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an upstate New York grocery chain magnate, Laurence Johnson, and later a former naval intelligence officer, Vincent Hartnett. It mounted a campaign against writers, including journalists such as Richard O. Boyer, who wrote profiles for the New Yorker, and the New York Times music critic Olin Downes. It attacked writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Ring Lardner Jr., as well as intellectuals including Albert Einstein. Radio and television personalities—many of them commentators and stars—were fired after being named in the pages of Counterattack. Those removed from the airwaves by nervous employers and sponsors included the Texas humorist and radio commentator John Henry Faulk; Ireene Wicker, the “Singing Lady,” who had a popular children’s television show; and Philip Loeb, who played the father on the popular sitcom The Rise of the Goldbergs. Loeb denied he was a communist, but the corporate sponsor of the show, General Foods, insisted he be removed.

The human cost of the blacklist was tragic. In his memoir Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, Walter Bernstein, a blacklisted screen writer, describes his friend Loeb as disconsolate. Loeb was the sole supporter of a mentally ill son whom he kept in a private treatment facility, and, as Bernstein wrote, “he was constantly afraid he would be unable to keep up the payments and his son would be moved to a state hospital for the insane.” Loeb lost his apartment. He moved in for a time with the blacklisted comic and actor Zero Mostel, who, Bernstein wrote, “loved Loeb, a short, sweet, sad-eyed man.”

Bernstein recounts how once or twice, Mostel and his wife Kate found Loebshouting out the window at pedestrians below. Zero could never cheer him up, no matter how hard he tried. I never saw Loeb smile, even when Zero was at his hilarious best. He gave the impression he could not be touched. Finally, one day, he checked into a hotel and made sure he took enough pills to kill himself.”45

A letter to the drama editor of the New York Times after Loeb’s death said he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist.”46 The actress Jean Muir, after being named, was removed from the cast of a television sitcom The Aldrich Family, in which she was supposed to appear as Mother Aldrich. The folk group the Weavers, which included Pete Seeger and the actress Lee Grant, all vanished from the public stage. Those who were blacklisted watched as friends, neighbors and acquaintances severed contact with them.

“My life revolved around those friendships,” Bernstein wrote:They were almost entirely with other blacklisted people; we had circled the wagons and it was dangerous to step outside the perimeter. In the morning I tried to write—speculative scripts or articles or the occasional story—but they were desultory, lacking conviction. I seemed to need a validation I could not produce from myself alone. The days were aimless, as they had been when I was waiting to be drafted. I felt suspended; my real life was somewhere else, on hold, waiting to be resurrected when the country came to its senses. Finally, I had to admit I was depressed, a recognition that only added to the depression. A conspiracy was afoot to make me feel unworthy and I was giving it credence.47

Many, including Mostel, Faulk, Grant, and Seeger, and even Bernstein, would return to prominence in the 1960s, but the purges marked the last gasp of an era, one of progressive and radical artists who were allied with working-class movements and saw art as linked to the articulation and creation of a social and political consciousness. The broad, bold ideas and truths expressed by radical movements and artists before the witch hunts were effectively censored out of public discourse.

“The overall legacy of the liberals’ failure to stand up against the anticommunist crusades was to let the nation’s political culture veer to the right,” writes Ellen Schrecker in Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America:Movements and ideas that had once been acceptable were now beyond the pale. Though Communists and their allies were the