Focus 580; COOL WAR, COOL MEDIUM: TELEVISION, McCARTHYISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

In this hour of the show we will be looking back to American television of the early 1950s a time when this medium was growing explosively both in its reach and in its impact on American culture and the guest of the program as Thomas Doherty He's professor in the American Studies Department at Brandeis University which is in the Massachusetts not far from Boston. He's also chair of the film studies program at Brandeis and he's authored a book that we will talk about this morning titled Cold War medium the subtitle television McCarthyism and American culture. And it is published by the Columbia University Press and I think that for a lot of people there will indeed be this this association between Joseph McCarthy. And the medium of television and they would say that certainly one of the things that television did at this time was to offer to McCarthy a national platform from which to put out his message. So they might indeed argue that it facilitated somehow television facilitated the both the Cold War the Cold War

thinking and McCarthyism that is no doubt true I think professor Dorothy would say that it indeed also worked the other way because television was the place where McCarthy his downfall was was on display as well for the people of the United States. So we'll talk about that some of the things and of course whatever questions or comments that people have they're certainly welcome here in Champaign Urbana where we are the number is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line. That's good. Anywhere that you can hear us and that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so at any point hear questions or welcome we just ask people to try to be brief so that we can keep the program going and getting as many people as possible. Of course though as I say everybody is welcome to join the conversation. Presser Doherty Hello. Hi thanks very much for talking with us. My pleasure. One of the things that that's really striking here when you talk about the spread and the reach of television you offer

this these numbers here in the book is that in 1949 only one out of every ten American homes had a television just 10 years later in 1959 nine out of 10 homes had a TV. That's amazing growth in the. The spread of this medium in just a decade. You know it's really amazing how quickly TV takes over as what you might call the mass medium of choice. And that's not to say that radio is not important or that people are still going to the movie. But increasingly television really becomes the form for American democracy. And you might even think by the mid 50s there's sort of what you might call a tipping point where you know Eric Parnell the great TV historian has a wonderful line where he says that after 1954 that's the year of the army McCarthy hearings the year of the great Edward R. Murrow shows few people now dared to be without a television set. And although there are some families that surely did

hold out increasingly even in the 1950s TV is the dominant and most influential medium in American culture. It seems that it was very clear to a lot of people almost from the very start after the war when television really started to take off people understood that television would the the effect of television would be far greater than any of the mass media that had come before. We wonder what Because before radio was there everybody had a radio and radio was was the thing. You know perhaps again was the first thing that that national nationally unified the country in the sense that everybody could be sitting there and listening to the radio at the same time and whether that was they were listening to Franklin Roosevelt or they were listening to the shadow or whatever it was it was something that brought everybody together but television somehow it's different. Yeah well it's always the difference between you know having those images in your room and

taking it at the time of Canadia of the experience and as you know some of that and a lot of that actually happens in the age of radio from around 19 I guess 30 on word but when you can add images to the audio and you get a clearly a much more visceral intense experience and just the whole magic of that is something that I think a modern viewer has trouble we capturing an age of cable. You know there's you know the word TV is there television is the same word we use for 50 years of this medium. But if you're looking at TV in 1950 it's really the difference between a pound and a mart silent cinema compared to the television today that young people are familiar with I mean we have a whole generation now that doesn't know what you know of course not the whole is or never manipulated rabbity. Or you know trudge across there or carpeting them actually manually turn a television dial up and that the medium that I try to recapture in the late 40s and early 50s is really a special

kind of creature in American history it's sort of before the three network Gemini really came in strong in the late 50s throughout the 60s. It's well in advance that cable. That's the spirit where a lot of TV is live. A lot of it is not preserved and therefore forgotten. And TV and American culture are just beginning the tango that they're of course going to dance for the rest of the century and on and on. Clearly there is some kind of a qualitative difference in the way people encounter television if you compare that with print or even with radio and that clearly is what Mr. McLuhan was talking about when he said that there was the there were media that were cool and they were media they were hot. Yeah and I guess that in fact one of my colleagues had raised this question in my mind were talking about it maybe it's because we're in radio that we would even think about such a thing. But when you think about particularly some of the themes that played on the Cold War you wonder well what if there was no television in one of the what if radio was the way that people were talking about this would somehow the the the

