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The House on
Un-American Activities Committee's Hearings
and the People It Affected
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The following information is concerned about the hearings performed by the House
on Un-American Activities Committee - mostly referred to as HUAC - and the
people whose lives were affected by the hearings. Both those who testified and
those who did not. It is about anti-Communism and how it culminated in the "Red
Scare" in the early fifties. But mostly it is about conscience. How people felt
about the whole procedure of "naming names" and how they prioritized morality
and conscience vs. their jobs.
Numerous people were affected by the hearings, some of the early ones were the
19 people who were called to appear before HUAC in 1947, of which ten of them
were to be known as the Hollywood Ten. Among people in the 1950s to be
questioned by HUAC were the director Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and Lillian
Hellman. However, it was not only in real life that the Americans dealt with the
hearings. Many artists also incorporated it into their works, be it in the
movies or in literature. There is also a description of how people perceived the
"Red Menace", and how today’s Hollywood deal with the hearings and the people
who did or did not testify some 45 years ago.
HUAC AND THE RISE OF ANTI-COMMUNISM
"With the tiniest Communist Party in
the world, the United States was behaving as though on the verge of bloody
revolution." (Arthur Miller, Timebends p. 311)
In the 1930s many unions were influenced
by the left-wing - radicals and Communists. This was also true of the labor
movements in Hollywood. The turbulence of the early years of the Screen Writers
Guild is part of the subject treated in Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy
Run?. The Screen Writers Guild was founded in 1933. John Howard Lawson -
later one of the Hollywood Ten - was the leader of the guild. In 1936 there was
a split in the guild and the highest paid screenwriters formed their own union -
the Screen Playwrights. It was not until 1941 that the Screen Writers Guild was
recognized by the producers.
In 1938 the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Martin Dies,
was founded. The committee found that:
"'there are not less than two
thousand outright Communists and Party-liners still holding jobs in the
government in Washington.' - In 1941 he referred to 1,200 subversive
officials."(source 29.
p 89)
In 1945 the Special Committee on
Un-American Activities was made a permanent investigating committee
"enjoying unique subpoena powers"(p 89,
source 29). The name was
changed to the House on Un-American Activities Committee - often referred to as
HUAC, but some places also as HCUA.
1947 was the year when the House Committee had its first serious go at exposing
Communists' influence in the movie industry. HUAC heard ten writers and
directors who were to be known as the Hollywood Ten. The men refused to answer
the House Committee's questions and they were cited for contempt and sentenced
to between 6-12 months in prison.
Where HUAC before 1945 had not really been a very respected part of the state
apparatus, making several unsubstantiated accusations on people who had never
been members or involved with the Communist party, it had changed and now only
went after people which it could prove had been in contact with Communists and
their party. This of course meant that it was taken much more seriously. One
thing which was always more or less evident was that the hearings were not so
much about establishing criminal guilt but rather a way in which to get people
to renounce their past - and in some cases their friends. For the most part the
Committee already knew the names that it demanded that the testifies should
name. Ellen Schrecker calls the hearings "a symbolic ritual",
Victor Navasky "degradation ceremonies" and Arthur Miller and
Lillian Hellman referred to it as "an inquisition."
Before World War II there was a strong anti-Communism in the USA, but during the
war when the United States and the USSR became allied, the American government
attempted to give a more positive picture of Russia. The Roosevelt
administration even asked Hollywood to make at least one "pro-Soviet" movie, it
was named Mission to Moscow. However, no sooner was World War II over
when the Cold War began, and the USA went back to its old anti-Communism stand,
only with much more vigor than ever before. It was under President Truman - a
Democrat - that the "Red Scare" was truly instigated: "Truman and the
liberals in Congress.... [tried] to create a new national unity for the postwar
years - with the executive order on loyalty oaths, Justice Department
prosecutions, and anti-Communist legislation." (source
4.)
To get the "Red Scare" in perspective it would be worth mentioning two cases
which helped keep the public aware of the "Communist threat". The first case
involved Alger Hiss who testified before HUAC in 1948 accused of being a
Communist which he claimed he was not - which was true. However, in 1950 he was
convicted to 5 years of prison for perjury, but he could have been indicted for
espionage as well if it had not been because "the statue of limitations
shielded Hiss from a substantive espionage charge." (source
29. p 60). The second trial took place in 1950
when the married couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were accused and convicted of
espionage. They were executed in 1953 as Soviet spies.
Still, it seems that even Truman discovered that he had pushed things too hard.
I found this tragic-comic quotation by President Truman, it is from The New
York Times, July 29, 1951:
"This malicious propaganda has
gone so far that on the Fourth of July, over in Madison, Wisconsin, People
were afraid to say they believed in the Declaration of Independence. A
hundred and twelve people were asked to sign a petition that contained
nothing except quotations from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill
of Rights. One hundred and eleven of these people refused to sign that paper
-many of them because they were afraid that it was some kind of subversive
document and that they would lose their jobs or be called Communists."(source
14)
The 1950s is the decade which has come
to be paired with McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy's hearings and the man himself got
much more press coverage than HUAC ever did. His committee was much less
thorough in its investigations of the people it called to appear before it.
Quite a lot of those who were called had never had any associations with the
left-wing.
The time from 1947 - while the appeal cases for the Hollywood Ten - to 1951 was
a relative quiet period in Hollywood. But in 1951 HUAC began its second round of
hearings, and this time it really hurt a great number of people in Hollywood.
Making people choose between their jobs and their personal convictions those who
testified before the Committee and named names had a chance to get back to work
in Hollywood, while those who did not were blacklisted and found it impossible
to get work (officially) in the movie business - for most blacklisted this was
true all through the 1950s. About eighty percent of those who did not cooperate
lost their jobs.
THE HOLLYWOOD TEN
The Hollywood Ten and the influence they had on the future testifies who were to
be called before the Un-American Activities Committee was not an insignificant
one. Witnesses who were to appear before the Committee in the years to come knew
that if they were to take the First Amendment, as the Ten had done, it would
most likely result in contempt of Congress and be followed by a time in prison.
On September 15, 1947 Newsweek ran a short piece about HUAC:
"Don't look for any so-called
corrective legislation to result from the forthcoming Un-American Activities
Committee investigation of Communism in Hollywood. Primarily the committee
is fishing for headlines. By citing specific examples of Communist
influences in movie scripts, the group hopes to alert the public to
them."(p. 13)
In 1947 19 people were subpoenaed to
appear before HUAC. The Committee wanted to prove that the:
"card-carrying party members
dominated the Screen Writers Guild, that Communists had succeeded in
introducing subversive propaganda into motion pictures, and that President
Roosevelt had brought improper pressure to bear upon the industry to produce
pro-Soviet films during the war."(source
28p. 408) .
Although 19 people had been subpoenaed
by the Un-American Activities Committee only 10 of them appeared before the
Committee. Among them were Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Edward Dmytryk, John
Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner, Jr. Besides these there were also 9 who did not
get to testify - at least not in 1947, some of them were Larry Parks, Gordon
Kahn, Robert Rossen and Richard Collins.
