The article has its facts straight, but I think that the consistent phenomenon of H'wood being "Lefty's" - it did not start with HUAC in "47 - is deeper, or more superficial than the author implies. Hollywood, from the beginning, has always had a longer left leg than a right leg.
That's true. Traveling performers, from the time of the Middle Ages on, were always regarded as untrustworthy, fugitive, shiftless, criminal vagabonds. I mean, they were the dregs of society and not even on an equal status with peasants tied to their land or with townspeople with established, skilled trades. At the turn of the last century, so much of theatre life was glamorized and theatre people became much the sought after crowd...sort of like the celebrated and fawned-over royalty of previous times. Royalty fell out of fashion (in many ways) and actors took their place in the attention of the general public. The public created the monster and the actors forever carried the banner of a once marginalized and prosecuted minority who have now become 'empowered'. They will always champion the offbeat, criminal, the outrageous... They are now like spoiled children with no reverence for the cultural substructure of which they are the beneficiaries.