Alvin Bessie, Stalinist soldier
From the website Useful Stooges
We’re talking this week about the
Hollywood Ten – a group of Hollywood scriptwriters who enjoyed ample rewards
for their talents in capitalist America even as they espoused a political
system under which the very jobs they thrived at didn’t exist and in which
their own stubborn contrarianism would likely have landed them in front of a
firing squad. We’ve already devoted a good deal of attention to the most famous
of the Ten – Dalton Trumbo, the colorful hero of a 2015 movie starring Bryan
Cranston. But the other members of the group, all of whom refused either to
answer questions about their political history or, in the phrase of the day, to
“name names,” are no less interesting in their own right.
Take Alvah Bessie (1904-85). The
son of a successful New York businessman, he attended Columbia University,
spent four years as a member of Eugene O’Neill’s acting troupe, the
Provincetown Players, then, in 1928, went to Paris to become an expatriate
writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Returning to the U.S. the
next year, he contributed stories and essays to most of the best American
magazines of the day.
He did something else, too. He
began moving in Communist circles, and in 1936 joined the Party. Two years
later, like many other American Communists, he went off to Spain to fight
against Franco and for the Republic. At the time, much of the left-wing media
in the U.S. and elsewhere presented the struggle as a straightforward clash
between fascism and freedom, but as George Orwell famously recorded in his
classic Homage to Catalonia, the Republican side was strongly under Kremlin
influence and was subjected to a great deal of pressure to toe the Stalinist
line and to crush any hint of non-Communist dissent. In Orwell’s view, indeed,
the Soviets in Spain oversaw a “reign of terror.”
Like Orwell, Bessie wrote his own
account of the Spanish Civil War. His book, entitled Men in Battle, was
published in 1939. In it, as the title suggests, he recounts everyday life at
the front, in the heat of warfare. Unlike Orwell, however, he doesn’t complain
about the Soviets. He was, as they say, a “good soldier.” He belonged to the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was one of the International Brigades that, as
Allan H. Ryskind records in his 2015 history Hollywood Traitors, were “a
Stalinist creation.” Just to make sure there’s no doubt about the matter,
Ryskind spells it out: Bessie “was fighting for the Stalinist wing in the civil
war.”
It was during World War II –
specifically, in 1943 – that Bessie began writing movies for Warner Brothers,
notably Objective, Burma! , for which he received an Oscar nomination. As a big
Hollywood name he had access to people at the top of the American Communist
Party, including its president, Earl Browder. Ryskind reports a conversation
that suggests that Bessie was even a more hard-line Communist than the head of
the Party himself. Browder’s – and the Party’s – official position was that the
U.S. should undergo a peaceful transition from capitalism to Communism. Bessie
rejected this notion: he believed in nothing less than a violent overthrow of
the U.S. system.
If Bessie was more of a Communist
than Browder, he was also more of a Communist than at least one of his fellow
Hollywood Ten members, Albert Maltz (1908-85). In 1946, Maltz, a veteran
of the New York theater, a Communist
since 1935, and an Oscar nominee for Pride of the Marines (1945), published an
article in the Party’s weekly New Masses complaining that the Party was too
strict in policing writers, expecting them to cleave strictly to the party line
and produce crude propaganda. Among those who savaged Maltz for his dissent was
Bessie, who at a Party meeting, according to one witness, “denounced” his
fellow screenwriter “with bitter vituperation and venom.” After HUAC and
prison, Maltz moved to Mexico, where he resumed writing films, including the
Cinemascope spectacle The Robe (1953).
As for Bessie, he didn’t last
long at Warners. Two years after going to work for the studio, he was fired.
The anodyne account of his career in the Hollywood Reporter says that he was
dismissed for supporting striking studio workers – which, of course, makes
Bessie sound virtuous and the studio bosses pretty rotten. In fact, there was a
struggle underway at the time between two unions, one Kremlin-controlled and one
anti-Communist, that sought to represent Hollywood workers, and Bessie was
squarely on the side of the Stalinists. Called before HUAC in 1950 and
subsequently imprisoned and blacklisted, he quit the Party in the 1950s and
wrote about his Blacklist experience in a 1957 novel, The Un-Americans, and a
1965 memoir, Inquisition in Eden.