The Hollywood Ten had agreed on taking the first amendment as a defense and each
of them refused to answer the question "Are you now or have you ever been a
member of the Communist Party?" All ten had indeed been members of that party,
but they would not answer the question as a matter of principle, claiming
(naturally) that it was their business - especially since the Communist Party,
at that time, was not illegal in the United States. The hearing itself - held on
October 27. - was vividly described by a correspondent from Newsweek in
the edition of November 10, 1947:
"The hearing room by now was in
turmoil. Thomas, Stripling [investigator], and Lawson were all shouting at
once. His face and neck flaming red, Thomas kept banging his gavel, but the
screen writer ignored him. The 400 men and women in the audience...booed and
cheered. The six newsreel cameras hummed. The 30 newspaper photographers
scurried around, exploding flashbulbs." (p. 17)
The Ten were all hold in contempt and in
1948 they were imposed to serve up to one year prison sentences. But they did
not serve their time until 1950 because of their appeals.
On November 24, 1947, fifty of the most important people in the American movie
industry gathered for a meeting in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. They
discussed what to do about the Un-American Activities Committee's preoccupation
with Communism in Hollywood. The result of the meeting was a statement, which
was read before the press. First of all, they would fire the men who had been
cited for contempt, that is the Hollywood Ten. Furthermore the industry would
not hire any Communists and it would discharge people who were known to be
Communists.
"The action was unprecedented. Never
before had an industry combined to bar Communists and other subversive from
employment" - "The Communists were on their way out. The industry would not
stop with the accused ten. It planned to ask the screen unions to help it
eliminate other suspected Communists.(Newsweek, Dec 8, 1947 p. 24-25)
It has been stated many times that
if only Hollywood had stood together against the Un-American Activities
Committee the blacklist and the later hearings might have been avoided. Ellen
Schrecker says: "The official manifestations of McCarthyism - the public
hearings, FBI investigations, and criminal prosecutions - would not have been as
effective had they not been reinforced by the private sector."(source
2.) In Newsweek, December 8, 1947, there
is likewise an indication that had the meeting in New York turned out
differently, the blacklist would not have been implemented. It said that the
Committee's "victory was especially surprising" because it had not
been obvious that it would win the case, and that "representatives of the
[movie] industry, who appeared before the committee, had stubbornly refused to
fire the suspected Communists on their payrolls," (p. 25) and the
well-known producer Samuel Goldwyn had denounced the Committee. The
movie-magnates probably changed their minds because of poor economy and public
relations. The industry was going through a tough time and it did not need any
bad publicity, thus the outcome. Towards the end of the article in Newsweek
the journalist writes "The industry feared what the House committee might
do next. So it decided to clean house, and thereby make itself less susceptible
to attack." Of course, that was not what happened at all. Yes, there was
a more or less tranquil period between 1948 and 1951, but then the House on
Un-American Activities Committee was back.
The blacklist thus came into action in 1947. "The Motion Picture
Association of America denied that the industry kept a blacklist, but said that
no Fifth [or First] Amendment takers...who hadn't purged themselves before
a...congressional committee could...work in Hollywood"(source
33. p 86). Despite this claim of not having any
blacklist the Hollywood Ten are referred to as "black-listed by Hollywood
for their defiance of [HUAC]" in Newsweek as early as December 8,
1947 (p 12).
DALTON TRUMBO AND EDWARD DMYTRYK OF THE HOLLYWOOD TEN
Dalton Trumbo was fired from MGM almost immediately after the hearing. In 1948
he was found guilty of contempt of Congress and in 1950 - after a negative
outcome of the appeals case - he was sent to prison. While in jail Trumbo wrote
some poems for his family, this is one of them:
"Say then but this of me:
Preferring not to crawl on his knees
In freedom to a bowl of buttered slops
Set out for him by some contemptuous clown,
He walked to jail on his feet." (source
29., p. 498)
The contempt Trumbo felt for the
House Committee is obvious. When he got out of prison he was blacklisted. He
could not get work in Hollywood under his own name until 1960. This did not mean
that Trumbo did not write films for an entire decade, it just meant that he
wrote under pseudonyms and fronts - not getting any credits and for a lot less
money than he was used to. Still, it was writers like Trumbo who helped end the
blacklist. One of the reasons for that was that he repeatedly won Oscars. He got
an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Brave One in 1957. He had
written it under pseudonym, and so naturally no one came forward to claim the
prize. A rather awkward moment for the movie industry. However, it was not until
1960 that Universal gave Trumbo credit "as the writer of Spartacus "(source
29. p. 520) another film that earned him an
Oscar.
Dalton Trumbo never gave any names to the House Committee, he remained an
unfriendly witness. So did eight of the other men in the Hollywood Ten group.
The only one to reappear before the Un-American Activities Committee as a
friendly witness was Edward Dmytryk. An action never forgotten by the other Ten.
Dmytryk had found it intolerable not being able to work, and as he came to the
conclusion that he no longer believed in the ideas of the Communist Party, he
decided that he would testify before the Committee, and give them what they
wanted. He did not do it, however, until after he had served his 6-month term in
prison. Actually, he started the procedure of appearing before the Committee
while still in prison. He did not tell Albert Maltz, who were to become
extremely angry with Dmytryk and never forgave him for his decision. Edward
Dmytryk said about his choice:
"I had long been convinced
that the fight of the Ten was political...I believed that I was being forced
to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from
which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and
distrust." (source 33.
p 236) - "I would have to name names, and I knew the problems this would
cause...my decision was made easier by the fact that....I couldn't name
anybody who hadn't already been identified as a Party member. Weighing
everything- pro and con, I knew I had to testify." (p. 236) - "I did not
want to remain a martyr to something that I absolutely believed was immoral
and wrong."(source 33.
p. 238)
There are two important things
which Dmytryk says in these two paragraphs. One is that he testified because he
now was opposed to the Communist Party and the other that he only named names
that had already been mentioned. They are important because they are so typical
of what the friendly witnesses would use as justification for their testimonies.
On the day Dmytryk testified the hearing was described in an article in
Newsweek under the title Hollywood Serial Story. It began: "Hollywood's
show before [HUAC] was almost good enough to bring back vaudeville" (Newsweek,
may 7, 1951 p. 26) It is difficult to find the anguish that these people had
gone through - and would go through - to do what they did! During his testimony
Edward Dmytryk gave the committee 26 names. Shortly thereafter he was off the
blacklist and back in business in Hollywood, directing movies. In 1973 Dmytryk
told - on TV - how he had felt about collaborating with the committee. He said
what he had said before, that he had not named names that had not been named
before and that he would not defend the Communist Party. (source
33. p. 238)
The question of guilt seems to be a never ending discussion. Some say forgive
others say revenge. Dalton Trumbo believed in the former. About Lillian Hellman
Trumbo said: "Lillian Hellman once said 'Forgiveness is God's job, not mine.'
