Fred Fiske on the Campbell Conversations

Campbell Conversations

Fred Fiske

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Fred Fiske. Fred spent his career in print journalism, including writing editorials for the Syracuse Post-Standard. He's here with me today because he's recently written a biography about a Syracuse businessman titled, "The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Communist Crusader Laurence A. Johnson." Fred, welcome to the program.

Fred Fiske: Thanks for having me.

GR: Well, glad you could make the time. So let me just start with a really basic question, just how did you get the idea to write this book?

FF: It came to me right after I got to Syracuse because I read about this guy. The headline for the article was, “The Butcher of Syracuse” and that got my attention. And what got my attention after that was the guerrilla tactics that this grocery supermarket magnate, a supermarket chain owner, adopted for his stores where he put up signs warning about communist actors on TV he'd point with an arrow to, the idea was to point with an arrow to like Swanson's peas and say, “Buy Swanson's peas and support Stalin's little creatures.

GR: (laughter)

FF: Or he'd have a survey, say, “If you want to kill our boys in Korea, then buy Ammident toothpaste. If you want good American toothpaste, buy Ipana or Chlorodent”.

GR: Wow.

FF: And sometimes he'd sweep products off the shelf and put up a sign saying, “I no longer carry Royal Crown Cola because they employ Lloyd Bridges on their TV sponsored show. I will return the bottles to the shelf when he is no longer employed”.

GR: Wow. Okay, that's fascinating stuff.

FF: That got my attention.

GR: Yeah. And kind of goes against basic business, you know, how to grow your business, but we'll get into that a little bit later. Let me start first, though, I want to ask you a question about Johnson's background without, minus his anti-communism activism, if that's possible. So just give us an idea of this this guy, like how he grew up, how he became successful as a grocery store chain owner. Give us that story first.

FF: Yeah. You ask yourself, I ask myself as a liberal, as a liberal who probably wouldn't have fared too well during the McCarthy era myself, when they were trying to screen and blacklist liberals. Why am I interested in this anti-communist extremist activist? And I think he's a very important figure in popular culture and certainly one of the most important people to come out of Syracuse. He started very humbly. He was from a farm family and farm background in Wayne County, west of here and he was orphaned by age 16. And he had an uncle who tried to help him along, but he basically had to make his own way as a teenager. And he farmed for a while but he always loved the old country store as a crossroads of culture and commerce and democracy. He was very patriotic. And he gradually built his business, he was pretty much self-taught, self-made man, built a supermarket chain in Syracuse. Very successful. Not ambitious, but he did find, and he helped kind of invent the cash and carry market. Up to that time. It had been pretty much over the counter off the shelf. And his idea was to have the customers come in and pick their items and go to the checkout counter. And he pretty much invented all these things. So he was actually a very astute merchandiser and commercial businessman. And so he built up this thriving business. And then right after the Korean War started, his daughter helped persuade him to join the anti-communist ranks.

GR: Interesting. And so, tell me a little bit about the anti-communism and how that develops. So his daughter got him interested in this and then how did he develop those views?

FF: Well, Eleanor was called the Molly Pitcher of the Blacklist by one of the writers of the period. And this was because her husband was a Marine reservist, called up to active duty in Korea in a mortar company. And he was right in the thick of the worst battles fighting in ‘51. And when she was with her father watching TV in the living room and there was an actor who had, I suppose you could say, suspect association she turned to her father and said, you know, you have a Red right here in your living room? And things like this really offended Johnson that we could still be supporting people with communist connections while the war in Korea was going on, we were fighting the communists. And so he took up the banner. And he had a lot of allies in Syracuse, too. He had the veterans groups full of these returning soldiers from World War Two and later from Korea and Syracuse was strategically placed in Central New York, close to markets close to New York City. And he developed relations with what (you would) call progressive professional communists in New York, including Vincent Hartnett. And drawing on sources from the anti-communist movement in Washington, fueling the Red Scare with their hearings in the House and Senate in the federal government. They put together this booklet called Red Channels, which listed nearly 150 actors. And his focus was on TV broadcasting and the actors who were performing on there because he and his allies were concerned that they were promoting un-American views on television and their propaganda was going to perhaps undermine American democracy. And so he became very, very active in that. And you're right, it did start to affect his business after a while because he kind of forgot about everything else.

