“For more than 50 years, the
communists and former communists of Hollywood have written the script of the
past, telling the story of the blacklist in memoirs and histories, movies and
documentaries in which they depict themselves as noble martyrs and champions of
democracy. It is time, finally, to put an end to the glorification of this
unhappy period and take a cleareyed look at the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist
and the movie industry Reds who wielded such influence in the 1930s and 1940s.
According to the familiar but
utterly romanticized script, the screenwriters, directors and actors who
flirted with and joined the Communist Party are unadulterated heroes -- just
"liberals in a hurry." It is a simple black-and-white tale, as they
tell it: The villains were the Hollywood moguls who blacklisted them, the
liberals who abandoned the fight, and most of all, the "friendly"
ex-communist witnesses who testified about their lives in the party and named
names of old associates to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
It is a fable that has acquired
an almost irresistible weight as a result of half a century of telling and
retelling. Read Lillian Hellman. Or go see the Irwin Winkler film "Guilty
by Suspicion."
But is it true? Certainly the
blacklist harmed the careers of some of Hollywood's finest. Its damage extended
not only to actual party members but, in some cases, to the well-meaning who
joined party-controlled "popular front" organizations. But the
accepted narrative obscures the important truth about communist influence in
Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten were among the most committed of the party
faithful, yet they've been wrapped and protected in a romantic haze, allowed to
wear their appearance before HUAC as a badge of honor. The blacklist was a
godsend, enabling them to reinvent themselves as heroic victims rather than
what they really were: die-hard defenders of Josef Stalin who accepted every
twist and turn of the party line, whether it was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the
invasion of Finland or the purge trials.
The truth is that, by the time
HUAC arrived on the scene in 1947, the communists had already worn out their
welcome in Hollywood. Liberals such as Melvyn Douglas felt betrayed at the time
of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when the communists suddenly transformed the
"Anti-Nazi League" into the "Hollywood Peace Forum,"
calling for American neutrality and using the slogan "Let's Skip the Next
War." When the Cold War began, liberals such as Olivia De Haviland were
already breaking from the party's main wartime front group, arguing against
unity with those "who are more interested in taking orders from Moscow and
following the so-called party line."
Today, we seem to have forgotten
the credible reasons that led some disillusioned former communists to
reluctantly appear as friendly witnesses before HUAC. Budd Schulberg talked
about how his Hollywood comrades did everything possible to stop him from
working on his first novel, "What Makes Sammy Run?," because it
deviated from the party line. The great director Elia Kazan told how the party
created a secret cell that sought to take over the Group Theater. Others talked
about how the party attacked screenwriter Albert Maltz for daring to write that
perhaps art was more than just a "weapon."