Today’s cancel culture harkens back to the excesses of the McCarthy era.
Today’s cancel culture harkens back to the excesses of the McCarthy era.
C ancellations had a precursor in the Hollywood Blacklist.
Why should anyone get upset about the ongoing wave of cancellations across the culture, when the government isn’t involved?
This isn’t a First Amendment issue, we are told, rather private entities making their own decisions to disassociate themselves from people who have said or done controversial things.
This line of argument, often made by cancellation apologists, is lacking in a number of respects, including that there is no reason it wouldn’t also justify the Hollywood Blacklist that the Left considers one of the darkest moments in American history.
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine made this point in a sharp column on the Gina Carano cancellation titled “Firing Actors for Being Conservative Is Another Hollywood Blacklist.”
His piece, not surprisingly, got blowback from progressives. On Twitter, Chait’s critics pointed out that Carano wasn’t being called to testify before Congress and name other right-wingers, and the current victims of cancellation aren’t going to jail.
Movie reviewer Danielle Solzman wrote, “The Red Scare is [sic] the result of the United States government cracking down on communist infiltration regardless of proof.”
“There is no comparison,” she continued. “Gina Carano needs to be held responsible for her actions. She is not the target of a government investigation. Nor is the government restricting her speech.”
To the contrary, not only is there a comparison, it is in important respects incredibly apt.
It is true that the House Un-American Activities Committee got things rolling by issuing subpoenas to several dozen people associated with Hollywood, ten of whom (the Unfriendly Ten or Hollywood Ten) refused to cooperate. They got cited for contempt and eventually sentenced to jail.
We haven’t seen anything remotely like that in this era (yet). But the Hollywood Blacklist was in significant respects a private initiative, with the studios reacting to PR worries and market pressures to cancel writers and actors in a direct analogue to what’s happening today across industries, not just in Hollywood.
Fearful of the potential fallout at the box office of continuing to employ any of the Hollywood Ten, studio executives got together at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City to consider their options, and they decided to cut ties with the Ten and not employ Communists or any member of subversive organizations.
There has been a lot of myth-making about the Hollywood Blacklist over the decades, to which Ron Radosh has proved a useful corrective in the book he co-authored with Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood, and in his journalism. For one thing, as he wrote here at National Review, the widely celebrated, blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was indeed a Stalinist who reliably followed the Moscow line and worked to shut down prospective anti-Communist films.
But it’s not necessary to adopt every jot and tittle of the morality-play version of the Hollywood (and broader entertainment) Blacklist to recognize that there were terrible abuses, with clear echoes today.
It’s easy to see a precursor to Judd Legum or Media Matters, who push for advertiser boycotts and cancellations, in the notorious 1950 paperback book published by three ex-FBI agents, Red Channels, that made blunderbuss accusations against radio and TV personalities.
It’s easy to see an analogue to the Twitter mob in the American Legion–organized pickets of offending movies that struck fear in the hearts of Hollywood executives.
It’s easy to see a predecessor of Gina Carano in Jean Muir, an actress summarily fired for getting named in Red Channels.
In his book, A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television, David Everitt describes the Muir case.
She was a minor actress who showed up in Red Channels for her alleged involvement in Communist-front activities. She was certainly a lefty, but she forcefully denied any association with Communism (and offered, once her case blew up, to testify before HUAC).
In 1950, Muir was set to appear as the mother in the NBC sitcom The Aldrich Family. The day before the sitcom was to air, word went out and people began to call the network and the show’s sponsor, General Foods, to protest Muir’s role. There may have been as few as 20 calls and two telegrams.
Nonetheless, the day the show was to air, it was canceled. General Foods said that Muir had to go because her role might “provoke unfavorable criticism and antagonism among sizable groups of consumers.” It said, crucially, that it wasn’t concerned about the accuracy of the allegations — just that there were allegations.
Sound familiar?
Everitt quotes an NBC PR executive: “There was no discussion about the validity of whether or not she would be canceled, or whether or not there was any sort of injustice. It was automatic.”
Muir was replaced by another actress on the show, which aired the next week.
At the time, this provoked criticism that sounds very much like the forlorn objections to today’s cancellations.
The anti-Communist New Leader editorialized, “Were Miss Muir a proven Communist and a five-day-a-week coast-to-coast news commentator, the action of the enraged citizenry might be looked upon with some degree of approval, although Lord knows, it would hardly shake the walls of the Kremlin.”
Life magazine said, “We don’t approve of gullibility, but we don’t like to see it equated with subversion or treason in advance of a hearing.”
The radio editor of the New York Times warned of making accusers the de facto “dictators of the airwaves.”
The Muir firing had nothing to do with the government. Nor does the work of our new would-be dictators of the airwaves, and of so much else.