THE PLAYWRIGHT TERMS AND CULTURAL REFERENCES EARLY YEARS OF TELEVISION "McCARTHYISM" AND THE "RED SCARE"

THE PLAYWRIGHT

Rinne Groff is a playwright and performer, born in New York, and raised in and around Tampa, Florida. Her work has been produced by the Public Theater, Trinity Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Women’s Project, PS122, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and Andy’s Summer Playhouse, among others. Rinne is a recipient of an Obie Award grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Whiting Writers Award, and a NYSCA Individual Artist grant. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Australian National Playwrights Conference, the Perry Mansfield New Noises Festival, and The Chautauqua Theater Company. Affiliations: Elevator Repair Service (founding member), the Dramatists Guild, New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin, and NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she teaches in the Department of Dramatic Writing. Publications: Theater Magazine, BlackBook Magazine, The Complete Plays of the Humana Festival 2003 and 2004, and Playscripts, Inc. Yale B.A. ’91. NYU M.F.A. ’99. She is currently working on two musicals and an adaptation of a novel for the stage.



TERMS AND CULTURAL REFERENCES


Actors Studio is an organization, in New York, for professional actors, directors, and playwrights that was founded in 1947. The studio is known for refining and teaching the method acting technique based on the innovations of Constatin Stanislavski.


Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living organism as the result of a chemical reaction during which chemical energy is converted to light energy.


Blacklist is the mid-century list of government workers, teachers, union members and entertainment professionals who were denied employment because of their political beliefs and association, whether real or suspected.


Cathode is an electrode through which electric current flows out of a polarized electrical device.


omrade is a term meaning friend, colleague, or ally. It is usually used to refer to a fellow socialist of Communist.


Delco was the automotive electronics design and manufacturing subsidiary of General Motors.


Generator is a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, generally using electromagnetic induction.


HUAC: House Committee on Un-American Activities was a committee of the US House of Representatives that investigated reported Communist activity and associations of its citizens from 1945-1975.


Influenza is commonly known as the flu and is an infectious disease of birds and mammals. Common symptoms include fever, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, weakness and general discomfort. The Spanish flu pandemic, which lasted from 1918 – 1919, killed an estimated 50-100 million people.


Philco Television Playhouse was a live television anthology series sponsored by Philco and broadcast from 1948 to 1955. It was carried on NBC, Sundays from 9:00 to 10:00 PM and was one of the most respected dramatic shows of TV’s Golden Age.


Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 is the most famous novel written by Jane Austen. It was one of the first “romantic comedies” in the history of the novel.


Prohibition refers to a sumptuary law (a law which attempts to regulate habits of consumption) in a given jurisdiction, which prohibits alcohol. In the US, the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol was made illegal from 1920-1933 by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution.


Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was an anti-Communist tract published on June 22, 1950 in the US, which named 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry.


Variety is a daily newspaper for the entertainment industry, which has been published since 1905.


World War I, also known as the Great War or the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict, characterized by trench warfare, which took place primarily in Europe from 1914 –1918. Over 20 million military and civilian deaths resulted. Causes of the war were vast and stemmed from a century of western militarism, industrialism, nationalism and foreign policies, which included the building of alliances to maintain a balance of power. All of this led to a powder keg in Europe that was ignited by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne on June 28, 1914.



EARLY YEARS OF TELEVISION

Television came into being based on the inventions and discoveries of many inventors and scientists. The history of television technology can be divided along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those which are purely electronic. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without discoveries and insights from the mechanical systems. These 'first' generations of television sets had displays (TV screen) consisting of a small motor with a spinning disc and a neon lamp, which worked together to give a blurry reddish-orange picture about half the size of a business card! The period before 1935 is called the "Mechanical Television Era". This type of television is not compatible with today's fully electronic television system.

On September 7, 1927, Philo Farnsworth's Image Dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, at his laboratory in San Francisco. In 1929, the system was further improved by elimination of a motor generator, so that his television system now had no mechanical moving parts. That year, Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images by his television system. After 1935, the electronic television was perfected. Several countries began broadcasting, most experimentally, with limited numbers of TV-sets in the hands of the public.

Nearly all television broadcasting was halted during World War II, but the time period after the war is considered the last and final birth of television. Families had accumulated savings during the war years, and were eager to purchase homes, cars and other luxuries denied them during the war. Television sets were soon added to the 'must have' list. The explosion of sets into the American marketplace occurred in 1948-1949.

1950-1959 was an exciting time period for television. In the USA, black &white television exploded onto the scene at the beginning of the decade, mid-decade saw electronic color television and remote controls launched, and at the end of the decade the public witnessed some interesting styling changes and the introduction of transistorized television. This period, when TV became a mass medium and many of the common programming formats were developed and is commonly referred to as “The Golden Age of Television”.



"McCARTHYISM" AND THE "RED SCARE"

“McCarthyism” is a term describing the intense anti-communist suspicion in the United States in a period that lasted roughly from the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s. This period is also referred to as the Red Scare, and coincided with increased fears about communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents. Though the word “McCarthyism” was originally coined in 1950 to criticize the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it later took on a more general meaning to describe demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on character or patriotism of political opponents.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, many thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person’s real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs were often greatly exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment, destruction of the careers, and even imprisonment.

The general sense of threat that was posed by Communism sharply increased in 1949 and 1950 due to some major world events. These include the testing of an atomic bomb in 1949 by the Soviet Union; the Communist take-over of China led my Mao Zedong, and the beginning of the Korean Conflict in 1950. This fear was greatly exaggerated by additional happenings here in this country, such as the conviction of high ranking State Department official Alger Hiss for espionage, as well as the arrest and eventual execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were found guilty of stealing atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union.



SOURCES:
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