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My 12th-grade English teacher blacklisted actors, directors, producers, singers, writers, and journalists during the McCarthy era. (Thread)
Vincent Hartnett studied Bolshevism at Notre Dame and was a naval intelligence officer in World War II. In the late 1940s, while working for a radio and TV producer, he claimed he saw Communist efforts to “colonize” the New York entertainment industry.
Hartnett began collecting information about the political activities of entertainment figures. He was hired by an anti-Communist organization, American Business Consultants, and wrote the introduction to a 1950 pamphlet titled Red Channels. 
“With radios in most American homes and with approximately 5 million TV sets in use,” Hartnett wrote, the Communist Party USA relies “more on radio and TV than on the press and motion pictures as ‘belts' to transmit pro-Sovietism to the American public.”
Its goal, he wrote, was “increasing domination of American broadcasting and television, preparatory to the day when … the Communist Party will assume control of this nation as the result of a final upheaval and civil war.”
Red Channels named 151 people as Communists or sympathizers, including Edgar G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Burgess Meredith, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lena Horne, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw and Burl Ives.
Hartnett testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He cofounded an anti-Communist organization, AWARE Inc., which published a bulletin, also called Aware.
“Hartnett had a clever business,” Milly S. Barranger wrote in her 2008 book Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era. “He studied old photographs of May Day parades and peace marches to identify ‘Red sympathizers.’ ”
He also attended Communist and left-wing political meetings, read FBI and HUAC reports, and scoured the mainstream press and the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker.
“Once identified,” Barranger wrote, “the culprit received a letter asking, ‘Have you changed your views?’ If the answer was ‘yes,’ Hartnett offered to clear that person for a fee. If not, the individual’s name appeared in Aware as engaged in Red-related activities.”
Sponsors and advertisers said they faced boycotts if named artists were hired. Hartnett worked both sides as a “clearance consultant.” He charged employers to check on performers before they were hired and performers to clear their names so they would be.
“Blacklisting,” the game-show host Garry Moore would say, “is a little like fighting six men in a closet with the lights out. You can’t tell who is hitting you.”
When Kim Hunter refused to pay Hartnett to “review” her record of liberal activism, Hartnett warned ABC—his client—that it would “run a serious risk of adverse public opinion” if it employed the actress. Hunter went from Academy Award-winning star to virtually unemployed.
In 1955, she gave in. Barranger:
Hartnett graduated third in his class at Notre Dame in 1937. In 1962, its alumni magazine hailed him as a “top expert on Communist infiltration of entertainment media” who wanted to “give the American public the facts” in the face of “sustained and violent attack by Communists.”
The profile noted that six libel lawsuits against Hartnett’s work had failed. It didn’t mention the pending one that would be his undoing.
A CBS entertainer and host named John Henry Faulk had been a leader in the radio and TV artists union, AFTRA, which had backed a resolution against blacklisting. In 1956, Aware accused Faulk of having been booked to perform at Communist-front events.
Advertisers abandoned Faulk's radio music show. In 1957, CBS fired him. Faulk sued AWARE, Hartnett and his cofounder, a supermarket-chain owner named Laurence Johnson. Johnson had told companies his stores would not carry their products if they sponsored Faulk’s shows.
The defendants’ lead lawyer was a partner in the same firm as Roy Cohn.
The case went to trial in 1962. The TV producer David Susskind testified on Faulk’s behalf. Susskind was remorseful about submitting the names of actors and guests for network clearance. He said an 8-year-old girl he wanted to cast was rejected as “politically unreliable.”
Kim Hunter and Tony Randall testified too. Hartnett spent six days on the stand. He said it was “unrealistic” to rely on legal procedures to identify Communists.
A jury awarded Faulk $3.5 million—the largest libel judgment in U.S. history. The day before the verdict, Johnson was found dead in his pajamas in a Bronx motel. The award was reduced to $550,000 on appeal. But the case ended the practice of institutional blacklisting.
Faulk wrote a 1964 book, Fear on Trial, which was adapted for a 1975 movie on CBS starring George C. Scott as victorious plaintiffs lawyer Louis Nizer. Hartnett sued CBS, Faulk, Nizer, and Susskind, who appeared in the movie, for libel.
A New York state judge dismissed the lawsuit, calling it “nothing more than an attempt to change what plaintiff perceives to be the verdict of history regarding his conduct.”
The movie and failed lawsuit occurred after Hartnett had begun teaching at Pelham Memorial High School in Pelham, N.Y.—his, his wife’s and my hometown. I took his honors English class in the 1980-81 school year.
Hartnett’s past was student lore. At the local public library my buddies and I microfilmed newspaper and magazine stories about Vinny. But we didn’t fully appreciate Hartnett’s outsize role in one of America’s ugliest periods.
It did come up once in class. When Hartnett’s back was turned, one of my friends quickly and loudly blurted “John Henry Faulk.” Hartnett couldn’t tell who said it. He spun around and glared at us all. The room went silent. “That was never proved,” he snapped.
Hartnett’s response temporarily restored the balance of power in the classroom. But the moment confirmed for us that Hartnett knew that we knew. For a bunch of smart-ass 17-year-olds, that knowledge was thrilling.
I can’t find an obituary, but it appears Hartnett died in 2009 at age 93. With journalistic hindsight, I wish I’d had the maturity—and courage—to ask him about his past, about why he believed what he believed, and why he did what he did.
And how, despite or because of all that, he wound up teaching Silas Marner to suburban teenagers. I got a B in his class.
End
