During the McCarthy period, a local grocer in Syracuse, New York took on the big powerful television networks and the Constitution of the United States and won. His name was Laurence A. Johnson, and his method was a simple one: he told the major ad agencies (which in those days controlled television programming) that if they hired talent that he decided (using the blacklister’s bible, Red Channels, as a guide) was a communist, he would post a notice on the shelves of his stores that the makers of that product sponsored a television program that hired “subversives.”
He never actually did that, mostly because if he had, no one would have given a shit, he would have been unmasked as a fraud and any power he had would have evaporated, but the threat was enough to force those pillars of Jello (actually, one of the first companies to fire artists off its shows) at the networks to cave.
When I wrote my television book, I went to see Frank Stanton who had been the president of CBS at that time. Sitting across from his desk, I asked him, “You, who had a reputation as a master pollster, why didn’t you at least test to see if Johnson had a following?”
Stanton almost literally turned purple in fury. “I had no choice! We would have lost all of our advertisers. I had to save the company. What would you have done?”
“The right thing,” I said.
He then sputtered something that I can’t remember, turned a few more interesting colors and threw me out of his office. The interview was over.
Imagine my surprise a few years later when I read in the newspaper that Stanton was being given a lifetime civil liberties award. Now, Frank Stanton did a lot of terrific things during his tenure at CBS, but this was the man who ran the blacklist; the man who fired those employees who didn’t sign a loyalty oath. I called the Times Arts and Leisure section and suggested there was a story to be written about this, and they agreed.
One of the first people I spoke to was Sig Mickelson, who had once been head of CBS News. He told me that Stanton literally handed him a list and said, “No one on this list gets hired.” What’s more, the list was still in existence, Mickelson said. It sat among his papers at the University of Texas. Here it is, the CBS blacklist:
I did a few more interviews, and then it was time to see Stanton again, who was by then 91 years old. Maybe he never got around to reading the interview we did for The Box, which was a good thing, and because I was writing for The Times, he even invited me to lunch. Clearly, instead of screaming at me, he was going to charm me, but he gave me the same line: he had no choice, blah, blah, blah. At least this time he didn’t try to toss me out of the restaurant, although he did have a friend of his at Channel 13 try to pressure me not to write the story.
I then went to see Allan Sloane, who was then living in a small Connecticut house and breathing from an air tank. He was in Red Channels.
Sloane had been a terrific writer, but thanks to Stanton, he couldn’t get hired to drive an ice cream truck. I was writing the story. It came out on May 30, 1999. I heard that Stanton checked himself into the hospital that day. I’m a cold guy. I had no sympathy for him, and now his actions were part of the newspaper of record. Of course, it would have been nice if they had been part of the newspaper of record fifty years before.
Here’s the story.
And here’s a copy of the CBS loyalty oath. It’s blank, so feel free to print it out, fill it in and send it on to CBS, or just change the word “Communist” to “terrorist” and mail it to your company’s CEO or the FBI.
Thanks for writing this. Really interesting – and sad – stuff. And to see the actual documents is really quite powerful.
But if that list is actually an official CBS-generated document, why does it say at the top, “protest their participation in programs by writing to the manufacturers of the product they advertise”? It seems as though CBS did something even worse than making up their own list — they just copied a page from some anti-communist newsletter, and distributed it.
Thanks, I have a bit more from this period that I’ll post sometime in the future.
You are absolutely right. I checked with Mickelson on that very point, and yes, the list came from an outside source to Stanton and was handed down to Mickelson anyway as a good list. Of course, plenty more were added to the list over time. If I remember correctly, the first person to refuse to sign the loyalty oath was a young secretary, and that turned into an embarrassment, not only to CBS but also to the liberals who signed it. Stanton and Murrow didn’t always see eye to eye, and I remember him saying to me, contemptuously, “Well, Murrow signed it, didn’t he.” He did, although that didn’t make it right.