whole debate the way people thought about it. Would it have been any different. And that's a great hypothetical because you can think of some of the radio personalities that were influential during the night. On the one hand you have you know the salutary progressive character is very conversational guys like Roosevelt who in his famous live chat you know talk to people one on one in a very kind of rational cool manner and then at the other extreme you've got guys like Father Coughlin the famous demagogue store Huey Long getting out another kind of message entirely and perhaps McCarthy had he just merely been a radio character. It might have been much more effective than he was high elevation because when he starts to go on TV there's something about sort of the visceral hotness of his personality that begins turning people off in a way that in some ways has nothing to do with ideology at them. The minute you see a character like that for extended periods of time on television your instinct is to draw

back because the character's so aggressive and so so overbearing where you tend to embrace somebody who's cooler and more patrician whether it's a journalist broadcast like Edward R. Morrow or you know the famous lawyer in the army McCarthy hearings. Joseph Welch Well it's certainly interesting when you go back and you look at some of the things that television brought into people's homes at this time early on and what was going on in the world and I guess I was maybe not surprised but to read that one of the things that television brought into people's homes was nuclear tests. Yeah. There was live coverage of in some cases nuclear explosions and they also showed film of the first hydrogen bomb probably if they could have done that when live they would have it it's really very striking that those sorts of things it somehow seems to me it is striking that those sorts of things would have been presented that way and one wonders exactly what people

made of that when they saw mushroom clouds live from the nuclear test out in Nevada. They're on their TVs. Yeah. And this is sort of one of just the curious points about the history of the 20th century in terms of our visual imagery that we tend to remember the history best obviously that we have the best images of felt counterintuitively I think our imagination and our memory actually of say the Great Depression or the 1930s or certainly the Second World War or the event that was in the 20th century that was most covered by cellulite is much more vivid than our memories of the early 1950s because this was an age before the invention of videotape which doesn't really come in and told one thousand fifty six and it doesn't start going online with great regularity until the late 50s and early 60s up. And so if things were. Kinescope would be the term

that is 16 millimeter photograph 50 millimeter record of a television screen. Well you did that in kinescope the image. It was flat gone. So a lot of the early 1950s is to our visual historical memory because we simply don't have the images. And so we don't have many of the images of the life of nucular test and we we actually don't have many images of live presidential addresses believe it or not. You know when I was doing this project one of the things that I was surprised about is that I do read accounts either in the motion picture or television trade press about Truman given the talker Eisenhower Nixon and you know I want to see it. And I'd call up the presidential library and they they wouldn't have an image. Atop the Truman gave Truman's 1948 like your early drafts was televised locally and when I believe it went as far as York. But we have no preserved record of it. And there are amazing moments from the late 40s and early 50s

that just then off to the ether and the nucular the coverage of some of the early atopic you go flat are some of those images that are just glad to be gone. Now something else that I thought was really fascinating and I guess that particular thought about it because yesterday and I I think I have this right. Yesterday I believe was that the 20th anniversary of the airing of the made for-TV movie The Day After which was very if people remember this it was very controversial it was a movie about what would happen if there was a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States and it was controversial because it was clearly intended to get people to think about how bad nuclear weapons were and the fact that we really should do something about them and we should be talking with the Soviet Union and trying to get rid of them. And it was a pointed to as and an indication of the fact that course the television networks we know that they're liberal and they have this liberal agenda. And I was really struck by one of the things along this line though that you

write about in the book and this was a film with a live prime time television drama that was done this was in 1954 interest. We have an ABC. This was a program of the then about New York City being head held hit by a hydrogen bomb and the story of one woman in particular dealing with the aftereffects and I just thought Well first of all I thought it must have scared the heck out of people in 1954. But I thought that the interesting parallel between that and essentially the same story. And when I really wondered about how people reacted to that in 1954. Well you can imagine people were terrified. And the real optic you get in this nucular terror of course is after the invention of the hydrogen bomb that as horrific as the atomic bomb was that ended the second world war we could kind of get our mind around it as a really big TNT explosion. And if you looked at the metaphors people would say what's the quick point that 10000 tons of TNT or whatever.

