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.