Cracker jack commercial jack gilford

The head of the nation’s largest radio station chain apologized to the House Energy and

Commerce telecommunications subcommittee recently, admitting he was “ashamed” of the

“Bubba the Love Sponge Show” contained in Howard Stern’s morning radio program. While

the content, for Stern, was no different nor more extreme than on any other given day, for anyone

nostalgic for the ‘50’s, McCarthyism in particular, the chord struck had a familiar tone. The

current hysteria over words is reminiscent of the frenzied panic exhibited over ideas during the

days of the Hollywood blacklist. The fear that Communists were subtly infiltrating film and

television with subversive messages brought actors, writers, directors, network and studio heads

to their knees before the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, and again

beginning in 1951 (Georgakas, 1). It is difficult to imagine, when looking back, that the reign of

terror led by Senator McCarthy was able to gain momentum at all, much less dominate the

national scene for several years. Yet mass hysteria is a phenomenon that seems identifiable only

in retrospect while implausible in the moment; and once in control of a nation’s emotional

currents can drag even presidents into its wake.

Such was the case when President Truman found himself in receipt of a telegram from

Senator Joseph McCarthy demanding he turn over a list of individuals that had previously been

cleared of Communist subversion by the White House so that McCarthy’s committee could make

their own assessment. In the telegram McCarthy tells the president that “failure on your part will

label the Democratic party of being the bed-fellow of inter-national Communism” (McCarthy

Telegram, 5). Truman, a year later, got his licks in during a speech made in Detroit when he

said, “This malicious propaganda has gone so far that on the Fourth of July, over in Madison,

Wisconsin, people were afraid…to sign a petition that contained nothing except quotations from

the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights…many of them because they were afraid

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that it was some kind of subversive document and that they would lose their jobs or be called

Communists” (New York Times, 1).

Even more astonishing than the duration of McCarthy’s power before his final humiliation

and disgrace was the Communist Control Act of 1954, co-authored by liberal senator Hubert H.

Humphrey. The bill proposed fines of up to $10,000 and/or up to five years imprisonment, or

both, for mere membership in the Communist party. It has been speculated this was a substitute

bill proposed to derail Maryland Republican John Butler’s amendment to the Internal Security

Act of 1950, which was to give the Subversive Activities Control Board the power to determine

whether an organization was “Communist infiltrated.” If that determination was so made the

organization could then be disbanded. This was viewed as an anti-labor bill that could

effectively, with no real evidence, do away with unions one by one. Humphrey’s proposal made

Communist party membership a criminal act and thereby under purview of court jurisdiction and

protections and, if accusations proved unfounded, subject to libel and slander suits, thus

decreasing the potential for aggressive unwarranted attack. What was perplexing however, was

Humphrey’s willingness to quickly agree to simply attach his bill to the Butler bill thereby

negating the power of the Butler bill not at all. The new more ambiguous language however, not

only watered down the bills’ impact, but it afforded certain democrats an opportunity to vote for

a bill that would improve their chances of re-election. Further, Eisenhower was against making

the Communist party outright illegal and would now be put in the embarrassing position of

possibly having to veto what was, at its core, a Republican bill. Whatever Humphrey’s true

intentions one thing is apparent: even after the fall of McCarthy, appearing strong on anti-

Communist measures was vital to political survival (McAuliffe, 3-11).

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For a firsthand insight into this daunting era, blacklisted Broadway, television and film

actor and humorist, Orson Bean, has lent his reflections in the following interview.

Jim Keily: Orson, you were a stand-up comedian, performed in Broadway revue shows, but it

was television that got you noticed by large audiences as well as by the House on Un-American

Activities Committee. How did you first find out you had been blacklisted?

Orson: I became a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show. And he would say, “And now my young

crew-cut headed friend”…and some years later when I got blacklisted it was Ed Sullivan who

called me up and said “You’re blacklisted, I’m canceling next Sunday's engagement, I’ll help

you when I can.” I got blacklisted as a result of two things: I became politically active in the

union, AFTRA, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which actually in those

days was the American Federation of Radio Artists and TVA, Television Authority, they were

joined together. And the blacklist was being abetted by a lot of extreme right wing people in the

business. The extreme left people in the business, many of whom were members of the

communist party, were doing things like getting AFTRA to go on record as supporting the

Trenton Six. The Trenton Six was a group of six black teenagers in Trenton, New Jersey, who

had been apparently unjustly convicted of some crime and put in jail. Well what did a

performance union have to do with getting involved in things like that? The Scottsboro Boys,

the Trenton Six, stuff like that. So you had the communists on the one side pushing the union

into becoming extreme left-wing. You had the rightists on the other side bitter about these

Communists and publishing lists of people that they felt were members of the Communist party

and those people were unable to find work. And then you had people like us who were in the

middle and were in despair about what was happening to our union. So a group of us got

together and we formed a slate to run, and we called ourselves the Middle of the Road Slate.

