Posted on 04/18/2005 10:47:45 AM PDT by Liz
In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began a series of official inquiries into the penetration of the Hollywood film industry by the American Communist Party (CPUSA).
Major public hearings were held in 1947 and 1951, with smaller hearings throughout the mid-1950s. In the course of these inquiries, dozens of “friendly” Hollywood witnesses denounced hundreds of people as secret members of the Communist Party, while dozens of “unfriendly” witnesses refused to discuss their politics with the Committee. Those who were either publicly or privately denounced as members of the CPUSA found it almost impossible to get employment in the motion-picture industry for at least for a decade.
The most famous victims of the resulting blacklist were the original group of “unfriendly” witnesses, known as the “Unfriendly Ten” or “Hollywood Ten.” These individuals–mostly screenwriters– refused to give political information about themselves before HUAC in October 1947.1
The blacklist functioned in part officially, as demonstrated by a joint public announcement of the motion picture firms in November 1947 that henceforth no studio would knowingly employ any member of the Communist Party, or the members of any other group which advocated the overthrow of the United States government by revolution.
The blacklist also operated unofficially, through instruments such as the irresponsible red-baiting newsletter Red Channels, which named whole swaths of people as subversives. This, for example, ruined the career of the left-wing but non-Communist actress Marsha Hunt. 2
The blacklist also often functioned in secret: jobs just dried up. As a result, “fixers” emerged to get people unofficially “pardoned” by anti-Communist organizations and film industry managers, therefore making them employable again. One famous “fixer” was the fiercely anti-Communist actor Ward Bond. 3
“Fronts” arose as well in the form of people offering scripts ghost-written by blacklisted screenwriters in exchange for official credit for the script and often a cut of the payment. One famous example of such a “front” was Philip Yordan, himself a quite famous screenwriter. 4
Some film careers were totally destroyed as a result of the blacklist system. For instance, Mickey Knox, “the next John Garfield,” was a rising star of the late 1940s, turning in a star performance in the great gangster film White Heat (1949). If you have never heard of Mickey Knox, well, that is the point. Many other careers suffered severe setbacks, such as that of actor Howard Da Silva. 5
Actors and directors suffered more severely than screenwriters because they could not act or direct under assumed names, whereas screenwriters could use the “front” system, which allowed the most talented of them to continue to write. The CPUSA, however, had made its largest inroads in Hollywood among screenwriters, and many screenwriters’ careers suffered greatly or ended.
It is generally not a good idea to attack professional writers because they tend to write, and to write well, to get in the last word. This has certainly been the case with the blacklist. None of the HUAC committee or staff (which originally included Congressman Richard M. Nixon) has written memorably on the events of 1947 and 1951, let alone on the later, smaller investigations.
A few of those who appeared as “friendly witnesses” before HUAC, such as directors Edward Dmytryk and Elia Kazan, and actor Sterling Hayden. have written important memoirs, often defending their conduct and sometimes expressing self-doubt. 6
But such figures are far outnumbered by the self-justifying and bitter memoirs of those who were denounced: Norma Barzman; Walter Bernstein; Alvah Bessie; Herbert Biberman; Conrad Bromberg; Lester Cole; Lillian Hellman; Howard Koch; Ring Lardner, Jr. (and now his daughter Kate); Donald Ogden Stewart; Dalton Trumbo; and Ella Winter. 7
The publication of these works, and more fundamentally the cultural shift in Hollywood to domination by a bien peasant Left that started around 1960 and accelerated in the 1970s, has led to the lionization of the Unfriendly Ten as American “rebels” and martyred “non-conformists.”
Meanwhile, the anger within the current filmmaking elite at those who originally “named names” in the 1940s and 1950s has been unremitting. A now unalterable view of what occurred is held by people who have little knowledge of what it actually meant in the 1940s to be a Communist; that is, a Stalinist. Two examples demonstrate the current political situation.
Long read---rest at link.
It's been over 50 years. Time to do it again.
ping
Freaking Communist traitors lost their jobs. Wah, wah, wah.
They should've lost their LIVES just like the other traitors, the Rosenbergs.
Problem is, 90% of the movies released nowadays don't seem to have an original screenplay.
I beleive the HUAC and later Sen. McCarthy as accomplished public servants.
INteresting article. Thanks.
Excellent article. Didn't know Gene Kelly's wife was a commie. Guess that's why he was such a left-winger.
Wait, where was Joe McCarthy's name? I mean, I know he was a Senator and thus not a member of the HOUSE committee, and his "witchhunt" was several years later, but his name wasn't in there at ALL! I mean, we all KNOW he just invented the "Red Scare" for politial power, right?!
