In September 1955, 67 TV critics got the opportunity of a lifetime: An all-expenses paid trip to London for a week, courtesy of Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Cream Oil.

They were there to learn about a new TV program called The Adventures of Robin Hood. The series was the first British-American co-production, and one of the very first programs available in the UK’s then-fledgling commercial television landscape. The half-hour episodes starred Richard Greene as the title character and Bernadette O’Farrell as love interest Maid Marian. It filmed at England’s historic Nettlefold Studios, renamed Walton Studios.

The junket was something out of Mad Men. The critics boarded a martini-and-cigarette-laden charter out of Idlewild Airport, which would later become JFK Airport. They stayed at London’s new Westbury Hotel, and luxury buses shuttled them around to the usual tourist draws, including Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.

Then, there were parties on the actual set at Walton, where the entertainment journalists could mingle with the show’s producers, set designers, actors, and directors.

But not the writers.

The writers of Robin Hood would never be made available for interviews. And they would never be credited for their work on the program, at least not with their own names. Indeed, some of the writers of Robin Hood would not have been allowed to leave the United States.

That’s because they were among Hollywood’s blacklisted—media workers victimized by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s persecution of those accused of communist ties and banned from working.

Had the writers’ identities been discovered, the show couldn’t have proceeded. Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot would have immediately withdrawn their millions of dollars in investment. And this loss of investment would have led to the withdrawal of Official Films, the U.S.-based distribution company that sold the program to CBS-TV in America and the CBC in Canada. Naturally, the broadcasters themselves would have withdrawn their commitment to air it.

So why did the show use these writers despite those risks?

The answer to that question was Hannah Dorner Weinstein.

Weinstein developed the series with leftist writers Ring Lardner Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and others. She’d worked with many of them on FDR’s 1944 re-election campaign, as executive director of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), which she co-founded. They’d also worked together when she was a vice-chair and co-founder of Progressive Citizens of America.

Lardner and Hunter had both been targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and were unemployable as screenwriters. Their involvement in Robin Hood was known only by Weinstein and two or three others on the show who were sworn to secrecy.

In making Robin Hood, Weinstein followed a formula she developed two years earlier with two other blacklisted writers, Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky. With the writers using pseudonyms, they’d created a single-season detective program called Colonel March of Scotland Yard. That series, featuring actor Boris Karloff (a friend of Weinstein’s), caught the attention of British mogul Lew Grade who decided to help Weinstein build her own studio. She did, and in 1954, Sapphire Films was created.

Still under surveillance by the FBI and the CIA for her own political activities back home in New York, the petite former journalist implemented a strict procedure for getting scripts and notes back and forth across the Atlantic. She did the same with getting the writers paid—no easy feat, considering they had to use pseudonyms for everything. Weinstein, 44 and a single mother of three, sweated mightily each time a journalist asked to speak to one or more of the show’s writers. She’d redirect the questioner to a trusted producer or assistant who would then find a way to deflect.

Weinstein’s choice of the legend of Robin Hood to challenge the cultural climate of the Cold War, and allegorize the contemporary geopolitical conflicts of the period was an apt one. As historian of blacklist-era entertainment Andrew Paul summarizes, Robin Hood “was an outlaw with a keen sense of social justice…His antagonistic attitude toward the authoritarian Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had the potential to reflect midcentury antifascist sentiments. And his empathy toward the poorest of England’s inhabitants could reflect socialist and Popular Front positions on wealth distribution.”

For example, in one episode of the show, called “The Miser,” a lord collects double rents from his tenants to cover his own taxes. Robin tricks him into thinking that an alchemist can turn buttons into silver and returns the money to the villagers. In another episode, “A Year and a Day,” Robin assists a serf who has taught himself how to do surgery by helping the man gain his freedom so he can treat the poor for free.

Lardner and Hunter weren’t the only blacklisted writers involved. Episodes were written by Adrian Scott, John Howard Lawson—members of the Hollywood Ten along with Lardner— and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt, Gertrude Fass, Fred Rinaldo, and Robert Lees (creators of the Abbott & Costello franchise), Arnold Manoff, and Hyman Kraft. Lardner headed up a writing cadre in New York; Scott did the same for Los Angeles.

Weinstein’s productions gave blacklisted writers the ability to put food on their tables, while allowing those same writers to impart sociological subtext about fascism, persecution and, leadership (good and bad). She also allowed them to take aim at the injustices of the Hollywood blacklist.

In “The Vandals,” for example, the sheriff interrogates a village ironsmith to make the man confess that he has made arrow tips for Robin Hood.

“I know you are a decent citizen now,” the lawman goads him, mimicking the language used by Congressional inquisitors who baited former radicals into naming the names of communists and fellow travelers.

