John Henry Faulk Comes to New York
In April 1946 a folksy Texan raconteur and commentator John Henry Faulk began a radio show on CBS called "Johnny's Front Porch." The show would last only a year. He and his wife at the time, Hally Wood, a folksinger with classical music training, had come to the city from the Austin in December, hoping to start professional careers in show business. The 32-year old Faulk had been teaching a course on folklore at the University of Texas and was the life of the party at faculty gatherings with his yarns. Today he is remembered largely as the man who successfully challenged the blacklist in court, as recounted in his book Fear On Trial, effectively ending the practice but only after it had ruined his broadcast career.
His story is an example both of the outrageous overreaching of the anti-Communist crusaders in the 1950s and the disingenuousness of those, like Faulk, who were involved with the Left during the 1940s. Faulk came under attack from an outfit known as AWARE when he became part of a ticket running for the board of AFTRA, the radio and TV performers union, Calling their nominees the Middle-of-the-Road, the slate ran on a platform that opposed both Communism and the blacklist. At the time, Faulk had a popular radio show on the CBS network. AWARE was an outfit that made its money charging fees to the networks to investigate talent for possible Communist connections, relying mostly on old press clippings. No broadcaster had ever asked them to check out Faulk but once the slate was announced AWARE, on its own, pored through its files of old clippings to uncover anything that could help them swift boat the Middle-of-the-Road candidates as Communists. In Faulk's case they generated a short list of events sponsored by the Left in which he had appeared just after the war when much of New York's talent pool was involved to some extent in the Popular Front. The "evidence" dredged up against Faulk included:
An announcement in the Daily Worker in April 1946 saying he would appear at Club 65, a "working man's nightclub" that Aware characterized as a popular venue for Communist events.
An appearance in 1947 in "Headline Cabaret," sponsored by agit-prop theater group Stage For Action, an event at which Art Carney of the popular "Honeymooners" also performed.
An appearance in April 1946 at a salute to the first anniversary of the United Nations sponsored by the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Profession, branded a Communist front by AWARE. The event was broadcast on CBS radio. Ronald Reagan and Olivia de Havilland were on the board at the time of the Hollywood chapter of the ICCASP. Lana Turner was among the celebrities who appeared at the dinner. The US Ambassador to the UN and former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. was among the scheduled speakers, although a bout of sinusitis kept him away. His speech was read by a military attache.
An appearance at a 1948 Wallace rally, at which Paul Robeson also appeared, at the Communist-run Jefferson School of Social Sciences.
A letter of congratulation to People's Songs, a Popular Front organization founded in December 1945, mostly by people from the folk music world, to promote songs with "social significance." It had close ties to the more radical unions in the CIO and the Communist Party.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, the FBI investigations had looked several times into Faulk's political activities and each time gave him a clean bill of health. It is unlikely that Faulk was an active member of the Communist Party, but it is also likely that he was far more supportive of the politics of these Popular Front groups than he pretended to be in later years. For one thing, his wife was very active in several front groups. For another, the Faulks had close personal ties to folklorist Alan Lomax, who was very much involved in left wing activities in the postwar years. Faulk most likely was sympathetic to Communist-led causes when he first got to New York.
Faulk was born in Austin, Texas, into a family of churchgoing Methodists who also were political liberals. His father, a judge, once ran as the Socialist candidate for governor of Texas and was an outspoken opponent of racism. Faulk attended the University of Texas during the Depression when many college campuses, even in Texas, saw substantial student political activism. He was an enthusiastic participant in liberal causes. His academic interest was folklore, a field of study in which UT excelled at the time, and his Master's thesis was on the sermons delivered in local African American churches.
Faulk's marriage in 1940 to UT music graduate student Hally Wood set off the first FBI investigation. The couple had met through their political activism. The FBI had been keeping tabs on Wood who reportedly had been a member briefly of the Young Communists League and a subscriber to the Daily Worker. The FBI concluded at this time that Faulk was "patriotic but liberal." According to evidence uncovered by David Everitt and reported in his book A Shadow of Red, an account of the blacklist years from a conservative perspective, Faulk was also briefly a member of the Young Communists League despite his later testimony to the contrary.
Faulk tried to join the Army when the war broke out but he was turned away because he had lost much of his vision in one eye from an infection contracted when he was in his teens. In 1942 he joined the Merchant Marine, serving on a tanker carrying supplies to Europe. The Merchant Marine had a reputation as a favored alternative to the armed services for men who wanted to do their part in the war but who were ineligible for the armed services for medical reasons or barred because of prior political activity. It was also home base for the Communist-dominated National Maritime Union. Faulk later said he rebuffed an invitation to join the Party during his tour of duty with the Merchant Marine. He then worked with the American Red Cross in Cairo. In 1944, when the medical standards were loosened, he was taken into the Army in a non-combat role as a medic stationed at Camp Swift in Texas.