GR: Well, what other kinds of things did he do in the store other than, you know, the drawing the arrows to people and taking Royal Crown cola off shelves? Pretty, pretty extreme. Were there other things that he did in his store, if I walked into a store, what would I get?

FF: You'd be a puzzled shopper some days, I think. I mean, the people didn't really get what he was up to, and he did it again and again, Grant. He did it, there was campaign after campaign. He took on Swanson's and Borden and Kraft and Schlitz and the major sponsors. And the thing is Grant, that he terrified them. All he had to do was threaten to do a poll in the store saying, you know, buy this product and support Stalin's little creatures and the sponsors would say, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that! We'll put pressure on the advertising agencies and they did. And the advertising agencies put pressure on the studios and the studios put pressure on the networks. And like as not, the performers got booted off and their careers really got damaged, a lot of them. And we're talking about, I don't know, you want to know who they are, I mean, Jack Gilford and Lloyd Bridges and Uta Hagan and Joseph Cotten made a pilgrimage to Syracuse to plead his case.

GR: Really? So these are A-list people at the time.

FF: Yeah, some of them really were. Kim Hunter, Judy Holliday, and a lot of lesser known actors. They really got hurt.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Fred Fiske, the longtime former editorial writer for the Syracuse Post-Standard has written a new biography titled, "The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Communist Crusader Laurence A. Johnson." So on that last point you were talking about that, you know, it does seem like, unless I'm missing something, this guy really had outsized influence on the media and society, given his relative profile in the grocery industry. So how do you account for that, if that's true, how do you account for that? What was his secret to have so much leverage?

FF: Well, it certainly is true. And I think part of the answer is that he was so well known in the grocery industry because he had been such an innovator. I mean, supermarkets were all over the country by 1950. And when he started in 1920, there weren't any. And he started developing them and, and he made a name for himself in the industry. The industry gave him numerous awards for his innovations and also for his anti-communism. So he had, he had their ear, he had the ear of the industry. And that was, that was really key because everything in 1951 depended on, you know, in TV broadcasting depended on the advertising, it was just explosively profitable at that time. Syracuse happened to be a TV town, which means before the Korean War there were two TV stations, WHEN and WSYR in Syracuse. It was one of the few cities that had them before the slowdown during the Korean War, when all the resources had to go into war production and so TV advertising was already a big deal in Syracuse. He had these ready-made allies in the veterans groups. He even formed one out of, from his employees, called the Veterans Action Committee of Syracuse Supermarkets and they were key allies. And whether or not he actually put up all of these signs in the store, all he had to do was talk to these sponsors and they would they would go after those actors because the tenor of the times, Grant, we weren't doing much around 1951, but there was a Red Scare out there. And it wasn't based completely on fantasy. There were plenty of spies in America and there were plenty of people who the Soviets thought they had in their pockets. And the House and Senate were compiling these dossiers and the Federal Archives were full of this information. It seemed very well documented if you want to put it that way, although there was definitely a major flaw in that argument, which is that if you're talking in the House or the Senate or in a federal courtroom or in a federal office, you're immune from libel suits. You're immune from being held accountable for what you say in that sense, you can't be sued legally. But when you're relying as a private citizen activist on Red Channels, the Blacklist booklet, which has those same citations, you're no longer protected.

GR: Interesting, interesting. So I'm curious, did this gentleman, Johnson, did he get the attention of Senator Joe McCarthy? Did they ever meet?

FF: Yeah, if you look on the first, I think it's in the introduction, there's a picture of them together. They met at Hinderwadel's Grove in Syracuse. When Joseph McCarthy came to town, he sued the Post-Standard, by the way, at one point for libel.

GR: McCarthy or Johnson?

FF: McCarthy.

GR: McCarthy, okay, okay.

