Ontario Empoblog

When I was growing up, I didn't know a lot about Orson Bean. I knew that he was a panelist on "To Tell the Truth" (along with Bill Cullen, Peggy Cass, and Kitty Carlisle, plus host Garry Moore), and that he went to Australia.

I was a bit surprised when he popped up in an audiobook by Bob Edwards about Edward R. Murrow. And therein lies a story:

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CrankyCritic: We can joke about not being seen on the coasts, but you did get whacked by the infamous Hollywood Black List, too.

Orson Bean: I was never bitter. I was horny for a Communist girl and she dragged me to some meetings and that's why I got blacklisted. Everybody in those days wanted to end the black list. I ran on a slate of AFTRA and was elected first VP of the New York Local. For my pains, they dug up this stuff about me and, I went from being the hot comic on the Ed Sullivan Show to not working for a year. However, I got a Broadway show. At the end of that year Ed Sullivan called me up, as he promised he would, and said "I think things have softened up enough that I can book you again" and he did. That kind of broke it.

CrankyCritic: Is there any kind of satisfaction seeing, in the last couple of years, [Joseph] McCarthy and [Roy] Cohn being totally exposed for what they were?

Orson Bean: It's always scary in a Democracy to see that stuff. I think Pat Buchanan is truly frightening. The man is a fascist and an anti-Semite. If he's willing to say as much in public as he says, imagine what he says in a room full of his friends whom he trusts. I really admire John McCain for saying that [Buchanan] shouldn't be in the Republican party while George W. is saying "well, we need all the votes we can get..." You've got to watch out for stuff like that. It's an easy target. I made a movie with old Joe Welch, who was the wonderful lawyer who said "at long last Senator McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?" Otto Preminger had the brilliant idea of casting him as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder. I had a part in that. At night we would sit in a bar up in Michigan. Welch told us that he was brought in to represent the Army by Tom Dewey, who was the head of the Republican party, who said "This son of a bitch McCarthy is crazy and he's going to drag the party down with him." So it's interesting to see that when things go far enough there are moderates, even moderate conservatives like McCain, who start seeing how dangerous Buchanan is. I trust America. I've lived long enough to see the pendulum swing back and forth, to see that Democracy really wins out in the end.

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Going back to the AFTRA incident (which Bob Edwards recounts in his book), you need to introduce a character named John Henry Faulk. Here's how the Daily Kos does it:

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John Henry Faulk was a popular radio personality in NY in the 1950s. He was a Texas boy who was both a scholar and storyteller. In 1956, shortly after he was elected to the board of his union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, he was accused of being a Communist sympathizer by Aware Inc.

Faulk didn't work on radio of television for the next 6 1/2 years. Unlike most who were blacklisted, he sued.

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Daily Kos continues by quoting from Faulk's autobiography:

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AFTRA had been founded in New York in 1938, and although it became a national union with strong locals in Chicago and Hollywood, the New York local was the largest and strongest in the union. The governing body of the New York local was a thirty-five man board of directors, whose members were elected from the membership every December, to serve throughout the following year. From the early 1950s, this board of directors had been controlled entirely by one faction of the union. The same group was elected year after year, and they made anti-Communism a big issue. A number of them, including Vinton Hayworth, the president of the New York local in 1955, were officers of AWARE,Inc....

[Faulk, Bean, and Charles Collingwood] managed, however, to get thirty-three people in all. We called ourselves the Middle-of-the-Road slate and put out a statement setting forth what we hoped to do for the union. We called it "A Declaration of Independents." Among other things, we declared that while we were opposed to Communism we were also opposed to the blacklisting and intended to do something to put a stop to it....

At election time, in December of 1955, we swept into office with a flourish. The Middle-of-the-Road slate won twenty-seven of the thirty-five seats on the board....A couple of weeks later Collingwood was elected president, Bean first vice-president, and I was elected second vice-president of the local.

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Now, in the simplistic version of the story, the evil fascist forces attacked our heroes Faulk, Bean, and Collingwood. But, according to Accuracy in Media, the simplistic version of the story may be too simple:

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Faulk, Orson Bean, and Charles Coilingwood headed a slate running for office in the television and radio performers' union, AFTRA, with the objective of fighting the blacklisting of performers accused of leftwing connections.

