The anti-communist purge of the American film industry

[IndianaGreen]

The anti-communist purge of the American film industry

By David Walsh
4 February 2009

Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, Reynold Humphries, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, 184 pp.

Reynold Humphries, former professor of Film Studies at the University of Lille 3, has written a valuable new account of the blacklisting of left-wing writers, actors, directors and producers in the American film industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This disgraceful episode, in which the FBI, ultra-right elements, official liberalism and Hollywood executives all played their parts, has had far-reaching consequences, not only for the film industry, but American society and culture as a whole.

One feature of the reactionary climate of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the attempted rehabilitation of the postwar witch-hunting. Openly right-wing proponents reclaimed FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the rest of that filthy crowd as defenders of the US against its enemies.

The slightly more respectable, liberal, sometimes ex-leftist version acknowledged that HUAC, McCarthy and company might have exaggerated and, after all, there were excesses, but anti-communism remained an essentially noble cause, pitting democratic institutions against totalitarianism. Communist Party members in the film industry, according to this argument, were more or less the equivalent of GPU agents.

Humphries’ book is unapologetically leftist and treats the anti-communist cohort with the contempt it deserves. A settling of accounts with this piece of history is no small matter. Until American artists and intellectuals finally get over their aversion to or fear of socialism, it will be difficult to make much progress. It’s impossible in our day to paint the sharpest pictures of life without the living presence of a Marxist critique of society.

For opponents of the political and economic status quo, the events of the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood raise a host of complex issues bound up with the Second World War, postwar society in the US, American liberalism, the film industry, the Communist Party and the general problems of the American left. Humphries approaches certain of these questions, and leaves some of the others aside.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/blac-f04.shtml

[corruptmewithpower]

1. I'm not pro-blacklisting of anyone.

But I have a very dim view of totalitarians.

[struggle4progress]

2. 1952: US Immigration slams door on Chaplin

... The Attorney-General, Thomas McGranery, has ordered the Immigration Service to hold Mr Chaplin "for hearings" if he returns to the United States, despite issuing him with a re-entry permit only a few months ago ...

Charlie Chaplin has been under severe pressure in the US over accusations from Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee that he is associated with left-wing causes.

Mr Chaplin has been on the FBI's Security Index since 1948, and he was one of over 300 people blacklisted by Hollywood film studios and unable to work after he refused to cooperate when he appeared before the Committee.

When questioned about his membership of the Communist Party, Mr Chaplin answered, "I do not want to create any revolution, all I want to do is create a few more films ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/19/newsid_3102000/3102179.stm

[Diclotican]

6. struggle4progress

struggle4progress

Charlie Chaplin var lucy enough to have another country to leave for, when the americans got to paranoid.. And he NEVER forgot US for the fact that he was more or less denied access to a country he loved and that have given him so much in return... Rest of his life, he was in the UK, and Switzerland, and never, never was to leave for the US anymore.. Even after the official witch hunt was over, and many was pleading with Chaplin to come over, he never was willing to do that... In any case, he was old and a trip that long was not that easy for a old man either...

He never forgot, and never forgives what the US was doing of harm to him.. But he was also found of your country, and was telling everyone how fantastic the country was - before the witch hunt started that is..

And if he was a communist, so what?.. I doubt he was in any power to revolt against the US government

Diclotican

Sorry my bad english, not my native language

[struggle4progress]

3. The Peekskill Riot (Being Red / Howard Fast)

... Then Pete Seeger called. It was going to be a wonderful summer concert. Paul Robeson headed the list of singers, and Pete would be there with the Weavers, and there would be other folk singers, and I, Howard Fast, had just returned from Paris ...

I looked at my watch again. It was seven-thirty. The three deputy sheriffs had disappeared. The mob was rolling toward us for the second attack. This was, in a way, the worst of that night. For one thing, it was still daylight; later, when night fell, our own sense of organization helped us much more, but this was daylight and they poured down the road and into us, swinging broken fenceposts, billies, bottles, and wielding knives. Their leaders had been drinking from pocket flasks and bottles right up to the moment of the attack, and now as they beat and clawed at our line, they poured out a torrent of obscene words and slogans. "We'll finish Hitler's job! Fuck you white niggers! Give us Robeson! We'll string that big nigger up!" and more and more of the same ...

And the FBI men watched calmly and took notes ...

