On June 22, 1950, a conservative anti-communist publication called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television became key to the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklisting campaign. Seventy-five years later, as President Donald Trump and his followers instigate similar attacks on artists, public cultural figures, and institutions, Red Channels represents more than just a past chapter in American history. Rather than a chronicle of antiquity, Red Channels and other texts of the 1940s and 1950s Red Scare provide real insight into Trump’s current inquisitions.
This tattletale publication, co-authored by three ex-FBI agents, was “the closest anyone came to an official blacklist” during the anti-communist witch hunts aimed at stifling dissent during the Cold War, writes New York Times reporter Clay Risen in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. This persecution of everyday Americans was spearheaded by the FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC), and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Red Channels was published just days before the beginning of the Korean War. These two committees “used that war as a reason to ramp up surveillance of and retaliation against progressives across the media,” says University of Oregon professor Carol Stabile.
Whereas by 1947 HUAC was focused on motion pictures, Red Channels zoomed in on broadcasting. The 109-page booklet listed in alphabetical order what Stabile, author of the 2018 book The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist, calls “a wide array” of 151 entertainers and journalists in radio and the growing television industry who allegedly had Communist Party ties and sympathies. The list of those accused included actress Jean Muir, folk singer Pete Seeger, dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, poet Langston Hughes, singer and actress Lena Horne, playwright Lillian Hellman, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, news reporter Howard K. Smith, writer Dorothy Parker, comedian Zero Mostel, and actor and director Orson Welles, among others. In her book, Stabile quotes pianist Hazel Scott—one of the forty-one women denounced by Red Channels, who was also married to New York Democratic Congressmember Adam Clayton Powell—as calling the McCarthyites “smear artists with spray guns.”
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Stabile notes that Red Channels was touted as the “bible of the blacklist,” helping to spread the gospel of anti-communism. Red Channels, which was published by Counterattack, a weekly mimeographed newsletter for subscribers that continued to be published until the late 1960s, was used by television and radio sponsors, as well as rightwing organizations such as the American Legion, to affect employment in broadcasting. For instance, in July 1950 Red Channels organized a letter-writing campaign against Muir, who appeared in The Aldrich Family. Muir was soon fired by NBC after sponsor General Foods Corporation issued a statement stigmatizing her as “a controversial personality whose presence . . . might adversely affect sales of the advertiser’s product.”
In September 1950, The New York Times reported: “The sponsors and advertisers have put the future of the medium in the hands of a ‘kangaroo court’ largely of their own devising. There now is under way in both radio and television a ‘Red purge’ which could lead anywhere. The minimum American standards of fair play have been thrust aside in timid appeasement of a handful of pressure groups . . . . [Muir] was presumed guilty without being given an opportunity to prove her innocence.”
Stabile recounts that in 1950, Gypsy Rose Lee became a target of anticommunist agitators after being offered a role as the host of the CBS quiz show What Makes You Tick?” The American Legion, a prominent veterans’ group, accused her of having ties to the Communist Party, citing Red Channels as its source. Despite Lee signing an affidavit denying any communist connections, What Makes You Tick? was cancelled in October.
According to Stabile, Red Channels often falsely accused performers, such as the so-called “Singing Lady” Ireene Wicker and the actor and singer Paul Robeson, of communist activities and memberships. Even if these artists had done what the inquisitors alleged, Stabile says, they would still not have been breaking any U.S. laws. “There were so many important reasons for being [Party] members in that period,” Stabile writes. “The Communist Party was alone in promoting so many progressive causes we’re still fighting for today. Being a member of the Communist Party was not illegal.” During the Depression the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was often at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights, such as with their support of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young Black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. Communist Party members also spearheaded unionization drives and strikes, and vigorously opposed fascism.
France-based journalist and novelist Dennis Broe points out, “[FBI Director John Edgar Hoover] assigned 400 agents to destroy communism, but only ten to track organized crime.”
In a similar vein, Trump has gone after a variety of high-profile law-abiding dissenters: Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, and Bob Woodward, as well as institutions including the Kennedy Center, ABC, CBS, The Des Moines Register, Harvard University, and public interest law firms.
As Stabile tells The Progressive, “attacks on high profile people send warnings that if you dissent, if you’re someone as powerful as Springsteen, you still can be harmed and attacked; then what chance do other people have to stand up?”
As is the case today, those subjected to scrutiny and persecution during the Red Scare were not being accused or charged, let alone convicted, of committing crimes. NBC didn’t drop Muir from its sitcom in 1950 because she robbed banks, but because, according to Risen’s Red Scare, she’d supported progressive causes and served as “vice president of the Congress of American Women, which the [U.S.] Attorney General had listed as a subversive organization.”
Professor Francis MacDonnell, author of the 2024 book Policing Show Business, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies, draws parallels between today’s use of “woke” as a derogatory smear and yesterday’s similar use of “communism.” MacDonnell continues, “To me, the whole concept of ‘woke’ is so vague and more like an epithet you throw at some idea you don’t like but don’t want to actually have to engage with an argument in any detail. So, you just dismiss it by saying ‘woke.’ ” In any case, being “woke” isn’t illegal.
If parallels between the Red Scare and Trumpism seem like déjà vu, Stabile explains why: “The playbook is very familiar—it’s unsurprising, as these are people who learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, so they know lots about pressure, retaliation, and bullying.” Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, mentored Donald Trump prior to eventually being disbarred for defrauding a dying client—a scandal that is dramatized in the 2024 film The Apprentice, which, predictably, Trump tried to suppress.
Informing on others has always been a key component for inquisitors. “The [FBI’s anti-communist] COMINFIL program was built on an army of confidential informants,” Stabile says. “Today there are groups like Canary Mission and the website KeyWiki that are producing their own lists of ‘subversives.’ ” She adds, “It was a confidential informant whose testimony was used to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador . . . . We absolutely are [seeing a similar network to those in the 1950s.]”
Broe, author of two recent novels set during the Hollywood blacklist, Left of Eden and The Dark Ages, sees striking similarities between 1950s House hearings interrogating filmmakers and the Congressional grilling of university presidents in the wake of the 2023 protests over the war in Gaza. “When three heads of Ivy League colleges were called before the modern HUAC, they were asked: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a supporter of Hamas?’ ” Instead of communism, Broe asserts, “Palestine is the issue that the modern McCarthyism is centered around, trying to make any support illegal.”
In terms of resistance, what other lessons can be learned from the American inquisition of 1947 to 1960? According to MacDonnell: “During the Red Scare, one of the great defenses for possible victims of the blacklist was the courts. Both actor Fredric March and producer Dore Schary filed suits against people who smeared their reputations.”
Broe insists that individuals must stand up to censorship, repression, persecution, and attacks on the First Amendment—such as when producers Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger gave Hollywood Ten screenwriter Dalton Trumbo a screen credit under his real name, instead of a pseudonym, for the movies Spartacus and Exodus, a stand which helped end the blacklist in 1960.
Instead of caving in to Trump’s threats and bluster, it’s time for all of us to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus!”