It’s notable that this seems to be a stricter blacklist than used in the movies, since many of those listed had never been Communists (Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Edward G. Robinson – I don’t think that, except for Robinson, any of these were ever under HUAC investigation) or had been but repented and named names (Lee J. Cobb, Burl Ives) and therefore largely avoided the movie blacklist.
I also wonder how long this was in effect – Burgess Meredith regularly appeared on The Twilight Zone (a CBS program) just a few years later.
An interesting point. I wrote quite a lot about the “clearing” operation in my book, and it’s possible some of the people on the list endured that process, which was essentially a protection racket.
Interesting and ironic that Elia Kazan is on that list. It must have been made prior to his squawking to HUAC. Has CBS ever formally apologized for this? Did any of the blacklistees ever sue for defamation, etc?
I think it was a malleable situation. If you look at the loyalty oath, you’ll see the name “Joe Ream.” He was in charge of the day-to-day running of the list, and I’m sure the situation changed as needed in regard to the talent.
Fascinating post. The current documentary “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” deals with the blacklist and its effect on Jack Gilford, Zero Mostel, and especially Philip Loeb.
I’m glad you dropped by and mentioned your film. I heard great things about it. I spoke at length to Jack’s wife about Phil and Zero and how they all dealt with it, and I imagine you saw their son’s play which was performed up here, I think last year. The Phil Loeb story is the one where you say, this wasn’t some political disagreement, it was murder.
Hi, Jeff —
I’ve been a big fan of THE BOX since it came out, and I’m delighted to find some “outtakes” here on your blog. I didn’t realize your original interview with Stanton had been so confrontational, and I’m impressed that you pushed your luck with him. I’ve interviewed a number of blacklistees but never one of the “bad guys,” and I wonder how I would’ve handled it.
I knew Allan Sloane, too — well, I never met him, but I was the beneficiary of a brief but voluminous correspondence with Sloane in 1996-97. We mostly discussed EAST SIDE / WEST SIDE, but the blacklist came up tangentially. As in your NYT article, Sloane always identified himself as a victim of the blacklist. That’s accurate up to a point, but it should be noted that Sloane, sadly, after being out of work for 3-4 years became a “late friendly” in 1954 and appeared before HUAC, armed with a few names, to clear himself. He had some mitigating personal circumstances that were about as sympathetic as you could imagine, but still, Millard Lampell (the writer/folk singer) made it clear in his TENDER COMRADES interview that he’d never forgiven Sloane for naming him.
I almost hate to point that out, because Sloane was an impressive man and remained a fiery lefty even during the diminshed health of his last years.
Jeff:
Not sure I understand why you felt it necessary to say, “…Just change the word communist to terrorist and send it to the FBI” What does that mean? Are you equating the definite threat that the Communist Party in the USA wielded then with the very definite threat of the Terrorists today? Also if you look closely you will see question number 2 asks about Fascist organizations as well. Why do we not hear so much about that? The list of organizations is fascinating stuff. The fascist groups take priority, with the Japanese groups up first. The Communists are listed under ‘subversives’ at the very end, almost an afterthought. So where is all this melodrama about the poor persecuted Communists coming from? Any second rate historian can tell you more about that era than you have outlined here.
MORE PLEASE.
You might also have mentioned that most of those on the list were known as Stalinists while those who once belonged to the CPUSA abandoned the Party after the Commintern Act of 1941 where Stalin and Hitler signed the non-agression pact that proved the last straw for the benighted Communist Party in this and other countries. The Stalinists where the ones who took the orders from Moscow to disrupt the Hollywood Ten Hearings.
I felt terrible for him, and he felt terrible for himself, as you know. I remember talking to my friend Eliot Asinof about it. He was also blacklisted but didn’t go through the clearing process. He said what people often did was name Sam Moore, who had been in radio. Eliot would say, “Sam was an open Communist, so it didn’t hurt him any if he was named, so they did.” The thing I learned from Sloane and Henry Morgan was that it’s easy to prejudge, and of course they were wrong, but while you hope if you were in that position you would do the right thing, do you really know what you would do if you were desperate to support a family?