Broadcast 41

Front matter

Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist

Carol A. Stabile

Goldsmiths Press

Contents

Acknowledgments Dramatis Personae Prologue

List of Figures Bibliography.

Index viii

Chapter 1 One pattern of suppression is that of omission

Patricia Hill Collins (feminist theorist):

The people want democracy, real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don’t get it any more in their newspapers. And that’s why you're out here, Mr. Dies—that’s why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations—because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.

Dorothy Parker (writer)?

It seemed as though the writers of the American’ situation comedy Leave It to Beaver knew from the start that the show.would be on the air—without interruption—for generations to come, Its first episode, broadcast in 1957, suggested as much. “Beaver Gets Spelled” began with a voice-over by Beaver’s father, Ward Cleaver. “When, you\were young,’ the omniscient male voice intoned, you had “values thatnothing could change. An ice cream cone was a snow-capped mountain of sheer delight. An autographed baseball was more precious than rubies. Anda note from the teacher meant only one thing: disaster”? Against images of a soda jerk handing an ice cream cone to an eager Beaver; Beaver and two friends marveling over an autographed baseball in a tree-filled park; and a female teacher scolding a chastened Beaver, the voice-over conjured a utopian past for the boy’s present.

The person—the you—this episode both addressed and remembered was male (someone for whom an autographed baseball was more precious than a gem), American (as the iconic game of baseball), middle class (a person who could afford ice cream cones and professional ball games), and white (a child for whom school discipline was a comic episode in an otherwise idyllic childhood). In less than fifty seconds, this montage conveyed a vision of 1950s America rooted in the suburban tranquility, consumerism, and masculine order symbolizing the American family and its values. The episode merged present and future in its vision of America, as the moment when viewers “were young” combined with a past, the narrator confidently asserted, for which they would someday most assuredly yearn.

In the decades following the emergence of American television, viewers were encouraged to remember, through similarly rose-colored lenses, the medium’s early period as a conflict-free era when women were happy with their domestic lot and African Americans with their subordinate place in American society. Judging from the scenes that flickered across television screens in the 1950s and 1960s, American culture mirrored a Cold War consensus. In it, the consumer was king and the new medium’s content a reflecting pool for the hopes and dreams of white veterans and women eager to return to the domestic sphere and get on with the business of having babies, settling into their new suburban homes, and buying the mass-produced items being churned out by a booming postwar economy. Other sitcoms of the era celebrated these postwar American values in similarly suburban settings, in Westerns that portrayed the individualistic triumphs of white, masculinity, and in police procedurals that taught viewers to fear urban areas increasingly associated with disruptive black residents. Much like the inaugural episode of Leave It to Beaver, mass-mediated narratives of television’s rise presented images from an untroubled, halcyon epoch, full of wholesome content and broad social agreement about American “values nothing could change.’

Many of those watching television.in 1957, when this episode aired, or in the years that followed had no reason to suspect that these images of a nation that shared universal values and happy consensus at the end of World War II were made possible by ongoing acts of repression. Television shows did not hint at the circumstances’ that prevented people of color from appearing in the medium’s imaginings of American life only in demeaning roles—as cooks in Westerns, like Bonanza’s Hop Sing, and the butts of racialized humor in the sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy. Instead, the absence of any other images reassured white viewers that racial hierarchies were natural and just. Black people either entertained white people on variety shows or turned up as domestic servants and mammy figures in the lives of white people. In Beulah, a series about a black housekeeper and cook for a white family, the series’ titular character was played by a succession of brilliant African American actresses—Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, and Louise Beavers—unable to find roles other than maids. Women were consigned to racially stratified domestic roles: by the mid-1950s, even The Goldbergs’ formidable Molly—a physically and emotionally large, working-class, Jewish matriarch—had been reduced to uttering clichés about the perverted, un-American desires of women who worked outside the home. No one seemed to notice when immigrants all but disappeared from small screens.

