Regnery History
Posted on 03/11/2015 1:20:08 PM PDT by NYer
Regnery History
Hollywood is not exactly known for accuracy when portraying historical figures and events in the movies. Perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised then when Hollywood gets its own history wrong.
That’s been the case with the blacklist of assorted industry communists during the early years of the Cold War. For nearly seven decades, leftists in the entertainment industry have peddled the idea that blacklisted screenwriters–especially the “Hollywood Ten”—were innocent, naïve standard bearers for First Amendment rights who unjustly suffered for their political beliefs at the hands of fascists in Congress and the movie business amidst a period of irrational anti-Red hysteria. This spin has come to be widely accepted as actual history.
Allan Ryskind, author of Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, will have none of it, however. The longtime Human Events editor (and son of Morrie Ryskind, a screenwriter with various Marx Brothers films to his credit) offers a compelling, comprehensive tome that takes a fair—and as a result, damning—look at mountains of evidence regarding what the Hollywood Ten and other communists in the movie business actually did and advocated. For good measure, as any writer delving into history should do, Ryskind places the events and individuals he’s writing about within the proper context of their time.
Ryskind writes, “The Hollywood Ten, far from being ‘radical innocents,’ far from having just ‘flirted with Communist ideas,’ as their sympathizers so frequently insist, had all been committed to a Soviet America.” This is perhaps best illustrated by the flip-flopping by Hollywood’s communists in and around World War II as they followed Kremlin orders via the Communist Party in America. That is, being anti-Nazi initially; then working against the anti-Nazis, including Great Britain and the U.S., during the Hitler-Stalin pact; once again, turning passionately against Hitler when he attacked the Soviet Union; and finally, turning against U.S. foreign policy and ultimately advocating our nation’s violent demise. It was all about defending the U.S.S.R., not the U.S.A.
Ryskind makes clear that the Hollywood communists were working for Stalin, either unconcerned or supportive of “Stalin’s swallowing of Eastern Europe, his installation of Red regimes in Asia, his aggressive acts against Western Europe, and the deep penetration of his fifth column in virtually all areas of American society.” Oh yes, and there were the millions of Russians starved and murdered by Uncle Joe.
As for the much-maligned hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Ryskind takes a close look at what actually happened. He concludes that the HUAC investigation of Hollywood “proved to be one of the most effective, albeit controversial probes ever carried out by any committee of Congress.” The results showed, in contrast to the revisionism heard for so long, “that Hollywood was packed with Communists and fellow travelers, that the guilds and the unions had been heavily penetrated, and that wartime films, at least, had been saturated with Stalinist propaganda.”
The Hollywood Left’s love affairs with totalitarianism, such as more recent embraces of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and continuing defense of the Hollywood Ten have nonetheless spread.
Over these many decades, the need apparently has grown to make clear the comprehensive ills of totalitarianism. As a reminder, at the 1947 HUAC hearing, actor and producer Robert Montgomery declared to applause in the hearing room, “Mr. Chairman, in common with millions of other men in this country in 1939 and 1940, I gave up my job to fight against a totalitarianism which was called fascism. I am quite willing to give it up again to fight against a totalitarianism called communism.”
Ryskind’s Hollywood Traitors would make an excellent movie, but I doubt it could ever break through the ideological barriers erected by the Hollywood Left. Those seeking an interesting, well-written history about the Hollywood blacklist, however, will find this book worth the price.
FYI, Ping!
And still are...to this day.
What's good for the goose...
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I’m curious about why a picture of Alger Hiss accompanies this posting. Hiss was definitely a traitor, and a soviet spy, but he betrayed this country while working in the State Department, and was never to my knowledge involved with Hollywood or the entertainment industry. Given the subject matter, a picture of Otto Katz (a lieutenant of Willi Munzenburg) would have been more appropriate.
And after McCarthy, there has been a well-known blacklisting of anti-communists that has lasted pretty much for the past 50 years.
Saw an old movie called Trial (1955) on TMC a few weeks back about how communists were using race and community organizing to further their cause. Parallels to to current events were plentiful.
Hollywood Party; How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s
“Overview
In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. In song, film, and live performances by stars such as Billy Crystal, Kevin Spacey, and John Lithgow, the audience relived a time some fifty years before, when, as the story has always been told, courageous writers and actors stood firm against a witch-hunt and blacklist that wrecked lives and destroyed careers. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic.
In Hollywood Party the complete story finally emerges, backdropped by the great upheavals of our time and with all the elements of a thriller—wrenching plot twists, intrigue, betrayal, violence, corruption, misguided passion, and lost idealism. Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party’s strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes.
In riveting detail, the shameful truth unfolds: Communist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies. From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler’s Nazis.
Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days. By chronicling what has been left on the cutting-room floor, from “back story” to aftermath, Hollywood Party changes those perceptions forever.”
Sort of like how on The Sopranos they’d all hang around the ISDA banquet denouncing and bemoaning the fact that Italian-Americans were being stereotyped as a bunch of mobsters.
Ronaldus Magnus learned how to deal with communists in Hollywood. Later, as governor, he dealt with communists in Berkley as they rioted and tried to take over a vacant lot they called “Peoples Park” in 1970. I loved it when he said of the commie radicals at the University of California “Those guys dress like Tarzan, they have hair like Jane and they smell like Cheetah” By the time he became president Reagan was very experienced in dealing with commie scum bags. It all started in Hollywood.
I now know what’s going on my FATHER’S DAY’ want lisr.
I now know what’s going on my FATHER’S DAY’ want list.
Articles of faith among the American dupes on the left are that the “blacklisted” people of Hollywood were unfairly persecuted, the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were innocent, and the Civil Rights movement was about civil rights.
Communists all.
The hypocrisy with Hollywood communists is all they really cared about was making money. And in their greed they sold out to Japanese, Chinese and Arabs, who now vet their story lines. And portray Russians as the heavies.
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Anyway, it was their Hollywood pals who weren’t hiring them.
They were Communists. Next.
Among them some of the Marx Brothers' best work.
He also got hierd by RKO to turn a relatively "normal" comedy called Room Service into a Marx Brothers movie. (The plot certainly fit the Marxes.)
One example of hos he did that was that he took a perfectly good straight line, "It was a great rehearsal", and turned it into a Chicoism: "It was a great-a rehearsal, Boss, a great-a rehearsal. i still think it's a lousy play, but it makes a great-a rehearsal."
Ronald Reagan wrote a tribute to John Wayne which was published in Reader’s Digest shortly after Wayne’s death in the late 1979-early 1980 time frame. In the article Reagan recalled how John Wayne had helped him block a communist takeover of the Screen Actors Guild when Reagan was the organization’s president..... It was a pretty interesting read. Both Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were real life heroes in that fight.
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