Customer Reviews

A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television

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None of us can learn all of history in detail, but we also need to learn something more about it than the one-sentence summaries of key events that we often settle for. Worse, when we are dealing with contentious and emotional issues, we tend to grab onto a very simplistic version that happens to be `safe' to hold. However, if you do try to read something in-depth about these emotional and controversial events what you are likely to pick off the shelf will be strongly biased to one or another position. That isn't necessarily bad, but it will require you to read and study multiple sources and that may require more time and energy than you care to spend on the topic.

David Everitt has written a wonderfully balanced book on the broadcast blacklists in radio and television after WWII through the $3.5 million dollar award to John Henry Faulk for libel and against Aware, Inc, Mr Vincent Hartnett, and the estate of Mr. Laurence Johnson. At that time, it was the largest libel judgment ever awarded by an American jury. The author reports the facts without feeling the need to make extraneous judgments about the people who made the events.

However, this isn't a simple indictment of the people who ran Counterattack, Red Channels, Aware, and other anti-communist media. The book is frank about their background, their sloppiness, their bullying, their mistakes, and those whom they harmed, and the few that were actually innocent and blacklisted. But this book doesn't content itself to make the easy condemnations of those like Keenan, Kirkpatrick, Bierly, and Johnson who printed and promoted the blacklists. He also faults the network executives who rarely questioned or pushed back against them. In the rare cases when some brave souls put up some resistance they usually won.

What I appreciate about this book is that Everitt also provides the facts about the very real efforts by communists to use the recording and broadcast industries and their associated unions to spread the ideology. While it was never as pervasive or as dire a threat as the alarmists claimed, it wasn't without threat either. Another aspect of this telling of the story that I really appreciated is that it provides the names of those who were actively promoting communism and the undermining of the US government, how they went about it, and some of the words they used (which have largely been swept under the rug of historical convenience). One of the wonderful examples of the connection between the American communists and Moscow was their opposition to America entering WWII. But when Hitler attacked the USSR and Stalin needed America in the war they flipped their story, songs, and advocacy without missing a beat.

This book is VERY much worth reading and I recommend it strongly.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

I rank this book along with Allen Weinstein's Perjury and Sam Robert's The Brother in terms of advancing the conversation about one of the most unfortunate chapters in 20th Century American History. Weinstein and Robert ended the debate, in my mind, about "were they really spies?" and thus moved the conversation to "was the punishment justified" and "why did the hysteria build?"

In this book, Everitt traces the beginnings of Red Channels, a publication that identified people in the entertainment industry with "ties to Communist Front Organizations." For years there has been debate about where these organizations were indeed fronts, whether those named were Communist sympathesizers, or just well-meaning liberals. Everitt building on others' work settles the question of CPUSA. There was a plan and action to infiltrate or create communist front organizations with an intent to influence the messages in mass entertainment.

That doesn't mean that every participant in those organizations was a sympathsizer or even aware of the intent. But some certainly appear to be based on their willingness to accept whatever party line Stalin was touting even when it directly contradicted the previous ones. Or their gullibility in declaring the Gulags a good workplace.

Everitt handles the "blacklisters" with a similarly cold eye. He points out the sheer lack of humanity in almost every action by American Business Consultants. He does a fine job of explaining how an obscure grocer from Syracuse, NY came to hold such sway over network television and how much that grocer relished that power.

Most importantly Everitt demonstrates that the blacklist was not pervasive and all powerful. Certainly, if it cost one person their job simply for having unpopular beliefs it was too much. The question Everitt raises is: if some institutions could resist, why didn't others? For example, why did CBS (the home of Edward R. Murrow) cave in while NBC pretty much ignored Johnson and Red Channels? Why did P&G and Mark Goodson have no trouble getting the writers, performers and directors over Red Channel objections? There are numerous examples given by Everitt that shows what paper tigers Red Channels and Johnson truly were. Was it merely hysteria that made so many kowtow to them? Was it simple cowardice?

Finally, Everitt makes that case that the tendency to demonize the opposition is still alive and well on both sides of the aisle and this tendency is as dangerous today as it was in 1951.

Highly, highly recommended.

A SHADOW OF RED: COMMUNISM AND THE BLACKLIST IN RADIO AND TELEVISION tells of the arrival of the Cold War and its politics in the broadcasting world, surveying the unique circumstances of the purge of the airwaves, different from movie industry blacklisting. This approach challenged media's free speech rights and affected writers, directors, and more - yet only five anti-Red watchdogs affected the media's freedoms and rights. SHADOW OF RED follows these five and uses interviews, personal correspondence, FBI reports and more to examine blacklister history and politics. A 'must' for any collection strong in media history or Cold War politics, especially at the college level.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch