Posted on 06/08/2005 7:14:58 AM PDT by SJackson
Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco, 2005: Encounter Books). Pp. 292. $29.95.
In August 1940, the actor Franchot Tone explained to the Dies Committee (forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) that to him as a liberal, the Communist Party of the United States as it operated in Hollywood was “just another political party.” If anything, that view is even more widely and strongly held today, 65 years later, by the artists of the film colony. The understanding in Hollywood is that the Hollywood Communists, including the famous Unfriendly Ten who refused to give testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947, were mere innocent left-wingers and non-comformists: they were eventually martyred—blacklisted or even sent briefly to jail—by “witch-hunters” on account of their political beliefs (which are left unspecified), and because of their unwillingess to “name names”, i.e., to be “stool-pigeons” against others. A ‘witch-hunter”, by definition, is an unrelenting inquisitor who is looking for something that is not there.
This is the gospel as received in Hollywood today--and woe betide anyone who objects to it. Naturally that gospel has found its way onto the big screen, in a stream of big-name movies such as The Way We Were (1973: starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand), The Front (1976: starring Woody Allen), Guilty by Suspicion (1991: starring Robert De Niro), The Majestic (2001, starring Jim Carrey), and One of the Hollywood Ten (2001: starring Jeff Goldblum). This is the greatest propaganda victory ever achieved by the CPUSA.
The deeply-researched and well-written new book by Ronald and Allis Radosh demonstrates why Tone and all those who have followed him have been so dreadfully mistaken.
Readers who are well-acquainted with the story of the Hollywood Ten and the subsequent blacklist of Hollywood Communists and leftists will find much that is familiar here--but also much that is new and important. The Communist Party as it operated in Hollywood was NOT just another political party. This was true for three profound reasons: (1) although it was a legal party operating in a democracy, its membership was secret; (2) its central function was to further the interests and policies of a foreign country and great power--namely the Soviet Union; and (3) it operated, as did all Communist Parties around the world, on the Soviet Union’s own totalitarian model, where all independent thought was forbidden in the name of revolutionary discipline. What is so striking and disturbing about this last point is that the Hollywood Party was made up solely of creative artists.
Let us turn first to the issue of secrecy. At its height there were about 300 Party-members in the film industry. Party-membership in Hollywood was secret, and the Party was essentially a revolutionary conspiracy. It was precisely this aspect of Party functioning that allowed secret Communist militants to take control of non-Party organizations, organizations which possessed innocent-sounding public names and involved hundreds of people who were not themselves Party-members but only liberals (or radicals) who thought they were working for good causes: peace, economic justice, anti-racism, civil rights. These are the famous “front groups;” and later, in the blacklist period, many Hollywood individuals who had innocently joined such front groups got into trouble with HUAC or the blacklist (the actor Edward G. Robinson is perhaps the best example).[1] But those victims of HUAC and the blacklist within broader Hollywood society (they were victims of the Party, too, of course) are not the Radoshes’ topic; the Radoshes focus sharply on the actual Party, and especially the hard-core Communist militants who made up the Hollywood Ten.
The secret Party-members gained control of these front organizations because (under Party orders) they worked the hardest for them, and so they got elected to the chairmanships and executive boards by people who did not know that they were voting Communist Party-members to positions of leadership and control. Through these “front groups” of mostly non-Party members the Party greatly multiplied its power, and came to exercize far more political power and influence in Hollywood than would have been the case if the Party had been a simple, open but small institution of 300 members.
The two most famous front groups were the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League of the 1930s (to which even John Ford belonged), and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions of the 1940s (to which even Ronald Reagan belonged). Such organizations funnelled great sums of money (mostly from innocent dupes) into causes the Party particularly favored (for instance, the Leftist side in the Spanish Civil War), while preventing any criticism of, say, the policies of the Soviet Union. Thus when Ronald Reagan, who thought he was merely associating with like-minded idealistic friends, sought in July 1946 to get some criticism of Soviet foreign policy as well as American foreign policy onto the agenda for HICCASP, he suddenly found himself in a ferocious shouting match with both John Howard Lawson (the secret head of the Party in Hollywood) and another secret Party-member, Dalton Trumbo. Reagan soon left the organization in disgust (pp. 115-116). Trumbo was the most talented and later the most famous of the Hollywood Ten.[2]
The other purpose of secrecy was, of course, to have secret influence over Hollywood films themselves. Both Lenin and Stalin had asserted the centrality of popular film as a weapon for “educating” the masses in proper thinking, This is precisely why the Hollywood section of the Party was so important ideologically and functionally that it was run directly from the New York headquarters of the CPUSA, and was never a subsidiary unit of the Los Angeles CP or even the California CP. To be sure, secret Party-members were rarely successful in getting their propaganda into the films being made by the studios for which they worked (though many Party screenwriters boasted of attempts). The problem was that studio moguls edited out any material they thought might offend any possible audience of viewers: after all, they were in the movie business to make money.