Now we ran down into the hollow, and we held together as we ran. As we swung around the curve of the road below, I saw the amphi- theater for the first time since I had driven down there earlier in the evening: the platform with the women and children on it and huddled close, the two thousand chairs standing empty, the table of songbooks and pamphlets--and all of it bright as day in the brilliant glare of floodlights. These lit the whole of the meadow, and as we swung around at the bottom, we saw the mob of screaming, swearing patriots, chanting their new war cry, "Kill a commie for Christ," and their lust to kill the "white niggers," break over the hillside and pour down into the light ...

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/peekskill.html

This is well-worth reading in its entirety

[struggle4progress]

4. He was blacklisted in a national witch hunt. Yet writer Dalton Trumbo never lost his integrity.

Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Thursday, March 3, 2005

At the 1956 Academy Awards, Deborah Kerr called out the winner of that year's Oscar for best original story -- Robert Rich, for "The Brave One. " But Rich was not present to accept the award, and for an original reason. No, he was not "on location" making another movie, and he was not ill. He did not have any philosophical problem with the notion of awards ceremonies. Nor was his wife at the hospital, about to give birth to a baby, which is what Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild claimed upon accepting the award.

Rich had the best possible reason of all not to be present: He did not exist. He was a pseudonym, one of many, for Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer. One of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo had gone to prison in 1950 for refusing to answer questions by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was trying to root out communism in the motion picture industry. Upon his release 10 months later, he could find no work under his own name, but scratched together a living by turning out scripts either under fake names or for fellow writers, who fronted for him and funneled the money to him.

Hollywood is never at a loss for writers. But Trumbo, even stigmatized, was worth working with because he was good, reliable and fast. He could write in any genre, though his films tended, above all, to celebrate restless spirits and individualists. He had flair and a voice, and he was also a gifted novelist. His anti-war novel, "Johnny Got His Gun," written in 1939, is still in print. A mainstay of junior high school English courses, it is often the first novel that students read all the way through. Trumbo is the subject of a play ("Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted") starring Brian Dennehy, opening Tuesday at the Post Street Theatre ...

The career that Trumbo was willing to give up on principle had been hard- earned ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/03/DDGOCBI5HV19.DTL

[Two Americas]

9. we will make an exception, then

Anyone expressing any opinions that we can associate with "totalitarian" we will then black list. It is not that we favor black lists, oh, no. We just take a dim view of "totalitarians," and the ends justify the means.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Just so eveyone here is clear about this

Many people were blacklisted in Hollywood who were nothing more than liberals, not communitsts. People were blacklisted who detested communisim, who were ignorant of communisim, who had read an article about it once in Life magazine, anything, anyone, who was not a righty, was suspect, and the lists were compiled not via fact but via innuendo. In short, each and every person who posts on DU would have been suspect. And suspicion itself served as proof.

[IndianaGreen]

7. People that supported the Spanish republic against the assault by nazi-backed fascists

were also blacklisted. People that supported Hitler, such as Henry Ford and William Hearst, were never blacklisted.

[Tansy_Gold]

8. Interesting (maybe) trivia

I stumbled across this information a week or so ago as a result of getting sidetracked on some other research.


Back in the late 50s there was a popular TV series "The Adventures of Robin Hood" starring Richard Greene. I was all of 9, 10 years old, something like that, but I watched it faithfully. In the early 80s it was still being syndicated and aired on one of the independent channels in Indiana (we didn't have cable or satellite then) and my kids and I watched it in reruns. Production quality was amateurish at times, but I still found it entertaining.

I have no idea what brought it to mind or how I veered off track, but I found myself at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Robin_Hood_(TV_series) and learned. . . .

1. The production was partly underwritten by the Communist Party USA.
2. Producer Hannah Weinstein, member CPUSA, hired a lot of McCarthy era blacklisted writers for the show; they wrote under pseudonyms, of course.
3. The vocalist who sang the theme song was a friend of George Martin, who "discovered" the Beatles.
4. British actress Jane Asher had a small role in the series and would later go on to become engaged to Beatle Paul McCartney. Her brother, Peter, was one half of Peter and Gordon.

In passing this nonsense along to a friend I commented: "None of this is of any practical value. I don't think I can even find a way to use it in casual conversation with the rightwing Roundheads I socialize with. (Not that the Cavaliers were any less rightwing, come to think of it.)"


Tansy Gold, wondering if there is an omen in her mentioning the English Civil War twice tonight on DU. . . . . . .