And if you looked at the aerial shots of Hiroshima and Nagasaki they didn't look all that different from you know those famous images appear Lannert Dresden for example. But when I do. I'm coming online and in the early 1950s that's what really scares the bejesus out of people because there you actually have the prospect of nucular annihilation of the entire species. And there's a wonderful TV moment in fact that commemorates this with Edward R. Morrow see it now on the very day that the ideation bomb is announced by the Atomic Energy Commission. Now I happen to be like that Saturday and they are getting the news live and the reports are coming in on Edward R. Morrow show is extremely braced by this prospect and he comments there's no joy at all in his voice and the and the other thing is this atmosphere does for you is it gives you an appreciation for the palpable terror so many Americans rightly

felt in the early days of the Cold War as they're confronting these images. And also the prospect of of course the Soviet Union is also a country with nuclear weapons it's not at that moment. I didn't weapons. Our guest in this part of focus 580 told the story he's professor in the. American Studies Department at Brandeis University He's also chair of the film studies program and has written a lot about media and has a new book out that's titled Cold War cool medium television McCarthyism and American culture and it's published by the Columbia University Press. It's out there if you would like to take a look at it and of course questions you're welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 and toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We talked about the fact that images of nuclear annihilation were present there they were there on the medium and I guess when it comes to the Cold War at early television another image that will be link those things will be linked in people's mind with Joe McCarthy Although interestingly enough it. As you

point out if you look at what McCarthy was doing he himself was not particularly interested in investigating the entertainment industry. Yet this is really one of the great misconceptions and it's sort of one of those misconceptions that you can't blast out of the public mind imagination with with dynamite that the phrase McCarthyism has become the all purpose rubric for any kind of domestic repression of thought or discourse during the Cold War. Now a period that last from around 1946 you know well sometime in the end of the 60s if you're talking about sort of the real oppression of you know what you might call aberant ideologies McLuckie own tenure as it were is really remarkably brief periods like from 1950 to 1954 is what you might call the height of its power. I don't know if that's McCarthyism is the phenomenon that predates McCarthy and postdates McCarthy. So he's given in a sense too much credit or blame for all the things that we kind of comp under the rubric

of McCarthyism. The thing that's probably the most widely misconceived is the point you just mentioned about you know McCarthy's relationship to the entertainment industry the McCarthy Committee. It's sometimes called the permanent subcommittee on investigations. It's often confused with the House Committee on Un-American activity which of course has the first famous series of hearings into Hollywood in October 1947. Basically three years before McCarthy comes on the scene as an anti-communist cold warrior. So that's always one of those misconceptions that the House Un-American Activities Committee is can trade it with Joe McCarthy because he's the targets were by and large intramural that he was concerned with investigating folks in the State Department and later with the U.S. Army sometimes with the U.S. Information Agency and other you know the Voice of America. But generally he went after the executive

branch which was OK during his first couple years in doing it from 50 to 52. But of course when I did our intellect in the Republican take over this that he's sort of engaged in shooting his fellow Republicans. And that's when he really started to become more trouble than he's worth for people in Washington. You know it was the it was you act that the House Committee on Un-American Activities that was involved in investigating initially investigating Hollywood. And I and to people I'm sure well will be familiar with the the term blacklist. Yeah but there were a number of people who were said to have been involved in left wing politics. And and as a result were they couldn't work in the industry. The same thing did happen in television although perhaps it doesn't have the quite the same place in people's imagination the did the Hollywood blacklist the one that affected people who worked in movies did. But there certainly was a television