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Charles Collingwood, the newscaster, and a guy named John Henry Faulk and I and Jack Parr

and Tony Randall and a whole bunch of people like that. And we opposed the black list but we

also were against what was being done by the extreme left wing of the party, too. We won a

fabulous victory and Charles Collingwood was elected President, I was elected First Vice-

President, and a guy named John Henry Faulk was elected Second Vice-President and we were

elated, and the New York Times wrote a great story about it. It was the beginning of the end of

the blacklist. It was a good thing. However, the black list was not completely over and two

weeks later I got this call from Ed Sullivan and he said, “Have you seen the latest issue of

Counter Attack?” Counter Attack was a newsletter put out by the Red Channels people, and the

Red Channels was the bible of the blacklist, channels meaning television channels, red meaning

Communist. And they would put out a newsletter every couple of weeks adding names and my

name was on there. And what they had on me was I’d gone to a meeting of something called the

Emergency Civil Liberties Committee which was, it turned out to be, a front for a Communist

organization. I went because I was horny for a hot-looking Communist girl. And then Charles

Collingwood was on the list, the newscaster, because he’d written a letter to the House on Un-

American Activities Committee critical of their attempts to root out communists on Broadway.

And John Henry Faulk had a list of something like a hundred things that he had gone to that were

Communist fronts. And when we were putting the slate of people together we asked everybody

“Do you have anything in your background, because we don’t want people that could cause

trouble?”, and Johnny never raised his hand. I raised my hand and confessed the one meeting I

had attended of the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, and Collingwood told about the letter, and

Johnny never raised his hand. So with all of the stuff against John, the three of us became

blacklisted. And suddenly overnight I saw actors cross the street to avoid having to talk to me.

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That’s how scary it was in those days. CBS had made a pilot of “The Orson Bean Show” and

was planning to put the show on the air and they replaced me with, uh, what’s-his-name from

“Murder She Wrote”, uh, who’s now my good friend, comedian actor from, uh, from – I’m old

and I forget. Oh, Dick Van Dyke. Dick’s the guy who replaced me. At the time I was annoyed

but now we’re friends. Anyway, they kicked me off – I was even snubbed by the doorman at

CBS. Meanwhile, I got a part, one of the leads in a Broadway show called “Will Success Spoil

Rock Hunter”, with Jayne Mansfield and Walter Matthau and I, and that ran the whole year so I

was working, and God looked after me. And at the end of a year Sullivan called up and said

“The pressure is off, now I think I can book you again”, and he booked me one more time, bless

his heart. But that was the end of my career as a stand-up. The air siphoned out of it. But then I

was an actor on Broadway.

Jim: You always hear of people ruined by the Hollywood blacklisting and were never the same.

Orson: And there were some like that. There were guys who committed suicide. Guys that

moved to England and remained bitter the rest of their lives.

Jim: People you knew?

Orson: Yeah. People that I knew of. But the ones that were, there were a number of them, I

mean, I had the good fortune to get a show on Broadway. And the reason that the blacklist never

touched Broadway, and they tried – they came, they came. And they subpoenaed Broadway

actors up the gazoo – the House Un-American Activities Committee – here’s why it didn’t work:

the public didn’t give a damn what Paul Robeson’s politics are. They want to hear how beautiful

he sings. But sponsors do. And on television you could get to the sponsors. You could get to

Campbell’s Soup company and say “Do you really want to sponsor a show that has these people

on it? That are trying to take over the country? That are communists?” And so Campbell’s

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Soup would bring pressure on CBS and CBS in turn would pay blackmail to Red Channels a fee

for every name that they had to clear. Every name of every actor that appeared on every show on

