After World War II, a network of conservative politicians, religious leaders, sympathetic journalists and like-minded organizations in the United States devised a plan.
This plan sought to turn back the clock on gains made over the previous decade by African Americans, women, workers and others, believing that “real” American values were rooted in the past. To criticize America, in the eyes of this newly established network, was to “chip away at our confidences” to allow a “special brand of tyranny” to “creep into America.” Members of this network considered criticism of their agenda subversive—evidence of “diabolical plots to wreck the American way of life.” Their mission was straightforward: generate fear of ideas that diverged from theirs, brand their critics as Communists, and call for purges of government, education, labor and media.
Fear is a volatile weapon, especially in the wake of a traumatic global event like World War II, requiring careful management of the flow of information. Anti-communists, as they would come to be known, had been monitoring radicals and liberals (who they labeled “fellow travelers”) in media for years. After World War II, they stepped up attacks on those who supported New Deal programs, like Social Security, fair labor practices and consumer rights, and condemned critics of U.S. domestic or global policy. In 1946, liberal commentators at a leading Los Angeles radio station were fired and the American Legion began coordinating campaigns against those who had been listed as subversive in the pages of CounterAttack, a newsletter established to provide “facts to combat communism.”
Since firing people for their political beliefs evoked the fascism only recently defeated in Germany and Italy, anti-communists were careful to emphasize that their fight against “Stalin’s stooges” was legal. The American Legion led the way in encouraging both a “vigilant public opinion and a struggle against communism within the framework of law and order.” This is where the blacklist came in. The playbook looked like this: the American Business Consultants – publishers of CounterAttack, an anti-communist newsletter – identified so-called Communists and “fellow travelers” in the newsletter. They then visited networks, advertisers, sponsors and individuals to offer their services for a fee to “clear” those they had identified. Typically, clearance required blacklisted individuals to cooperate with the FBI or the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by providing names of other subversives and publicly renouncing all progressive political affiliations. If individuals did not comply, the FBI and anti-communist organizations then pressured organizations and institutions to eliminate blacklisted personnel by coordinating letter writing campaigns threatening negative publicity and boycotts. In the case of media industries—especially vulnerable to smear campaigns—these threats gave networks and advertisers justification for firing employees because, they maintained, the public had demanded it.