Libertarian Paul Matzko’s new book tells the story of a campaign to silence dissent from the Right during the 1960s, which in certain ways prefigures today’s deplatforming wars. The medium at stake then was radio, which became a home for conservative opposition in the late 1950s and early 1960s, much earlier than most people realize. Paul Matzko, The Radio Right Before the rise of television, most radio stations were affiliated with one of four major national radio networks such as NBC and CBS. The networks produced national programming, which they distributed to local stations for a fee. They also had a right to veto local programming and were quick to overrule anything they feared might be “controversial.” The resulting programming was bland.
The emergence of television in the 1950s led to a scramble on the part of national networks to invest in the new technology — and divest from the old. By 1952, fewer than half of American radio stations had a network affiliation, and that fraction continued to drop. Perhaps surprisingly, the number of stations also increased during these years, nearly quadrupling between 1945 and 1960. The result was a transformed radio landscape of small, independent, and often cash-strapped stations that could not afford to be picky about accepting “controversial” programming:
Niche political groups were suddenly able to buy timeslots on stations all across the country. Conservative broadcasting was utterly transformed. In the early 1950s not a single nonnetwork conservative broadcaster aired on more than a handful of stations. Within a decade, a dozen conservative broadcasters aired on a hundred or more independent stations nationwide, most on a daily basis. [page 14]
Conservatives had tremendous reach. The most popular program was Rev. Carl McIntire’s Twentieth Century Reformation Hour. Beginning with just two stations in 1957, McIntire reached 20 million listeners at over 480 stations at his peak in 1964. Dr. Matzko also profiles Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade. Other conservative household names of the time included the Dan Smoot Report, Clarence Manion’s Manion Forum, and Texas oilman H. L. Hunt’s Life Line. Dr. Matzko notes that tens of millions of people listened to these programs every week at a time when William F. Buckley’s National Review had just 73,000 subscribers.
Radio The power of radio: boycotting Polish ham
Dr. Matzko describes the influence of conservative radio with the now-forgotten story of the Polish Ham Boycott:
Following Stalin’s death, some of the Communist nations of Eastern Europe, including Poland, cautiously began asserting a measure of autonomy from the Soviet Union. Hoping to use this development to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its allies, Pres. Eisenhower granted “most favored nation” (MFN) trade status to Poland in 1958. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy agreed, asking “if we fail to help the Poles, who else will dare stand up to the Russians and look westward?” [28]
This argument was lost on many Americans, however, for whom any trade with the communist enemy was anathema. In January 1962, after spotting a Polish ham at his local grocery, a Miami chiropractor set up a protest group called “The Committee to Warn of the Arrival of Communist Merchandise on the Local Business Scene.” For several months, protests were local. Then, on July 2, Carl McIntire devoted an episode of his program to the Miami boycott. Within weeks, 260 local committees sprouted up across the country. Most members were housewives. They discreetly placed small cards in the aisles of offending stores with sarcastic messages such as “Always buy your communist products at SuperGiant.” Targeted stores began losing sales; panicked managers dropped the offending merchandise and even issued apologies. Poland saw a $2.6 million drop in ham exports.
This popular movement took the Kennedy administration by surprise just as Congress was debating a trade bill. When the bill passed in October 1962, it included an amendment revoking MFN status for Poland and Yugoslavia. It was an embarrassing defeat for the President.
By early 1963, two dozen American towns had gone on to pass local ordinances discouraging the sale of Eastern European products. Typically, they made retailers apply for a license costing between $1,000 and $5,000, and display prominent signs announcing that the store was “Licensed to Sell Communist Imports.” [40]
Most of these ordinances were never enforced, and when they were, the courts usually sided with shopkeepers. Their direct effect was, however, less important than their demonstration of the power of the grassroots opposition coordinated with the help of radio. Boycotters had:
compelled dozens of the largest retailers in the country to drop the offending products, convinced at least two dozen major cities to enact ordinances, and swayed Congress itself into revoking MFN status to Yugoslavia and Poland. [44]
The Kennedy Administration vs. conservative radio
JFK and White House Staff The principle subject of Dr. Matzko’s book, however, is not conservative radio’s spectacular growth and influence in the early 1960s but its gradual suppression by a coalition of liberal interest groups. Broadly speaking, censorship was led by the Kennedy Administration from 1961–63, by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the election year 1964, and by the liberal National Council of Churches (NCC) in the latter part of the decade. Acting through the regulatory power of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and sometimes the audit power of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), these forces all but eliminated conservative radio in the late 1960s. Conservative broadcasting would have to be rebuilt virtually from scratch beginning in the late 1970s.