blacklist and found what you call the founding document of that was something called Red Channels which allegedly listed people working in television who were who were communists. Yeah red channel comes out in June nineteen fifty and what it is is this is this the pamphlet and it's kind of a compile ation of these newsletters an anti-communist outfit called American business open putting up for a few years and it puts between covers the names of one hundred fifty one radio and television performers entertainers of directors and screenwriters who are alleged to have communist party affiliation or like minded opinions. The idiom of the day would have been fellow travellers. That is people who although not in their early communist party members certainly hew to the party line on the board of foreign affairs. When Rich is published and on June 22nd 950 it's the

official beginning as it were of the TV blacklist because it puts these people names between covers. By coincidence that's also the week that the Korean war erupts overseas and it's also the same month that Julian Rosenberg is arrested domestically. So you have this sort of concatenation of events in which you've got a war overseas and a firing off you've got the intensity of the cold war domestically firing off and you have red channels being published. And one of the curious phenomena or maybe appropriate phenomena of the post-war era and the HUAC committee hearings of forty seven is another. It's also I think part of the same matrix is that increasingly Americans when they want to talk about anything sex violence and ideologies you name it they will go to the media because during the Second World War we've learned in America in a way we've never known before that the film and radio and television later is

a powerful medium for the communication of the political values of our culture. And increasingly when we want to talk about something in our culture we use media to talk about it. Think HUAC goes. After all he wouldn't forty seven. Why private interest groups and the government eventually starts looking at the television medium as a place where perhaps aversive activity of ideology can be communicated back. You present in the book a couple of case studies of how this worked and how one one actor in particular was his career was destroyed in fact he was life was destroyed by it and then another perhaps better known a case where there where a performer significantly confronted it head on and perhaps because she was extremely popular that that helped it was able to ride it out in the first

place. It was an actor named Philip Loeb who was a performer on the show The Goldbergs I don't know how many people will remember it before my time. A program that had been a radio show about this about a Jewish family was living in New York that Dan made the transition as a number of radio shows did to radio to television. And this particular actor was singled out and they fired him. And it was dark he was dogged by these allegations had a very difficult time for the rest of his life eventually he committed suicide and in part because of that so here is a part there is a particular case. Case in which that allegation clearly destroyed this man's career and his life. Yeah. Philip Loeb is a real tragic character and I think he's probably the most poignant and most tragic of all the blacklist stories. You know like I think I think I said in the book that you know every black with stories like those families and post-oil they're all unhappy in a different way. And Lopes is clearly the most on happiest if you will because he does end up

actually committing suicide. Maybe if your listeners have seen the Woody Allen movie the front you know directed by Margaret and you know my character in that movie he jumps out of a hotel window is sort of a loose loosely based on Philip Loeb. Loaded up played the father on the long running radio and then television show The Goldbergs he was named in Red Channels the sponsor of the Goldberg got cold feet dropped the show it was picked up for renewal on NBC but contingent on lope no longer being in the cast because in these days the sponsors controlled the shows totally and every sponsor had sort of an ethos of what was called 100 percent acceptability. They never wanted their name associated with anything that would alienate anybody they wanted. The overall acceptability. So if you alienated any group they they would tend to back away from the product and

certainly no American company wanted their product associated with anything to do with climate variations. And that is that low be taken off the show in the tour of the series. The woman who played Molly Goldberg and the lovable Yiddisher Momma of the show I was the favorite to shoot the producer ator was faced with the prospect of either firing Philip Loeb and letting a friend go and caving into the pressure or I'm not firing Logan having her show basically be blasted off the air and you know takes her livelihood away in the livelihood of everyone else which is really an anguishing position she was put in. She openly decides to let the load go. He is blacklisted from much of the entertainment as he gets some jobs in Broadway and. You know but is really living foot to mouth and it was so poignant when I was doing the research on this because I went and got the Philip Lote FBI file which you can do you can

