I Love Lucy’s Brush With The Red Scare

September 3, 2025

In September 1953, Lucille Ball was the undisputed queen of TV, averaging 15 million viewers per episode of I Love Lucy—a whopping 60 percent of American households.   She’d worked her way up through Hollywood’s ranks with perseverance, hard work, and savvy choices—like featuring her before untapped talent for comedy in her switch from the big to small screen when she hit 40 and was no longer the typical pin-up beauty favored in the B-movies she’d starred in before.   With her husband, Cuban bandleader and singer Desi Arnaz, she started Desilu Productions, which created not only the sitcom featuring the two of them, but also hit series like The Untouchables.  It was a stunning business achievement and position of artistic autonomy for a woman in the 1950s.

But September 4th, 1953, all that could have been ripped away from her when McCarthyism’s Red-hunt targeted her.   She was hauled in front of Congress, accused of being a communist.

Many performance artists and writers had already been smeared during the Red Scare reign of Senator Joseph McCarthy—the strangely charismatic, self-declared “skunk-hunter” who claimed only he could save the nation from a deep state of hidden communists lurking in government, schools, the media, and the entertainment business. Socialists supposedly hell-bent on destroying the American way of life.   That basically translated to “left-leaning radical” liberals, people with more inclusive lifestyles and philosophies, and anyone rattling the cage of the status quo by advocating for civil rights, improved labor laws, or aid to refugees.

Using wild exaggerations, unsubstantiated accusations, dehumanizing hate-labels, and the power of the Senate, McCarthy would ruin the lives of thousands while turning Americans against one another in a mob-mentality polarization unseen before or again...until today.   Loyalty review boards and required oaths of allegiance.   Book bans.  Community “watch dog” groups attacking local librarians and educators in coordinated letter-writing campaigns and appearances at school board or city council meetings.

When hauled in front of McCarthy’s Senate Committee or the House’s Un-American Activities Committee, those who didn’t cooperate by “confessing,” naming names of “fellow travelers,” or who took the 5th during questions about their personal lifestyles, friends, or even reading preferences, were found in contempt of Congress, jailed, and/or were blacklisted by their industry.

The taint of being blacklisted could last for years. In 1943, the US Army asked anthropology professor Gene Weltfish to write a pamphlet on race equality to help educate white soldiers about people they would be fighting with and for during WWII.  Ten years later, however, that pamphlet was deemed “subversive” because of data she had included in the report.  She stood her ground against McCarthy’s belligerent questions, defending her report’s evidence that education made a critical difference for young children no matter their race, citing findings that Northern Blacks enrolled in well-run public schools had scored higher on IQ tests than Southern Whites.  Columbia University, where she’d lectured for 16 years, fired her.   She was unable to find another teaching position for eight years, smeared as having led a campaign “to undo and replace ‘White Civilization.’”

Such was the personal devastation facing Lucy with the accusation she was "a Red."   And looking through the lens of today’s MAGA backlash against “woke,” it seems likely the real reason McCarthy and his cronies considered her a threat to America might have been how much she challenged cultural taboos of the time—being in a mixed race marriage to a Latin icon, appearing on TV pregnant, and running a business (even if it was in partnership with her husband).

Miraculously, Lucy survived and her reputation recovered.  Perhaps because she “fessed up” to having registered to vote as a communist in 1936—during the Great Depression when pro-labor parties were trying to form—solely “to appease her socialist grandfather.”   She wrapped herself in the safety of being a dutiful and obedient grandchild.  She also reminded everyone of her and Desi’s celebrity as “TV’s First Family.” 

And at a press conference in their backyard, she allowed her co-star husband to speak for her, defending her with, “the only thing red about Lucy is her hair—and even that is not legitimate.”   

It couldn’t have hurt that McCarthy’s main supporter and collaborator in the Red Hunt, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, claimed I Love Lucy as one of his favorite shows. 

I include Lucy’s brush with disaster in the photo essay of my first Cold War doc-novel, SUSPECT RED—my first look at how inflammatory rhetoric and distrust fermented by political leaders seep into the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens and change how we treat one another.

I’m finding McCarthyism’s echoes and actual direct connections to Trump only loom larger by the day.   McCarthy’s sidekick Roy Cohn—a lawyer eventually disbarred for unethical practices and who fabricated evidence for McCarthy-- went on to later mentor a young Donald Trump.

SUSPECT RED follows a year in the life of Richard, a high-schooler whose father works for the FBI—the same year McCarthyism’s hysteria reaches its height.   It opens with his Mom fearfully yanking Robin Hood away from him since the book was banned from public libraries.   The Merry Men took from the rich to give to the poor—a supposed socialist manifesto.

Richard’s new best friend is Vlad, a hip, jazz-playing kid whose mother is Czech and whose father works for the State Department—the very agency McCarthy claims is riddled with closet Communists, sympathizers, and “fellow travelers” looking to undermine America or “bleeding hearts” who won’t recognize a threat.   As the teenagers write songs together, discuss their favorite—often controversial—new books (Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451), deal with school bullies, and play on the basketball team, Richard begins to wonder if Vlad's family might have ties to the "Reds" in Eastern Europe.   He must choose between his loyalty to his father, a WWII veteran and patriot in the true sense of the word as well as an FBI G-man tasked with finding “Reds,” or his newfound friend, who has so expanded the shy Richard’s world.

It’s a story about family and friendship, the tests of loyalty and competition between the two, a coming-of-age journey for a boy finding his way in a bitterly divided country, and the devastating power of rumor, ginned-up suspicion, and hatred.

For educators: I wrote SUSPECT RED as a natural contextual tie-in to English literature canon: The Crucible, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, and Invisible Man, all written during the reign of McCarthy.   These works were incredibly daring and often brought their authors censorship and persecution by McCarthy’s Senate investigation.

Especially The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch-trials—a purposeful metaphor by the playwright for the fear and pack-mentality he was witnessing all around him.   So obvious was the parallel,  the McCarthy-scared State Department denied Miller a travel visa for an opening of his play in Brussels.   He was rejected “under regulations denying passports to persons believed to be supporting the Communist movement, whether or not they are members of the Communist Party themselves.”   Reading it knowing those realities for the playwright deepens students’ appreciation of his themes and characters, and also provides a safe, arms-length springboard for students to compare and contrast its history with what they are seeing and experiencing today.

For more about McCarthyism and today, see in my blog:

1. Turning Points: The McCarthy-Army Senate hearings

2. McCarthyism and Roy Cohn (and connections/echoes today)

3. The college students who fought back with a “Green Feather Movement"

4. Librarians and “fake news” then and now

5. Banned books and Eisenhower

For educators: a discussion guide.