Contrary to popular beliefs, the images that appeared on American television after 1950 were not simply reflections of American culture. They were products of suppression, fear, and, eventually, self-censorship. This book is about how the values and happy consensus viewers saw on their television screens came about. It is about what seemed possible for the new medium in 1945, as progressives gathered in the broadcast capital of New York City, and how those possibilities were eliminated within a ten-year period. While what happened to the ‘41’ shows us the limits of that rosy image of TV consensus, their efforts were not limited to TV alone: they were cultural workers across media and took advantage of all the means by which mass cultural forms could be used in the service of progressivism. Although most of the book’s action takes place in the past, its resonance for the present and the future lies in the lessons this story can teach us about the impact of political struggles over new media and the consequences of allowing one set of perspectives to dominate all others.

To dislodge the notion that what appeared on television screens after 1950 resulted from some broad social agreement, this. book tell two overlapping stories. One story centers on the white, native-born anti-communists who created and carried out the blacklist in television, the principal means by which anti-communists were able to impose their version of Americanism on television. Three men in particular, Kenneth Bierly, John Keenan, and Theodore Kirkpatrick, former FBI agents, founded a group that called itself the American Business Consultants in 1947. They coined an anti-communist tautology—“factual information”—to distinguish between the media they wrote and disseminated and)what they described as the Communist propaganda of anti-racist progressives. Unfettered by journalistic accountability to facts, these men published the influential anti-communist newsletter CounterAttack and the book Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. As former agents of the FBI, Bierly, Keenan, and Kirkpatrick drew on the power of the anti-communist security state in their efforts to impose stories favoring the political and economic objectives they shared with others who aspired to G-Man masculinity.

The second story documents the dramatically different perspectives of a group of progressive women who had been influencing media production in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, the American Business Consultants identified 41 women and 110 men as “members or sympathizers” of the Communist Party in Red Channels, the publication that became the central vehicle for the ensuing blacklist.t Although Red Channels listed far more men in its pages than women, anti-communists singled out women for their initial attacks. These women were engaged in oppositional cultural production: they criticized anti-communist norms of gender, race, class, and nation and resisted the imposition of these norms in their personal, professional, and political lives. Playwright Lillian Hellman’s father once told Hellman that she “lived within a question mark,” referring to the profound curiosity that caused her to constantly ask questions about the world that surrounded her.’ The Broadcast 41 were all women who lived within similar question marks, asking questions and creating new ways of seeing a world that was in the midst of massive and divisive changes. Their contributions to American culture, and what happened to them in the harsh dawning of the Cold War era, show how the consensus American television presented in the 1950s existed only by virtue of anti-communists’ ability to criminalize dissent, drive dissenters from media industries, and then make it all but impossible to remember that dissent had existed in the first place.

These repressed realities of resistance are far richer than most versions of American television’s history allow. Sociologist Herman Gray-observes that in the early days of television, “Blacks appeared primarily as*maids, cooks, ‘mammies, and other servants, or as con artists and.deadbeats.”® Gray is right, but as this book shows, those stereotypes were not reproduced without a fight. Not all of those present at the birth of American television in New York City willingly acquiesced to the rigid norms imposed by the American Business Consultants or subsequent Cold War_prescriptions for race and gender. Not all of those working in and around the new industry were white, male, or middle class. Indeed, in 1945, it was not pre-ordained that the content of American television would center the perspectives of Cold War masculinities rather than the chorus of heterogeneous, politically progressive voices that were in conversation witheach other in media industries in New York City.

Laying bare the conflict between progressive women and the anti-communists who opposed them not only challenges the belief that what appeared on television screens reflected what was in the hearts and minds of American viewers in 1950, it shows that struggles over television’s stereotypes predated the social movements of the 1960s. Indeed, accounts ofthe Broadcast 41’s lives and work reveal the contours of another history of American television, one that has been clouded by the legacies of anti-communism. In this counterfactual version of television’s history, people of principle and courage tried to present the perspectives of diverse groups of Americans to national audiences in the years following World War II. Their efforts offer a new context for understanding contemporary debates about the need for heterogeneous voices and ideas in media production and thus in media representations. The Broadcast 41’s experiences remind us of the weighty cultural and political work done by the stories we hear, and the people and ideas that are permitted to enter our screens, homes, and hearts. Without this context, we undertake the struggle over complex and respectful representations of all people thinking that we are the beginning, when in reality we participate in a long line of resistance.

