Naming Names

Victor S. Navasky

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781480436213
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Winner of the National Book Award: The definitive history of Joe McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and HUAC explores the events behind the hit film Trumbo. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred and fifty people who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—including Elia Kazan, Ring Lardner Jr., and Arthur Miller—award-winning author Victor S. Navasky reveals how and why the blacklists were so effective and delves into the tragic and far-reaching consequences of Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts.
A compassionate, insightful, and even-handed examination of one of our country's darkest hours, Naming Names is at once a morality play and a fascinating window onto a searing moment in American cultural and political history.

PART I
NAMING NAMES

4. HUAC in Hollywood

HUAC APPEARS TO HAVE chosen the entertainment industry as its special target for three reasons. First, the Committee was the tail on the Communist Party’s kite, following wherever it flew. The Party itself had focused on Hollywood starting in 1936, when V. J. Jerome, a cultural commissar, and Stanley Lawrence, a CP organizer,* journeyed out to the West Coast to set up a movie-industry branch of the Party. Hollywood represented the prestige of its stars, a source of financial support, and a chance to influence or control “the weapon of mass culture,” although John Howard Lawson, who ran the Hollywood branch, quickly understood that the collective process of moviemaking precluded the screenwriter, low man on the creative totem pole, from influencing the content of movies. As the Party’s national chairman, William Z. Foster told the faithful in a secret meeting at Dalton Trumbo’s house in 1946, “We can’t expect to put any propaganda in the films, but we can try to keep anti-Soviet agitprop out.”¹ Lawson and Ring Lardner did run a writer’s clinic that tried to analyze scripts from the viewpoint of a Marxist aesthetic, but submission and compliance were mostly voluntary, and the project never got very far.

Second, HUAC chose Hollywood for its glamour. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker called Hollywood “the dream factory.” But if its inhabitants were in the business of manufacturing our dreams, they were also in the habit of living them. Not only their salaries but also their cars, pools, breasts, alimony payments, mansions, muscles, psychiatrists’ bills, talents, and images were, like the images on the silver screen, larger than life. HUAC saw a chance to bask in the publicity glow of Hollywood’s stars. And as Edith Tiger, current director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee observes, “They were our royalty and if you want to scare a country you attack its royalty.”

The Party at the time, and independent commentators subsequently, have maintained with some credible evidence that HUAC was in the thought-control business and out to break the left. Whatever its collective motive, HUAC stayed with Hollywood because it succeeded where such earlier red hunters as Congressman Martin Dies, who first went after Hollywood in 1940, and State Senator Jack Tenney of California’s Joint Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, had failed. HUAC put its nickel in the slot machine in 1947 when J. Parnell Thomas held the hearings that resulted in the incarceration of the Hollywood Ten, but it was not until four years later that it hit the political jackpot.

The industry’s initial reaction to HUAC in the spring of 1947 was negative. “Hollywood is weary of being the national whipping boy for congressional committees,” complained the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP). “We are tired of having irresponsible charges made again and again and again and not sustained. If we have committed a crime we want to know it. If not, we should not be badgered by congressional committees.”²

When Chairman Thomas announced open hearings in Washington in the fall of 1947, he miscalculated: the subpoenaed witnesses were either “friendly” ones who didn’t really know any names (like the movie mogul Jack Warner, Ginger Rogers’ mother, and the actor Robert Taylor) or “unfriendly” ones who wouldn’t give them. From the friendlies who led off the testimony, such as Warner, HUAC got lists of so-called Communists; these turned out in fact to include names of non-Communists (like Howard Koch) whom Warner resented for participating in the famous 1945 strike against his studio. (Later Warner admitted to having been “carried away. I was rather emotional,” he said.) Robert Taylor, only slightly more circumspect, allowed as how “… I can name a few who seem to sort of disrupt things once in a while. Whether or not they are Communists I don’t know…. One chap we have currently, I think, is Mr. Howard Da Silva. He always seems to have something to say at the wrong time.” Taylor said if he had his way the Party would be outlawed and “they would all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.” Lela Rogers repeated her testimony of the previous spring, this time omitting the story of how her daughter Ginger had been required to speak agitprop in a 1943 Dalton Trumbo picture called Tender Comrade (the offending line—“Share and share alike, that’s democracy”).

The proceedings had comic overtones. Walt Disney described attempts to subvert Mickey Mouse by taking over the Cartoonists Guild. The novelist and objectivist Ayn Rand found Communist propaganda (which she described as “anything which gives a good impression of Communism as a way of life”) in the smiling faces of Russian children in Song of Russia.³ And Lester Cole was fingered as the subversive screenwriter who had a rabbi address a group of death-camp-bound Jews, after the fashion of the Spanish Communist La Pasionaria, that “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”⁴

The following week came the unfriendlies. Only eleven of the nineteen who had been subpoenaed and announced that they would not cooperate were called; the eleventh, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, when asked if he had ever made application to join the CP, answered “No, no, no, no, no, never,”⁵ and within hours fled the country. The other ten were backed by a planeload of stars organized under the banner of the Committee for the First Amendment; Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra, and others flew to Washington to provide visible and vocal support. The film community seemed united.

