<figure><figcaption> Fred Fiske</figcaption></figure>

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