get the thing through the Freedom of Information Act in and read you know a fairly extensive litany. Better tracking this guy around the country as he's touring in various Broadway shows when he can manage to get a job and now every six months there's an FBI agent who's going to the shows and filing reports and the very last page in Philip Loeb. FBI file is from August 1955 and it's the FBI agent who sort of a kind to his case and the FBI agent realizes after following this guy around for three or four years he's no threat to national security. And he goes out on a limb and recommend that Lowe be taking off their lives a security risk. And that's the last piece of paper and it's dated like August 25th. Then several days later Loeb goes in to a hotel room and commits suicide. Of course having no way of knowing that even the FBI has decided that he's no threat to national

security. So the story is really at the extreme ends of tragedy a more human. Don't worry if you will and one that is at the other end of the experience is the Lucille Ball story. Believe it or not Lucille Ball actually had a brush with the House Un-American Activities Committee herself at the height of her fame when she and Desi had the number one show in in the country and she was the sort of America's sweetheart she's really when you think of the stature of Lucille Ball in terms of her ratings and just how popular she was in the 1950s she said you know if you adjusted for inflation and modern day Nielsen she's probably the you know the biggest star that the medium the biggest star the medium ever had. And in the early 1930s there are 36 37 she had allegedly or actually she really did indicate her willingness to vote the Communist Party ticket she had in mind a

voting registration card. And so this is regurgitated in the early 1950s of a time when it's a lot less politically correct. She's called secretly before the House Committee on an American activities and the news is leaked by the reporter Walter Winchell on his television show which he had on Monday night. And for the next week there's just a flurry of speculation about who this person is and exactly what's going on. Why did the story break out in the press that it's Lucille Ball who's been accused Sheehan. Does he give a tearful press. Don't fret about it that night at the taping of their show she said she goes out to the audience. The only thing read about this girl is her hair and even that's not genuinely red and the audience embraces her. And two days later the story kind of blows over and Lucy just sort of strides above the hole. I mean if you're in a way that almost no one else in the 1950s managed to do.

We have a couple callers here will bring him into the conversation and I should introduce Again our guest Thomas Doherty. He's professor in the American Studies Department at Brandeis University. He is also chair of the film studies program there and has written a lot about media. He is the author of The Book Code work or medium television McCarthyism and American culture. It's published by the Columbia University Press and explores some of the content the themes and also the politics in television of the early 1950s here in the United States. Questions are welcome again we just asked people that to help us by being brief so we can get in as many folks as possible but Anyone's welcome into the conversation. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4. Five champagne County here to start us off line 1 0 0 0. There's so many interesting anecdotes. I wanted to know whether you covered the fact that J Edgar Hoover was purely blue pencilling scripts

for the radio series and then I went on into the FBI TV series. You're aware about or about in your book. Well Hoover is that yeah he did have a lot of public attention to TV that in the beginning in the 1980s. Hoover realized how powerful radio could be is and Israel has a way to fight his own power in the FBI and they. I had a very powerful public relations campaign as it were. Didn't do much of this in the thirties or forties later on with this series in the 1960s with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. the FBI he took on a more active role. I think the show in the 50s that is most associated with the FBI is something called I Led Three Lives which as some of your listeners might recall a show based on the true life adventures of a fellow named Daniel Philbrick

and overcrowding and Herbert Philbrick was a triple agent. He was an advertising executive who joined the Communist Party on behalf of the FBI. So the story every week told about his adventures infiltrating the Communist Party before. But he had to do so because he was a true American patriot. So Burke really was sort of an ad hoc effort not an official FBI agent but he was an informant for the FBI. The show was often confused as being sort of an official FBI production although And Hoover did his best to deny it because the show didn't have the official FBI imprimatur. But that's the show I think is most associated with that sort of Cold War FBI infiltrating the communist threat in America an area. Very popular this time by the way. Yeah yeah. There's really there's a been a recent full length