Notwithstanding Billy Wilder’s quip that “of the Unfriendly Ten, only two had any talent, the other eight were just unfriendly,” the Ten included some of the most talented writers in Hollywood, and politically the most active. Most of them either had been or were still members of the Communist Party. To take them alphabetically:

• Alvah Bessie, who worked on screenplays such as The Very Thought of You (1944), Hotel Berlin (1945), and Objective Burma (1945), had fought in Spain and written a good book about it called Men in Battle, served as drama critic for New Masses, and received a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. He was an active and somewhat dogmatic member of the Communist Party.

• Herbert Biberman, married to Gale Sondergaard (“The Spider Woman”), who was herself called as a witness in the early 1950s and took the Fifth Amendment, had directed such movies as Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) and The Master Race (1941). The Bibermans, too, were in the Party.

• Lester Cole had written thirty-six films (Objective Burma, High Wall [1948]) and was running for reelection of the Screen Writers Guild executive board when he was subpoenaed. Cole was a vocal and hard-line Communist from a working-class background; he had not gone to college.

• Edward Dmytryk had directed twenty-four films between 1929 and 1949 (Till the End of Time [1946], the anti-anti-Semitic Crossfire [1947], Hitler’s Children [1943]). He had left the Party in 1945.

• Ring Lardner, Jr., the son of the great American humorist, was co-author of the Academy Award-winning screenplay Woman of the Year (1942). One of the youngest members of the Ten, he also was something of a Marxist theorist, but was moving away from the Party at the time of the hearings.

• John Howard Lawson, founder and first president of the Screen Writers Guild when it was organized in 1933, was head of the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party. His expressionist play Processional had won good reviews; he wrote authoritative texts on the theater and film and two of the more celebrated movies coming out of World War II, Action in the North Atlantic (1943) and Sahara (1943).

• Albert Maltz, O’Henry Award winner whose short stories were widely anthologized, had probably the best literary credentials of any member of the Ten and was a frequent contributor to controversy in the world of Marxist periodicals. The previous year his writings on socialist realism had triggered a major Party controversy. His movies included This Gun for Hire (1942), Pride of the Marines (1945), and Destination Tokyo (1944).

• Sam Ornitz had written twenty-five films between 1929 and 1949, none particularly notable. He was best known for his novel, Haunch, Paunch and Jowl. In deliberations as to what posture they should take before the Committee, it was Ornitz who advised, “Let us at least be as brave as the people we write about.”

• Robert Adrian Scott was a writer-producer whose career was just taking off when the blacklist descended. He had produced such films as Crossfire (1947) and Cornered (1946), both with Dmytryk, and the very successful Murder My Sweet (1944). His starlet wife wanted him to cooperate with the Committee and left him when he didn’t.

• Dalton Trumbo, in addition to being one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood, had written a prizewinning novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbo, whose films included Kitty Foyle (1940), an Academy Award nominee, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), was in such demand that his contract omitted the standard “morals” clause (whereby a studio could cancel an employee’s contract if it had come into public disrepute because of his actions) but included a stipulation that story conferences would be held in his house, where he preferred to sleep days and work nights in a bathtub with a special cross-board to hold his typewriter. Trumbo had worked as a baker for eight years before coming to Hollywood, where his first job was editing the Screen Writers Guild magazine. Although close to the Party for many years he didn’t actually join until 1943.

Each of the Ten arrived at the HUAC session in Washington with a prepared statement denouncing the Committee, which none but Maltz was permitted to read, and each challenged the Committee’s right to ask questions relating to political affiliations. Although to avoid conspiracy charges they maintained the fiction that each had arrived at his stand in consultation only with his own attorney, in fact there had been a series of strategy meetings to arrive at a collective stand: they would refuse to answer questions about Party membership and base their stand on the First Amendment’s guarantee against incursions on free speech rather than the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. A public-relations defect of their collective legal strategy had to do with their decision not merely to tell the Committee that they refused to answer because it had no right to ask, but, rather, for each to add, “I am answering your question, but in my own way.”* In the event, this tactic turned out to be unwise, since it murked the First Amendment issue. And John Howard Lawson’s aggressive ripostes to the chairman’s hostile and bullying directives upset many of those in the audience who thought they had come to cheer on a group of civil libertarians and instead found themselves listening to what sounded suspiciously like Party rhetoric.

