Coulter Explodes Hollywood's Blacklist Myth

NewsMax.com ^ | 6/30/03 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[kattracks]

It is one of the most enduring lies created by leftists: that all Hollywood trembled in fear over the persecution allegedly launched against Tinseltown by Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Along with the infamous Hollywood 10, actors, actresses, directors, producers and even the guys who swept the studio floors were allegedly writhing in agony, fearing they’d become victims of McCarthyism, and driven into unemployment and poverty.

There are just a few things wrong with this – to begin with it’s not true, Ann Coulter writes in her best-selling new book, "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism."

Nowadays, nobody bothers to point out that the phrase "McCarthyism" first appeared in the pages of the Communist Party’s organ in the U.S., the Daily Worker, which got it directly from the bowels of the NKVD’s Moscow headquarters at 3 Dzerzinski Square, where it was coined by the Stalinist disinformation experts in the belief that leftist useful idiots in the U.S. would adopt it as their own. Which of course they did, eagerly, and continue to do so even today.

The hysterical cry of the terrible consequences of blacklisting – of McCarthy depriving honest hardworking Hollywood celebrities of an opportunity to ply their trade, was based on a lie. But as Coulter observes, everything we know about Joe McCarthy is a lie.

The fact is that the so-called blacklisting began when the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings to determine the extent of communist penetration of the film industry, which was extensive.

Witnesses known as the Hollywood 10, acting under orders from their communist bosses, refused to admit under oath that they were members of the Communist Party. For this contempt of Congress they went to jail for a brief of time.

The Supreme Court refused to hear their appeals. And these so-called victims of the McCarthyite reign of terror, instead of being deprived of their civil liberties, "had the benefit of legal counsel, trial by jury, and proof beyond a reasonable-doubt standard," Coulter writes. "Still the cosseted, overpampered Hollywood elites were shocked to discover they could be held responsible for anything they did, and vowed that the rest of the country would never hear the end of it.

"At about the same time – under the legal system Communists revered, Stalin executed, starved, exiled or imprisoned more than ten million people."

Coulter writes: "Ten Hollywood scribblers who subscribed to an ideology responsible for the murder by the million refused to admit their membership in the Communist party to a House Committee," which McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with.

As Coulter repeatedly points out, McCarthy was a senator, not a member of the House of Representatives, where the committee did its work. He concentrated on communist infiltration into the U.S. government, which the evidence from the Venona intercepts now clearly shows to have been massive.

Recoiling in fear of being labeled employers of traitors, courageous Hollywood film moguls canned all 10 and refused to use them, at least not under their real names. As a result some of them were simply allowed to work under false names and kept on writing films and getting well paid.

Over and over we are told that the so-called blacklist created a reign of terror in Tinseltown, with everybody in filmdom cringing in fear.

Couler reveals the terrible exile endured by one of the blacklistees: Norma Barzman, who was forced to flee not to Devil’s Island, but instead to gay Paree, where, in her own words, she suffered such grievous punishment as having "dinner with Picasso every Tuesday night when we were at our country house in Provence. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Jacques Prevert were our friends. Plus we got to work with all the amazing European directors including Vittorio De Sica and Constantin Costa-Gavras. It was hard, but was also the time of my life."

Oh, the horrors of it all!

"Meanwhile," Coulter notes, "back in the country they preferred [the U.S.S.R.], people were being whisked off to Soviet gulags in the dead of night. They were being sentenced to work in forced labor camps. They were sent to Siberia for five years. They were being shot execution-style after being forced to confess to absurd diabolical conspiracies."

But there was a real Hollywood blacklist you never hear leftists talking about. As NewsMax.com reported in The Left’s Lies That Never Die, conservative anti-communists in Hollywood were denied work because of their beliefs. Men such as Bruce Cabot, Ward Bond, Adolph Menjou and many other members of John Wayne’s anti-communist Motion Picture Alliances were blacklisted and found work only in Wayne’s movies.

In "Treason" Ann Coulter proves her point again and again: Everything you think you know about Joe McCarthy is a lie.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Media Bias

[HISSKGB]

Emma Goldman's book called "Living My Life" partially explains her fanantical dedication and that of her New York cohorts in overthrowing the evil government and evil capitalists of America. One of her followers even assassinated President McKinley. At that time communists called themselves anarchists or syndicalists although they were all followers of Karl Marx.

