Robert L. Hilliard

For other uses, see Robert Hilliard (disambiguation).

Robert L. Hilliard
Born	(1925-06-25) June 25, 1925 New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	playwright journalist author professor
Education	University of Delaware (1948, B.A.) Case Western Reserve University (1949, M.A., 1950, M.F.A.) Columbia University (1959, PhD)
Subject	Holocaust Communications Television Radio Extremist websites
Years active	1948–present
Spouse	Joanne Reese

Robert L. Hilliard (born June 25, 1925, New York City) is an American World War II veteran, activist, and academic of communication studies. During and directly after World War II, he informed American citizens and politicians of the plight of concentration camp survivors, and of those survivors taken to an unequipped hospital which was formerly St. Ottillien Monastery in the district of Landsberg, Oberbayern Germany. After the war, he became an accomplished academic, playwright, author, and professor of communications and journalism.

Early life and education

Robert Hilliard was born in New York City on June 25, 1925.

His parents were Eda Hilliard, a Jewish French immigrant, and Irving Hilliard, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in a majority-Italian and Irish neighborhood, where he learned to defend himself against other boys and defend more vulnerable peers.

After WWII, Hilliard received his Bachelors from the University of Delaware in 1948. He earned two Master's degree at Case Western Reserve University: a Masters of Arts (1949) and a Masters of Fine Arts (1950). His PHd. was from Columbia University in 1959, an institution noted for their programs in journalism and the literary arts. In 1960, he followed with postgraduate work at Columbia Teachers College.

Military service and activism

Hilliard was drafted into the U.S. army in February 1944, aged 18 and a recent high school graduate. He was assigned to the Ninth Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division. Having received instruction in morse code and radio operation, he was responsible for serving in an advanced unit that would inform American command of the location of the enemy. He was soon wounded by mortar fire, and later served during the bloody combat that took place at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944. He was wounded again in spring 1945 by flak from an 88mm German gun, and like many American troops, also suffered from frostbite. He received the Purple Heart for his service in the battle.

Activism

In the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, Hilliard was assigned to the 2nd Air Disarmament Wing, whose aim was to disarm the German Air Force. Hoping only to research a good story for a serviceman's newspaper he founded to provide news for allied troops, he drove a jeep for miles to attend a concert put on by the newly liberated concentration camp survivors at the hospital at St. Ottillien. He found himself driven to tears by the emaciated and sick survivors of Buchenwald and Dachau, still on stretchers, without food, and wearing the cold, threadbare and inadequate striped uniforms they had formerly been issued as camp inmates. Hilliard and his partner Edward Herman, both Privates in the U.S. Army tried to buy food from the black market to supply refugees, but the supply was inadequate, and they lacked funds to make a significant improvement in the lives of the survivors. German citizens and American officers judged Hilliard and the survivors for buying food on the black market, despite their having few other sources.

Acting against the stated policy of the American military to refrain from political activities while in the service, Hilliard wrote hundreds of letters to American citizens, and Congressmen informing them of the absence of food, medicine, and clothing available to the surviving concentration camp survivors. After President Truman received a letter from Hilliard and Herman, General Eisenhower sent a full Colonel to inform Hilliard and Edward Herman that the military would improve the situation, but that he and Herman should refrain from writing any more letters, as they might end up assigned to a highly undesirable location like the frigid Aleutian Islands. Hilliard took the advice primarily as a threat, rather than a promise to help Holocaust survivors. He and Herman continued to push their cause of informing the American public. On September 30, 1945, a New York Times headline announced "President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews . . . Likens Our Treatment to that of the Nazis".

Coming months after the surrender of Germany, the Truman Directive of December 22, 1945, among other objectives, intended to set the United States as an example to the World by vastly increasing and expediting the admission of displaced person to the United States, and to open U.S. immigration to full use. It also requested that Great Britain allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine. On October 21, 1945, 1,500 packages containing food, clothes and medicine arrived at St. Ottillien. The failure of supplies to be delivered prior to October had been partly the result of a U.S. Military and State Department policy to withhold the delivery of the supplies. Hilliard and Herman also helped to change the policies restricting displaced persons from voluntarily leaving the camps, or the countries in which they resided. At the time, the camps were heavily surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed American servicemen instructed to shoot escapees, as had the German guards that previously guarded the camps.

