They’re gone now, but they provided our culture with enduring gifts.
Folk singer Burl Ives left us his version of a bouncy holiday song, “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”
Sultry Lena Horne left us her classic recordings of “Stormy Weather.”
Banjo-playing Pete Seeger left a catalogue of music, much of it anti-war, as in “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”
Leonard Bernstein provided the score for the musical West Side Story.
Singer and actor Paul Robeson – who had an early connection to Narragansett – displayed his booming bass-baritone voice in the 1936 film Show Boat with a timeless rendition of his signature song, “Ol’ Man River.”
So, besides their talent, what did these artists have in common?
They were blacklisted for their left-leaning political views during one of our country’s darkest periods – the “McCarthy Era.”
And now we have begun to hear under the Trump Administration the same red-baiting howls that spewed from toxic Sen. Joseph McCarthy:
Communists!
The current President has on multiple occasions taken to swinging the communist paintbrush, declaring at one point that “Social Democrats are communists by another name.”
For those of us who remember the rectitudinous McCarthy, a shiver goes up the spine when Trump vows to send his self-declared “communists” into exile.
Blacklisting in the early Fifties affected at least 300 artists and writers.
When it reached the droll poet and screenwriter Dorothy Parker, a left-leaning anti-fascist, she responded, “I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?”
Also hurt by blacklisting were the Weavers, a rollicking folk group (Seeger was a member) that had hits including “Tzena,Tzena,Tzena” and “Goodnight Irene.”
But the centerpiece for ruinous harassment was Robeson, an outspoken anti-racist whose musical and dramatic acclaim was worldwide.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee haunted him over his leftist views and his refusal to denounce the Soviet Union in that Cold War era.
The government revoked his passport and his income plummeted, even though many considered him among the greatest performers the country had ever produced.
The son of a runaway slave, Robeson was the lone Black student at the then-Rutgers College, where from 1915 to 1919 he gained honors for his debate skills and excelled in four varsity sports.
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he was his class valedictorian. Subsequently he earned a law degree at Columbia University, where he taught Latin and, at 6-feet-3 and 240 pounds, played professional football on weekends to pay his tuition.
As for lawyering, Robeson, with his resonant voice and oratorical skills, gave it up early for the stage.
As he prepared for Rutgers with a scholarship, Robeson had another source of income: He worked as a scrub boy and waiter at the elegant Imperial Hotel on Central Street in Narragansett,.
A New Jersey native, he was introduced to Narragansett by his big brother Ben, who was familiar with how the ornate hotels there hired Black students as summer waitstaff and kitchen help. Fire destroyed the Imperial in 1923.
The list of other McCarthy Era victims is long, and many of them still entertain us in those old movies we watch late at night, or with other skills that have been preserved in recordings and writings.
Among them are actors Charlie Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, and Judy Holliday; composer Aaron Copeland; and playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.
Joseph McCarthy’s reign of intimidation began falling in 1954, when a network television rebuke by respected journalist Edward R. Murrow turned public opinion against him.
During a hearing that same year, a lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, asked McCarthy the famously penetrating question that today might – and should – be asked of the accusatory Donald Trump:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