The Marxists started their sedition in the US as soon as they got off the boat.

[Stultis]

I am a little surprised by the enthusiasm for using the power of government to haul citizens into a forum and question them under penalty of imprisonment about their political affiliation and associations.

Which shows that you entirely miss the point (and have bought into a couple key elements of the leftist myth). There was not one damn bit of "enthusiasm" about it at the time, nor is there retrospectively.

Take McCarthy himself. He wasn't investigating Hollywood, he was investigating the government. He was trying to get some answers as to why the bureaucracies in the State Department, Treasury, the Military, etc were effectively ignoring large numbers of known or suspected security risks. He, and other loyal Americans, were aghast at what was found.

Thank God McCarthy did conduct his investigations, for considerable damage had already been done by Soviet agents, and all this finally spurred the public to elect Eisenhower, who tightened up security considerably and purged many communists (even if not thorougly enough according to McCarthy). God only knows how the length or outcome of the Cold War might have been further effected if McCarthy hadn't made the issue of security risks that he did.

But "enthusiasm"? Hell no. The investigations McCarthy conducted shouldn't have been necessary, and wouldn't have been if the bureaucracies, and the elites, and the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were doing their jobs. It was tragic, and a cause for great anger and sorrow that the investigations were necessary, but they sure as hell were.

[HISSKGB]

You may have been misled by reading secondary sources such as the NYT. If you would take the time to read the transcripts you will find you were misinformed.

[DPB101]

America's "Red Decade"

[Arioch7]

Very good point.

[HISSKGB]

Wasn't there a journalist who was executed at Nuremberg for being a Hitler propagandist? What is wrong with this picture of having so many liberal US writers justifying the murder of millions of Ukrainians? Surely if the Nazi deserved execution the American apologists for Stalin deserve no less.

MEG33 You can add another pulitzer prize winner to your list. In this article Sinclair was more than forthright in explaining the bolsheviks needed to kill in the Ukraine for the greater good of the soviets.

[Fintan]

This is apropos of nothing, but I'm still waiting for Ann to respond to my marriage proposal.

[Bernard Marx]

Bump for later.

[MEG33]

#74 here has a link that contains #17"The Yalta Betrayal".It helps to have a bit of history.Our government was infiltrated with Stalinists.The first lady,my idol for years,was a useful idiot.I'm letting her off easy.Roosevelt chose to be a dunce about communism and Stalin's promises.Ignored were the millions of deaths caused by Stalin and his implemntation of communisism.

[demkicker]

Wow, you really got me there. You say "why don't you read Coulter's book" and I say "because I don't like her" and you accuse me of "shooting the messenger".

Sorry, but the truth hurts. You're trying to change the subject by whining that I'm accusing you of shooting the messenger. You are! You don't believe Ann Coulter's account of what transpired during the "McCarthy era", correct? You stated that you don't want to read her book, Treason (regardless of her well documented facts) because "you can't stand Ann Coulter".

Psssst... it is quite obvious you are too emotional to make a rational decision about what happened in the McCarthy era because you won't even consider Coulter's account. You are indeed shooting the messenger because of your personal 'feelings'.

There are other sources of information out there, you know. And some of them aren't full of personal insults and hyperbole.

I just love it when people like you illustrate absurdity by being absurd. You rant about your dislike for Ann Coulter and say you will not read her book, but have to get your little dig in by saying her book is "full of personal insults and hyperbole."

So, you know what her book is "full of", even though you won't read it. Sorry, but you don't qualify as an objective critic. In fact, the more you say about this topic, the less credibility you have. Quit digging a deeper hole. Give it up already...

[Antoninus]

I bought into all the Hollywood bunk about the HUAC committee and the Hollywood 10 until I got to college and did a paper on the subject. I watched the tapes of the hearings and they were eye-opening to say the least. The Hollywood 10 were combative for no good reason--it was quite obvious that they were attempting to turn the inquiry into a circus. The "11th" member, Berthold Brecht, actually admitted to being a communist and left the country. The other 10 never did, although it was plain as day.