The Hollywood Party did have a single spectacular success in this regard, however: the film Mission to Moscow, made by Warner Bros. in 1943, at the height of the Second World War. The Radoshes devote a full chapter to this story. The film was in good part the product of the same creative crew that had just finished the masterpiece Casablanca: screenwriter Howard Koch and director Michael Curtiz. Its theme—astoundingly--was that the Moscow Purge Trials of the mid-1930s were justified, that all the accused (despite being elder statesmen of the Revolution of 1917 ) were guilty of treason with Nazi Germany and/or Japan, and that Stalin was a democrat. The Radoshes demonstrate conclusively what has long been denied, especially by apologists for the Party such as Victor Navasky: that Mission to Moscow was a Communist Party secret project. The film’s screenwriter Howard Koch was not “apolitical” (Navasky’s characterization) but a pro-Stalin intellectual, and his very influential “technical advisor” for the film, Jay Leyda, was a Communist operative. The Party never had another success like this; the film, however, did not do very well financially.[3]
And in the end Party-members paid dearly for belonging to a secret organization. The hard fact is that there would have been no “naming of names” if the Party had not been a secret organization in the first place. This was later ruefully admitted even by prominent Party-member Paul Jarrico--and this turns out to have been the private opinion of the famous blacklistee Dalton Trumbo as well. Trumbo’s bitter remarks on Party secrecy have not been known before, and the bringing to light of material that for 50 years has lain unnoticed or ignored in Trumbo’s private files is a major scholarly contribution from the Radoshes.
“The question of a secret Communist Party lies at the heart of the Hollywood blacklist,” Trumbo wrote in a 1958 memorandum which the Radoshes have now rescued from obscurity (pp. 219-222). Trumbo argued that there had been no need for the Party in the United States to maintain the rule of secrecy, since Party-members were not living under a despotic regime such as Czarist Russia, under the threat of torture and death, but were working for change in America’s open political market-place. Yet this was a distinction the Party refused to make. Party-members in the U.S., Trumbo said, “should have all been open Communists, or they should not have been members at all.” What happened instead was that secret membership ultimately “destroyed them”. The reason was that the moment of conscious choice whether to openly join an openly revolutionary party (with admitted risks to one’s career) was never permitted people; and when the illusion of secrecy collapsed and Party-members were then called before HUAC, “the quality of choice was radically changed for the worse. Instead of voluntary choice between party and career, they now faced compulsory choice between informing and the blacklist.” Thus “even the informers can be counted among the victims of a [Party] policy which gave them no realistic moment of choice.” (pp. 220-221; emphasis added). In a later letter, Trumbo also pointed out that no informer before HUAC “gave all the names he could have, had he wanted to” (p. 231); and so even in the 1950s Trumbo made a point of maintaining friendships with “friendly witnesses” such as Richard Collins (Ronald Reagan’s favorite ex-Communist)--much to the disgust of his comrades in the Ten (pp. 224, 231).
Trumbo’s 1958 memorandum is a remarkably subtle analysis of the dilemma which the secret Party people faced before HUAC,--both those who remained silent and those who talked--and he concludes that the ultimate cause of that dilemma lay in Communist Party policy, not in the “anti-democratic” nature of American society. It is the sort of modulated analysis which you will never see in a current Hollywood film about the blacklist period, where we find only “heroes” (those who kept the secret) and “villains” (informers--and, of course, the alleged anti-democratic nature of American society). It is no wonder that Trumbo’s essay met savage criticism and rejection by the Party when in 1958 he attempted to get it published in the Party journal Mainstream (p. 219). It would be unacceptable in Hollywood today as well.