There is cruel irony in the fact that this book depicts the repression of the histories, to borrow a phrase from activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, of a group of women who were themselves deeply conscious of forces in the past that had conspired to exclude dissenting perspectives from historical view.’ The Broadcast 41 and other progressives knew that the blacklist was a mechanism for throttling dissent and preventing its dissemination and recollection. Many of them lived long enough to watch as their perspectives were erased by histories of the medium’s “Golden Age,” stories told from the points of view of the white men who subsequently went on to prosper in Cold War television, accounts popularized by scholars and journalists who listened to those men, affirmed their experiences, and universalized their stories.* We should not be surprised that when we view the history of television through lenses fashioned by anti-communism, what we see.is,the absence of anyone but white men and a handful of white women, most of them stars. The continued erasure of the Broadcast 41 and other progressives in media industries, as feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, is an ongoing process of suppression.

Everything about you—your race and gender, where and how you were raised, your temperament and disposition—can influence whom you meet, what is confided to you, what you are.shown, and how you interpret what you see. My identity opened some doors and closed others. In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.

Matthew Desmond (sociologist)?

I was rebellious when I was four years old, I think, and a nuisance, too. All rebels are nuisances too.

Lillian Hellman (writer)

Unlike later generations of writers, directors, and producers—almost exclusively white and economically privileged, mostly male—the Broadcast 41’s lived experiences hinted at the diversity of American culture in urban areas like New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Four of the Broadcast 41 were African American (Shirley Graham, Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Fredi Washington); one was Mexican-American (Maria Marguerita

Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O’Donnell, a dancer and actress who performed as “Margo”). Most of the women listed in Red Channels in 1950 were from working-class or immigrant backgrounds (sometimes both). More than a third were Jewish women from politically progressive urban enclaves. As artists and cultural workers, they were aware that they were being represented in ways that were untrue to their lived experiences and degrading. Hollywood forced white women like Judy Holliday to play dumb blondes in order to mask their intelligence. The film industry cast African Americans strictly as maids or hypersexualized women, stereotypes that Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, and Fredi Washington fought against for the entirety of their careers.

Their experiences of being excluded encouraged the Broadcast 41 to participate in progressive social networks across media industries. Kate Mostel, wife of blacklisted actor Zero Mostel and close friend’ of blacklisted actress Madeline Lee, once said that living in New York City made her feel as though “there are only 200 people in the world. They all know each other.” ™ Progressives like Mostel encountered each another personally, politically, and professionally across spheres of cultural production in New York City. Writers Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman.worked together in theater, forging a friendship surprising to those who believed that independent, strongwilled women could not get along.” Blacklisted actresses Madeline Gilford and Jean Muir were close friends,whose husbands worked together in the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (AFTRA).

Like other women of their era who enjoyed economic advantages, Broadcast 41 members Lena Horne and Dorothy Parker attended benefits like a fundraiser for the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, intended to help African American veterans get the cash payments they were owed when they left military service.’ After a dinner party they both attended in Manhattan, actress Rose Hobart became fast friends with actress Selena Royle after Royle publicly reprimanded Hobart’s verbally abusive (and soon-to-be former) husband." Actress and journalist Fredi Washington and musician and actress Hazel Scott traveled in the same circles in Harlem: Washington’s sister was politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr’s first wife; Hazel Scott was his second.

These women and their friends partied at Café Society, a hangout frequented by progressives founded by Communist Party member Barney Josephson because he “wanted to own a club where blacks and whites could work together as entertainers and a mixed audience could sit out front together to watch the show.”! Years later, in her one-woman show, Lena Horne described how much it meant to her to have “her beautiful sister Billie Holliday” performing at one of Josephson’s clubs, while her “other beautiful sister Hazel Scott” performed at the other.'®