FF: And he came to town for depositions and for examinations before trial. And at one of those occasions, he was greeted by the veterans and hosted at a clambake at Hinderwadel's Grove and Johnson looks pretty uncomfortable. He looks, you know, he looks rather ill at ease like he doesn't know what to say. They were not intimate, but he certainly admired the Wisconsin senator. He was not a leader in any sense, I mean, he ran his is grocery business and he was a leader in the grocery industry, the retail shopping industry. However, he never took a leadership position in any anti-communist organization or never ran for office or never looked for the spotlight. He was never one to make long speeches. So I think he was he was not very comfortable being in these august circles with McCarthy. But he was thrilled.

GR: Yeah, I bet, interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Fred Fiske. He's recently published a biography titled, "The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Communist Crusader Laurence A. Johnson" and we've been discussing his book. So you kind of intimated this a little bit, I think, right before the break. But my understanding is Johnson's career as an anti-communist sort of came to a head with a with a big court case. Give us the background on that.

FF: Year after year from 1951 on, he was able to pursue this campaign with devastating effectiveness. Some would call it, I mean I think it's one of the most effective private merchandising campaigns in (the) political history of our country. And the Red Channels document that he used has been called the most effective blacklist that we've ever had. And so I mean, in total hundreds of actors were affected by this whole movement and Johnson was one of the leaders of it. In 1956 he took on a new target, John Henry Faulk, who was at that time a TV personality and just breaking. He had hundreds of appearances on game shows and he had a radio program and he was just about to start a TV program when the anti-communists took him on. He'd been very active in AFTRA, the labor union for show people, and he was part of a slate that ran against the anti-communists. There was sort of an anti-communist majority on the board of AFTRA and these middle of the road people with Faulk, their most outspoken member, won election to AFTRA’s board and this brought him to the attention of the anti-communists. And they put out a sheet of seven or eight suspect associations from him, never accusing him of being a communist, but citing the Daily Worker and citing House committee reports, I think. Very official looking. And then they started putting pressure on sponsors. And what happened to Faulk was just a crime. I mean, he lost, eventually his contracts. Within a year he was unemployable in show business. He ended up trying to be a bond salesman, that didn't work. He finally ended up in Texas trying to run an ad agency, wasn't a very good advertising agent. Oddly enough, he was a great merchandiser. He was a super salesman for his network, for CBS. He would go out to stores and sell product. I think he and Johnson would have gotten along great because he was also very interested in American folklore, just like Johnson was. So they had some things in common, but he was the Eugene Debs side and Johnson was the William Jennings Bryan side. So they took him on, and Johnson, who would make these trips to New York, started visiting advertising agencies and putting pressure on them to get rid of John Henry Faulk. And it worked until Faulk took his friends’ advice and went to look for a lawyer and he found Louis Nizar, who was a celebrated attorney, just a showman and a wonderfully effective lawyer in New York City. And he took on Faulk’s case and they sued for libel in 1956. ’56, you know, think about that. That's five years after he started and two years after Joe McCarthy, you could say, got his comeuppance. The senator in the Army-McCarthy hearings was kind of discredited. And by ‘56, he was near the end, he'd really gone downhill. I think Louis Nizar sensed an opportunity here and he told John Faulk, I think, presciently, he said, this is going to take a while, but you're going to win. And it sure did, it took six years to come to trial in 1962 and the trial was remarkable. It wasn't just about John Henry Faulk and Red Channels and Laurence Johnson and his allies, it was about the whole blacklisting phenomenon. It really put the whole process on trial. And in fact, John Henry Faulk wrote a book about it later, “Fear on Trial” about the trial and it was made into a TV movie and Louis Nizar was played by George C. Scott.

GR: Yeah, I think I may have seen that as a kid. It's ringing a bell, yeah.

FF: William Devane played John Henry Faulk. But oddly enough, there was no Laurence Johnson in the film because he never appeared at trial. By this time he was in his 70s and he pleaded ill health. And I don't know if I want to put in a spoiler about what happened at the trial, but it was pretty dramatic.

