A terrific article by the Smithsonian's Jackie Mansky on how the blacklist suppressed creativity and innovation during the early years of television.
If you're kicking it around Martha's Vineyard tonight, here's a tribute to the brilliant Garson Kanin, husband of the Broadcast 41's Ruth Gordon and an alum of Gertrude Berg's The Goldbergs (Berg was graylisted for her support of actor blacklisted actor and union leader
Join the MIT Press Bookstore in welcoming Carol A. Stabile to discuss her book, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist
Broadcast 41 has been excerpted on Literary Hub. Check it out!
Talking at 6 PM tonight at NYU about the Broadcast 41, new media, and resistance.
"When the #MeToo movement made headlines in fall 2017, a group of people from entertainment and cosmetic industries signed a statement declaring that “the clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace.” Journalists swiftly dubbed this “the reckoning”—a word that reflected their sense of some seismic shift in public awareness about how sexual violence is reflected and refracted in policies, politics, work cultures and the stories media tell about the worlds around us."
At the end of World War II, anti-communists—including powerful organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the American Legion, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Catholic Church, Chambers of Commerce around the country, and many other institutions and organizations—initiated an apocalyptic battle over their definition of Americanism.
In New York City, then the center of broadcast production, in the years between the two world wars, diverse groups of women had taken advantage of economic and political instabilities to carve out toeholds in media industries. To be a woman who wanted to change the treatment of women on and off-screen in the 1930s and 1940s was to struggle constantly against incredibly rigid and powerful institutions.