Well, so is vengeance, you know." (source
33. p. 392) In 1970 Dalton Trumbo gave a speech
before the Screen Writers Guild, in which he said that everybody involved with
the hearings, both the friendly and the unfriendly witnesses had been victims:
"....the blacklist was a time
of evil, and...no one on either side who survived it came through untouched
by evil" - "it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or
devils because there were none; there were only victims...because almost
without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to
say, to do thing he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he
truly did not want to exchange."(source
33. p . 387-388)
This ecchoes what Eli Kazan said,
(a director who named names): "I did what I did because it was the more
tolerable of two alternatives that were, either way, painful, even disastrous,
and either way wrong for me. That's what a difficult decision means: Either way
you go, you lose. " (source 31.
p. 462)
Trumbo's speech really set Albert Maltz off. He was of the opposite opinion. He
felt that the friendly witnesses had not paid enough for their deeds, and that
being ostracized from the society forever was a mild punishment. Maltz wrote in
The New York Times:
"There is currently in vogue a
thesis pronounced first by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during
the years of blacklist was equally a "victim." This is factual nonsense and
represents a bewildering moral position."(source
33. p. 389)
Maltz and Trumbo spent the next
months discussing this subject - they never came to agree on the matter. Trumbo
thought that one should forgive - Maltz thought one should never forgive them.
Still, to his death Trumbo said that he felt uncomfortable around people he knew
testified as friendly witnesses before HUAC and that he would rather not
associate with them.
OTHER WITNESSES AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR TESTIMONIES
When the House on Un-American Activities Committee began its second round of
hearings in Hollywood on March 21, 1951 the first witnesses to appear before the
House Committee was the actor Larry Parks and director Edward Dmytryk. Larry
Parks had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s. His testimony is
said to be one of the most excruciating ever given before the Committee. Dmytryk
said that "[Parks'] tortured testimony was so copiously reported that it
haunted him throughout his life."(source
33. p 236) Before the House Committee Parks at
first did not want to name names, he said "[it would be contrary to] American
justice to confront me with the choice of going to jail [for contempt] or
crawling through the mud to be an informer..."(Newsweek, April 2,
1951 p. 21) and "I don't think this is American justice...So I beg of you not
to force me to do this."(source
28 p. 493) Parks also referred to his two small
children: "Is this the kind of heritage that I must hand down to them? Is
this the kind of heritage that you would like to hand down to your children?"(source
33. p. 360)
The Committee insisted that Parks should name names and he finally agreed to do
it in executive session. But Larry Parks' career was destroyed. After the
hearing Parks contract with Columbia Pictures was canceled, he worked on only
three more films until his death in 1976 (source
33.p. 373). It is difficult not to feel sorry
for Larry Parks. There was a picture taken of Parks during the hearing, which
followed the article in Newsweek, it showed a man truly tormented. The
last words of Larry Parks in the magazine were these: "Parks was 'sick at
heart and sick in bed,' wondering what would now become of himself and his
family." (Newsweek, April 2, 1951 p. 21) Arthur Miller said about the
people who named names that he "felt distaste for those who groveled before
this tawdry tribune of moralistic vote-snatchers, but I had as much pity as
anger toward them." (source
32, p. 329)
There were also people who, when subpoenaed, left the country. One of those was
the screenwriter (The African Queen) Gordon Kahn who was one of the
original 19 who had been subpoenaed by the House Committee in 1947. Like many
others - including Albert Maltz and Dalton Trumbo (source
34. p. 176) - he fled to Mexico, where he lived
with his family for five years. Kahn was identified by witnesses in 1951-53, and
in the years 1937-1949, he had 28 credits, after that he never got another
credit. (source 29.
p. 559) Before Kahn fled to Mexico he wrote a letter to his wife explaining how
he felt about the committee's demand that he name names:
"If now, in full flight from
any principle I possess, I went and recanted everything and every decent
thing I believe in, it wouldn't be enough. They'd want to know 'Who else?
Now that you are purged who else? Give us names, dates and places!' Do you
think I could live with myself for a minute after I did a thing like that?
Or with you? Or could face my children? If this is a decent world when they
grow up, they'd spit on me and be perfectly justified in doing so... No.
I've got to hang on to something and if I can't be the most prosperous
writer, I want to be able to hold my head up among the people of America and
the world." (source 9.)
When holding Larry Parks' and Gordon
Kahn's "testimonies" up against each other, they in many ways seem very alike.
They both do not want to give names, they both mention being able to look their
children in the eye, and they both have major problems with their conscience and
they also take their jobs under consideration. And still, they come to
completely different conclusions. One testifies and one does not. Naturally, it
is necessary to take into consideration that Gordan Kahn never actually
testified before the Un-American Activities Committee, but fled the country.
It seems that in some cases it came down to how strong a psyche they had, in
others how badly they wanted to keep their job, and in some cases it even seemed
that the friendly witnesses really believed that they were doing a good thing,
when they named names.
One of those who seemed to be a keen anti-Communist was the actor Adolphe Menjou
who testified before the Un-American Activities Committee on November 3, 1947 -
7 days before the Hollywood Ten went before the committee. Menjou was certainly
very enthusiastic when it came to getting rid of Communists. A magazine report
from the hearing - which also included such people as Ronald Reagan, Robert
Taylor, Gary Cooper, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and the writer Ayn Rand who -
by the way - were all friendly witnesses - quoted Menjou: "I'm a Red-baiter;
I'm a witch-hunter if the witches are Communists" when asked:
"...why so many highly paid writers
were opposed to capitalism and democracy [Menjou explained] ' We find
crackpots everywhere. We have them in California - political idiots,
political morons, dangerous Communists....I don't think 'Mission to Moscow'
should have been made. It's a thoroughly dishonest picture."(Newsweek
November 3, 1947 p. 25)
On the same day, incidentally,
producer Jack Warner defended Mission to Moscow as being a product made
during a war when Russia had been an allied. He further said that: "...he
always made it a policy 'to turn my back whenever I see one of those Reds
coming."(source 32,
, p. 301) And then Warner named a lot of people most
of them writers; among them: Alvah Bessie, Gordon Kahn, Ring Lardner, Jr. ,
Albert Maltz, and Howard Koch. (Newsweek, November 3, 1947, p. 24)
CONSCIENCE, BLACKLISTING AND THE HEARINGS IN FICTION
Of course what went on in life were mirrored in the world of fiction, here
characters - likewise - lived with anti-Communism, hearings and blacklists. Here
follows a brief analysis of three novels dealing with this subject. They are by
Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg and Norman Mailer. Fitzgerald's novel The Last
Tycoon introduces the theme of Communism in Hollywood and hints at what will
be happening in the near future.