Orson Bean has written that when the slate was formed it was deemed essential that the candidates be completely free of any leftwing taint. The potential candidates were urged to reveal if they had anything in their past of this nature. If they did, they were urged to drop out. Bean himself, confessed to having been involved in a relatively minor incident, but Faulk assured him that it was not serious and urged him to stay on the slate. Faulk himself said nothing about any possible taint in his own background.

The Faulk-Bean-Collingwood slate won the election. Aware came out with an article, which asked, rhetorically, just how anti-communist this slate actually was. It started with Faulk. Bean wrote: "I read with wonder as it went on and on: Johnny at 'Headline Cabaret' sponsored by Stage for Action, officially designated as a Communist front. Johnny appearing with Paul Robeson at the Communist Jefferson School. Johnny sending greetings to "People's Songs", a Red publication. Johnny as U.S. sponsor of the American Continental Congress for Peace in Mexico City. Johnny at "Showtime for Wallace," staged by Progressive Citizens of America, a Communist front."

Bean said that the publication then went on to Bean and Coilingwood, but what they had against them alone would not have been worth printing. But lumped with the list they had on Faulk, he said, "it added up to a grim picture."

Bean said he was dumfounded. He wondered how they could have made up all that stuff about Faulk. He said: "I was sure it couldn't be true or he wouldn't have jeopardized us all by running with us. I ran over to Johnny's office at CBS. 'It isn't true, is it. Johnny? You didn't appear at those places, did you?"

"'Oh honey.' he said. 'What does it matter'? Don't you see those people are fascists? If they didn't have something on us, they'd have made it up.

Faulk, by not revealing his leftwing associations to his fellow candidates in advance, had, according to Bean, placed them all in jeopardy. Faulk elected to sue Aware for libel. Bean tells of speaking to Faulk while the trial was in progress. Faulk told him how his attorney, Lou Nizer, had demolished the defendants. Bean asked: "Was the other side right?" He says Faulk replied: "The point is they didn't prove it. They were sloppy and they were bad detectives, and we're gonna kill 'em."

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Now there are several ways you can carve this turkey. On the one hand, in a free society it shouldn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Communist or the head of your local Al Qaeda cell. On the other hand, one can claim that it's dishonest to cover up past associations...in fact, cover-ups are Nixonian, aren't they? On the other other hand, one can claim that it's OK to mislead when threatened. Or is it?

This is why any analysis of the McCarthy years can't be reduced to a simple good guys-bad guys scenario. Failure to examine the complexities of the situation leads one with an incomplete view.

And what happened to John Henry Faulk? For those who followed the history of CBS' replacement show for the Smothers Brothers, this little tidbit is somewhat ironic - Faulk joined the cast of Hee Haw.

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John Henry Faulk, who works on a farm in Madisonville, Texas, tells stories on “Hee Haw” about “the folks back home,” as well as comments on the political scene, much as he did years ago as a CBS radio personality.

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Favorite U.S. president - Third favorite Finnish figure skater

Labels: aftra, blacklist, charles+collingwood, communism, fascism, hee+haw, john+henry+faulk, orson+bean

Followup. A bit more on the political theory of the Caliphate:

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Hizb ut-Tahrir says that Muslims should abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single Islamic state, known as "the Caliphate," that would stretch from Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people.

It's a simple and seductive idea that analysts believe may someday allow the group to rival existing Islamic movements, topple the rulers of Middle Eastern nations, and undermine those seeking to reconcile democracy and Islam and build bridges between East and West....

"The Caliphate is a rallying point between the radicals and the more moderate Islamists," says Stephen Ulph, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation. "The idea of a government based on the Caliphate has a historical pedigree and Islamic legitimacy that Western systems of government by their very nature do not have."

But unlike Al Qaeda, Hizb ut-Tahrir believes it can recreate the Caliphate peacefully. Its activists aim to pursuade Muslim political and military leaders that reestablishing the Caliphate is their Islamic duty....

The Caliphate was created after the death of Islam's founder Muhammad in 632 AD. During the following centuries the Caliphate expanded Islam's territories by conquest and treaty to cover most of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. As the Ottoman Turks lost ground to the West, they increasingly donned the cloak of the Caliphate. In the 1920s, Muslims throughout the British empire, particularly in India, used the restoration of the Caliphate as an anti-colonial rallying point....

Hizb ut-Tahrir promises that a revived Caliphate will end corruption and bring prosperity...

