In August 1950, NBC announced that the actress Jean Muir would have a lead role in a new TV show, “The Aldrich Family.” An accomplished performer on stage, Muir was set to become one of America’s first television stars. Then, a few days later, NBC fired her.
The reason? That summer Muir’s name had appeared in a publication called Red Channels, a book-length compendium of actors, musicians and other artists who, its authors said, had once sympathized with the far left. In Muir’s case, she had briefly belonged to the Congress of American Women, a feminist group suspected of ties to the Communist Party.
NBC was soon inundated with demands that it cut ties with Muir. So was the show’s exclusive sponsor, General Foods. Even though Muir insisted she had never been a Communist — she called the party “a vicious and destructive force” — it wasn’t enough. She was blacklisted from television.
We often think of the Red Scare, the period of intense anti-communist hysteria in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as a story centered on the abuse of government power. But it was also a story of how much of the hysteria emanating from Washington relied on the obedience of companies like NBC to implement it.
These days it’s the Trump White House that is conducting what some see as a new version of the Red Scare, using government officials to pressure networks to rein in performers it doesn’t like. But this isn’t the first time TV networks have had to decide whether to accede or resist such government demands. Looking back at the stories like Muir’s shows how easily the private sector can be brought to heel, and how individual demands — suspending a late-night host like Jimmy Kimmel, for example — can easily solidify into a new, invasive norm.
Just as today’s media companies are going through a period of consolidation that makes them especially sensitive to the whims of government regulators, the Red Scare came at a delicate time for the country’s broadcast networks. Television was only a few years old, and while NBC and others had invested heavily in the new medium, they were not yet sure how to make it profitable.
Key to their financial calculations were corporate sponsors like General Foods, who would back entire programs, but also insist on uncontroversial content in return. Such an arrangement made the networks especially vulnerable to public attacks against its shows and actors.