In the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald the main
character Stahr, a big time movie mogul, says:
"Writers are children - even
in normal times they can't keep their minds on their work."(source
25.p. 145) - "I don't want to kick anybody
out if they do their work...I never thought...that I had more brains than a
writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me - because I
knew how to use them." (source
25.150-151)
This seems to be a prevailing
sentiment in Hollywood. During the hearings before the House Committee in
October, 1947 the witnesses - mostly actors and producers - said that: "...by
far the most troublesome of all [Communists in Hollywood] were the writers."(Newsweek
November 3, 1947 p. 24)
Jack Warner mentioned a bunch of writers before the House committee - If the
producers could not control them they would fire them. Also one should remember
that most of the men that Warner mentioned in his testimony were writers who had
all caused trouble in the industry by founding the Screen Writers Guild and
arranging strikes. It was probably not "just" to get Communism out of Hollywood
that the producers named certain writers, it had very likely as much to do with
getting rid of trouble makers.
Stahrs final words on Communists is what came to be part of the "excuse" for the
hunting of Communists and left-wingers: "This fellow has an influence over
you,' [Stahr] said darkly, 'Over all you young people. You don't know what
you're doing."(source 25.
p. 152) The People should be protected from the Communists and their ideas.
What Makes Sammy Run? AND ITS AUTHOR BUDD SCHULBERG
What Makes Sammy Run by Bud Schulberg is especially relevant because
it deals with the Guild, blacklisting and the decisions concerning whether or
not to give in to anti-Communist pressures, but it was written by a man who
would ten years later testify before the House Committee as a friendly witness.
Like Stahr in The Last Tycoon Al (the narrator)says he is an
individualist. He wants to make up his own mind about things and he says to his
friend Kit: "I haven't got anything against the Guild...But, oh, hell, I
guess I'm an individualist" (source
25. p. 127) Meaning that although he does join
the Guild, he does not feel altogether at peace with it. The same problem that
Budd Schulberg himself had with the Party at the very time he was writing this
novel.
There are certain similarities between the following passage and Walter Disney's
testimony before HUAC. He too was very preoccupied with the possibility of
Communists in the guilds. In Sammy some of the big shots in Hollywood
discuss the Guild:
"If this bunch of Reds have
their way we'll be marching down Hollywood Boulevard in their May Day
Parade,' Wilson said. 'What do you mean, Reds?' I said. ' Well, maybe not
Reds,' Paine said...'But they're goddam parlor-pinks and that’s just as bad.
It's up to the responsible element to save the Guild." (source
25.p. 137) -
Walter Disney testified on October 24,
1947 before the committee. He named several names - most of them people who had
organized unions and strikes in his company. Almost his entire testimony is
about how the organized labor is annoying him. He says of union man: "I think
Sorrell is sure tied up with [the Communists]. If he isn't a Communist sure
should be one." and when asked "Do you feel that there is a threat of
Communism in the motion-picture industry?" Disney replies:
"Yes, there is, and there are
many reasons why they would like to take it or get in and control it, or
disrupt it, but I don't think they have gotten very far, and I think the
industry is made up of good Americans, just like in my plant, good, solid
Americans. My boys have been fighting it longer than I have. They are trying
to get out from under it and they will in time if we can just show them up."
(source 12.)
In Sammy - almost like in real
life - the film company that the characters in the book work for, one day
demands that all the employees who wish to stay on as employees have to sign a
resignation form from the Guild. Al Manheim, the narrator, finds it very
difficult to decide what to do. He talks to his friend Kit about it:
"I guess I'd like to be a hero
and flush this goddam resignation blank down the drain. But there's no use
kidding myself. I feel like a tug-of-war, the whole damned business, the
rope and both teams pulling." (source
25.p. 182-83). Kit says: "Al, I'm afraid
that's a lonely battle you've got to fight out with yourself...But I
wouldn't feel you were ratting out if you did. It's too late for that."(source
25.p. 183)
Al decides to sign the form:
"Guild or a sewing circle I
had gone down the line for them every way I could. It had to stop somewhere.
After all, I had come out here to be a writer, not a second John L. Lewis.
So I took the paper out and scribbled my name at the bottom."(source
25.p. 184)
However, after his nemesis Sammy
compliments Al on signing the form, Al tears it to shreds. When the company
finds out, he is immediately fired. He says to his agent:
"So I'm really on the
blacklist?' 'If there was a blacklist, I guess you'd be on it, all
right...But they don't need anything like that in this chummy little
business. All it takes is a couple of big shots happening to mention it over
a poker game...That's why you should have played ball."(source
25.p. 191)
Like several people in the real world,
Al regrets his choice and so when Sammy gives him another change to return to
Hollywood, Al takes it:
"The trouble with Hollywood is
that too many people who won't leave are ashamed to be there. But when a
moving picture is right, it socks the eye and the ear and the solar plexus
all at once and that is a hell of a temptation for any writer. I felt that
when I went back for the fourth time to see The Informer...And even when I
saw one of my own jobs, a stinker if there ever was one, but with one scene
in it that sang because I happened onto real picture technique...Hollywood
may be full of phonies, mediocrities, dictators and good men who have lost
their way, but there is something that draws you there that you should not
be ashamed of."(source 25.p.
233-34).
This fascination with Hollywood
most likely also applied to Budd Schulberg himself. Having grown up there, with
a movie mogul for a dad, surrounded by famous people - even writing a book about
Fitzgeralds last years, and writing screenplays, working with a director like
Elia Kazan, there is little doubt that Schulberg was very much into Hollywood!
When Schulberg was named by Richard Collins, he sent a telegram to the House
Committee in which he offered to cooperate with it "in any way I can"(source
33. p. 239) On May 23, 1951 Schulberg testified
before the House on Un-American Activities Committee. He told that he had been a
member of the Communist Party from 1937-39 and that he had left it because he
did not like the way its members tried to tell him how to write his books.
Newsweek reported:
"Budd Schulberg...told of his
youthful indiscretion in joining the party. He described how he had rejected
Communism when party critics began attacking his work as 'decadent' and
'depressing.' "(Newsweek, June 4, 1951 p. 19-20)
Reminiscent of Al in What Makes
Sammy Run? Schulberg said his works had been accused by Party members as
being "much too individualistic" (source
33. p. 239) During the hearing Schulberg named
fifteen names: "They had all been named - there wasn't much new I could add."(source
33. p. 243) and later he said:
"I expressed doubts [about
naming names]- it would be inhuman not to. But I truly felt the Communist
Party was a menace. It was hard for me to see myself doing anything to help
the Communist Party." (source
33. p. 245)
This is almost exactly what Elia
Kazan says in his biography.
Many years after his testimony, Schulberg says that he does not regret naming
names, although he would have preferred not to. "Budd Schulberg has, like
Kazan, continued to justify his decision."((source
33. p. 242)
About his problems with his conscience about naming names he spoke to a friend
of his. The friend told him:
"First, you argue inside
yourself...Second, you go out of the Party...Third,...you realize you have
not been true to yourself....he would not be true to himself if he did not
speak out on something he thought was a scourge." (source
33. p. 245)
Schullberg also attacks those who were
members of the Party, but did not speak out. He is especially scornful towards
playwright Lillian Hellman. He said she would excuse any cruelty done by the
Russian government, in the name of Communism:
"They question our talking. I
question their silence. There were premature anti-fascists but there were
also premature anti-Stalinists." (source
33. p. 246)
ELIA KAZAN, HIS CONSCIENCE, AND FRIENDS
"In their guts, however, they
remained newcomers to America, with all the uncertainties immigrants have.