Within weeks of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy began a series of meetings with labor leaders Walter and Victor Reuther to plot a reelection strategy for 1964. He asked them to find a way to undermine what he called the “extreme right wing.” Later that year, the Reuther brothers submitted a 24- page paper called “The Radical Right in America Today,” popularly known as the “Reuther Memorandum:”
The focus of the memorandum was on right-wing broadcasters. The Reuther Memorandum noted these broadcasters’ ability to rouse “vicious local pressure campaigns against teachers or preachers or anyone else who supports anything from negotiation in foreign affairs to governmental programs in domestic affairs.” Their “pressure tactics on already timid Congressmen” were already having an effect on the administration’s legislative agenda. [5]
In response, the Reuthers outlined specific steps for the Kennedy administration to take “to contain the radical right from further expansion and in the long run reduce it to its historic role of impotent lunatic fringe.” [78]
The administration acted on two recommendations. The first aimed at interrupting the flow of money to conservative organizations, most of which claimed exemption from federal taxes as educational groups. As such, they were not supposed to engage in partisan politics. However:
the IRS had neither the means nor the inclination to investigate every group that applied. But if the Kennedy administration could revoke even a few tax exemptions, they “might scare off a substantial part of the big money now flowing.” The Treasury Department should be encouraged to begin “undercover operations” to find tax violations by these organizations, their founders, and their donors. [78–79]
The second recommendation was combating critics over the airwaves. Victor Reuther reported having heard Billy James Hargis assure listeners to his Christian Crusade broadcast that the Communist Party USA had filled the Kennedy administration with Communist staffers. He suggested the FCC should “encourage” (i.e., pressure) stations that aired programs such as Hargis’s “to assign comparable time for an opposing point of view on a free basis.”
Why I Fight for a Christian America These two recommendations had the advantage of not being easily traceable back to the administration. Both the IRS and the FCC had the legal right to investigate the abuses mentioned in the memo. It was simply a matter of two federal agencies enforcing regulations that had been long neglected. It would be all but impossible for conservatives to prove that they were receiving targeted, unfavorable treatment. [79]
In late 1961, the administration acted on the Reuthers’ first suggestion by arranging for the IRS to audit “organizations generally considered to be right-wing.” The head of the audit division, Mitchell Rogovin, compiled a list of 18 such groups. At the top stood the Reuthers’ bête noir, Billy James Hargis and his Christian Crusade; other conservative broadcasters were also included. Rogovin himself was appointed lead investigator for the audit campaign.
In March 1962, somebody realized that a campaign exclusively against conservative groups would not look good if it became known. A revised list was prepared that reduced the number of conservative groups to 12 and added 10 left-wing groups for camouflage. This list was then forwarded to Robert Kennedy, who signed off on it, but Rogovin instructed his subordinates to “first deal with the right- wing groups.” Later, he revised the list again, dropping most of the left-wing groups and adding several additional conservative broadcasters, including Carl McIntire. In the end, the IRS audited 24 groups and revoked the tax-exempt status of 15, all of them conservative.
Dr. Matzko illustrates how the audit campaign functioned, with the example of Billy James Hargis. The IRS began by forwarding the “balanced” version of its target list to the Tulsa office, where Christian Crusade was produced. But the local agent assigned to the case reasoned that neither Hargis’s rhetoric nor the relevant tax code had changed since the IRS first granted Christian Crusade a tax exemption in 1952. Consequently, between 1962 and 1964, the agent returned a “no charge report” four times. Each time the national office instructed him to look again and look harder. When its patience finally ran out, it ordered the Tulsa office to ask for “technical advice” from Washington, and even sent instructions on how to word the request. As soon as the national office got its hands on the case, it recommended Christian Crusade’s tax-exempt status be revoked and charged it $100,000 in “back taxes.” Hargis spent eight years fighting the ruling, which was eventually reversed. But by then the damage was done: Countless donors had been scared off.
