Hating free speech: Howard Biberman
From the website Useful Stooges (https://usefulstooges.com)
We’ve been looking at the
Hollywood Ten, those unwavering devotees of totalitarianism, blind servants of
Stalin, and out-and-out traitors who, after being held in contempt by the House
Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, spent a few years on the so-called
Blacklist and later, in the 1970s, were gloriously rehabilitated, applauded by
the media and by a new generation of Hollywood luminaries as heroes of the
individual conscience, the life of the independent artist, and the First
Amendment. Today’s subject: Herbert Biberman (1900-71), who after working in
the New York theater in the early 1930s went to Hollywood, wrote several minor
films, and married Oscar-winning actress (and fellow Blacklist member) Gale
Sondergaard.
In Hollywood, Biberman was a busy
Communist bee. Among much else, he played a major role in a Soviet front group
whose history of ideological shifts illuminates the way in which these groups
perfectly mirrored the Kremlin’s own changing policies. Originally founded in
1933 as the American League against War and Fascism and conceived of as a means
of preparing the Depression-struck U.S. for imminent Communist revolution, it
encouraged workers to oppose FDR, whom it presented as oppressing workers and
as being engaged in preparation for war. Two years later, however, having
decided the U.S. was not on the verge of revolution after all, the Kremlin had
the group’s name changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy and
ordered it to support FDR and to boycott and propagandize against the USSR’s
more immediate enemies, Germany and Japan.
Two years after that, when the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, forging an alliance between Stalin and
Hitler, the American League for Peace and Democracy was renamed American Peace
Mobilization (APM) and told to be pro-peace, pro-Nazi, and, once again,
anti-American. After Hitler invaded Russia, however, the APM, under Kremlin
orders, underwent another ideological make-over: now it supported the Soviet
war against Hitler and equated Nazi Germany with the U.S. and Britain,
representing Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill as equally imperialist and
equally intolerable.
How does Biberman fit into all
this? He was on the APM’s “National Council.” As Allan Ryskind writes in
Hollywood Traitors, Biberman told an APM meeting that the U.S. had become “a
colony of the British Empire” and that Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill were
“making a deal for the money markets of the world” and sacrificing “the lives
of millions of men” in the process. At an APM rally in Los Angeles, he received
a standing ovation after savaging FDR and Churchill. The readiness of Biberman
(and several other members of the Hollywood Ten who were also on the APM
“National Council” or otherwise involved in the group) to instantly change
their ideological tune, not once but several times, in accordance with Kremlin
directives only goes to show that none of this had anything to do with
individual conscience or personal philosophy – it was all about being robotic,
lockstep soldiers who were prepared to believe anything that Josef Stalin told
them to.
Later, after America had entered
the war on the side of the USSR, Biberman was active in other Soviet front
groups, among them the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and the Hollywood Writers
Mobilization (HWM). These supposedly independent groups, which represented
themselves as having been founded spontaneously by free-thinking individuals
who, among other things, simply wanted to serve the war effort. In fact they
were all branches of the same tree, following the same orders from the same
masters in Moscow.
In 1946, like Alvah Bessie,
Biberman stood up at a Communist gathering to condemn their fellow Hollywood
Ten member Albert Maltz for the high crime of having suggested that the works
of Communist artists should not be straitjacketed by Kremlin ideology but
should rather be allowed to deviate from that ideology in minor specifics as
long as it served, on the whole, the general aims and principles of Communism.
For Bessie and Biberman, Maltz’s suggestion amounted to heresy; after Bessie
denounced Maltz, Biberman took his turn, “spout[ing] elaborate mouthfuls of
nothing, his every accent dripping with hatred.” In short, despite the
Hollywood Ten image that would take form decades later, he was very far from
being a champion of free expression.