Replies

"Almost everyone who named names died shortly after it, they were so guilty. But not Kazan. He felt he did the right thing. But what kind of person is that? He was an opportunist."

He didn't feel guilty because he did do the right thing. He was an American, that's the kind of person he was.

To deny that the communists had infiltrated Hollywood is to have your head somewhere dark.

That being said, I saw Carnovsky do King Lear at the Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, CT, in the early sixties. To this day, the most powerful performance I've ever seen.

The entire "Red Baiting" era is one of the most propagandized and distorted periods in American history. Friedman is simply repeating pro-Communist lies created by CPUSA apparatchiks in the 1940s and 50s, often on instructions from Moscow. These lies have become the templates used by most of the establishment media to frame their "reporting" on these issues, and the ideological cornerstones of organizations like People for the American Way, the ACLU and many others.

While HUAC was guilty of some excesses, the actual blacklisting was done by Hollywood studio heads who didn't want to become associated with the Communist label. Even so, most of the people Friedman considers heros could have avoided all their problems simply by testifying honestly before the committee instead of taking the Fifth. Most of the people Kazan named were or had been Communists, as he himself had been.

I worked as a publicist in professional theater for five years and knew many people who had been employed in Hollywood or on Broadway during the HUAC period. No matter how they tried to put lipstick on the Bolshevik pig, they were Commies through and through. They were simply shrill and arrogant enough and had a large enough megaphone to leave the impression that they, not the American people, were the victims of their own treachery. They were actors and professionals at duplicity after all. They loved being able to spit in the eyes of loyal Americans while living off their largess. After all, they were smarter and better and more privileged than the lowly bourgeoisie, weren't they? Sarandon, Fonda, Farrell, Asner, ad nauseum come from a long line of show business liars.