A second crucial factor that made the CPUSA different from any other political party in Hollywood was its devotion to the interests of a foreign power, the Soviet Union. The Party-membership in Hollywood faithfully followed every twist in policy that came out of Moscow (which in turn was reacting to European conditions, not American ones), and proclaimed each policy of Stalin the epitome of virtue—for the Socialist Motherland could do no wrong. Looking back later, the Party-member and exiled director Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday) said that “The slogan was always ‘Defend the Soviet Union.’ It was not ‘Defend the Socialist Idea’ or ‘Defend a Fairer System.’ It was ‘Defend the Soviet Union.’ Impossible.” Looking back, too, Party-member Paul Jarrico’s negative opinion was the same--not that Jarrico ever deviated from the Party line at the time.[4]
The Radoshes devote an illuminating chapter to the most glaring example of this conduct: the Hollywood Party’s reaction to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939. The staunch anti-Nazism of the CPUSA between 1933 and 1939 had been one of its major attractions to many people; but now the Hitler-Stalin Pact created friendship and de facto military alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Pact was a moral disaster for the Party--both for those who became disillusioned and especially for those who did not. I will cite just one example. When in late August 1939 the Party leader Herbert Biberman, who was a screenwriter and director as well as one of the most rigid of all Hollywood Stalinists, heard rumors about the Pact, he publicly denounced them as hideous fascist slanders of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union, he declared, would never cooperate with Nazism (pp. 64-65). That was the day before the Pact was signed. And after the Pact? Well, Biberman became chair of the Hollywood Peace Forum--an organization whose goal was to prevent American economic and military aid from going to those countries, such as Great Britain, which were now actually fighting Stalin’s friend Hitler (p. 78).[5]
The tight chain to the Soviet Union meant in turn that when the Cold War began, the Party would naturally and fervently back the USSR against the United States. It was the inevitable Party position, the position that destroyed the Party in America--and it destroyed the Hollywood faithful along with it. Once the Soviet Union was a clear enemy of the United States, it was perfectly natural to see the CPUSA as a potential fifth column (as even Paul Jarrico admitted at the end of his life)--and HUAC was therefore on the way. HUAC was a reprehensible and irresponsible instrument of state power (its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, would soon be in jail himself for financial corruption), and the eventual blacklist in Hollywood was mostly the work of knaves and fools. Nevertheless, the very nature of the Communist Party itself, both its intense secretiveness and its extraordinary ties to a foreign enemy power, made it all too likely that something like this would occur.
Equally disturbing in terms of human behavior, however, is the third characteristic of the Hollywood Party which the Radoshes underline: the inner workings of Party intellectual discipline in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. Here were creative artists who either willingly or under enormous and savage psychological pressure submitted their talent to the complete control of a central committee. The preferred instrument whenever anyone sought intellectual or artistic independence from the current Party line was a “trial” in which the defendant was brutally criticized and mercilessly excoriated for hour after hour as “unrevolutionary” and “anti-working class” by people he had previously thought of as his friends. That these Stalinist “trials” often took place in sumptuous Beverly Hills mansions complete with swimming-pools only makes the situation more grotesque.
A most disturbing pattern in these Party “trials” is how often those who were intellectually abused then passed the abuse on to others, becoming inquisitors themselves. Thus the Party’s rigid cultural commissar Mike Gold brutally abused the writer John Howard Lawson for being “too bourgeois” in his work, for failing to see that “art is a weapon” in the revolution--a failing which made Lawson’s writing worthless; Lawson had to accept the judgment (p. 27). But Lawson himself went on to become the head enforcer of intellectual discipline out in Hollywood. Lawson in turn forced the screenwriter Alvah Bessie to set aside a script in which Bessie offered an honest and complex account of his personal experiences fighting for the Left in the Spanish Civil War: Lawson ruled that the project was not ideologically sound (p. 128). Bessie himself, in turn, was then one of the board of stern inquisitors (including Mike Gold, Herbert Biberman and Dalton Trumbo) who in 1946 humiliated Albert Maltz--screenwriter of the classic film noir This Gun for Hire (1942), which made Alan Ladd a star--because Maltz had dared to argue that art should be free, that art need not be a weapon in the class-struggle, and that artists should be judged by the quality of their work, not by their politics. Maltz was forced first privately and then publicly to recant these heresies (p. 128). Maltz himself, in turn, was one of the board of inquisitors who brutally interrogated the Party director Robert Rossen in 1949 because of his Academy-Award winning film All the King’s Men--for the film’s attack on one-man rule, though about an American politican set in the American South, might be viewed as a covert criticism of Stalin. In fact, the Party ruled that Rossen’s trial take place at Maltz’s own Beverly Hills home—an obvious message both to Maltz and to others (p. 135).
