Doherty, Thomas, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, Mccarthyism
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doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page i COLD WAR, COOL MEDIUM TELEVISION, McCARTHYISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page ii Film and Culture A series of Columbia University Press Edited by John Belton What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Henry Jenkins Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle Martin Rubin Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II Thomas Doherty Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy William Paul Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s Ed Sikov Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema Rey Chow The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman Susan M. White Black Women as Cultural Readers Jacqueline Bobo Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film Darrell William Davis Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema Rhona J. Berenstein This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age Gaylyn Studlar Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond Robin Wood The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music Jeff Smith Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture Michael Anderegg Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, ‒ Thomas Doherty Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity James Lastra Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts Ben Singer Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture Alison Griffiths Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies Louis Pizzitola Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film Robert Lang Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder Michele Pierson Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form Lucy Fischer doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page iii THOMAS DOHERTY COLD WAR, COOL MEDIUM TELEVISION, McCARTHYISM, AND AMERICAN CULTURE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORKcolumbia university press new york doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page iv Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2003 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Cold War, cool medium : television, McCarthyism, and American culture / Thomas Doherty. p. cm.—(Film and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–231–12952–1 (acid-free paper) 1. Television and politics—United States—History. 2. Television broadcasting of news—United States—History. 3. McCarthy, Joseph, 1908–1957. 4. Anti-communist movements—United States—History. 5. United States—Politics and government— 1945–1953. 6. United States—Politics and government—1953–1961. 7. United States— Social life and customs—1945–1970. 8. Cold War—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. II. Series. PN1992.6.D64 2003 791.45'658—dc21 2003051501 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page v contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii 1. video rising 1 A Television Genealogy 3 Red and Other Menaces 6 McCarthy: Man, Ism, and Television 13 2. the gestalt of the blacklist 19 The Blacklist Backstory 20 Pressure Groups and Pressure Points 24 Institutional Practices 34 3. controversial personalities 37 The Goldbergs: The Case of Philip Loeb 37 I Love Lucy: The Redhead and the Blacklist 49 4. hypersensitivity: the codes of television censorship 60 Faye Emerson’s Breasts, Among Other Controversies 64 Amos ’n’ Andy: Blacks in Your Living Room 70 5. forums of the air 81 Egghead Sundays 83 Direct Address 90 The Ike-onoscope 96 6. roman circuses and spanish inquisitions 105 “Kefauver Fever”: The Kefauver Crime Committee Hearings of 1951 107 doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page vi vi CONTENTS HUAC-TV 116 Wringing the Neck of Reed Harris: The McCarthy Committee’s Voice of America Hearings (1953) 126 7. country and god 134 I Led 3 Lives: “Watch Yourself, Philbrick!” 140 Religious Broadcasting 149 Life Is Worth Living: Starring Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 153 8. edward r. murrow slays the dragon of joseph mccarthy 161 TV’s Number One Glamour Boy 163 Murrow Versus McCarthy 168 The “Good Tuesday” Homily 172 To Be Person-to-Personed 177 “A Humble, Poverty Stricken Negress”: Annie Lee Moss Before the McCarthy Committee 180 McCarthy Gets Equal Time 184 9. the army-mccarthy hearings (april 22–june 17, 1954) 189 Backstory and Dramatis Personae 190 Gavel-to-Gavel Coverage 195 Climax: “Have You Left No Sense of Decency?” 204 Denouement: Reviews and Postmortems 210 10. pixies: homosexuality, anticommunism, and television 215 Red Fades to Pink 219 Airing the Cohn-Schine Affair 224 11. the end of the blacklist 231 The Defenders: The Blacklist on Trial 240 Point of Order!: The Army-McCarthy Hearings, the Movie 244 12. exhuming mccarthyism: the paranoid style in american television 249 Notes 261 Index 293 doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page vii preface and acknowledgments Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who died in 1957, lives as a metaphor. No time- bound demagogue, he has long since metamorphosed into a Cold War totem and universal bogeyman, nearly as vivid in the present as he was in the past. Television—a site for his ascent, the stage for his downfall—continues to keep his image vital and alive. Viewed through a gauze of memory and motives, newsreel clips and video snippets, McCarthy and the era named after him are hot combat zones in a fierce Kulturkampf over Cold War America. The man and his “-ism” have launched a multitude of memoirs, biographies, critical studies, and documen- taries, many as ideologically driven as their subject. The historian who pre- sumes to lob another volume onto the pile needs a clear rationale; the reader deserves a frank confession of allegiances. The outlook for this study of the phenomenon known as McCarthyism is televisual. Rather than a retrospective glance backward via interpretative scholarship, I have viewed the period dating roughly from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s through the lens of television programming and the contemporary commentary about the embryonic medium. Save for a few necessary flash for- wards, the window into this chamber of the American past has been the tele- vision screen. Unfortunately, the extant materials are easier read about than looked at. All historians are bedeviled by problems of access and imagination, but researchers into the early days of television have special reason to whine. Until the advent of magnetic videotape in 1956, television came live or on film. Networks treat- ed the heritage haphazardly, and the official repositories of the federal govern- ment were oblivious to its future significance. Counterintuitive as it seems, the 35mm film used by the newsreels to chronicle the pretelevision history of the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s is sharper, clearer, and more readily retrievable than the live telecasts of the 1950s. Caught in the interregnum between film and videotape, the passage exists in a kind of moving-image lacuna. doherty_FM 8/21/03 3:20 PM Page viii viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Whenever possible I have watched the original telecasts, but much enticing material is just plain gone, never recorded, vanished into the ether. In these in- stances, I have relied on transcripts of the shows, trade press accounts, and newspaper reports. Among the pioneering commentators on the medium, I found Jack Gould of the New York Times, John Crosby of the New York Her- ald Tribune, Marya Mannes of the Reporter, and Dan Jenkins of the Hollywood Reporter especially reliable and astute (meaning that I tended to agree with them). The archival gaps in the television record are magnified by a problem of per- ception. Since its official coming out party at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, television has undergone a series of tectonic changes, audiovisual revolutions akin to the leap from silent film to sound cinema or from theatrical motion pic- tures to home television. The difference in the programming and technology of television in the 1950s and television in the 1960s and 1970s (during the era of Three Network Hegemony) and in the 1980s and 1990s (during the Age of Cable) is a gulf that the single word television cannot adequately straddle. However, that one word is used to describe the full life span of the medi- um, a linguistic holdover that is not only imprecise but deceptive. Yet to in- vent a neologism—paleo-video, classical television, IKE-TV—seems unduly cute. “Television” will do, with the caution that television then was a different medium than television later, or now, and broadcast over a different cultural atmosphere. Within that atmosphere, the question of political allegiance weighed heav- ily—the answer, or the refusal to answer, shaping or stunting a life. Today, the stakes are not nearly so high, but few cultural historians who venture onto the field emerge unscathed from the polemical firefights that swirl around Mc- Carthyism. Thus, though the pages that follow are in the end more about the medium than the man and the ism—a portrait of television and American cul- ture at a pivotal moment in the history of each—to answer that question once asked under duress and subpoena seems a necessary gesture of self-identifica- tion rather than self-incrimination. So, like the Cold War liberal, that now nearly extinct creature, I believe it is not mutually exclusive to conclude that Soviet communism posed a menace to human freedom and that Joseph R. McCarthy was a scoundrel. While writing the book, I have exploited the expertise and challenged the patience of a number of friends and colleagues.