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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
By the waning years of the 1940s America had lost much of what remained of its postwar optimism as fears of Communism came to dominate the national political conversation. Left-leaning citizens had particular cause for disillusionment as politicians continued to trample many vestiges of New Deal programs and ideals in their rightward trek. The passage of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace's abysmal failure at the polls in the 1948 election hammered more nails into the coffin of leftwing activism. What ultimately caused the Old Left to retreat from mainstream political discourse was, of course, the new ideological war that loomed on the horizon. While U.S. foreign policy focused on containing Communism abroad, local and federal governlnent agencies and civilian vigilante groups rallied to fight suspected communists at home, Government agencies and private organizations compiled lists of alleged subversives, such as Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television that the right-wing publication Counterattack released in 1950. The attacks on those in the media and government were well documented, as news sources reported the trials of iconic groups like the Hollywood Ten and televised the Army-McCarthy hearings. At the same time that anticommunists focused on rooting out subversives in the State Department, organized labor, and the entertainment industry, they also turned their attention to education. Many political leaders, both liberal and conservative, viewed education as the “key factor” in securing American victory in the Cold War; as a result, between the end of WWII and the 1960s, anticommunists devoted an unprecedented amount of scrutiny to public schools, administrators, and teachers.
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52 At the time of this article, the complete ledgers of Folkways Records from the 1950s were unavailable. The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has just begun the accession of the ledgers of Folkways Records. However, Asch was notorious for keeping vague and incomplete records, such that the exact amount is very difficult to determine. Even in Goldsmith's extensive biography of Asch and Richard Carlin's study of the company, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways (Smithsonian Books: 2008), there is no mention of the financial records regarding the educational albums.Google Scholar
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