memoir by a woman who was expatriate I'm forgetting her name right now but you know she told an anecdote about you I believe actually mean it. Elizabeth Farrelly sounds impossible yet you tell the anecdote about them having a meeting in Ollywood and are being tipped off about it was being surveilled by none of them Marilyn Monroe or something like that. An interesting little anecdote. I note that don't Trumbo son has off off Broadway we're called Red White and blacklisted Now I don't know if that's. Well rotten Well well put on but it's interesting to hear that. But one of the people that was most affected by the blacklist. Yeah what a trauma get up better than a lot of people. He's one of the original Hollywood Ten of course not really having all that much to do with TV he's so you know blacklisted in 1940 seventies as you know part of that first wave he is the one that had the great lines at it and when I asked him how do you know you were blacklisted. And he said My agent told me why. My wife told me and my landlord told me

so talented that he very quickly starts getting work under the table in the guise of a run for the pseudonym. And in 99 56 He's actually given an Academy Award under an assumed name Robert Rich and by 56 it's an open secret that many of these allegedly or have met many of these blacklisted writers are working under assumed names or fronts goes on local television in L.A. And yet he's the guy who just got off the ground and it turns assumed name and that. Clip is picked up by CBS in New York and broadcast nationally nationally. So it's really an open secret by even you know if you think that the original Hollywood Ten at least or some of them are working under the table in Hollywood TV doesn't open up like that and cool much much later. A key moment in a key date might be

1954 with a show that perhaps some of your listeners do remember Copa defenders with Eugene Marshall and Robert Reed where they play a father son lawyer team and in January of that year they teach the defenders on television does an episode called blacklist which is about a blacklisted actor played by Jack Klugman. And that's the first time that TV drama addresses the issue. Full on and that is that of course several years after Hollywood has more or less broken the blacklist of 1947 it was I curated 40 of them. Could you mention again Red Channels and oh what kind of like oh how it came about. Oh well kind of right wing groups were funding it and was there any channel. Going up the Red Channels was the template that is kind of the greatest hits collection of a newsletter called counterattack. And there are a

lot of these newsletters that were published in the late 40s and early 50s listing a legit communist in the entertainment industry you know there's you know file 13 count like I mentioned counterattack. There's a guy named Myron C. Fagan who published a lot of pamphlets as well the American Legion had won the Catholic war veterans had won and you know virtually anybody with a mimeograph machine typewriter something it seemed sometimes with publishing a list of various people in Red Channels with sort of the in some ways the best document why they would be the perpetrator's name and have a list of. And says. And the chances were you know we've I think of them as fairly benign but they were kind of a. Capable by and large and in the sense that the editors had lifted back issues of the Daily Worker or a massive mainstream communist

Journal and seen these actors you know publish letters of support or take out ads in support of various causes they considered communists. So the you know the I mean a campaign of this time is kind of this bizarre amalgam of you know government agencies like the House Committee on Un-American Activities private groups like the American Legion or the folks who did red channel and some newspaper reporters frankly who you know and they were all communicating together and publishing names and making insinuations and the government always has the power of subpoena. So you get sort of that wedge there and the pressure groups have the power to pressure sponsors and sort out the work. Throughout most of the 1950s TV at least. OK let's go to Bloomington Indiana. Line 4 below where you're talking about television performers being blackballed in the early days of television. What about the

systematic blackballing of them both Rush Limbaugh and Dr Laura Laura Schlessinger in much more recently and written recent years they were blacked out. Rush Limbaugh had a very popular television program which was exiled to the television time slot so it was after midnight and despite the fact that he was consistently broadcast after minute they wouldn't let him be broadcast at a decent hour. He would get higher ratings and the popular comedy shows but if any television station broadcasting at a decent hour they were threatened that a few times when some brave station owner would broadcast him at a decent hour his ratings would soar and then they were what they were threatened and threatened entirely move him back into the exiled after midnight time slot. That's real black balling up. Well but the caller makes a reasonable point that that is an open sides of the political spectrum.