GR: Okay, we'll leave that for listeners to buy the book. But let me ask you this, I don't know if I'm ruining it, you can just say I'll take a pass on this. But I did want to ask you how Johnson's life ended.

FF: He did plead ill health and Louis Nizar wasn't having it and so he said, let's have two doctors examine you, one for our side and one from your side. And so Laurence Johnson’s doctor said he had this esophageal problem and a trial could really put him over the edge. And Louis Nizar's doctor, who was a gastroenterologist, said, that's nonsense, he could do it easily. And Louis Nizar just left it at that. Let the jury draw its own conclusion. And right near the end of the trial, Johnson was found dead in a motel room like five miles from the courtroom. Died of pretty much natural causes. He took his meds and then and that had a problem while in his sleep and died in his sleep.

GR: Wow.

FF: So that's how his life ended. And by that time, I think he knew things were not going well at the trial. So it was a kind of a sad end.

GR: Yeah, but the other gentleman's life was ruined. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Fred Fiske, and we've been discussing his new book about the anti-communist crusader Laurence A. Johnson. So I had some questions here at the last part of our program that are kind of bigger picture. Obviously, you had a fair amount of historical knowledge of this era before you started writing this book. You know, your experience with the paper and just otherwise your education, you knew quite a bit about the time period. I was curious, in the course of writing this did you learn something about our history that you didn't know before that really kind of struck you and stayed with you?

FF: I learned that Laurence Johnson came out of a long tradition of fear of the other, of demonizing the stranger or the marginal, the radical. I mean, it goes back to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1700s. I mean, that's before we were even really organized. And right through the 1800s with the Know Nothings and the anti-Masons and on, you know, the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan and people who just were afraid of these big groups in society. And in the 1920’s there was an anti-immigrant push and there were red scares in the ’30s. And all around, Johnson, there was evidence that that there really was a problem in America at that time. I mean he didn't have to be making anything up. I mean, a lot of the stuff that he was looking at was made up. And Grant, what I also realized is that it's going on now. I mean, it never really stops.

GR: Yeah, I wanted to ask you.

FF: ...fits and starts, you know. 50 years ago, we had book bans, and now we have efforts to ban books. We have another anti-immigrant scare going on with the illegal migrants. We have pushback against being woke, if you will. We have pushback against DEI. I mean, these are becoming epithets today. We have pushback back against LGBT+ rights. And so there's there are these cultural wars that get fueled by government, by government agents and government hearings and the political process. And I think you just have to accept that it's kind of part of who we are and that's really why I wanted to study this guy. I said, what is it about us that creates people like Laurence Johnson? Well, they've been with us all along, and they probably still will be. And I think that understanding Laurence Johnson, this patriot, this well-meaning idealist who trampled on civil rights, you know, of due process and free speech and association, we understand him a little better we'll be able to cope with these challenges when they come up today and tomorrow.

GR: And it's, in a lot of ways he's really, he's a tragic figure. You know, and you kind of intimated that they're talking about his death and, you know, you don't want to feel too sorry for him, we only have about a minute left, but in the process of writing this, did you get some empathy for this guy that you weren't expecting?

FF: Yeah, I really respected him. I don't know if I would have liked him. I can't impugn his motives. He never made any money off of this, he spent money on this. He jeopardized his business for this. And keep in mind, he never fired anybody. He never actually ruined anyone's career. That was done by CBS and ABC and the ad agencies and the agents who wouldn't touch these actors. Johnson was just a private citizen. He wasn't even the leader of a group, and he was just acting on his patriotic ideals. But yet that's the kind of idealism that can wreck the country.

GR: Well, it’s a real fascinating set of contradictions and paradoxes, but it's a very, very interesting book. I highly recommend it to anyone who's listening. It would make a great summer read, and it's a nice blend of something that happened in Syracuse, but as you and I have been discussing, has implications for the entire arc of American history. So that was Fred Fiske, and again, his new book is titled, "The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Communist Crusader Laurence A. Johnson." Fred, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, very interesting.

FF: Oh, it's been great.

GR: Thanks. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.