Above all, though, Robin Hood was entertaining. The series was a huge hit in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, often taking a spot among the top 20 programs. It was in production for four years and wound up with 143 half-hour episodes. Before its first season was half over, Official Films and sponsors commissioned more seasons of it—and of Sapphire-produced costumed dramas The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers, featuring a very young Robert Shaw (1956) and then Sword of Freedom (1957).

Ironically, the popularity of these Sapphire programs made life even more difficult for its writers. Talent agents wanted to poach them, but could not find out who they were. The writers couldn’t be at the 1955 junket, and they weren’t ever available stateside, either. The job of deflecting chiefly fell to story editor and trusted lieutenant Albert Ruben, who ran interference between the production company and these types of requests from press or advertising executives.

What made it all work was that Weinstein and her writers trusted each other, perhaps because she faced the same risks that they did. In 1950, she had been fired from her job as a public relations executive for her leftist activity, and her appearance on McCarthy’s list of “concealed communists.” The listing was incorrect—she was not a communist. But, had she not left the country, it was likely she would have been subpoenaed by some arm of McCarthy or the House on Unamerican Activities Committee, or had her passport revoked, or both.

So it was that, in the mid-1950s, this woman who had been outspoken for decades made a shift and let her television productions be the face of her activism. “Meet Hannah [Weinstein],” a British, syndicated columnist wrote in 1959, “the Quiet Woman of television. You won’t have seen her on your screen. She rarely makes news in the papers, avoids interviews if she can. But the fabulously long-running Robin Hood, Sword of Freedom, and Sir Lancelot all owe their tele-creation to this petite American.”

Their writers quietly owed their livelihoods to her, and never forgot.

The post When Screenwriters Won an Uncredited <br>Victory appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1956, Florida’s state legislature established a committee to investigate legal infractions by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as any links that the organization might have to subversive groups. At the time, Florida was just one of several Southern states creating their own sovereignty and education commissions, as well as committees on un-American activities.

The Florida committee, like the others, was part of the white South’s campaign of “massive resistance.” State and local governments deployed legal and procedural weapons against efforts to implement Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision desegregating public education. These state groups, which operated largely independently but maintained varying degrees of communication with each other, all had one purpose: to keep white schools white.

In Florida, however, that purpose would expand to include other threats to the status quo. In an effort to fight the influences it saw transforming society, the committee would turn into a vehicle for identifying, interrogating, and removing homosexuals from schools and universities, while also attacking other groups it believed were threatening traditional American values. This broad targeting of groups and manipulation of public fear in the face of cultural change emerged as a set of strategies still in use today.

The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was led by state senator Charley Johns, a key member of a bloc of conservative lawmakers from northern and central counties who held power well beyond their numbers in the legislature. The Johns Committee, as it became known, was an interim committee, which meant that every two years its renewal required approval from both chambers.

Over the next nine years, legislators renewed the Johns Committee four times. During that period, the committee’s list of targets grew. First, they focused on the NAACP. Spying on and harassing members, they held a series of public hearings in which they tried to show that the organization was breaking the law, that it had been infiltrated by communists, and that social equality (a euphemism for interracial marriage) was its true aim.

Two years later, the committee moved on to homosexuals. Late in 1958, the Johns Committee began an investigation of suspected gay professors and students at the University of Florida. This expanded to a search for gay and lesbian public schoolteachers around the state; then to scouring Miami for underage male prostitutes and pornography; and finally, investigating alleged deviants, atheists, and liberals among the University of South Florida faculty.

In all of its investigations, from civil rights to gay and lesbian teachers, from liberal professors to indecent literature, the Johns Committee was both a product of its time as well as a trailblazer in mobilizing opposition against liberalism as a threat to racial and sexual norms. Its investigations of civil rights activists were part and parcel of a regional attack on the NAACP. Rooting out homosexual teachers and professors—which involved surveillance, entrapment, interrogations, threats of exposure, and accusations of seducing and recruiting the young—reflected the prevailing approach to dealing with homosexuality at the time, from local law enforcement to the federal government and the U.S. military. Concern over obscenity was enmeshed in a broader decency crusade that was washing over much of the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And criticism of leftist intellectuals and the modern university had been a mainstay of Cold War conservatism for years.

Beginning in 1958 at the University of Florida in Gainesville, chief investigator R. J. Strickland, assistant investigators, and city and university police officers moved to question hundreds of suspected homosexuals around the state. They spied on private residences and infiltrated gay bars. They staked out bus stations and parks, as well as men’s bathrooms on college campuses and in the Alachua County courthouse. They questioned prison inmates, college students, juveniles in reform schools, public school teachers, choir directors, university professors, ministers, hustlers and prostitutes, truck drivers, scout leaders, and traveling salesmen.

