“Voice of the People”: Sidney Roger, the Labor/Left, and Broadcasting in San Francisco, 1945–1950

Abstract

In July 1950, San Francisco radio station KGO canceled Sidney Roger’s news commentary program. The station, owned and operated by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), contended that Roger no longer represented the views of any “significant group in the community.” KGO-ABC officials believed that Roger’s broadcasts promoted Communist party (CP) and radical union ideas and thereby skewed the station’s news coverage. The Federal Bureau of Investigation already had a file on Roger for associating with area communists; and the California Senate’s Fact-Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities officially branded Roger a “bona fide, iron disciplined Communist revolutionary.” These public and private sector attacks sought to remove Roger from the airwaves. But they also aimed, as Gerald Horne has argued in a similar context, to undermine “popular front” journalists engaged in an ideological/cultural war with corporations and political conservatives. Roger posed a particular threat because, contrary to the assertions of radio officials, he continued to speak to and reflect the values and interests of the Bay Area’s labor/Left public sphere: a community of radical trade unionists, civil rights and civil liberties advocates, and communists who soon rallied to restore Roger to the air. Historians and media scholars have discussed how H.V. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow, and other prominent broadcast commentators reflected and shaped the nation’s Cold War political culture. Sponsored by large corporations, these news analysts reported on and interpreted developments at home and abroad. Yet their observations rarely scrutinized the roots of a nascent military–industrial complex, a national security state, and political repression. Nor did independently minded, liberal journalists (like William L. Shirer and Don Hollenbeck), fully dissect the internal logic of the state and corporate sectors. Commentators supported by organized labor did a better job than their businessfunded counterparts of presenting alternative perspectives on domestic issues. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has explained how Frank Edwards and Edward Morgan of the American