Anxious to be everyone's friend, they would head up charities, dish out
favors, seek the company of men who had larger influence, make frequent
optimistic statements to certify their good hearts, and take popular
positions as often and as publicly as possible to reaffirm their civic and
national loyalty - which no one had questioned. A crisis revealed their
insecurity. Like most immigrants then, they would defend themselves by
flaunting their patriotism. I do not altogether exclude myself from this
characterization." Elia Kazan A Life p. 451.
Elia Kazan is one of the most
well-known friendly witnesses. Not only because he named names - many before and
after him had done that as well, but because he was so "open" about it. He took
out an advertisement after the hearings, telling what he had done and why, and
encouraging others to do the same, he made movies that favored the characters
that "squealed" and he never changed his mind about having testified. He did not
enjoy doing it, and he did have serious problems with his conscience years after
his appearance before the House on Un-American Activities Committee. But he
never excused. He believed he had done what he had to do under the given
circumstances. For many he became the "ultimate betrayer." (source
33. p. 206)
In his biography, Kazan deals at great length with his appearance before the
Committee and the consequences it had for him and his friends. When rereading
Odet's play Waiting for Lefty fifty years after he had performed it with
the Group Theater, Kazan says:
"I'd turned violently
anti-Communist. But the yearning for meaning, for dignity, for security in
life, stirred me now as it had then. The Communists got their influence and
their power by speaking up for these universal human desires. It seemed that
I hadn't changed; they had."(source
31.p. 115)
It was not until Nazi-Germany
invaded Poland and Russia, during the Second World War, that Kazan was really
turned off by the Communists who, until then, had believed that the war was an
imperialistic one and then said it was "a war to save civilization." (source
31.p. 231).BR> Thirteen years later (1952)
Kazan was subpoenaed by the House on Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan had
decided even before he was called, that he would not name names: "while I
would tell the whole truth about myself, I would refuse to name any of my old
friends." (source 31.p.
432) And so, when he appeared before the House committee on January 14, 1952, he
knew what he would do. Before the hearing - which would be held in executive
session - Kazan told the committee investigator Raphael Nixon about the Group
Theater and stated that his "disgust" with the Party had made him leave it. When
asked about Clifford Odets Kazan replied that he would "cooperate in every
way about myself but would not discuss others."(source
31.p. 445) Nixon did not pressure Kazan to name
names merely advised him "to reconsider whether I wanted to withhold names
from the committee." During the hearing itself Kazan still refused to name
names. This meant that he would be called back - and next time it would be a
public session.
The next months Kazan went through a lot. First of all he felt sick, he could
not sleep and he felt up-tight. At this time Elia Kazan still believed that he
would not be a cooperative witness. He told his analyst that he was willing to
give up film making, and go back to working at the theater, since he would
undoubtedly loose his job if he did not name names: "I can take the
loss,'...'I'm wondering...if your fellow members would do the same for you if
they were called upon to protect you by endangering their careers.' [his analyst
said]" (source 31.p.
448)
But Kazan was not at all as sure of himself as this might imply. At the same
time he had become a fervent anti-Communist and believed that the Communist
Party was "a thoroughly organized, worldwide conspiracy."(p. 449) Kazan
says:
"So I was in the clutch of a
dilemma, between two emotions swaying one way, then the other, and the
squeeze was just beginning. I didn't want to cooperate with this committee.
On the other hand, I didn't want to defend the Party by a silence on
critical point of their inquiry."(source
31.p. 449)
Arthur Miller explains in his biography
- Timebends - why many informers, like Kazan, explained their cooperation with
the committee as a "moral" obligation:
"...it came down to a
governmental decree of moral guilt that could easily be made to disappear by
ritual speech: intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting former
beliefs. This last was probably the saddest and truest part of the charade,
for by the early 1950s there were few, and even fewer in the arts, who had
not left behind their illusions about the Soviets." (source
32, , p. 331)
After much thought Kazan began to sway
towards the decision to cooperate:
"You can't give that committee
names!' I said to myself. But why should I be alone out in the cold? I
hadn't heard from any of the others in our cell, although they all knew what
had happened." (source 31.p.
459)
Kazan started asking himself if
the "Comrades" would have done the same for him, if the roles had been reversed.
He began weighing his career against not testifying against something he no
longer believed in: "I would give up my film career if it was in the
interests of defending something I believed in but not this." (source
31.p. 460) So Kazan says that part of his
decision to be a friendly witness was the factor that he wanted to keep his job.
Arthur Miller thought that Elia Kazan was:
"a genius of the theater...to
be barred from his métier, kicked into the street, would be for him like a
nightmarish overturning of the earth itself. He had always said he came from
survivors and that the job was to survive." (source
32, 333)
Another writer and director, Abe
Polonsky who did not cooperate with the committee and who was subsequently
blacklisted agrees with Kazan that if he had not named names, he could not have
continued working in Hollywood: "...it was not a moral, ethical, or political
question at all. It was a practical question - but people don't like to see it
that way because it makes their character less worthy." (source
33. p. 279)
Now, there is an interesting incident which both Miller and Kazan have depicted
in their respective biographies. It is a day in early April, 1952 when the two
of them take a walk in the woods, and Kazan tells Miller about his decision to
name names. Although they describe the exact same scene, even down to the
weather condition, the interpretation of what took place is somewhat opposite of
each other. Kazan says that he felt that his friend Arthur understood him, and
forgave him for what he would do, and that they parted on "affectionate terms":
"Walking back to the
house...[Miller] put his arm around me in his awkward way...and said, 'Don't
worry about what I'll think. Whatever you do will be okay with me. Because I
know your heart is in the right place.'...There was no doubt that Art meant
it and that he was anxious to say this to me before we separated." (source
31., p. 461)
In his biography Arthur Miller describes
the drive up to his friend, and how he has a strong feeling of what Kazan is
going to tell him. Miller says that he felt his "anger rising, not against
[Kazan], whom I loved like a brother, but against the Committee." (p. 332)
When Elia Kazan does tell Miller about what he is going to do Miller feels both
sympathy and fear towards him:
"Had I been of his generation,
he would have had to sacrifice me as well. And finally that was all I could
think of. I could not get past it...I was growing cooler...I could still be
up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of Party writers
years ago...I felt a silence rising around me...It was sadness, purely
mournful, deadening..." (source
32, p. 333-334)
As he drove off, Miller says:
"We...waved rather grimly as I pulled away." (source
32, p. 33)
I said in the beginning Kazan has never regretted his decision and does not feel
like apologizing:
"Reader, I don't seek your
favor. I've been telling you only some of the things I was asking myself on
the way 'down'. But if you expect an apology now because I would later name
names to the House Committee, you've misjudged my character. The 'horrible,
immoral thing' I would do, I did out of my true self. Everything before was
seventeen years of posturing." (source
31.p. 460)
Although some might claim, that it was
not to keep the Communist Party out of the spotlight, that they refused to name
names, but that it was to avoid other people getting hurt.