One of them, Dalton Trumbo, continued to ply his trade as a writer and bragged that, although he didn't get any overtly communist movies made, he did prevent some anti-communist ones from seeing the light of day. Some black list.

And now 50+ years on, we have a motion picture industry that surprises us when they actually make a movie that ISN'T overtly communist or full of filth.

[miss marmelstein]

I recommend you read a terrific book called "30 Years of Treason" edited by Eric Bentley. It is the transcripts of important HUAC investigations. You'll find some interesting stories having to do with the Screen Writers Guild - a Stalinist union that engaged in blackmail, blacklisting, forced firings as well as brutal re-education seminars for scriptwriters who didn't tow the line. As I recall, one of the Hollywood Ten - the president of the Guild - John Howard Lawson, was a particularly nasty guy.

On an international note, the Soviets forced writers in Russia to only write about swell subjects like the Five Year Plan and the joys of socialism or off to the Gulag. Moscow then gave the same orders to the The American Communist Party which passed them on to the theatrical unions.

[Antoninus]

Why should these people have been required to tell Congress whether they were Democrat, Republican, Nazi or Communist?

They weren't. They could have taken the 5th Amendment and that would have been that. Instead, they chose to make a spectacle of the hearings, and got rightfully slapped with contempt of congress citations. I think the worst any of them got was a $1000 fine.

Compared with what happens to people in every other nation who try to overthrow the government, I'd say they got off light.

[DPB101]

Checking google news for Ann articles is a riot. The left is foaming at the mouth:

Kids fear Ann Coulter
The Tallahassee Democrat - 18 hours ago
... who for the last five days has been awakened
in the middle of the night
by terrifying nightmares -
nightmares featuring television pundit/author Ann Coulter. ...

No substance to any of it. The same old talking points oever and over.

[Antoninus]

Do you really believe that these movie people posed a serious threat to the United States?

Absolutely, positively yes. Stalin was once quoted as saying "If I could control Hollywood, I could take over the world" or words to that effect. As far back as the 1920s and 30s, the communists had developed a program called "Art is a Weapon" and they used it wherever their revolution broke out. Think of Guernica.

Plus, I should point out that the communists were perfectly fine with HUAC investigating German and Italian Americans with Nazi/Fascist sympathies--which is the real reason the committee was started. Like the rotten hypocrites they are, they only turned on HUAC when HUAC started investigating them. Kind of sounds like our friends over at the World Workers' Party pretending to be pacifists, doesn't it?

Some things never change. Communists lying is one.

[Antoninus]

It's interesting that they were ashamed to do so.

Don't for a second assume that they were ashamed. They weren't . They were trying to score political points by discrediting HUAC. They were successful because too many Americans didn't/don't understand that communists are the most ruthless, lying, twisted phonies on earth. Nothing matters but the world revolution. Negotiating with them is like negotiating with Hamas. Ask Chiang Kai-shek.

[miss marmelstein]

No offense but you're fairly offbase about Emma Goldman. She was an Anarchist but became a vehement anti-Communist after a short visit to Russia during the revolution. For ever after, she worked against the Soviets. She had nothing to do with McKinley's assassination. A crazed subscriber to Mother Earth did it without her help or knowledge. A trained nurse, Emma begged to help nurse the dying president. Eventually, she was thrown out of the country during the Palmer Raids but when she visited Canada she would go to the border and look wistfully upon the country she loved. I believe she is buried in Chicago.

Look, she was no saint and had some pretty wacky political views but she was never a Communist.

[Antoninus]

I don't believe this is true. You can plead the Fifth if subpoenaed to testify in front of Congress (unless you have been granted immunity). Ken Lay did it. So did Oliver North.

I believe you're correct. But these worms didn't plead the Fifth. They were going for a full-blown spectacle to score political points and try to discredit the US government.

[Antoninus]

Now if we had nazi's in the govt and nazi party members producing propaganda in hollywood would this problem be easier for you to understand?

Actually, when HUAC was formed, it was for the purpose of rooting out the Nazi spies and sympathizers. The commies were suspiciously silent when this was going on. Par for the course....

[lugsoul]

I was talking about the enthusiasm on this forum. And it is plain.