On November 24, 1947, Congress voted to cite the Ten for contempt, and fifty top Hollywood executives met for two days at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to consider what their position toward the Ten should be. Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, who had earlier promised, “As long as I live I will never be party to anything as un-American as a blacklist,” announced after the meeting that the Ten would be suspended without pay, and that thereafter no Communists or other subversives would “knowingly” be employed in Hollywood. Liberal Hollywood, which had been with the Ten on arrival in the East, abandoned them as they left—partly out of shock at the confrontation with the Committee, partly in reaction to the indictment for contempt of Congress, and partly out of fear, after the Waldorf meeting, that they themselves would be tainted. The Committee for the First Amendment, which had announced a major propaganda campaign on behalf of the Ten, folded almost as fast as it had formed.

Dore Schary, the liberal writer-turned-producer who was assigned the unpleasant task of informing the Screen Writers Guild (SWG) of the Waldorf decision, which he had opposed, to this day tries to give it a happy gloss. Schary’s personal position (and he so testified before HUAC at the time) was that since a California law explicitly prevented the denial of employment based on political affiliation and since no law prevented anyone from being a Communist, blacklisting was illegal. As an executive at RKO he opposed the firing of Dmytryk and Scott, “despite the fact that they had lied to me about their having been members of the Communist Party.” And since the executives’ decision at the Waldorf-Astoria was not to employ Communists “knowingly” and since “the only known Communists, as far as I knew, were the guys whose cards were called,” Schary claimed a narrow victory. He voted against and declined to fire Dmytryk and Scott, so somebody else fired them, and along with other liberals, he supported the establishment of a Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC)—a council of management and the talent guilds—whose purpose would be to fight the blacklist, to let the public know that Hollywood was innocent of the charges of subversion. Schary speaks for many liberals when he says, “I felt the Committee acted with absolute banality, the producers acted cowardly, but the Ten acted stupidly—they were trying by their hysterical acting to get the Committee to admit error. They should have quietly but firmly refused to cooperate with the Committee and then held a dignified press conference where they said eight of us are Communists, but all of us are Americans and patriots, and the public and the press would have backed them one hundred percent.”

In the summer of 1949 the liberal Supreme Court justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge died, and the following spring their conservative successors, Tom Clark and Sherman Minton, helped to constitute the Supreme Court majority that refused to review the Ten’s convictions. The Ten went to prison for sentences of up to a year. (So did the chairman of the Committee, J. Parnell Thomas, who in 1948 was convicted of taking kickbacks from his staff and locked up at the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut, where his fellow inmates included Ring Lardner, Jr., and Lester Cole.) Not long after, the Supreme Court decided Rogers v. U.S., the case that established the waiver doctrine (i.e., if a witness talked about himself he couldn’t refuse to talk about others).*

The Hollywood investigation, suspended while the Ten’s case worked its way through the courts, was reopened in 1951 with John Wood at the helm and Larry Parks as the first witness. Thereafter the informer came into his own, and the blacklist became institutionalized. No Hollywood Communist or ex- who had ever been accused, or called to testify, or refused to sign a studio statement would get work in the business—at least under his own name—unless he went through the ritual of naming names.

For every Hollywood informer there are two who refused to go along—and many of these seemed to revel in their resistance. The gravel-voiced Lionel Stander volunteered to identify “a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to undermine the Constitution.” He was, of course, referring to the Committee itself, and he offered “to name names.”⁶ The folksinger Pete Seeger wouldn’t name names, but he offered to sing songs and when Chairman Francis Walter demurred, Seeger noted, “I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.”⁷

Or, to cite a positively existential moment, consider Congressman Donald Jackson’s attempt to explain to Zero (“After my financial standing in the community, sir”) Mostel that he had aided the Communist cause by appearing at a benefit for Mainstream magazine. All I did, Mostel argued, was “an imitation of a butterfly at rest. There is no crime in making anybody laugh. I don’t care if you laugh at me.”

Mr. Jackson: “If your interpretation of a butterfly at rest brought any money into the coffers of the Communist Party, you contributed directly to the propaganda effort of the Communist Party.”

But, argued Mostel, suppose I had the urge to imitate a butterfly somewhere?

Mr. Doyle: “Yes, but please, when you have the urge, don’t have such an urge to put the butterfly at rest by putting some money in the Communist Party coffers as a result of that urge to put a butterfly at rest….”⁸

The hearings quickly gave rise to free-lance blacklisters—some of them nonprofit, like the American Legion, the Catholic War Veterans, or Hollywood’s Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI); others free enterprisers of the blacklist, like the American Business Consultants and Aware, Inc., which published, listed, and cleared names for pay. The Committee itself got into the act with annual reports that conveniently listed names and namers in the appendix, which could be clipped and pasted by the free lancers. Not only in scandal sheets such as Confidential but in national magazines and newspapers, political and gossip columnists supplemented and subtracted from the “official” lists by giving two-line case studies in repentance and/or subversion.

At least the Committee—contrary to what propaganda from the left alleged—was an “honest” red hunter. By the 1950s it wen...