Posted on 04/18/2005 10:47:45 AM PDT by Liz
In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began a series of official inquiries into the penetration of the Hollywood film industry by the American Communist Party (CPUSA).
Major public hearings were held in 1947 and 1951, with smaller hearings throughout the mid-1950s. In the course of these inquiries, dozens of “friendly” Hollywood witnesses denounced hundreds of people as secret members of the Communist Party, while dozens of “unfriendly” witnesses refused to discuss their politics with the Committee. Those who were either publicly or privately denounced as members of the CPUSA found it almost impossible to get employment in the motion-picture industry for at least for a decade.
The most famous victims of the resulting blacklist were the original group of “unfriendly” witnesses, known as the “Unfriendly Ten” or “Hollywood Ten.” These individuals–mostly screenwriters– refused to give political information about themselves before HUAC in October 1947.1
The blacklist functioned in part officially, as demonstrated by a joint public announcement of the motion picture firms in November 1947 that henceforth no studio would knowingly employ any member of the Communist Party, or the members of any other group which advocated the overthrow of the United States government by revolution.
The blacklist also operated unofficially, through instruments such as the irresponsible red-baiting newsletter Red Channels, which named whole swaths of people as subversives. This, for example, ruined the career of the left-wing but non-Communist actress Marsha Hunt. 2
The blacklist also often functioned in secret: jobs just dried up. As a result, “fixers” emerged to get people unofficially “pardoned” by anti-Communist organizations and film industry managers, therefore making them employable again. One famous “fixer” was the fiercely anti-Communist actor Ward Bond. 3
“Fronts” arose as well in the form of people offering scripts ghost-written by blacklisted screenwriters in exchange for official credit for the script and often a cut of the payment. One famous example of such a “front” was Philip Yordan, himself a quite famous screenwriter. 4
Some film careers were totally destroyed as a result of the blacklist system. For instance, Mickey Knox, “the next John Garfield,” was a rising star of the late 1940s, turning in a star performance in the great gangster film White Heat (1949). If you have never heard of Mickey Knox, well, that is the point. Many other careers suffered severe setbacks, such as that of actor Howard Da Silva. 5
Actors and directors suffered more severely than screenwriters because they could not act or direct under assumed names, whereas screenwriters could use the “front” system, which allowed the most talented of them to continue to write. The CPUSA, however, had made its largest inroads in Hollywood among screenwriters, and many screenwriters’ careers suffered greatly or ended.
It is generally not a good idea to attack professional writers because they tend to write, and to write well, to get in the last word. This has certainly been the case with the blacklist. None of the HUAC committee or staff (which originally included Congressman Richard M. Nixon) has written memorably on the events of 1947 and 1951, let alone on the later, smaller investigations.
A few of those who appeared as “friendly witnesses” before HUAC, such as directors Edward Dmytryk and Elia Kazan, and actor Sterling Hayden. have written important memoirs, often defending their conduct and sometimes expressing self-doubt. 6
But such figures are far outnumbered by the self-justifying and bitter memoirs of those who were denounced: Norma Barzman; Walter Bernstein; Alvah Bessie; Herbert Biberman; Conrad Bromberg; Lester Cole; Lillian Hellman; Howard Koch; Ring Lardner, Jr. (and now his daughter Kate); Donald Ogden Stewart; Dalton Trumbo; and Ella Winter. 7
The publication of these works, and more fundamentally the cultural shift in Hollywood to domination by a bien peasant Left that started around 1960 and accelerated in the 1970s, has led to the lionization of the Unfriendly Ten as American “rebels” and martyred “non-conformists.”
Meanwhile, the anger within the current filmmaking elite at those who originally “named names” in the 1940s and 1950s has been unremitting. A now unalterable view of what occurred is held by people who have little knowledge of what it actually meant in the 1940s to be a Communist; that is, a Stalinist. Two examples demonstrate the current political situation.
Long read---rest at link.
Fine. Name the ten. Is da Silva on the list?
I don't think so. I told you I hadn't heard of him. I get from you that he wasn't even jailed.
He wasn't jailed, charged, convicted of anything. He was there in the first place because a better known actor said he had a loud mouth. And still he was kept from working for ten years. That is not America.
Then the other actor would have looked foolish.
A lot of folks on this forum are ok with this because of the targeted group, but what if it were Evangelical, anti-Abortion Christians who were on the spot? Whom would you respect more; people who got on their knees and said, "yeah, I was there but it was that guy who did all the talking" to save their jobs at the post office or the people who might say, "none of the government's effin business what church I went to thirty years ago"?