Billy James Hargis Dr. Billy James Hargis. (Credit Image: © Keystone Pictures USA / ZUMAPRESS.com)
The administration’s principle tool against conservative radio, however, was the so-called Fairness Doctrine, originally established by the FCC in 1959. The Reuther Memorandum’s call for pressuring broadcasters for “comparable time for an opposing view” was an appeal to this doctrine, which as first formulated under the Eisenhower administration included three main components: 1) stations that gave airtime to one candidate for political office had to offer “equal time” to opposing candidates; 2) stations had to notify targets of “personal attacks” and offer them airtime to respond; 3) stations were required “to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.” [106-7]
The Kennedy administration lost no time appointing activism-minded allies to the FCC. Their early efforts, however, were directed against the major television networks, and they had enough resources to fight back. By 1963, the activists realized they would have to begin with more vulnerable targets such as independent radio stations with little money and no political connections.
On July 26, Kennedy’s man at the FCC issued a “clarification” of the Fairness Doctrine that required station owners who aired personal attacks to notify the persons or groups attacked and give them “a specific offer of his station’s facilities for an adequate response.” As an example, the FCC said that if a station aired an editorial in support of segregation, then it must offer “similar opportunities” to those who favored desegregation. There were other clues as to the partisan intent: “It is immaterial whether a particular program or viewpoint is presented under the label of ‘Americanism,’ ‘anti-communism,’ or ‘states rights,’” [112] wrote the FCC — but all of these expressions were unmistakably associated with the right. They were to be the targets of “fairness,” as liberal groups instantly recognized:
The next day, the Washington Human Rights Project, a pro-civil- rights organization, mailed all of its members selections from the statement. Since the FCC had made “clear reference to programs such as ‘Life Line,’ Billy James Hargis, and White Citizens’ Council broadcasts,” it was “absolutely essential” that members immediately contact their local stations and request response time. [113]
The first public issue to get the full “fairness” treatment was a proposed treaty to ban above-ground nuclear testing. The administration favored it, while “all the major right-wing broadcasters, including Hargis, Carl McIntire and Clarence Manion, blasted away at the treaty throughout 1963, reaching a fevered pitch that summer.” [111]
Carl McIntire Carl McIntire (image via Wikipedia)
The administration’s principal ally in the early phase of the debate was the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, founded in 1957. But this organization had advocated radical positions, such as total disarmament of both nuclear and conventional weapons. The President decided he needed a new, more “bipartisan” organization. The Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban (CCNTB) was established at a White House meeting on August 7, 1963. James J. Wadsworth, a liberal Republican who had been involved in early negotiations for the treaty under Pres. Eisenhower, was chosen as the public face of the new organization. Immediately following the White House meeting, Wadsworth sent out a blizzard of letters to radio stations that aired the Manion Forum, the Christian Crusade, and Life Line, demanding free response time. Most of the stations knuckled under.
Two stations wrote the FCC, asking whether they were required to give the CCNTB free time or merely sell them time; they also argued that the pro-treaty position had already been presented in other programming on their stations. On September 18, the FCC responded that stations were required to offer free response time if they could not find anyone willing to pay. Furthermore, if in their “good faith judgment” [116] they believed their programming had already sufficiently informed the listening public about both sides of an issue, they could deny the request for response time. As Dr. Matzko phrases it, this “was a risk they were free to take but a risk nonetheless.” [117] These FCC rulings became known as the “Cullman Doctrine,” after the location of one of the inquiring stations in Cullman, Alabama.
Left with no clear criteria for determining compliance, stations became wary of broadcasting conservative programs. The Cullman station, for example, chose not to extend its contract with Carl McIntire when it expired at the end of 1964....
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Poster Comment:
Here you go -- JFK AND IKE ganging up on the First Amendment with the rotten so-called Fairness Doctrine. There's not a dime's worth of difference all right!
Politicians are evil.
This is a major treatise -- fascinating, mostly forgotten history of the fight for honest media here. The above is only about 1/4 of it..... Guess it's always been a struggle, though the net freedom years were a quarter- century of glory.
My folks were faithful Fulton Lewis listeners. Anybody here remember that name?