CBS had to be cleared at fifty dollars a head by Red Channels. And in the vast majority of the

cases they’d say “they’re fine, this one’s questionable, this one – you can’t use this one, you

can’t use – that’s fifteen hundred dollars. For every show. Every week. And they’d have to re-

clear each person, all the same actors each week. Because they never knew if they’d become

communists since Saturday. It was a protection racket among other things. But on Broadway

there was no middle man to bring pressure. The producer didn’t care. CBS didn’t care. CBS

didn’t have the spine to stand up to Campbell’s Soup. And Campbell’s Soup happened to be a

very reactionary guy…People would write letters to Campbell’s Soup and say “do you want your

soup advertising the Jack Parr show? They had a communist named Jack Gilford on there last

week.” Oh my God. And so The Tonight Show began paying blackmail, and Jack Gilford who

was a decorated war hero, was not able to work anymore…Then Jack Gilford, as did many of

the directors, began working in commercials. There was no cast list at the end of a commercial.

So unless they recognized these people by their face, which usually they didn’t, nobody knew

what Jack Gilford looked like – they saw his name – so Jack Gilford became the Cracker Jack

Man and made a fortune. Jack Gilford made a fortune and became famous as the Cracker Jack

Man because he was blacklisted off of television. Many, many directors made fortunes in

commercials where they were forced to go and work because there were no credits at the end.

And then gradually after the blacklist faded, partly because of our victory in AFTRA with the

Middle of the Road Slate, they began working in mainstream. And so those who had kept their

head above water and not become bitter, and either killed themselves or left the country, they did

okay. Not all of them. Some of them just left the business. And it was a terrible thing to do.

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Jim: How long did it last?

Orson: The blacklist lasted, I think, about five years. I didn’t get blacklisted until the last year-

and-a-half of it, when it was already starting to ebb. And then I started working again in those

programs like the game shows that didn’t have one sponsor. Those game shows were sponsored

by four or five sponsors…so there was never that much pressure on those. But if it was just

Lucky Strikes that sponsored the Horace Heidt musical show then they could bring pressure on

Lucky Strike cigarettes and they in turn would bring pressure on the network. So little by little

the blacklist faded into the past and was forgotten about.

Jim: But at its height did you feel former friends avoided you because of an alleged ideology or

because of a fear of association?

Orson: Fear of association. They didn’t want – in those days Senator McCarthy was – you

know, there was guilt by association and that was a phrase that was used. And you didn’t want

to be seen with what was perceived as a possible communist. It might raise questions about you

if somebody spotted you. You never knew. It was like the Hitler Youth Movement. You never

knew who was gonna turn you in. It was that bad.

Jim: So it had nothing to do with political views.

Orson: It was fear. Nobody – by and large there was only a handful of people that cared

whether you were a – because “Communist” didn’t really mean that you were planting bombs to

bring down the country. It meant that you were a fuckin’ do-gooder, usually horny for a

communist girl, went to some meetings, you handed out some pamphlets and walked in a picket

line. Who gave a shit?

Jim: Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

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Orson: I don’t regret any of it. I don’t. I can’t speak for anyone else whether the country was

better or not for it. There was a long period of time prior to the blacklist where there was a de

facto blacklist in Hollywood – by the Communists. The Communists were very important in the

movie industry. And there were many of the biggest directors, were actually members of the

party. And you didn’t get cast in their picture unless you were a member of the party or a young

actor being wooed to be a member of the party. You can see movies today, famous Film Noir B

pictures like “They Drive By Night” where the director was one of the Hollywood Ten, and five

or six members of the cast were either members of the Hollywood Ten or subsequently

blacklisted. And you know that that was a commie picture. And the right wing actors, like

Adolphe Menjou was a notorious right winger, he would never get cast in those pictures. And he

was furious. And for a number of years there was a lot of rage and hurt on the part of either non-

political or conservative right wingers, that there was this cabal in Hollywood. And when they

got their chance, when the Cold War set in, and the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing

atomic secrets to the Russians, then they got their chance and they had their revenge. And that’s

what the blacklist came out of. Frequently politics is combined with that kind of personal

animosity, on both sides. And it’s never a good thing, of course. But, it’s interesting. I mean, I

think it’s true in life that you grow from the painful things. I’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes in

my life and I, (laughs) I keep waiting to grow from them. But I have grown from a lot of them.

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Bibliography

Hollywood Blacklist

Georgakas, Dan Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992

Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954 McAuliffe, Mary S. The Journal of American History, Vol. 63, No. 2. (Sep., 1976), pp. 351-367 President Harry Truman, in a speech at Detroit’s 250

th anniversary celebration

New York Times, July 29, 1951

Telegram from Joseph McCarthy to President Harry Truman

February 11, 1950