Colors

Red Channels

How It's Used

"Mr. [Norman] Corwin now comes full circle. Still tall, with a thick head of wavy white hair, he's observed America's periodic discomforts over its Bill of Rights for a quarter of its 200 years, and rarely from the sidelines. In the '40s, his words helped define fascism to the nation. Ten years later, the alchemy of Cold War politics had turned those words a shocking ‘pink.’ ‘I was never on a "black” list,’ he says, claiming no martyrdom, ‘more a gray list.’ Actually, he was on the original Red Channels list, along with Aaron Copland, Edward R. Murrow, Leonard Bernstein and Orson Welles."

"[Marsha] Hunt was a busy film and television personality with a growing career as a character actress at MGM and Paramount, where she started in 1935. She was a regular on television game shows and was negotiating to host her own program on the fledgling medium. In March 1950, she was featured on the cover of Life magazine.

“But when her name appeared in the government publication Red Channels, her career disappeared. ‘I was 30. I had made 54 films by then,’ she said, in an interview last week from her Sherman Oaks, Calif., home. ‘I've made eight since.’"

“Shortly afterward, Ms. [Kim] Hunter took a supporting role in the Ginger Rogers film 'Tender Comrade,' about young women living communally during World War II, a film that struck some as pro-Soviet. It was cited, years later, as a reason that her name appeared in 'Red Channels,' a 1950's pamphlet naming suspected Communist sympathizers. Ms. Hunter, a liberal Democrat, had been a vocal supporter of civil rights, though she never belonged to the Communist Party. She said she traced her problems with the blacklist to a world peace symposium that she helped sponsor in 1949. No one ever announced that she was on a blacklist, she said.

“‘Gradually it became sort of clear,’ she said. ‘I think CBS was first. I was on the blacklist at CBS. No more CBS television. Then I think ABC dropped out and then, finally, it was NBC. And then by that time, I won my Oscar for the movie of “Streetcar,” but I could not work in films. The last film I made was in 1951.’”

“The 1950s saw the publication of a small paperback called Red Channels: the report of Communist influence in radio and television, price one dollar. The book was nothing more than a frequently misspelled list of over 100 names of show-business people, together with the alleged Communist or Communist-front organisations with which each was said to be connected.

“Although the careers of Judy Holliday, Jose Ferrer, Gypsy Rose Lee and the writers Lillian Hellman, Irwin Shaw, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber survived the smears of Red Channels, the career of the actress Beverly Dennis did not. When her name was mentioned in its pages, she was appearing in the successful television series 'The Red Buttons Show.' Before you could say 'unemployable', a one-dollar paperback blighted a career that had begun 16 years earlier, when she was only 10.”

“[Pete] Seeger and [Lee] Hays were also members of The Weavers, a folk quartet who charted in 1950 with a version of Lead Belly's 'Goodnight Irene' before a mention in the commie-baiting tract Red channels (used by TV executives to keep left-wingers off the air) put them on the blacklist, killing their career and losing them their recording contract.”

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