In Burnt Orange Britannia, a collection of autobiographical sketches, Henry Middleton, who was director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library from 1970 to 2002, remembered Faulk and his wife performing songs and irreverent patter at service clubs while both men were in the Army. Faulk and his wife both also continued their political activism during this time, leading to FBI investigation number two after Faulk was reported to have joined the People's Educational and Press Association, which the agency considered a subversive front. He again was cleared and the surveillance ended. The FBI would question him again about this organization in the 1950s after Wood, by then his ex-wife, was named as a Communist in the HUAC testimony of Harvey Matusow. He would tell the agents that he had considered the members of that organization to be a pack of neurotics with questionable sexual morals whom he tolerated only on his wife's behalf. Matusow, who named many names, later claimed in his book False Witness that he had been paid to testify and that much of his testimony had been fabricated at the urging of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Matusow was convicted of perjury and spent three years in prison.
When John, or Johnny as he was known then, and Hally got to New York in December 1945, they looked up their old friend and mentor, Alan Lomax, who was following in his father's footsteps as a folklorist. Lomax also was working at the time as a radio producer. Lomax threw a couple of parties on Faulk's behalf where his friend told his folksy yarns to invited radio executives. This led to Faulk getting a radio show. Meanwhile Lomax helped Hally work on her contacts in the folk music field. She performed with Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers and with Woodie Guthrie. She played union halls and other gatherings, where traditional folk music was mixed with pseudo-folk songs of protest and worker solidarity. Seeger later wrote that most of the union members for whom they performed would have rather listened to the Andrews Sisters. Communists, fellow travelers and sympathizers were much involved in the folk music scene at this time and Hally was a part of it, becoming involved with People's Songs, in which Lomax and Seeger played prominent roles. It was during this period that Faulk appeared at several events considered suspect by the folk at AWARE.
Faulk and Hally divorced in 1947. Around that time Middleton, who had taken a job with AP, ran into him in New York where Faulk jokingly claimed that he had divorced Hally because she had eaten crackers in bed. Middleton visited his apartment several times where he noticed that Faulk had a photo of Earl Browder on the wall. Middleton and Faulk, who became longtime friends, never discussed the significance of the photo. Maybe Wood had left it behind. Maybe it was an ironic statement. In any case Browder was persona non grata to the Communist Party in 1947 although he continued to defend the Soviet Union in his writings and in public debates. At one debate he was reminded that he was lucky to be living in the United States since most foreign Communist Party leaders who had fallen out of favor with Stalin were dead.
Much of Everitt's A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Televison, is devoted to an analysis of the Faulk trial. Everitt wrote that the excessive zeal, overreaching accusations, sloppy research and vindictive actions of the anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s damaged the credibility of the conservative movement. However, he also sought to prove that many of the accusations had some basis in fact and that many of the accused were more involved with Communist political activities than they pretended to be. He portrays Faulk as more of a Party sympathizer than a full-fledged fellow traveler. Based on letters that Faulk wrote to friends and colleagues during this period, Faulk apparently subscribed at least in part to the Party line that Truman had betrayed the New Deal by provoking or exacerbating international conflicts to satisfy the greed of the Wall Street crowd while the Soviets, exhausted by the war, wanted friendly relations between the two remaining superpowers. Faulk may not have been an ardent Stalinist but he apparently saw the Soviets as less of a threat to world peace than the Wall Street crowd. This might make him wrong but it did not make him a subversive.
His next run-in with the FBI would be over his support of Henry Wallace's presidential campaign in 1948. It seems that after he got a network radio show in 1951, a formerly enamored fan reported him for having sent her a letter a couple of years earlier urging her to support Wallace in 1948. No longer a fan, she did not believe that a man who had supported Wallace should be allowed to be on a network radio show. The FBI called in Faulk for a personal interview over his political activities during this period and found that he answered all their questions to their satisfaction. Supporting Wallace, a former Vice President of the United States, was not a punishable offense. This experience strengthened his resolve against the red-baiting of the FBI and HUAC, which had also called him in for private testimony.
Twenty-seven of the Middle-of-the-Road slate. including Faulk, won election to the AFTRA board but a year later Faulk lost his radio show despite good ratings. He could not find another job in the industry. Everitt asserts out that the blacklist, at least in broadcasting, was more of a gray list. Some of the bigger names fingered by AWARE and other red-baiters continued to find work although often not as easily as before. Some of the biggest names who had been fingered prospered, including Lucille Ball, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Miller. With a few notable exceptions, it was the lesser names such as Faulk who became the main victims of the Right Wing purges.
The trial on Faulk's suit against AWARE was delayed six years through legal maneuvering orchestrated by the vile Roy Cohn. By then Faulk was bankrupt. Faulk won a huge settlement, subsequently reduced, but by then AWARE and its principals were bankrupt themselves-one had committed suicide during the trial- so Faulk's actual payoff did not cover the debts and legal expenses he had incurred. In his later years Faulk appeared as a storyteller on "Hee Haw" and a televised dramatization of his book about his trial was critically acclaimed.