In a 1959 report to the legislature, Charley Johns explained that the committee had uncovered vitally important facts about the problem of homosexuality in Florida: There were “several classes” of homosexuals. Homosexual activity became “more prevalent as you progress upward on the educational scale.” Lesbians and gay men were “made by training, not born.” And “a surprisingly large percentage of young people are subject to be influenced into homosexual practices if thrown into contact with homosexuals who desire to recruit them.”

For a brief period in the early 1960s, the committee’s mission and ideas had the full and enthusiastic support of the governor, Farris Bryant, a conservative Democrat who created advisory committees on homosexuality and indecent literature in 1961. That year, the Johns Committee joined with these advisory committees and the Florida Children’s Commission to host a series of conferences across the state.

Nearly twelve hundred Floridians attended the conferences. According to the Tampa Tribune, until Governor Bryant “or other experts” could find the “best answer to curbing homosexual practices before they corrode innocent persons’ characters, there will be no attempt by the administration to hamstring or slow down the work of the Johns Committee.”

The title page of the Johns Committee’s controversial 1964 report, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida. Courtesy of the Florida Heritage Collection and the George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collections, University of Florida.

Around the same time, a small group of self-described “concerned citizens,” including the mayor of Tampa, met to discuss the University of South Florida, where parents expressed concern that their kids were being corrupted in the classroom by the teaching of evolution, moral relativism, acceptance of interracial dating, and the historical fallibility of the Bible, as well as a speakers’ policy that would allow communist sympathizers on campus.

The group voted to ask the Johns Committee to investigate the university—not only about homosexuality, but about this whole set of issues. Strickland began questioning students in Room 170 of the Hawaiian Village Motel in Tampa. There, witnesses described unwanted homosexual advances by a music professor, rumors about which professors were gay or suspiciously effeminate, inappropriate sexual comments in class, liberal discussions of race, disdain for religion, softness on communism, and even a list of swear words uttered by one professor during a lecture.

Word got out about the motel-room interrogations, and the USF president, John Allen, took the investigation public, demanding that the committee hold open hearings on campus. For two weeks, the Johns Committee questioned faculty, staff, and administrators about who they were hiring and what they were teaching. As with the NAACP, the university was able to defend itself and paint the committee as overzealous and overstepping legislative bounds. A consensus in the Tampa Bay area eventually emerged on the side of defending academic freedom, but that was tempered by a persistent distrust of higher education from the right.

The effects of the investigation rippled across the state’s university system. In 1962, the Board of Control of the university system revised its “Policy on Morals and Influences,” in part mandating that each university president maintain files on all faculty members, including their “academic background, loyalty, attitudes toward communism, moral conduct, and general teaching ability.” Prospective and current students were now to be scrutinized for “any indication of antisocial or immoral behavior, such as communistic activities or sex deviation.”

In 1963 the committee again used a highly publicized investigation to make the case for their own renewal by the legislature. Charley Johns reported that they had succeeded not only in uncovering homosexuality, “anti-Christian teachings,” and communist sympathizers “teaching and indoctrinating,” but also in helping an unnamed federal agency remove “thirty-nine homosexuals and two of ’em was in high, exalted positions of trust.” The work of the committee, Johns insisted, “has got to go on. It’s larger than any of us.”

But the Johns Committee would disband before its term was up. In less than a year after the publication of a lurid 1964 report called Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida (informally, and infamously, known as the Purple Pamphlet) and the outcry it elicited, the committee quietly disbanded. A state attorney in Miami called it obscene and threatened legal action, while publications ranging from the Tallahassee Democrat to the New Republic, Life, and Confidential drew national attention to the graphic photos, alarmist claims, and eye-popping glossary contained in the report. Johns himself later admitted that they should “close the office, lock up the records, and save the taxpayers of Florida the remainder of the $155,000 appropriation.”

The myth behind the anti-gay, anti-integration, and anti-obscenity arguments at midcentury was that liberals were attempting to force Americans, especially young people, to accept abnormal behavior as normal. It is striking how these views still animate part of our political imagination in much the same way they did in postwar battles: over what kind of nation we want to be, as well as how to define “Americanism” and who should be included in, and excluded from, the rights and privileges that come with it. There are some historical moments—like the time the Johns Committee operated in Florida—when such myths are embraced by enough people to provide a veneer of legitimacy, and an excuse to act.

The post The Group of Florida Legislators Whose Attack on the NAACP Turned Into a Witch Hunt Against ‘Liberal’ Minorities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.