U.S. tactics use pressure group tactics to sort of. To go after characters whose ideology they disagree with. And I actually have no problem with that that my objection would be when the state starts intervening when you actually have a House committee with subpoena powers or a government agency within the gate of powers going after people that's when I do think it becomes a really sinister but the the normal things that American citizens do to organize and vote voiced their opinions against media corporate entities. That's fine that's the way our system works. So if a group of gay Americans wants to get together and protest Dr. Laura Schlessinger because of the opinions that she's expressed about homosexuals that they don't like that's fine and they can go after sponsors or networks or affiliates and you know that's the way our system operates and if people who support President Reagan and find that you know this miniseries The Reagans which has been in the news lately is an

elucidation a smear against a president they consider to be great then you know by all means go after CBS. That's the way our system works. Let's. Let's see if I've got this right. Yeah it's OK. When the when the program managers when the when the television establishment blackballed people perhaps all right. You know I don't know when but when the government who has reason to believe I mean they've got they have investigative agencies who can actually get evidence Very know when someone is sinister. So when they blackballed from women when they issue a warning that this is a sinister somebody who's doing something that is actually hurting the country. It may be hurting the country. I doubt very seriously whether a conservative point of view is being broadcast on television would hurt the country very much. Well you know I don't I don't think that the government has the right to make those kind of decisions when you're talking about free expression in the media I think you have every right in the world to voice your objections to Laura Schlessinger or Rush Limbaugh or to a liberal media elite you see is suppressing her conservative notion. That's that's fine.

I actually also don't think that Rush Limbaugh has much trouble getting an audience on amazing radio announcer. My own sense of what happened to him on TV is not that he was blacklisted by the television industry who I think if he were getting great ratings he'd be doing it be on TV with that as we were talking about earlier in the show. With with David that Limbaugh is a hot personality. He's great on radio but he's too overpowering on TV and it seems like there are those personalities that can make the transition from a radio persona to a TV persona. And that my sense is that limbo really wasn't one of them that he worked at best you know behind a radio microphone on television. And I could watch the show a few times like I do but I didn't really think he had the kind of charisma that he had on his radio show. I think the bottom line is here one thing we know is that the networks commercial

broadcasters they're going to put whatever is going to make money for them. And I was. For example I was just kind of surprised the other night to tune in to CBS and see the Victoria's Secret lingerie show going on you know. You watch purely for scholarly research. Well I have to admit that I just caught the very end as I switched over there to get the news. But I guess once again it's says that and particularly I guess you have to understand the environment the over the air broadcasters find themselves in increasing competition from all other sources of entertainment and they're just struggling to hang on and they're going to put anything on that they think is going to make their money. We have about 10 minutes left and our guest is part of focus 580 again Tom's story. He's professor of American studies at Brandeis University he's also the chair of their film studies program there. We were talking about his book club medium which is about television in America and the early 50s questions are welcome. One of the thing that I thought was interesting again I was struck by looking at the book as I guess I have

this idea perhaps a lot of people have the idea that early on certainly Senator McCarthy was had enough influence so that people were afraid of criticizing him at all. And I was very struck in reading that. Book about the very rough treatment that he got from journalists particularly television journalists and some of the famous venue's like FACE THE NATION which is still going on now. Those kinds of programs he was really hammered really hard by the reporters and I was guess I was a little bit surprised but yeah I was too and in fact the thing that kind of inspired this book I was doing some other project and I thought the Library of Congress and for some reason the archives showed me this show called American form of the air she asked if I wanted to see it the guest was McCarthy that on that particular episode is and you have been 1053 you know it's a live political show in which the studio audience members ask a politician questions and it was a different politician every week