Kazan did ask his friend Clifford Odets if he could name him. Odets said yes,
and they both agreed on going through with naming names before the committee.
Elia Kazan says that he later regretted that he had influenced Odets to become a
friendly witness, because it broke him psychological. He was never to write
another play.
"Out of the Red: Elia Kazan, stage
and film director of 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' admitted that he was a
member of the Communist Party for eighteen months in the mid '30s when there
was 'no clear opposition' between the United States and Russia, the House
Un-American Activities Committee disclosed. Kazan testified he joined the
party in 1934 and quit...later with a 'deep and abiding hatred' of Red
philosophy. On Saturday, Kazan took a two-column ad in The New York Times
to explain his stand." (Newsweek, April 21, 1952 p. 60)
This ad that is mentioned was an
ad that Kazan's wife at the time, Molly, suggested and wrote. She felt that the
ad could help explain why Kazan had done what he did. The ad, however, did not
have the effected they had hoped for: "it brought me scorn and hardened the
antagonism."(source 31.p.
465) Lillian Hellman wrote in her biography Scoundrel Time: "Kazan followed
[his testimony] up with an advertisement in The New York Times that is hard to
believe for its pious shit." (source
30. p. 98,)
After the testimony - in which he named eight people, all from the old Group
Theater - Kazan does say that he felt some doubt as to whether or not he had
done the right thing:
"I still believed that what
I'd done was correct, but...there was something indecent...in what I'd
done...No one who did what I did...came out of it undamaged. I did not. Here
I am, thirty-five years later, still worrying over it." (source
31.p. 465)
If Kazan had had problems with his
conscience it was nothing compared to what he would go through the next year,
not to mention the rest of his life. In his biography he has published segments
from his diary. Two days after the hearing Kazan wrote:
"Stayed home all day.
Miserably depressed. Can't get my mind off it. I know I've done something
wrong. Still convinced I would have done something worse if I'd done the
opposite. I spend every minute making rationalizations for my act." (source
31.p. 466)
When he returned to the studio,
people ignored him, they crossed the street to avoid meeting him, he got crank
phone calls and he got hate mail. One blamed him for an actors dismissal,
because Kazan had mentioned his name, another said: "I shall continue to
great you in the course of our associations but only on the basis of formal
courtesy." (source 31.p.
468):
"I really didn't understand
the intensity of my guilt - everything rational told me that I'd done right
- but I seemed to have crossed some fundamental and incontrovertible line of
tolerance for human error and sin." (source
31.p. 468)
A lot of friendships were
destroyed by the hearings held by the Un-American Activities Committee: "the
destruction seemed total when the sundering of friendships was so often with
people whom the witness had not ceased to love."(
source 32, p. 339). One
of the most famous of such destroyed friendships is probably the one that
existed between Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan. And so the person who most hurt
him by his absence was his close friend Arthur Miller. Kazan did not hear
anything from Miller after he had testified, until one day Kazan reads in a
paper that Miller disapproved of his action and that he would have nothing more
to do with him:
"It would have been nice if
Art, at this moment, while expressing the strong disapproval he felt, had
acknowledged some past friendship - or even written me a few words, however
condemnatory. But he didn't, not a word...Although many years later I would
enjoy Art's company when we met...and would even direct another play of his
[After the Fall], I would never really feel toward him quite what a friend
should. Nor, I imagine, he toward me." (source
31., p. 472) - "I've been perplexed and
angry at him, as he, I must believe, has been disgusted and mad at me...But
I like Miller; I wouldn't even mind being cast away on a desert island with
him." (source 31.
p. 530)
As already mentioned, Budd Schulberg
also appeared before the House committee as a friendly witness. He believes,
like Kazan, that he did the right thing, and that there was a Communist
conspiracy going on. The two men knew each other before they testified, but
after the hearings they both felt a kind like kindred spirits:
"Budd had testified as I had,
been reviled by many of his old companions as I'd been. His closest friend
had stopped talking to him as Miller had shunned me. Now the 'progressives'
had us both on their shit list. As we talked that first night in New Hope,
there was an immediate warm sympathy between us. We became brothers." (source
31.p. 487)
They would make movies together,
that all dealt on a larger or bigger scale with the "stool pigeon", seen in a
positive light. One of those movies was On the Waterfront. Originally
Kazan and Miller had been working on a film project about the waterfront. But
after Kazan's testimony, they went each their way. Kazan and Schulberg made
On the Waterfront about a man who "realizes his obligation to fink on his
fellow hoods."(source 33.
p. 199) while Arthur Miller, who in 1956 testified as an unfriendly witness
before HUAC, made his own waterfront picture namely A View From A Bridge
which "tried simultaneously to understand and condemn the informer."(source
33. p. 199)
On the Waterfront went on to win numerous Oscars, and Kazan remembers
that that night: "I was tasting vengeance...and enjoying it."(source
31.p. 529) Kazan says that he was "comforted
by something Budd Schulberg wrote me: his experience paralleled my own, 'The
person in my difficulty,' he said, 'since he cannot please all his old friends,
must settle for pleasing himself." (source
31.p. 471) Kazan took this to his heart.
Like several other witnesses Kazan worried about how his children would
"carry the burden of my 'informing' and be ashamed. This worry never ceased."(source
31.p. 472) The producer Kermit Bloomgarden, who
had worked with Kazan, said to him before he testified, when asked what
Bloomgarden thought about Kazan's intention to name names:
"Everyone must do what his
conscience tells him to do.' [Kazan] said, 'I've got to think of my kids.'
And I said, 'This too shall pass, and then you'll be an informer in the eyes
of your kids, think of that."(source
33. p. 201-202)
Bad conscience keep haunting Elia Kazan.
He says that while he was writing his biography - which was published in 1988 -
he had a dream about Tony Kraber - a man he named before the committee:
"I thought what a terrible
thing I'd done; not the political aspect of it...but the human side of the
thing. I said to myself, 'You hurt another human being, a friend of yours
and his family, and no 'political aspect' matters two shits.'...What good
deeds were stimulated by what I'd done? What villains exposed? How is the
world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence,
and I'd been taken in and twisted from my true self. I'd fallen for
something I shouldn't have, no matter how hard the pressure and no matter
how sound my reasons. Then I woke all the way and had breakfast. I knew the
past was past and there was nothing to do about it."(source
31.p. 685)
Arthur Miller on the same subject:
"I was experiencing a
bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before, a hatred
of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom. Who or what was now
safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate
himself? What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?" (source
32, p. 334)
Kazan's final words on the matter
is about his friend Odets who was destroyed by the hearing. Kazan again say how
sorry he feels about having "persuading" him to testify: "that [Odets]
needed...to have people respect him as their hero - something I could, as I
finally had to, get along without." (source
31.p. 818)
KAZAN AND LILLIAN HELLMAN
I believe that I had better give Hellman a separate section. Mainly because she
is widely acclaimed for her resistance to the House committee, but also because
I do not think I can put her under the section titled "Elia Kazan, His
Conscience and Friends", because Hellman was not a friend of Kazan's. In
fact she was one of Kazan's most fervent attackers.