The Broadcast 41 often admired one another’s work and relished opportunities to work with each other. Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, Fredi Washington, and Shirley Graham counted blacklisted actor Paul Robeson among their circle of friends. Later, the FBI took great pains to investigate all those who moved within Robeson’s international orbit. Lena Horne admired actress Ella Logan’s singing and made a point to keep in touch with her in New York and Los Angeles.” Lillian Hellman was a fan of Judy Holliday’s work with the comedy group the Revuers.!®

Many of those listed in Red Channels knew one another from working on writer, director, and actor Gertrude Berg’s popular radio series, The Goldbergs. Actress Louise Fitch’s first husband was character actor Richard H. Harris, who played Jake in the radio series; actor and union leader Philip Loeb played husband Jake in the television series; Fredi Washington had a recurring role as well; Adelaide Klein was on the show; as a young man, writer Garson Kanin appeared on the radio program; blacklisted screenwriter and novelist Abraham Polonsky got his start writing for Berg; and actress Madeline Lee appeared in the television seriesseven after her name appeared in Red Channels.

Obligations of citizenship also brought the Broadcast 41 into contact with one another. During the wat, Margaret Webster, Selena Royle, Hester Sondergaard, and Lillian Hellman shared billing in a program sponsored by the Artists’ Front to Win the War. Dozens of other progressives supported and attended a broad array of cultural and political events that would later be used by anti-communists, to blacklist them.” Actress Anne Revere was a leader in efforts to defend the Hollywood Ten (a group of white, male writers, directors, and producers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee [the HUAC] and were jailed as a result in 1950), while Lena Horne and Hazel Scott used their stardom to promote civil rights. Over the course of a life cut short by FBI surveillance and harassment, concert pianist Ray Lev lent her talent to a procession of political events, eventually running for City Council in Manhattan as an American Labor Party candidate.

The Broadcast 41 knew about one another, even when they did not know each other intimately, and they understood their work to be part of a much larger conversation about popular culture’s role in a democracy. Critics and producers of popular culture themselves, the Broadcast 41 sawin mass media and popular culture new opportunities to effect social change and to influence American culture on a massive scale, ushering innovative and diverse perspectives, ideas, and representations onto the historical stage. Outsiders in a variety of media industries, the Broadcast 41 understood their perspectives were one among many views on the social worlds that surrounded them.

Alienated from mass-mediated narratives that represented women, people of color, queer people, and immigrants as inferior, abnormal, and subversive, the Broadcast 41 wanted to represent perspectives that had been hitherto unrepresented, seeking ways to break out of forms of thinking and representing that, in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s words, reflected a “monopoly over the universal”? To monopolize the universal in the case of television was to assume that there was a singular perspective from which an American experience could be told, a standpoint that invisibly regulated what could be seen and represented. The anti-communist perspective that achieved dominance during the 1950s was such a monopoly, reflecting the standpoint of white, native-born, Cold)War masculinity. From this vantage point, the lives of people of color, women, and immigrants were largely hidden, or reduced to»stereotypes confirming their inherent inferiority.

To challenge this monopoly, progressives) like the Broadcast 41 emphasized the heterogeneity of American life-rather than its alleged uniformity, drawing on historical and personalreservoirs of richly varying racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and class backgrounds to do so. These perspectives were refined in the crucible of Popular Front organizations, a movement that cultural studies scholar Michael Denning describes as “the insurgent social movement forged from the labor militancy of the fledgling CIO, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China, and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal.’”! Influenced by the vibrant art and popular culture that emerged from the Popular Front, the Broadcast 41’s.experiences of the Depression further caused them to wrestle with capitalism’s systemic inequalities. Republican Spain’s war against fascism moved many of the Broadcast 41 to political action. Most of these women strongly identified with the progressivism of the left wing of the New Deal, inspired by the Popular Front’s constellation of communist-inspired and led anti-racist organizations. They believed in peaceful democracy, and they translated their passion into action, campaigning for the rights of African Americans, women, immigrants, and workers.