The author has written some articles that probably touch on what the book will cover which you may be able to find even if the book isn't out yet. I found this one particularly interesting because in my own research into the FBI wiretaps mentioned I'd independently reached the same conclusion he advances regarding Lauchlin Currie and Thomas Corcoran's role in obstructing the Amerasia investigation:
The biggest fish caught in the Amerasia net was State Department official Service, one of Vincent’s "China hands". . .Given all this, McCarthy said, J. Edgar Hoover believed he had an "airtight case," and Justice Department officials geared up for prosecution. Then, for some mysterious reason, Justice decided to downplay the matter and treat it as a minor indiscretion; Service got off scott-free and was restored to State Department duties. Jaffe and Larsen escaped with fines, and all the others walked. In essence, the whole thing was shoved under the official rug, to be conveniently forgotten. It was, McCarthy charged, a security breach and cover-up of immense proportions. The Tydings Committee and the administration viewed it more benignly; "an excess of journalistic zeal," Jaffe’s attorney had called it, and the prosecutors had agreed, so what was the big problem? Such was the anti-McCarthy view that was handed down to legend. We now know, however, that all of this was false, and that McCarthy was right in what he said. The whole thing was fixed from the beginning, engineered by Elizabeth Bentley’s agent Lauchlin Currie, operating from the White House, and carried out by Washington wheeler-dealer Thomas Corcoran. The truth of this emerged a decade ago when FBI wiretaps from the ’40s came to the surface; these showed Currie, Corcoran, Service and Justice officials conspiring to deep-six the case, and succeeding. As I have treated this matter in some detail before, I shall not repeat all the particulars here (See "The Amerasia Affair," Human Events, July 12, 1996, and "History’s Vindication of Joe McCarthy," Human Events, May 16, 1987).
I'll try to think of other stuff you might find useful. If you FReepmail me on it with some more specific details about what you're considering for a paper topic, I will see what I can help you find.
Party at nopardon's house while she is on vacation!
Shhh!--she's not supposed to know--heh-heh. . . :-)
If the guy had realized the bigger picture...that the panel was fighting a fight against Communism, maybe he should have cooperated. Turns out that Communists did get into the Government later. So the committee's fears were not that far off.
Ronald Reagan cooperated. De Silva should have too. Keeping quiet made him look like someone the studios didn't want to work with.
And, RR did start off as a friendly but then went to Washington (along with Bogart and dozens of others) to protest the excesses of the Hollywood hearings.
I don't remember hearing that Reagan travelled to DC with Bogart. Do you have a source for that? I would like to read about it, if so, because I am interested in the time period.
Do a search of the Committe for the First Amendment.
Don't you have anything more specific? I had not heard that Reagan travelled with Bogart. In fact, I had heard that opposite...that Reagan cooperated with Congress despite the Bogart and Bacalls protest.
In my opinion the investigation of this was at least part of the purpose of the HUAC investigation of Hollywood. Among the German emigres who came to the US and Hollywood during this period--amidst a far larger percentage of non-Communists, of course--were some important German CP and Comintern members and fellow travellers linked to Willi Munzenberg's propaganda fronts in Europe, notably Gerhart Eisler--a leader of the Comintern illegal underground apparatus in the US, in which capacity one of his jobs was obtaining fake passports for Communist agents--and his brother Hanns Eisler, along with Arnold Schoenberg, Bertholt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann, to name a few of the most prominent that were of interest to the FBI and HUAC. This group of emigres started coming over around 1933; in 1934 Munzenberg joined them in the US; in 1935 the US Communist Party issued a directive to infiltrate the Hollywood labor unions and creative community. This Comintern/CP effort to infiltrate Hollywood bore on the Hollywood Ten investigation because during this period, in 1933 three of the Hollywood Ten--John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, and Lester Cole--cofounded the Screen Writers Guild, which Lawson initially presided over, and then in 1934, Lawson formally joined the Communist Party, which he had been travelling with for some time prior to this (likely dating back to World War I when he became close to John Dos Passos, one of the most prominent literary fellow travellers of the 1920s, who later turned anti-Stalinist in the mid-30s). Another of the Hollywood Ten, Edward Dmytryk, when he eventually agreed to testify to HUAC, alleged, "John Howard Lawson settled all questions. If there was a switch in the Party line, he explained it. If there were any decisions to be made, they went to John Howard Lawson. If there was any conflict within the Communist Party, he was the one who settled it." The HUAC investigation of Lawson and his associates seems to have overlapped with the investigation of the Comintern's influence among German emigres to Hollywood. IMO both these investigations also overlapped with investigations of Communist intellectuals' influence in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project and Federal Theatre Project and the wartime propaganda operations of the Office of War Information/Office of Strategic Services, the latter which stood in the background of the Amerasia spy case. I think HUAC was partly investigating the Hollywood Ten as part of a broader investigation of these other matters.
During Bogart's trip he came to realize that he was being used and he afterward protested Communist publications using his name. I will need to find my source on that, but I've read it in several places--should be online, or if not, in Bogart biographies or books on the Hollywood Ten.
Yes, I think I had heard that before. wtc911 said earlier that Ronald Reagan had travelled to DC with Bogart but I had never heard that. I would be interested to know if that was true.
Yes, I think I had heard that before. wtc911 said earlier that Ronald Reagan had travelled to DC with Bogart but I had never heard that. I would be interested to know if that was true.
I'm surprised to see Thomas Mann on your list since he was known as a staunch hater of tyranny.
I hadn't heard that, either, but I'm also interested in more information on that. Bogart did make his trip about the same time Reagan was testifying--the subpoenas Bogart flew out to protest were issued in September 1947, Reagan testified that October.
He did speak against Nazi tyranny.
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