Lillian Hellman was a play- and screenwriter. She was very dedicated to politics
and the cause of the left-wing. Hellman traveled to the Soviet union, and did
not until quite late in her life recognize the terrible things that had happened
under the ruling of Joseph Stalin. Very recently there was an article in the New
York Times about Hellman, it was titled "Why Lillian Hellman Remains
Fascinating". In it there is a very brief summation of her life:
"When in 1934 the success of
her first play, 'The Children's Hour,' brought celebrity at the age of 28,
she immediately put her fame to work for leftist causes and remained,
throughout her life, a bellicose figure in the nation's political arena.
This commitment culminated in her courageous defiance of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities in 1952. As a dramatist, author, screenwriter and
activist, Helena was a commanding presence in America's cultural life for
half a century." (source 15.)
Yes, Lillian Hellman did defy the House
committee. In May, 1952, Hellman sent a letter to HUAC in which she offered to
tell everything the committee wished to know about her, but that she would not
name names. If her offer could not be accepted, she would have to take the
diminished Fifth Amendment, which means that one can "decline to answer
questions...on the grounds of self-incrimination."(p 93). She went on to
say:
"to hurt innocent people whom
I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and
indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit
this year's fashions." (source
30. p. 93)
Her offer was denied by the
committee, and on the May 21, 1952, Helena took the Fifth Amendment when she
appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee. After her testimony had
been given, Lillian Hellman was not to get another credit in the USA until 1961
(source 29.
p. 559)
Victor Navasky hints in his "Naming Names" that Lillian Hellman perhaps did not
have the right to be so condemning of others as she was:
"Maltz [one of the Ten]
reminds us that Lillian Hellman, who despite her eloquence did not risk
prison, portrays herself in her memoir as alone against the McCarthyite
crowd, when in fact she was a private in a virtual army of resisters, many
of whom risked and suffered more than she. Hellman's wisecrack that Arthur
Miller, who told HUAC he had 'been to hell and back and seen the devil,'
must have gone as a tourist - meant that he was too cozy with the Committee
for her taste, too willing to grant their right to ask questions in the
first place. More fundamentally, the center liberals point out that these
people were collectively wrong about Stalin, failed to see the great moral
crime of their day."(source
33. p. 423)
Elia Kazan, certainly did not like
Lillian Hellman. In his biography her refers to her, among other things, as
"liar", and a "coiled snake":
"Miss Hellman...she had the
sharpest knife of all for me. Still I would tell people that I rather liked
her, when the fact was that I knew damned well what she was: a liar for one
thing and my enemy for sure. (source
31.p.592)
Before he testified Kazan invited
Hellman out, and he told her that he was considering naming names, both Hellman
and Kazan have a passage in their biographies about that scene:
"I laid everything on the
table, told her I wouldn't be able to work in films if I didn't testify to
everything I knew. Then I told her...that while it would be a blow, I'd
prepared for it and could get along okay without film work...Lillian was
silent as a coiled snake. I didn't realize until later how threatened she
felt in the same emergency. She said nothing to turn me away from where I
seemed to be moving"(source 31.p.462)
Hellman said about the same scene
that she "didn't want to talk anymore and so we stood in silence until Kazan
said, 'It's O.K. for you to do what you want, I guess. You've probably spent
whatever you've earned." (source
30. p. 67)
Thus Lillian Hellman claims that to Kazan it was just a matter of money. She
says that he - and many other friendly witnesses, cooperated so that they could
save their careers:
"The attempt to save jobs, or
status, or an Academy Award, led men like Larry Parks and Elia Kazan...to
name the guiltless in order to sweeten their own guiltlessness into what the
Committee would call innocence." (source
30. p. 30)
Hellman remained a stout critique of the
"informers." Kazan - like Maltz - was not a big fan of Hellman:
"I believe now that she wanted me to
become the "villain" I became. Life was easier for Lillian to understand
when she had someone to hate...Later I heard her reaction to me, the old
familiar one: He sold out! He did it for the money!" (p. 462)
About her choice not to cooperate
with HUAC, and the letter she wrote to the committee, Kazan wrote: "Lillian
spent her last fifteen years canonizing herself." (source
31. p. 452)
However, in the end when all else is said, what Lillian Hellman did was what
most people will agree was the right thing to do, and probably also what most of
us would like to believe we would do too:
"[Murray] Kempton thinks of
Hellman as 'inclined to be a hanging judge of the motives of persons whose
opinions differ from their own.' Nevertheless, he honors her for her moment.
'It is her summit. We can ask from her nothing more; I do not suppose that
in the only crucial sense we really need to. The most important thing is
never to forget that here is someone who knew how to act when there was
nothing harder on earth than knowing how to act." (source
33., p. 406)
Finally it would be appropriate to
mention that while it might seem as if most people cooperated with HUAC that was
not the case. After reading all this material on "informers" it might surprise
some to learn that "two out of three who testified were unfriendly or
uncooperative." (source 6.)
THE PUBLIC AND THE NEWS MEDIA ON THE "RED MENACE"
As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, the Truman administration really
made the American public afraid of Communists.
"Perhaps no single weapon in
the federal arsenal was as powerful in the government's construction of
anti-Communist consensus as the criminal justice system. By putting
Communists on trial, the Truman administration shaped the American public's
view of domestic communism. It transformed party members from political
dissidents into criminals - with all the implications that such associations
inspired in a nation of law-abiding citizens." (source
2.)
Throughout my reading up on this
subject, there have been numerous examples of this "Red Menace" perception that
pervaded the American community in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Letters from
people, FBI reports containing people's "testimonies" about other people's
probable political opinions, and in movies.
A Harry W. Weinstein wrote to Newsweek in November, 1947 to inquire:
"...if the man writing articles for
Newsweek under the name of John Lardner is the same Ring Lardner Jr.
who was called before the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee and
who refused to answer the 'yes' or 'no' to the question if he ever was or is
a member of the Communist party. If he is the same man, don't you think
Newsweek should check into his activities and either give him a clean
bill of health or do the next best thing?"(p 10)
The response was that "Ring Lardner
Jr. [had] no connection with Newsweek," and that this was John Lardner, one
of Ring's brothers. (ibid. p. 10) Some months earlier another man had written to
the same magazine, but with a slightly different message. He was very upset
about the House committee's had subpoenaed the producers that the producers of
the movies Song of Russia, Mission to Moscow, and The Best
Years of Our Lives "for 'Communist' ideas presented therein". The
reader went on to say:
"If the committee is successful in
halting production of such films as this...the action may well lead to
unchecked and arbitrary government censorship of the film industry. Shades
of Gestapo! Indeed, if I receive a subpoena to appear before this
all-powerful committee to account for my own 'un-American' ideas presented
here, I shall not be at all surprised, in view of what has gone before.