The Broadcast 41 called themselves progressives, a term that from roughly 1934 (when the Comintern announced its Popular Front strategy for fighting fascism) until the end of World War II, to borrow cultural historian Alan Wald’s definition, referred to “a radical who was willing to collaborate with Communists and who looked on the Soviet Union favorably as a force for peace and anticolonialism.’”” While this definition was obvious to those on the organized left anxious to distinguish among communists, socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and New Dealers, in the early years of the Cold War, anti-communists increasingly identified anyone expressing opinions to the left of center as ideologically suspect and un-American. Although the term progressive was gradually redefined by the left as well as the right after World War II, throughout this book I use “progressive” as an umbrella term incorporating a range of the leftist political thought and alliances running throughout the Popular Front, before the Cold War reshaped its meaning.

While the perspectives of the Broadcast 41 bookend the following chapters, the middle section of this book describes the forces conspiring against the Broadcast 41 in the years before anti-communism became institutionalized in media. I use the verb conspire intentionally here, because as the postwar era gave way to the Cold War, anti-communists'were nothing if not deliberate in their campaigns against progressives_in»broadcasting. Evangelical in their beliefs, the founders of the American Business Consultants viewed America from a standpoint they considered natural, uncontroversial, and unassailable because their superiority was conferred on them by God. To question the anti-democratic and often illegal behaviors of anti-communists, to challenge the:beliefithat women and people of color were biologically inferior to white men, to have been at any point in time infected by the politics of the Popular Front was to be in the eyes of anti-communists forever potentially treasonous and un-American.

Anti-communists iny government, industry, and the private sector (including the American Legion, a veterans’ organization, and the Boy Scouts) had been monitoring progressives since before the end of World War I, creating lists of people, groups, and organizations they claimed were communists or communist sympathizers (known as “fellow-travelers” because they moved in overlapping progressive cultural and political circles). Activist and white supremacist Elizabeth Dilling created the first anti-communist political blacklist in The Red Network (1934).” The blacklist orchestrated by anti-communists built off her model, and it enveloped media along with government, education, manufacturing, and other industries considered vulnerable to communist infiltration. Anti-communists in government and the private sector shared their lists with likeminded organizations, using this information to attack, smear, defund, and otherwise undermine the reputations of progressives and the organizations and institutions with which they were associated. Anti-communists and progressives recognized that this new medium, whose audiences were anticipated to be so vast as to make all previous audiences tiny in comparison, had the potential to create what Bourdieu describes as a “single, central, dominant, in a word, quasi-divine, point of view”?

Anti-communists used the blacklist to create this divine point of view by eliminating progressives from the industry, forging a lasting link between criticism and controversy on one hand and communism and treason on the other. To be critical of white supremacy was to be communist; to be communist was to be a treacherous and un-American. These links imposed conditions of conformity within the television industry, generating the appearance of postwar consensus on television screens that provided cover for anti-communists’ distinctly undemocratic political activities. Anti-ccommunists made it dangerous to even remember progressive ideas or the people who had held them by repressing the history of the vibrant and contentious field of perspectives that had attended the birth of television in New York City.

To counter the forms of repression that linger many years after the events in this book took place, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist reflects on the birth of television not from the center of the television industry, but from its margins, where progressive ideas and culture had flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. In doing so, it understands the content of American television not as the product of consensus, but as the effect of a culture war whose casualties included the perspectives of a generation of progressive women. By documenting the.perspectives of these women and the blacklist that anti-communists used tosuppress them, this book takes a first step toward undoing their erasure from history.

By providing a counterfactual history of what American television might have looked like had anti-communists not succeeded in eradicating the perspectives of the Broadcast 41 from the industry, this book vividly illustrates what American culture lost when anti-communists succeeded in driving all but a very narrow swath of perspectives from the new medium of television. The Broadcast41’s stories challenge us to think about what the new medium might have become had anti-communists not won this culture war. What would it have meant to create programs where women, people of color, and immigrants were neighbors and schoolmates, colleagues and supervisors, people with agency and complexity and not secondary and subservient to the lives and objectives of G-Men and their allies? What might American culture have looked like if stories about democracy and equality had dominated rather than narratives about homicide?

After a hundred years of the modern struggle for women’s equality Soviet women are urged in their magazines to educate themselves and grow, to fulfill their production quotas and thus add to the happiness and well-being of the nation; while judging from the number of square feet given over to the subject in every issue of the Ladies Home Journal, the highest ideal of American womanhood is smooth, velvety, kissable hands.