But unlike Maltz, Rossen refused to submit either intellectually or morally: his outraged response to the interrogation of his art was “Stick the whole Party up your ass!” A noble sentiment. The terrible fact, however, is that most Hollywood Party-members--artists though they were--DID submit to intellectual discipline, and usually voluntarily and without even the necessity of a gruesome “trial.” The intellectual discipline included lists of books which Party-members were forbidden to read.[6] It appears, in fact, that those who had once been suspect were the most eager to serve on the inquisition-boards. This was a way both of demonstrating their (suspect) purity and—one imagines—a way of passing on the deep personal shame of the “trial” experience by inflicting it on and abusing others. Whatever it was, the whole process strikes one as psychologically sick. But then, the Party forbade its members to consult psychiatrists.[7]
Those who participated as inquisitors in these savage rituals—and that list includes all the Unfriendly Ten—were many things, but they were not innocents. In fact, Maltz later said that compared to the humiliation he suffered during the Party inquisition of 1946, his appearance before HUAC the next year--and even having to go to prison for refusing to testify--was like a walk in the park.[8]
For Dalton Trumbo--a man who for years had acted as a severe Party inquisitor--the real break with the Party apparently came when, in 1952, he too finally became a recipient of the sharp end. This is another new and important finding of the Radoshes (pp. 212-217). What happened was that Trumbo got caught up in a new Party internal campaign, “The Negro Liberation Movement.” In this campaign, Party people who used terms such as “white wash” or “black sheep” suddenly found themselves expelled from the Party as “white chauvinists” (p. 213); the whole atmosphere was evidently like today’s average university at its worst. A script which Trumbo had submitted to a new film company run by Albert Maltz and Herbert Biberman (the company which would later produce the now-sainted mine union film Salt of the Earth) was found to have serious “white chauvinist” defects; the script was rejected out of hand, and Trumbo was mercilessly chastized. We do not have the attack on Trumbo for his thought-crimes (from a board consisting of Biberman, Jarrico, Adrian Scott and Jean Field), but we do have a 30-page defense of his script written by Trumbo. To judge from that furious response, the charges against him appear not merely fallacious but ridiculous--and Trumbo was never friendly with either Biberman or Maltz again. Instead, he gradually dropped out of active participation the Party. His last attempt at the reform of Party conduct was the 1958 essay we have already discussed, and which was bluntly rejected.
It should be clear that for all the above reasons the CPUSA in Hollywood was definitely NOT “just another political party.” But Dalton Trumbo dominates this book and remains himself an enigma. He was a very talented and complex man--an Academy Award-winning screenwriter (1956: under an assumed name!), the screenwriter of both Exodus and Spartacus in a single year (1960). He eventually had many private doubts about the Party, telling a friend in 1956 that he was not at all surprised by Krushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s terrible and massive crimes, because all along he had kept a secret library of forbidden books that included Orwell, Whittaker Chambers and even Trotsky (p. 218--another important discovery from the Radoshes). Yet Trumbo also could never bring himself to criticize the Party in public. Well aware that most of the Hollywood Ten and the other blacklistees were “mediocrities” (this is another astounding statement: see p. 226), Trumbo was evidently also too proud to go back on his own past. Thus when in 1969 he got into a debate with the anti-Communist liberal comedian Steve Allen over the nature of the Soviet Union and the CPUSA, Trumbo’s tone towards Allen was by turns condescending, mocking, and savage. It was a stunningly bad performance, all the more strange since Steve Allen was saying things about the Party and the Soviet Union which Trumbo not only knew to be true but which he had said in private himself.[9] This is in character with the man who in 1944 had--following the Party policy of total support for war against the Nazis ever since Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941--denounced to the FBI people who had written him simply asking for copies of his anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939).[10]
But as the Radoshes say, you won’t find any of these complexities in any popular-culture presentation of the Hollywood Ten or the blacklist. Dalton Trumbo’s son Christopher, for instance, has written a play about his father which is currently being performed on multiple stages around the country. Premiering in 2003, it has starred both Richard Dreyfuss and Paul Newman as Dalton Trumbo (you can’t get bigger names); and yet the play fails even to mention that Trumbo was a Communist, indeed a long-term Communist militant, a namer of names to the FBI, a stern inquisitor for the Party (against both Maltz and Rossen), who yet had second thoughts about Communism, though perhaps only because in 1952 he himself was finally victimized by the Party process. In Christopher Trumbo’s play, the fascinating intellectual trajectory of Dalton Trumbo, which is laid out so carefully by the Radoshes, is missing; Dalton Trumbo is not a Communist at all; he ends up blacklisted evidently for simply believing that it was immoral to inform on your friends. Meanwhile, there is even a “Dalton Trumbo Free Speech Fountain” (!) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It is a favorite speaking spot of the ineffable Ward Churchill.[11]
Can the Radosh book, well-researched, well-written, and with very important historical discoveries, make a dent in the massive machine that now lies behind this enormous CPUSA propaganda victory? Probably not. But that shouldn’t prevent you, dear reader, from picking up Red Star Over Hollywood, reading it, and learning the truth.
NOTES
[1] No doubt most Communist Party-members were themselves first attracted into the Party by such social idealism.
