From the website Useful Stooges
(https://usefulstooges.com/) I highly recommend bookmarking that page
Ring
Lardner, Jr.
Some of the Hollywood Ten were
from humble backgrounds. Not Ring Lardner Jr. (1915–2000), who, himself the son
of a famous writer, went to Andover and Princeton. He was also an earlier
convert to socialism than several of his fellow traitors. At Princeton he was
active in both the Socialist Club and the Anglo-American Institute of the
University of Moscow, a Kremlin propaganda organization based both in the U.S.
and the U.K. By 1937, he had become a writer in Hollywood and a member of
Communist Party. Soon he was also active in various Soviet front groups, among
them the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood Writers Mobilization
Against the War. In 1943 he won an Oscar for co-writing the Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn hit Woman of the Year. Four years later, 20th Century Fox
made him one of Hollywood’s best-paid writers – and HUAC called him to testify.
A prison term ensued. His long post-Blacklist rehabilitation climaxed with a
1970 Oscar for writing the film M*A*S*H.
John Howard Lawson
John Howard Lawson (1894–1977),
too, came from New York money. After Williams College, he drove an ambulance in
Italy during World War I. Later he simultaneous wrote agitprop Broadway plays
and Hollywood scripts. Although not as important a screenwriter as some of the
other Hollywood Ten members (his major efforts included the Charles Boyer
vehicle Algiers, a Bogart drama called Sahara, and a Susan Hayward weepie,
Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman), he was the central figure in the group,
co-founding the Screen Writers Guild, serving as its first president, and
acting, according to one source, as “the Communist Party’s de facto cultural
commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers.” Among his duties
was the enforcement of Party ideology and discipline among his sometimes
recalcitrant fellow scribes. After his appearance before HUAC, he decamped to
Mexico, wrote scripts under pseudonyms, and ended up as a university lecturer.
Samuel Ornitz
Samuel Ornitz (1890–1957) was
also the scion of a wealthy New York family. He was an active socialist by age
12, giving speeches on street corners. Working briefly as a social worker, he
soon became a successful Manhattan playwright and novelist. He went to
Hollywood in 1928, where he spent the next two decades writing mediocre
pictures for RKO and Republic (perhaps the most prominent item on his CV is a
shared four-way writing credit on a John Wayne flick, Three Faces West) and
telling everyone who would listen just how wonderful Stalin was. The Hollywood
Reporter claims that he was “one of the most outspoken political figures in
Hollywood”; another source says that his “doctrinaire, party-line communism
alienated many of his liberal colleagues and friends, such as his dogged
insistence that there was no anti-Semitism in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
After his encounter with the House Un-American Activities Committee, he quit
scriptwriting and resumed writing novels, including a now-forgotten 1951
bestseller, Bride of the Sabbath.
So there we have it: three men,
born with silver spoons in their mouths, who enjoyed their richesse even as
they embraced an ideology dedicated to the coldblooded murder of people with
bank accounts just like theirs.