Academic career

From 1943 - 1964, he worked as a theatre professional, while serving in a variety of full-time academic roles. From 1950-1956, he was an instructor at Brooklyn College, and from 1956 - 1960, served as an assistant professor at Adelphi University. From 1960 - 1964, he was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From 1964 - 1980, he was Chief of Public Broadcasting at the Federal Communication Commission, in Washington D.C., and "was present for the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967". Simultaneously, he served from 1965 - 1978 as a Chairman of the Federal Interagency Media Committee.

In 2017, Hilliard served on the board of WGCU, an NPR affiliate in Fort Myers, Florida.

Extremism studies

While serving as a professor at Emerson College in Boston, he collaborated with Boston College professor Michael Keith, in writing Waves of Rancor: Tuning in the Radical Right. White at Emerson, he taught a class known as "hate.com", which examined how hate groups target impressionable youth through websites, how they grow, and how they spread rage. Hilliard observed that hate groups build interest slowly with rock music and games, and initially avoid inflammatory rhetoric and epithets. The book was well-received and was read by Bill Clinton during his presidency. In 1993, there were more than 300 extremist websites, though many scholars, including Holocaust author Eli Wiesel, consider their number to be closer to 800.

Hilliard has said that there is "open fascism" in the modern American political right, citing Project 2025 as an example.

Personal life

Hilliard wrote the musical Piccadilly in the late 1940s. The work will be put on for the first time in December 2024. The musical follows two G.I.s in London following World War II.

Hilliard has lived on Florida's Sanibel Island since 1998. He and his wife, JoAnn, have two children. Hilliard is a member of non-profit Floridians for Democracy. He has been a strong critic of Donald Trump, comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

Honors

While with the U.S. military, Hilliard's decorations included but were not limited to the Purple Heart, Combat Infantry Badge, and Commendation Ribbon.

Awards

Source

• Ohio Medical Education Network award
• Broadcast Preceptor award
• Kappa Delta Pi, World Communications Year award
• Phi Delta Kappa Annual award
• Cambridge Community television, Lifetime Achievement award, Emerson College
• Columbia Distinguished Alumni award
• Goethe Institute fellowship

Selected works

Books

• Hilliard, Robert L. (1996). Surviving the Americans: The Continued Struggle of the Jews After Liberation. New York: Seven Stories Press., memoir
• Hilliard Robert, L., Phillipa, fiction, (2010) Parlance Publishing
• Hilliard, Robert L. Selected Plays by Robert Hilliard, Volume 1. (2021) Parlance, ISBN-13: 9780984248964
• Poems of Love and War (2018), poetry collection

Media studies

• Hilliard, Robert L.; Keith, Michael C. (1997). The Broadcast Century: A Biography of American Broadcasting (2nd ed.). Boston: Focal Press. ISBN 978-0-240-80262-6.
• Hilliard, Robert L.; Keith, Michael C. (1999). Waves of Rancor: Tuning into the Radical Right. New York City, Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire: Routledge Publishing.
• Hilliard, Robert (2000). Writing for Television, Radio, and New Media. Wadsworth.
• Hilliard, Robert L.; Keith, Michael C. (2003). Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in American Radio. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Press. ISBN 978-0-8138-2409-3.
• Hilliard, Robert L.; Keith, Michael C. (2005). The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0813824095.

Articles

• Hilliard, Robert L. (1956). "The Integration of the Negro Actor on the New York Stage". Educational Theatre Journal. 8 (2): 97–108. doi:10.2307/3203866. ISSN 0013-1989.
• Hilliard, Robert L. (1957). "Desegregation in Educational Theatre". The Journal of Negro Education. 26 (4): 509–513. doi:10.2307/2293512. ISSN 0022-2984.
• Hilliard, Robert L. (1958-11-01). "Television and Education". The Journal of Higher Education. 29 (8): 431–470. doi:10.1080/00221546.1958.11779578. ISSN 0022-1546.
• Hilliard, Robert L. (1962-11-01). "The Organization and Control of Educational Television". Peabody Journal of Education. 40 (3). doi:10.1080/01619566209537110.
• Hilliard, Robert L. (1963-06-01). "Dramatic Arts Production on Television: Practices and attitudes in the Southeast". Southern Journal of Communication. 28 (4). doi:10.1080/10417946309371698.