Red Channels Published, Launching Broadcasting Blacklist and Corporate "Smear and Clear" Racket

American Business Consultants Inc. publishes Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television on June 22, 1950, as an anti-Communist pamphlet-style book naming 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry. The organization was founded in May 1947 when Alfred Kohlberg, an American textile importer and ardent member of the anti-Communist China Lobby, funded three former FBI agents to issue a newsletter called Counterattack. The three founder members are John G. Keenan (company president and businessman), Kenneth M. Bierly (who later becomes a consultant to Columbia Pictures), and Theodore C. Kirkpatrick (managing editor of Counterattack and the group’s spokesman). The introduction to Red Channels is written by Vincent Hartnett, an employee of the Phillips H. Lord agency, an independent radio-program production house.

American Business Consultants operates in the “smear and clear” business, collecting information on progressives in government, business, and media industries, using that information to “prove” their associations with communism, and then selling their services to clear employees. This represents a form of blackmail in which the organization threatens consumer boycotts if advertisers, networks, and sponsors do not agree to terminate employees anti-communists have branded un-American. Because TV is financed by advertising dollars, anticommunist groups achieve quick results by threatening to organize boycotts of goods produced by sponsors of shows employing “blacklisted” individuals. Afraid of having their products associated with anything “un-American,” sponsors often respond by either firing the suspect or asking the network to do so. Lawrence A. Johnson, owner of a chain of supermarkets in Syracuse, New York, mounts a campaign based largely on material from Counterattack aimed directly at sponsors, agencies, and networks to prevent them from employing blacklisted individuals. Since about 60 percent of television advertising revenue comes from goods sold in supermarkets, Johnson’s campaign proves effective.

Many well-known artists are named in Red Channels, including Hollywood stars Edward G. Robinson and Orson Welles, literary figures Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, and musicians Hazel Scott, Pete Seeger and Leonard Bernstein. In the most notorious case, actress Jean Muir is cast for NBC’s “The Aldrich Family” in 1950 when her contract is suddenly cancelled for seemingly no reason. Only after being pushed for an answer does the show’s sponsor, General Foods, acknowledge they have been hit with letters and phone calls from Red Channels subscribers demanding Muir be fired. General Foods states it will not sponsor programs featuring “controversial persons,” and though the company later receives thousands of calls protesting the decision, it is not reversed. The blacklisting era effectively ends in 1962 when CBS radio personality John Henry Faulk successfully sues Vincent Hartnett, who proudly proclaimed himself a coauthor of Red Channels. A jury awards Faulk $3.5 million in damages, and although the award is later reduced, the verdict marks the effective end of the systematic corporate-sponsored blacklisting that demonstrates how business interests willingly participated in political persecution to maintain ideological conformity and protect advertising revenues.