TRUE COLORS
By Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
I want my Red back.
Television graphics have annihilated a big piece of our social and political heritage, and though political colors are only symbols, the loss of their meaning is a loss to our common culture.
Red: in the words of the British Labour Party’s anthem, The Red Flag:
“The People’s Flag is deepest red/ It shrouded oft our martyred dead.”
Red was the color of the working class movement, and later its socialist and labor parties for more than 150 years before NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN all used Red to project Republican states on their election night maps 2000. The association between Red and egalitarian movements of common people dated from the French Revolution in 1789-90 and then the turmoil of 1848. In the decades following, Red flags came to symbolize both the sacrifices working people made in their struggles for dignity and respect, but also their hopes for a world more equal, more just, more democratic. At its founding in 1900 the British Labour party adopted the Jim Connell 1889 song as its own.
While red flags were increasingly associated with the Communist movement in the 20th Century, they were never its exclusive possession. In the course of the 20th century, the democratic socialist movement adopted a red rose as its symbol. Red has, then, been the color of the parties of equality – until the 21st century.
For much of the history of election coverage of Presidential races, television was only black and white. However, in the era of color television there was no consistent identification of one party with a given color. The pivot appears to have been in the hotly contested Gore-Bush election of 2000 and its Electoral College drama.
Using the colors red and blue, which compose good contrast on television, NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC all used Red Republican, Blue Democrat to project their electoral maps. Previously these two colors had something of a rotation between the parties, but after 2000, the current color-coding has stuck.
Television imagery has such a hold over our collective imagination; it has all but erased the three-century span of Red as the color of movements for equality and worker respect. I experienced this in a sharp encounter a few years ago.
At a centennial symposium for the great Lawrence strike of textile workers (1912), often called the Bread and Roses Strike I found myself sipping coffee with a foundation staffer who was interested in supporting work on American social history. Our conversation was cordial; we were in the company of the great troubadour Charlie King, and then she noted my necktie. “Why”, she asked, “would you wear a Republican red tie?” Gulp. Now I had to instruct someone who controlled a lot of money about the culture of a movement about which she was apparently ignorant (which is different from dumb or hostile). So I said that since the middle of the 19th century, or so, Red has been the color of the working class and labor movements and by extension of advocates for equality.
I might have mentioned all the pop-culture associations – Warren Beatty’s film, “Reds” where John Reed recounts his experience in Revolutionary Russia; or the idea of a Red diaper baby; or even the McCarthyite attacks on “Reds.” But what is really galling is the contemporary Republican Party – the party committed to destroying unions, which is giving away trillions of tax dollars to the very richest among us, that is using voter suppression to turn back the civil rights revolution – that this party should get the color red. It’s too much.
I want my Red back.
