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6 Hear It Now Robert Lewis Shayon had reason to be optimistic that 1950 would be happier for him than the previous year had been. He was “shocked and perplexed ” over his firing by CBS while feeling “a sense of public humiliation.”1 At the start of the new year, however, he was offered a new position in Paris supervising the radio operations of the Economic Cooperative Administration (ECA) associated with the Marshall Plan. Shayon was delighted, only to see the job offer suddenly withdrawn. The newsletter Counterattack had questioned the appointment, citing Shayon’s participation in “Communist front” organizations such as the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). Soon afterward, the ECA informed him that his services would not be needed because the necessary clearances could not be obtained.2 Shayon protested bitterly in a letter: “If I am disloyal, I know of no other American, bar none, who can lay claim to true loyalty.” He had in fact worked with the Progressive Citizens of America “at a time when this organization was the hope of many sincere liberals. The principles I found attractive in the PCA were American principles.” Still, he had stopped working with the organization by the time it formed the Progressive party that backed Henry Wallace for president. His entire radio career had “been devoted to working for the highest principles on which this country was founded,” Shayon wrote. Therefore it was “a great pity” that he was prohibited from working on behalf of the United States “at a time, when above all times, it needs and should call forth the very best and highest in all its citizens.”3 It did no good; a friendly journalist with sources inside the ECA wrote Shayon that the organization was “in the midst of a battle for funds” from Congress and thus was not eager to court controversy: “With McCarthy on the war path, I assume that the government agencies, including ECA, are not pressing matters even in those cases where they might like to.”4 “McCarthy” of course referred to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was charging that the State Department harbored fifty-seven known communists—charges that he first made at almost the exact time that Shayon received his ECA job offer. Shayon’s family urged him to go to Counterattack’s publishers to try to persuade them to retract the allegations against him, but he refused: “In my view the whole gang of witch-hunters was beneath contempt.” A few months later, he was listed in Red Channels, and as he later put, “I withdrew from the world.”5 Red Channels and Blacklisting The intensifying cold war had emboldened the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and anticommunist groups in their investigations of radio. HUAC had subpoenaed Corwin’s One World Flight scripts in 1947and held its hearings on the film industry that fall, with members of the so-called Hollywood Ten landing in prison after they refused to answer whether they were or ever had been communists. The rifts that had begun to emerge among liberals by then were demonstrated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He scorned what he called “fellow-traveling, ex-proletarian” writers turned “film hacks,” similar to his low regard for Corwin.6 That said, Schlesinger also had low regard for HUAC, saying that it showed “the dangers to civil freedom of a promiscuous and unprincipled attack on radicalism” through its “reckless accusations and appalling procedures” as well as “the unlovely progeny it has spawned.”7 In effect, Counterattack was one of those progeny in that its publishers served as their own ad hoc investigating committee. Three onetime FBI employees formed American Business Consultants in the spring of 1947 and soon began publishing a weekly newsletter purportedly exposing communists in American business, including broadcasting. In December 1947, they attacked Corwin for “tender, unswerving devotion to the Kremlin.” By 1949, Variety reported that fears of being labeled procommunist had “grabbed a stranglehold” on broadcasting to the extent that “any actor, writer, or producer who has been even remotely identified with leftist tendencies is shunned.” According to the CBS executive Sig Mickelson, Counterattack “was on the desk of virtually every advertising agency executive and radio and television network official in the New York City area.” If Shayon’s experiences with the aborted ECA appointment were any indication, the newsletter’s influence may have extended to the nation’s capital and even overseas.8 13 0 . chapter 6 [3.138.101.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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