Appalachia-shtick revue Hee Haw, in the 1970s. And he told this tearjerker of a tale, something that many public radio stations re-air every Christmas. 

Fear on trial

Faulk had his own radio show on the CBS network starting in the early 50s, delighting the East Coast with his down-home drawl. And he clearly delighted news king Edward R. Murrow, because they became drinking buddies. Perhaps because Faulk played the part of a good ol’ boy so well, it was not super clear to those around him how much he was a strident leftist. But then Faulk got involved in union politics at AFTRA, which drew the attention of a new anti-Communist group called Aware, who of course doxxed him. Faulk decided to sue them for defamation. They hired the notorious anti-Red lawyer Roy Cohn, who couldn’t get the case dismissed, but did get it delayed for years. 

By the time Faulk v Aware finally got underway in 1962, the paranoid gas was leaking out of the Red Scare balloon. And restraining his garrulous Southern-fried persona, John Faulk presented himself a sympathetic plaintiff who claimed he lost jobs because he exercised free speech. He won damages of half a million dollars and pretty much put Aware out of business. He wrote a memoir called Fear on Trial that eventually became a movie produced in-house by CBS in 1975. I guess Old Man Paley finally got some measure of revenge with that one.

But historian David Everitt is not content with the popular morality-play version of Faulk’s “anti-anti-Communism.” He digs up a recording of a panel Faulk did in the 1960s at the 92Y in New York about the blacklist. Someone from the audience was apparently not satisfied with his narrative, and asked whether he’d ever spoken out against the Soviet Union. Specifically they asked about Faulk’s stance as a media figure in 1956, when the Soviets invaded Hungary with tanks after an uprising.

He could’ve just responded, “Honey, ol’ boy like me don’t know ‘nuff about a place like HunGARRY to say a sangle word!” and drawn a laugh. But no. Faulk went on some long geopolitical jag about Budapest Nazis, concluding that Hungarians “were a conquered foe and as I understand it were treated as such.” 

And there you have it, that kind of thing is why the Red Scare is so frustrating to write about. As we keep reliving these societal paroxysms of paranoia and accusation, we want heroes from the past to show us a way out. But all we get is a hall of mirrors.

Down beneath his bubba-fied demeanor, John Henry Faulk had a hard, angry edge — and he had every reason to be angry. Was that edge forged by youthful, Comintern-friendly interactions? We’ll probably never know, because he almost never slipped like that time in the 92Y.

More importantly, does it all matter in the end? Bubba never took over a radio station to reach 90 MILLION PEOPLE WITH A MESSAGE of Soviet greatness. He just wound up making liberals cry every Christmas. Hee haw, indeed.

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