ypical of
the "camel's
nose" syndrome
was the furor on Veteran's day 2004 when sixty-six
ABC affiliate stations refused the telecast of Stephen
Spielberg's Academy Award-winning "Saving
Private Ryan." And why did they refuse to broadcast
this ode to World War II heroism? Because they feared
its gut-wrenching but accurate violence, as well as
its obscenity-laced but accurate dialogue would incur
the the wrath of the FCC. Though the film
had been telecast nation-wide in 2001 and 2002, the
outrage and fines associated with the Janet
Jackson and Bono affairs
frightened the affiliates into dropping the film.
So America spent the
daytime hours of November 11, 2004 honoring the heroics
of the war's soldiers but feared showing at night the
truth that illuminated how they actually fought and
died. There's a strange set of double standards at
work there, all brought on by the fear of "censors," a
fear that brought about its own form of censorship.
It would, of course,
be a different thing if the boycott had been based
on veterans' groups or historians criticizing inaccuracies
in the script, but that wasn't the case. Only the American
Family Association fought
as a group to ban the film, somehow equating the valor
and anguish of America's "greatest generation" on
D-Day at Omaha Beach with the raunchiest of generations—Janet
Jackson and Co. Talk about strange equations.
One cannot help but
wonder if beneath this censor's cloak there didn't
exist an ulterior motive, that is, at least a modicum
of fear that realistic war images would somehow impede
military recruiting efforts for the war in the Middle East, just
what the government feared photos of returning coffins
would do. The latter fear resulted in a policy of "no
coffin photos" for the first time in U.S. military
history. Granted, the government offered the same excuse
for this censorship as the American Family Association—the
protection of family privacy/family values. The end
result was a portrayal of war minus its savagery, minus
its horrors, minus the pain that accompanies any kind
of killing. In other words, censorship offered a John
Wayne-version of warfare—war without guilt and nary
a hair out of place.
Censorship and
hysteria
Back in the 1940s and
50s, a wave of anti-communist hysteria shook the American
landscape from top to bottom. Politicians like Richard
Nixon and Joseph McCarthy fed
on the hysteria to cultivate nascent or stalled careers.
In their minds the two most insidious campgrounds for "Reds" were
government and the arts. In the latter, the Red-baiters
feared communist sympathizers and propagandists would
use film and theater scripts to worm their way into
the American psyche and twist democratic morals. Decades
of history in the Soviet Union attested to the reality
of such imaginings.
The first two years'
worth of scripts for CBS' acclaimed series "You
Are There" were written by three blacklisted writers.
But as often happens
when politicians embark on a public witch-hunt, things
quickly went out of control. Youthful indiscretions
and flirtations with the Communist party were brought
out in public testimony. Never mind that the short-lived
relationship ended 25 years ago and that the writer
has been a God-fearing loyal American in the years
since. Once a Red, always the possibility of being
Red again. Friends, fearing for their careers and families,
were first encouraged, then threatened or blackmailed
into testifying against more famous friends. It became
one of the darkest chapters in American history. And
while there may have been some noble intentions at
the start, it degenerated into an ego-driven witch-hunt
to control the American creative spirit.
But good minds
eventually outwit ill minds. Today's censors — bent
on cleansing from the American scene everything except
what they themselves believe in — might consider
what befell the efforts at censorship during the McCarthy
era. As the government compiled its list of "blacklisted" writers
who could no longer be employed to write for theater,
radio, television, or the movies, the writers simply
moved underground. And the industries' directors and
producers, knowing that the hysteria was morally reprehensible,
hired the blacklisted writers under assumed names.
Many of the "Lassie" television scripts of
the 1950s were penned by blacklisted writers. The first
two years' worth of scripts for CBS' acclaimed education
series "You Are There" were written by three
blacklisted writers. Hosted by the likes the Walter
Cronkite and Mike Wallace,
the writers described the lives of Joan of Arc, Nathan
Hale, Socrates, Galileo, and other historical figures.
But between the lines, one could read the points they
were making about the courage necessary to survive
in contemporary America when the witch-hunts begin.
By popular demand, for
many years National Public Radio has broadcast a 10-minute
December segment called "John Henry Faulk's 'Christmas
Story.'" Available
online, it is a holiday tale
for the ages.
John Henry Faulk,
who died in 1990, was a legendary humorist and storyteller
whose reputation was smeared by McCarthyism
during the 1950s, despite the fact his patriotism went
far beyond what anyone would have expected of someone
whose physical ailments exempted him from WW II service.
He is a shining example of what can happen when humans
set themselves up as "thought police." Here
is how The Handbook of Texas Online (a
joint project of The General Libraries at the
University of Texas at Austin and the Texas
State Historical Association) describes both
Faulk and his smearing:
"Early in World
War II, the army refused to admit [Faulk] because
of a bad eye. In 1942 he joined the United States
Merchant Marine for a year of trans-Atlantic duty,
followed by a year with the Red Cross in Cairo, Egypt.
By 1944 relaxed standards allowed the army to admit
him for limited duty as a medic; he served the rest
of the war at Camp Swift, Texas. ... WCBS Radio debuted
the "John
Henry Faulk Show" on December 17, 1951. The
program, which featured music, political humor, and
listener participation, ran for six years. . . .
. Faulk's radio career ended in 1957, a victim of
the Cold War and the blacklisting of the 1950s. Inspired
by Wisconsin Senator Joseph
McCarthy, AWARE, Incorporated,
a New York-based, for-profit, corporation, offered "clearance" services
to major media advertisers and radio and television
networks. For a fee, AWARE would investigate the
backgrounds of entertainers for signs of Communist
sympathy or affiliation. In 1955 Faulk earned the
enmity of the blacklist organization when he and
other members wrested control of their union, the
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
from officers under the aegis of AWARE. In retaliation,
AWARE branded Faulk a Communist. When he discovered
that the AWARE bulletin prevented a radio station
from making him an employment offer, Faulk sought
redress. Several prominent radio personalities and
CBS News vice president Edward
R. Murrow supported
Faulk's effort to end blacklisting. With financial
backing from Murrow, Faulk engaged New York attorney
Louis Nizer. Attorneys for AWARE, including McCarthy-committee
counsel Roy Cohn, managed to stall the suit, which
was originally filed in 1957, for five years. When
the trial finally concluded in a New York courtroom,
the jury had determined that Faulk should receive
more compensation than he sought in his original
petition. On June 28, 1962, the jury awarded him
the largest libel judgment in history to that date—$3.5
million. An appeals court subsequently reduced the
amount to $500,000. Legal fees and accumulated debts
erased the balance of the award. . . . The city of
Austin, Texas, named the downtown branch of the public
library in his honor."
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