In 1943, pursuant to orders from Alexander Trachtenberg, a Communist leader, there began a systematic Communist infiltration of the field of radio. Thereafter, a continuing struggle developed within the Radio Writers Guild between pro-Communist and anti-Communist factions.

Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era examines the experiences of seven prominent women of stage and screen whose lives and careers were damaged by the McCarthy-era “witch hunts” for Communists and Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry: Judy Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Margaret Webster, Mady Christians, and Kim Hunter. The effects on women of the anti-Communist crusades that swept the nation between 1947 and 1962 have been largely overlooked by cultural critics and historians, who have instead focused their attention on the men of the period. Author Milly S. Barranger looks at the gender issues inherent in the investigations and at the destructive impact the investigations had on the lives and careers of these seven women—and on American film and theater and culture in general. Issues of gender and politics surface in the women’s testimony before the committeemen, labeled “unfriendly” because the women refused to name names. Unfriendly Witnesses redresses the absence of women’s histories during this era of modern political history and identifies the enduring strains of McCarthyism in postmillennial America. Barranger recreates the congressional and state hearings that addressed the alleged Communist influence in the entertainment industry and examines in detail the cases of these seven women, including the appearance of actress Judy Holliday before the committee of Senator Pat McCarran, who aimed to limit the immigration of Eastern Europeans; actress Anne Revere and playwright Lillian Hellman, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, sought the protections of the Fifth Amendment with different outcomes; of writer Dorothy Parker, who testified before a New York state legislative committee investigating contributions to “front” groups; and of director Margaret Webster, before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee, whose aim was the indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and the U.S. State Department. None escaped subsequent blacklisting, denial of employment, and notations in FBI files that they were threats to national security. Unfriendly Witnesses is enhanced by nine illustrations and extensive excerpts from Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, originally published in 1950 at the height of the Red Scare, and which listed 151 allegedly subversive writers, directors, and performers. Barranger includes the complete entries from Red Channels for the seven women she discusses, which include the “subversive” affiliations that prompted the women’s interrogation by the government.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Freedom and the Foundation is a study in depth of the first and most controversial of the tax-exempt foundations dedicated to research and public education in the field of civil liberties and civil rights: The Fund for the Republic. The story of its struggle for survival, as Mr. Reeves demonstrates, exemplifies the broader conflict between America’s liberal and conservative forces in the early 1950s. The Fund—created in 1952 by the Ford Foundation—was set up to explore possibilities for liberalizing American society at the very time when, under the hysterical goading of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the forces of repression had reduced dissent to a hoarse whisper. Reeves tells of the mounting criticism when, less than two years after the Fund’s launching, the noted educator and thinker Robert Hutchins became its president. He shows how, as the Fund attempted to follow its mandate under the leadership of Hutchins and his vice-president, W.H. Ferry, it encountered vociferous and persistent attack from powerful and entirely predictable sources, and became a magnet for all the political crosscurrents of the day. With a subtle feeling for the atmosphere of the McCarthy era, the author carries the reader into the Fund’s first crisis, when it was brought before HUAC by the superpatriotic organizations and its other ultraconservative enemies. He describes the many clashes between Hutchins and his detractors in Congress and the press—such adversaries as Chairman Francis Walter of HUAC and the columnist-commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. The account of the Fund’s inception and development, of its accomplishments in creating, sponsoring, and disseminating ideas useful to the nation—of its inner conflicts and politicking as well as its struggle to makes its way in the outside world—is not only fascinating in itself, but particularly timely in the light of the recent Congressional investigations of the tax-exempt foundations. Professor Reeves’s study is based on the files, reports, and publications of the Fund for the Republic (the first foundation to makes its complete files available to scholars), which are now at Princeton University, and on scores of interviews with Fund staff members, partisans, and critics, as well as more than five years of examining the more conventional source material.