Betty Millard (writer, artist, feminist)”

The fad of denouncing the American woman has another effect which is more tangible and even less funny than its effect on people’s feelings. There is today a real danger that resentment against women, especially against women in industry, will be promoted into an issue by professional agitators. Many know that this is becoming a serious threat.

Alice Sheldon (author)

Historian Stephanie Coontz once observed that people in the United States treat sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver as if they were documentaries, describing the traditional family or its family values through images drawn directly from representations originating on television screens.” This observation has stuck with me over the years, causing me to think about why conservatives of all genders persist"in endorsing values that privilege a family ideal grounded in so many exclusions. Even when their lived experiences do not match those of the idyllic American family, as was the case with politicians like Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump and pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, conservatives stubbornly clingto these images. When I began researching representations of family on television, I jokingly referred to the tendency of mass media to represent the American family in terms supplied by television as the “Leave itto Beaver syndrome,’ a condition caused by years of watching reruns of family sitcoms, viewings that induced nostalgia among many white people for a form of family that was historically contingent and far from universal.

After researching this book, I am less inclined to treat this suggestion as a joke. In the second half of the 1940s, anti-communists—including powerful organizations and institutions like the FBI, the HUAC, the American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Catholic Church, Chambers of Commerce, and myriad others—initiated an apocalyptic battle over their definition of Americanism. Some of them believed that this war was reality; others were swift to recognize the political and economic utility of frightening people into giving up fundamental rights in exchange for promises of security. Arguing that the ends (stemming what anti-communists depicted as a rising tide of atheistic communism) justified the means (unconstitutional, illegal, and often brutal forms of surveillance and retaliation), anti-communists set out to make sure that the new medium of television would be free of progressive influences.

Television served as a crucial battleground over American values for a number of reasons. In the first place, anti-communists feared the intrusion of this new medium into American homes and its effects on domestic security. J. Edgar Hoover told the HUAC, “The best antidote to communism is vigorous, intelligent, old-fashioned Americanism.” For anti-communists, the home was the most important front in the war over old-fashioned Americanism.” Hoover considered the family the first line of defense against the dangerous perspectives of his critics. Ignoring the historical variability of family forms, as well as demographic changes that had occurred during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, anti-communists defined the American family as “the old-fashioned loyalty of one man and one woman to.each other and their children ... the basis, not only of society, but of all personal character and progress,” as anti-communist Elizabeth Dilling put it.”°

Gender and race lay at the heart of anti-communists’ anxieties about a family form they diagnosed as being in crisis atthe war’s end. Following on the heels of the Depression, a catastrophic global economic disaster that challenged conservative notions of American.identity, a successful war effort required the labor of women and mem of color in industries that had previously excluded them. As women and people of color joined in wartime production, moving into positions previously reserved for white men, norms of race and gender were temporarily waived, a form of social destabilization, according to political theorist Cynthia Enloe, typical of periods of militarized conflict.® At the end of the war, white anti-communist men and women mobilized to restore the social hierarchies that had existed before 1941, expecting thatwhite women would cede their freedoms to returning veterans and that African Americans who had fought a war against fascism in Europe would quietly accept the injustices of racism at home.

The anti-communist movement drew much of its strength from organizations that represented white veterans of war. These organizations encouraged white men traumatized by World War II to understand the changes that had happened in their absence as evidence of subversive, communistic influence. Veterans who had returned home to find families, homes, and communities changed in their absence were urged by anti-communist ideologues to redirect their anger, resentment, and pain toward American women and African Americans in particular, a tactic still used today. In exchange, anti-communists promised them nothing less than the restoration of their birthright as white men. According to historian Katherine Belew, “The return of [white] veterans from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor,’ highlighting the link between all-white veterans’ organizations and renewed racist violence.” Indeed, in the years following World War II, veterans’ organizations, working closely with fellow anti-communist institutions and organizations, redoubled their efforts to maintain segregation in American society and media industries, playing a key role in supporting and expanding the blacklist on television.*