Thomas B. Peck, Jr. , Princeton University"(Newsweek, September 15,
1947 p. 8)
As for the FBI files, here are some
extracts from Gordon Kahn's file. The file contained information from neighbors,
coworkers, social acquaintances and the personnel files of his employers. Some
of the information given by people is mean, some odd and some just plain
stupid.:
"Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Kahn
belong to the Russian-American Club...Kahn personally remarked that he had
no objection to living next door to Negroes, Japanese or any others." - "I
am convinced he is definitely a Communist through I have no proof of card
member-ship."(source 7.)
Some of the information was gathered by
special agents, who went out and talked to people about the Kahns, but some
people also took the time to write to Herbert Hoover himself:
"Dear Mr. Hoover, Kahn is
currently applying to bring three of his relatives to the United States from
Europe. I don't know whether or not they are Communists, but I feel they'd
be of the same type and there is no legitimate reason to allow any more
Communists into this country. I agree with you the 'now is the time for
every American to stand up and be counted...' and I thought you should know
the score.(source 7.)
Finally, it would be proper to mention
some of the anti-Communist films that were made in this period. According to
Brian Neve in Film and Politics in America some 42 anti-Communist films
were made in the years 1951-53(p. 187).
"The equation of domestic communism
with gangsterims is a feature of a number of the films that picture an
'enemy within', while most of them are explicitly or implicitly
anti-intellectual...Related to this cycle were early 1950s science fiction
films which...taught the viewer 'to be wary of inept scientists and to have
faith in the FBI and the military'."(p. 188)
One of these films was the movie
I Was A Communist For The FBI which was semi-based on a real-life
undercover agent for the FBI. It was produced by Warner Brothers and came out in
1951. The movie was about a man who "(it is suggested) single-handedly
brought the Communist Party to its knees...[the movie] was nominated for an
Academy Award as the best documentary of the year." (source
8.)
Obviously it was not only the far right-wing people who participated in the "Red
scare." In 1956 the New York Times ran an editorial:
"We would not knowingly employ
a Communist party member in the news or editorial departments...because we
would not trust his ability to report the news objectively or to comment on
it honestly" (source 4.)
In August, 1947 Newsweek ran a
long article on the new hearings of HUAC and stated that unlike the Dies
Committee HUAC would not be ridiculed because "this time it counted on
sympathetic press and a public wiser in the ways of Kremlin." (Newsweek,
August 25, 1947, p. 22) One must say that the House committee certainly had it
right this time -
HOW THE BLACKLISTING AND THE WITNESSES ARE PERCEIVED TODAY
"Years from now' he said in the
voice of a public speaker 'when credit is given the struggle for peace in
this country, they won't forget the courageous stand which individual
statements of principle - no matter how uncoordinated like Charley Eitel's
here - made on the consciousness of the American people, who let us not
forget are under their collective hysteria a deeply peace-loving and
progressive nation."
Charlie Eitel, The Deer Park
p. 179
Yes, how does Hollywood treat its
friendly and unfriendly witnesses today, approximately 40 years after the
hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities took place? Here are
some clippings and sites that give us some hints, the first is from the magazine
Variety, September 13, 1996:
"Sony finally announced this
year that all future prints of Columbia's Lawrence of Arabia will
bear blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson's name as well as Robert
Bolt's." (source 10.)
In 1995 no less than three plays about
the "Red menace" were staged in L.A. As for some new material that would mention
Elia Kazan:
"According to one board
member, the American Film Institute continues to deny Elia Kazan a Life
Achievement Award because the Oscar-winning director of On the Waterfront
cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities."(source
10.)
Thus, people have not forgotten
what Kazan did in 1952 - some 45 years ago! According to Dan Cox from Variety,
Elia Kazan is still "treated as a pariah by many in Hollywood. The younger
Kazan was reluctant to be interviewed for this article, but admits that many
people in the industry behave strangely to him because of his father's actions."
(source 10.)
Another response to Charlie Eitel's speech about how people will see differently
when the hearings are but history the author of Naming Names writes:
"[The blacklistees] turned the
tables. Events conspired to make having been a blacklistee something of a
status symbol. They shed their stigma, transformed it into a badge of
honor...[The friendly witnesses] named names because they thought nobody
would remember, but it turned out to be the one thing nobody can forget."(source
33., p. 329)
The tables have indeed been
turned! In 1989 a MGM building was given a new name. Its former name had been
Robert Taylor "the highest profile star to name names for the committee's
cameras." (source 10.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Internet
1.Buhle,
Buhle, and Georgakas, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Left. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992)
2. Ellen Schrecker. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents.
Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994
Web-pages:
3."Congressional
Committees and Unfriendly Witnesses" by Ellen Schrecker
4.Howard
Zinn. A People's History of the United States - covering the period
1945-1960.New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980
5. See link 4.
6.
Blacklisted
7.
Excerpts from Gordon Kahn's FBI files
8.
"I Was A Communist For The FBI"
9.
Letters To Barbara: Gordon Kahn writes to his wife
10.
Movienet - Film Finders Buzz
11.
SF Bay Guardian, October 10, 1996
12.
Transcript of Walt Disney's testimony, 24 Oct 1947
(Unfortunately it seems that this site no longer exists, this link is another
site which talks about Walter Disney and his view on Communism/Communists)
13. Variety,
September 13, 1996
Articles
14.
New York Times, July 29, 1951
(Truman quote)
15.
New York Times, November 3, 1996
(Why Lillian Hellman Remains Fascinating)
16. Newsweek, September 15, 1947
17.Newsweek, November 3, 1947
18.Newsweek, April 2, 1951
19.Newsweek, May 7, 1951
20.Newsweek, April 21, 1952
21.Newsweek, June 4, 1951
22.Newsweek, December 8, 1947
23.Newsweek, November 10, 1947
24.Newsweek, November 24, 1947
Books - Fiction
25. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Last Tycoon. London: Penguin Books, 1941
26. Mailer, Norman. The Deer Park. London: Flamingo, 1957
27. Schulberg, Budd. What Makes Sammy Run?. New York: Vintage, 1941
Books - Non-Fiction
28. Balio, Tino, ed., The American Film Industry. The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1976, 1985
29. Caute, David. The Great Fear. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978
30. Hellman, Lillian. Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976
31. Kazan, Elia. A Life. London: Andre Deutsch, 1988
32. Miller, Arthur. Timebends - A Life. London: Methuen, 1987
33. Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: The Viking Press, 1980
34. Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America - A Social Tradition. London and
New York:
Routledge, 1992
Composed by R.B. Johansen, student in
American Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Article Reproduced from:
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-communists-HUAC-Lists.htm
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