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Howard Cosell was 1983. Jimmy the Greek was 1988. Marge Schott was 1992. John Rocker was 1999. What other milestones in 20th Century cancel culture am I missing?
(I'm using "cancel culture" in it's modern sense here, to mean "celebrity says something bigoted, suffers professional repercussions.")
(I actually buy Cosell's defense, so I guess he's the Justine Sacco of the 1980s.)
To clarify/reiterate, what I'm interested in here is folks who were "cancelled" by liberals or the left, not folks who suffered non-political scandals or pissed off the religious right.
It's the "liberals today are so censorious, not like in the good old days" crowd that I'm looking to rebut.
Anita Bryant getting boycotted for opposing gay rights in 1977 (!) is a perfect example.
Another excellent early one: James Watt, forced to step down from the Reagan (!) cabinet.
Now I'm really getting interested, because the early 1990s are seen now as the heyday of political correctness, but cancel culture was clearly going strong by the mid-1980s.
The Bryant thing is a little different—the orange-juice folks were boycotted over her activism, instead of her being fired for an isolated comment. (Boycotting organizations for having bad politics is VERY 1970s.)
I feel like there have to be examples of folks getting cancelled in the 1970s and 1960s, but I can't for the life of me think of any. (Maybe fewer earlier not just because of bigotry but because of changes in how the media reported on famous people who acted like jerks.)
Okay, the 1970s are coming into focus. 1979: Elvis Costello spews racist remarks in a drunken bout of assholery. Some career damage, but he bounces back.
1976: Eric Clapton gives a racist, anti-immigrant speech from a concert stage. Again, blowback, again, his career recovers.
Also in the mid-seventies, Nixon/Ford agriculture secretary Earl Butz survives making a crude ethnic joke about the pope in 1974, but steps down after making a breathtakingly racist joke two years later.
MANDATORY CANADIAN CONTENT
So yeah, I bet we could find earlier examples, but it does feel like the late seventies or the early eighties were when cancel culture as we now know it really came into bloom. That's about four decades ago, if you're keeping score.
(Bowie's late-seventies flirtation with fascism is another datapoint I just remembered, and one that went down very differently than it would have a decade later.)
And as for what life looked like BEFORE cancel culture, there's this from 1938: nytimes.com/2008/07/27/spo…
Asked in a live radio broadcast how he spent his offseason, Yankees outfielder Jake Powell said he worked as a cop in Ohio, and kept in shape by "cracking n-----s over the head with my blackjack." He got a ten-game suspension.
(The Yankees had acquired Powell two years earlier when they traded Ben Chapman to the Senators. Chapman had made a habit while a Yankee of taunting Jewish fans with slurs and Nazi salutes.)
Hey! Lookit what our friend Ben Chapman went onto later in life.
Addendum mentioned by several: Al Campanis, fired by MLB in 1987 for racism.