and this particular episode had the cast and the studio audience is you know maybe there are some ringers in there but they kind of look like your average American from from the 1950s. And to a man and woman every one of them gets up and gives McCarthy serious grief. This woman who looks to be kind of your stereotypical image of the nice young 50s lady with the white glove asked McCarthy whether he thinks that a man is guilty and innocent until proven guilty and he says of course. And then she just comes back at them. And why do you treat people guilty before they're proven innocent. An American Legion guy gets up and criticizes McCarthy and one of those weird flashforwards that you sometimes experience watching these documents. A guy gets up and said Senator McCarthy My name's John Rekha I'm a lawyer here in town. And of course you know that the young lawyer who will become John Sirica of Watergate hearings fame and yes McCarthy an aggressive question. Well and you do get the sense

that it's kind of the memory of what a lot of maybe historians on the left I think a little too politically call the McCarthy era or the era of the American Inquisition is just a little overstated and that TV although certainly nothing like the medium it is today and certainly not totally free with a lot more complicated and complex even issues involving McCarthyism than popular memory is sometimes recalled. And your your bottom line is just to drown this out that well indeed you might argue that television helped to make McCarthy it also. Hope to undo him. Oh absolutely because McCarthy is in the business in the end of restraining discourse of restraining thought of restraining expression and TV. Not because it's you know at the right place necessarily but because of its commercial interests needs to fill air time. The TV isn't the business it seems to me generally

expanding expression expanding discourse expanding there is so. I think they were destined to conflict eventually and when it came to the head in nineteen fifty four guys like Edward R. Morrow and later the army McCarthy hearings that the two of them were inevitably in conflict and the TV would and never would be inevitably went out because in the end Americans would rather have their television. And I just Carthy we're getting close to the end we have couple minutes we have several callers will get to at least one first one of the line is Chicago in line one fellow and I just a couple of. Thank you for defamation of character and I thought of playing a couple million dollars close to the supermarket. Oh and up in the Syracuse New York area. You know

what. I know there's a. A whole bunch of stupid people and you know people saying Oh oh I don't understand why paper reporters got onto the discussion. You know but I'm not going to happen. That's all I have to slowly filling up. I think the person that the caller is referring to is actually a fellow named Laurence Johnston and he was the guy said a supermarket owner in New York and he wasn't really part of red channel. He was another one of those players in the you know the great pressure group matrix. Anti-communist pressure group he was sued by

or I read where he cooperated actually a kind of red channels like offshoot was sued by a guy named John Henry Hall and he had the character that really breaks the blacklist the guy I have real courage and tenacity who when he was named and blacklisted took away or incorporated the court took Laurence Johnston to court and in the early 1960s received what at the time was the greatest jury award for this kind of defamation. Ironically Laurence Johnston is found dead in his hotel room the day the verdict comes back. I will try WU quick to get another caller in Chicago here line for you don't I think because he was will have its time because it seems we like the country more ready for the thing with this Patriot Act so that we can clear up to be more of a sense that we're children the government is their father our government or their parents just like that guy who is supporting Rush Limbaugh you

know if the people are supposed to be able to have any of the sentiment only the government has the power. I mean there are parents who are the children. Well a final thought. Well I think you know one of the things about America in the post-9 11 era that might make us more sympathetic and understanding of the Cold War era is that most of us now have an important national security and that sense that there are people out there who want to fly airplanes into our buildings and that because of that. Some of the old acceptance maybe or some of the. If you're talking about the balance between civil rights and national security in a pre-9 11 era we would always choose civil rights in a post-9 11 era that decision might not be as easy as it once was. And that's I think just the difference between really feeling that fear in your bones as people did the late 40s and early 50s and having it just being in a match. It's a construct.

Well we're going to have to leave it at that. And again if people who are interested like to go back and think a little bit and read about television of the early 1950s whether you were there or not for the set you might look at this book we mention it's titled Cold War cool medium by our guest Thomas Doherty. He's professor of American studies at Brandeis University Professor Doherty thanks very much. Hey my pleasure David thank you.