[2] The confrontation between Reagan, Lawson and Trumbo would make a wonderful scene in a film; we may be sure that we will never see it.
[3] Compare the account of Mission to Moscow in Red Star with that in Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980): 300. In Los Angeles in May 2005 , in a debate between Navasky and Ronald Radosh over this film, the noted film critic Richard Schickel called upon Navasky finally to stop hiding the truth.
[4] Dassin interview in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, ed. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York, 1997): 209; Jarrico interview in McGilligan and Buhle, 398.
[5] In the most outrageous of all contemporary Hollywood depictions of the blacklist period, the grim and rigid Stalinist Biberman was played by handsome Jeff Goldblum and turned into an innocent liberal in One of the Hollywood Ten (2002).
[6] See Edward Dymtryk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (Carbondale, Ill., 1995): 14.
[7] See Norma Barman, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York, 2003): 85; similar is Paul Jarrico in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades: 384-85. There were two reasons psychiatrists were forbidden, according to Barzman and Jarrico: to preserve Party security (the Party was a secret organization, but you were supposed to tell everything to your psychiatrist), and because psychiatrists concentrated too much on psychological development of individuals, rather than social problems. There was, in fact, a single psychiatrist whose ideology was minimally acceptable to the Party--and he turned out to be an FBI informant: Barzman, ibid.
[8] See Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist, 73.
[9] The exchange between Trumbo and Allen was published in Esquire Magazine, January 1970, pp. 73ff. It can now be conveniently read on-line at www.marxmail.org/HappyJackFish.htm. And the exchange is well worth reading, to catch the character both of Trumbo and the surprisingly tough and erudite Allen.
[10] On the 1944 incident where Trumbo “named names” voluntarily to the FBI, see Art Eckstein, “The Truth about the Hollywood Ten”, Frontpage Magazine, April 18, 2005.
[11] See Art Eckstein, “Fountain of Lies,” Frontpage Magazine, March 13, 2005.
Art Eckstein is the author of “The Hollywood Ten in History and Memory,” Film History 16 (2005), and co-editor, with Peter Lehman, of “The Searchers”: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western (Wayne State University Press, 2004).
So many still, so naive as to the messaging of Hollywood movies.
With every new piece of info on the blacklist that comes up, Trumbo's truism "that there were no heroes-only victims" becomes more and more deep.
bump for later
Its about time someone pulled the cover off Hollyweird, just look at the story lines that have come out of there for the last 40 years, formula socialist plot lines, that is why I no longer attend movies and have sold my TV. why support those who are trying to destroy our country? for my entertainment? our fathers gave up a lot more than entertainment for their country.
Good to see another book on the Party in print again.
I remember Trumbo being on a number of talk shows in the sixties, Dick Cavett's for example, during his "rehabilitation" as a modern lib hero for fighting all the "evil" conservatives as a member of the Hollywood Ten. What all these Trumbo apologists always failed to mention was that Trumbo was indeed a commie during that time period and a stooge of Stalin. That bit of info was always neglected.
Bump for reading later.
save for later.
I hate to admit this, but I'd always just assumed they kept their membership secret because it was an illegal organization. But I guess... it never was actually illegal to form and have a CP in the US... was it?
True still too many but a lot less than previously. People are finally catching on to Hollywood's "agenda" of makeing socialist behavior seem the good thing to do.
I'm hoping as more catch on, the money made from crappy movies goes down.
It seems that (many) conservatives wouldn't have approved of Maltz either. "Art Is Politics" seems to be embraced by both Left and Right.
The "other" Hollywood:
http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/
The underground party kept separate from the open party, using it as a source both of ignorant tools and recruits. Its activities were mostly illegal (which is why it was underground), things such as fraud, espionage, and even the occasional Arkancide. In such a case, everybody in the organization, if not open to the direct criminal charge, is on the hook for conspiracy to commit same.
And, although I say the open party was legal, its members were mostly aware of the underground, even if they didn't know who was in it, and they supported its general mission even though they had plausible deniability of its misdeeds.
If you've never read Witness, check it out. Whittaker Chambers tells his own story of the CPUSA, both open and underground, from an insider's viewpoint. (And let me add to that, his mastery of English makes him a pleasure to read, on the level of Tolkien or even Milton.) Then check out the biographies by Tanenhaus and Weinstein. (I liked Weinstein's better. )
Good post ...thanks SJackson.
About time, what cover, most are openly still stark raving socialists, only now its fashionable. No need for a secret party, now it’s the Democratic Party.
I must say while reading this that it would make a great movie, but only if Mel Gibson made it.
wow its good to see hope!
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