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Here is a description of the Caliphate's solution to poverty:

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Lining up patiently together with old ladies, foul mouthed youths and people reeking of alcohol, a highly qualified engineer waits his turn in the queue to collect his 'dole' otherwise known as 'job seekers allowance'. This scene is not uncommon in the Western world where graduates and professionals from all manner of fields find themselves without work and struggling to make ends meet. For some professionals the handout from the dole office every Wednesday morning is what barely keeps them afloat until the next week....

A particular view towards the economic problem has dominated Western economies since the time of the founding father of capitalist economics, previously a Professor at Glasgow University, Adam Smith.

In 1776 (CE) Smith published what became the bible of capitalist economics, 'An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations', it articulated his laissez faire view towards the economic problem.

In essence capitalist economists believe that the economic problem is caused by the unlimited needs of people and the scarcity of resources, this leads to the dilemma of how to bridge the gap between the two - how do people get their needs satisfied? In answer to this question, Smith developed the 'invisible hand theory'. It denotes that if the economy is left to run in a free manner the resources will be distributed fulfilling the needs of society almost in an automatic way.

The basis of the theory is that by focussing on production the gap between the unlimited needs and limited resources is lessened, it is assumed that people will work to achieve their own interests. By working and earning a wage they can in turn purchase the goods and services they require. This has also come be known as 'trickle down economics' where the focus is on increasing the size of the cake, believing that it will somehow trickle down into the bellies of the hungry.

However the theory is not that simplistic, in order to explain the 'invisible hand' the price mechanism is seen as key. It is seen as the incentive for production, the regulator of distribution, and the link between the producer and the consumer i.e. it is the means which achieves a balance between production and consumption.

The price mechanism is cited as the incentive for production because the principal motive for people to undertake any productive effort or sacrifice in view of the capitalist economists is material reward. The Capitalist economists exclude the possibility that man expends effort for a moral or spiritual motive. They consider that man expends his efforts to satisfy his materialistic needs and wishes only....

Western societies have high levels of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) yet still have high levels of poverty as was established earlier. This fact itself disproves the 'invisible hand theory' and the free market as the solution to the economic problem....

An increase in the level of production leads to a rise in the level of the wealth of the country and does not necessarily lead to the complete satisfaction of all the basic needs of each and every individual. A country could be rich in its natural resources, as in the case of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but the basic needs of most of their citizens are not satisfied completely....

Due to an attitude previously seen in the pre-renaissance bigotry of the Church in repressing the philosophers who questioned the unquestionable, this new clergy of economists today do not question their bible written by Adam Smith. This religious adherence blinds them from admitting the failures of their fundamental philosophy. It is this fact that has led to their failure in dealing with poverty on the streets of Britain and in the West....

[W]elfare legislation and the concept of the welfare state itself were 'ad-ons' to the capitalist economy spurned by a pragmatic approach to stem the tide of Socialism....

Although the cause for poverty in the west is the capitalist economic philosophy, Western economists fail to look at any other alternative apart from Socialism. They only see two paradigms for the economy, Capitalism or Communism. I recall a discussion with my previous economic lecturer where I put forward the ills of Capitalism, after debating the points exhaustively he said, 'Capitalism is the best of the worst'. I then went on to explain the Islamic economic system as an alternative, it became obvious that he had never considered Islam as having any alternative nor had studied it.

Leftist movements, thinkers and writers are increasingly voicing their opinion against the inequalities created by Capitalism. However they too like my economics lecturer cannot see any other alternative and therefore call for the reformation of Capitalism. We need to articulate the Islamic economic system as an alternative to the mass of economic problems that face the world today....

Islam views the economic problem in a radically different way than Capitalism and Socialism. Islam focuses on the distribution of wealth not just the production....

Islam looks at every individual by himself rather than the total of individuals who live in the country. It looks at him as a human being first, who needs to satisfy all of his basic needs completely. Then it looks to him in his capacity as a particular individual, to enable him to satisfy his luxuries as much as possible. The purpose of the economic policy in Islam is not to raise the standard of living in the country without looking to secure the rights of life for every individual completely. Nor is it just to provide the means of satisfaction in the society, leaving people free to take from such means as much as they can, without securing the livelihood right for each individual. Rather, it addresses the basic problems of everyone as human beings, then enabling each individual to raise his standard of living and achieve comfort for himself.

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More here.

From the Ontario Empoblog (Information on the greatest 20th century U.S. president here)

Labels: adam+smith, al+qaeda, caliphate, capitalism, communism, empoblog, hizb+ut+tahrir, islam, ottoman+empire, socialism, wealth+of+nations