A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television Review

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A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television ReviewNone of us can learn all of history in detail, but we also need to learn something more about it than the one-sentence summaries of key events that we often settle for. Worse, when we are dealing with contentious and emotional issues, we tend to grab onto a very simplistic version that happens to be `safe' to hold. However, if you do try to read something in-depth about these emotional and controversial events what you are likely to pick off the shelf will be strongly biased to one or another position. That isn't necessarily bad, but it will require you to read and study multiple sources and that may require more time and energy than you care to spend on the topic.
David Everitt has written a wonderfully balanced book on the broadcast blacklists in radio and television after WWII through the $3.5 million dollar award to John Henry Faulk for libel and against Aware, Inc, Mr Vincent Hartnett, and the estate of Mr. Laurence Johnson. At that time, it was the largest libel judgment ever awarded by an American jury. The author reports the facts without feeling the need to make extraneous judgments about the people who made the events.
However, this isn't a simple indictment of the people who ran Counterattack, Red Channels, Aware, and other anti-communist media. The book is frank about their background, their sloppiness, their bullying, their mistakes, and those whom they harmed, and the few that were actually innocent and blacklisted. But this book doesn't content itself to make the easy condemnations of those like Keenan, Kirkpatrick, Bierly, and Johnson who printed and promoted the blacklists. He also faults the network executives who rarely questioned or pushed back against them. In the rare cases when some brave souls put up some resistance they usually won.
What I appreciate about this book is that Everitt also provides the facts about the very real efforts by communists to use the recording and broadcast industries and their associated unions to spread the ideology. While it was never as pervasive or as dire a threat as the alarmists claimed, it wasn't without threat either. Another aspect of this telling of the story that I really appreciated is that it provides the names of those who were actively promoting communism and the undermining of the US government, how they went about it, and some of the words they used (which have largely been swept under the rug of historical convenience). One of the wonderful examples of the connection between the American communists and Moscow was their opposition to America entering WWII. But when Hitler attacked the USSR and Stalin needed America in the war they flipped their story, songs, and advocacy without missing a beat.
This book is VERY much worth reading and I recommend it strongly.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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