I'll second that motion. Let's have at the liberal beasts.
"Didn't know Gene Kelly's wife was a commie"
I saw her on a special on Gene Kelly. She was his first wife and said that Kelly picked and chose his causes and considered himself a "liberal" democrat.
LOL
Credit goes to Ann Coulter for her perspecive on Joe McCarthy, and how he was right all along as supported by the Venona papers released in the early '90s.
BTW, even talk show hosts still don't know McCarthy had nothing to do with Hollywood. Glenn Beck had a rant on McCarthy a while back, showing he had no idea who he really was and what he really accomplished.
Hollyweirdos act like entertainers but they are subversive change agents.
Hollyweirdos thought back then---and continue to think now---that the rest of us just fell off a turnip truck and can't possibly be aware of leftist proselytizing via their movies, TV and music output.
Ping
Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern
Münzenberg was and is not a famous name, though this man’s power had given him a potent grip on the workings of fame. Since his radical youth in 1917, Willi Münzenberg had been a largely covert but major actor in the politics of the twentieth century. As a founding organizer of the Communist International and a leader in the structure of Marxist–Leninist power outside Russia, Münzenberg had played an especially influential part in the conspiracies, the maneuvers, the propaganda, the secret policies and actions that had led to this very spot. . .
SNIP
Münzenberg’s true role in the world was a closely guarded secret, though in keeping with his particular talent, it was concealed in conspicuousness. His talent was for propaganda, albeit of a special kind. For Willi Münzenberg was the first grand master of two quite new kinds of secret-service work, essential to this century, and to the Soviets: the covertly controlled propaganda front, and the secretly manipulated fellow traveler. His goal was to create for the right-thinking non-Communist West the dominating political prejudice of the era: the belief that any opinion that happened to serve the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was derived from the most essential elements of human decency. He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.
To create his networks of fronts and fellow travelers Münzenberg used every resource of propaganda, from highbrow cultural opinion to funny hats and balloons. He organized the media: newspapers, film, radio, books, magazines, the theater. Every kind of “opinion maker” was involved: writers, artists, actors, commentators, priests, ministers, professors, “business leaders,” scientists, psychologists, anyone at all whose opinion the public was likely to respect.
SNIP
The evidence is strong that two of Münzenberg’s principal lieutenants, Louis Gibarti and Otto Katz, were not only “Münzenberg-men,” and so agents of the Comintern, but (probably without Willi knowing for sure) agents of the NKVD as well. Gibarti and Katz: an extraordinary team. They did know something about trenchcoats, and careful tracking of their artful dodging through the first half of the twentieth century will turn up surprise after surprise. Gibarti was an elegant but slightly seedy Hungarian, affable, multilingual, and outspoken. He looked, said Babette, like “an opera cavalier.” Gibarti ranks as a founding father of the modern mingling of propaganda with espionage and covert action. Though his modus operandi made him seem like a “legal”—in contrast to illegal—Comintern agent, Gibarti’s “perfectly legal” organizations were pioneers in the art of doing secret-service business in the open. It was Gibarti, for example, who in 1934 guided a young recruit named Kim Philby through a “perfectly legal” front in Paris and on to Vienna, where Philby took up his first real job as a secret agent.
SNIP
In America, one might add to the list the name of Ella Winter, who began her career in politics being introduced by Felix Frankfurter to Lincoln Steffens in the midst of the Versailles Conference.
SNIP
After Steffens’s death, Winter proceeded to another marriage that was exceptionally useful from the apparat’s point of view. This one put her in a leading position managing the networks of Stalinist fellow travelers in Hollywood, a long-standing special concern of the apparatus, with much attention from Gibarti, Katz, and many others. Winter met and married a very successful Hollywood screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart-—a companion to Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos; a runner with the bulls at Pamplona in the company of the circle immortalized in The Sun Also Rises. Stalinism and Hemingway aside, Stewart was an attractive but malleable guilt-ridden lightweight. And at his side, Ella Winter was ideally placed for an active life among networks of Stalinist opinion in the film colony.
Ella Winter worked closely with Münzenberg’s men, especially those who were active in Hollywood. She knew Otto Katz well, and Gibarti referred to Ella Winter as “one of the most trusted party agents for the West Coast.” Gibarti had every reason to know.
This is one of those things that isn't what it appears on the surface, like the 3/5 compromise in the Constitution-
If you look at the origins of the HUAC, at its inception it had the approval of the CPUSA because they thought it would be a tool for taking on the right- their position changed quickly when the spotlight moved leftward.
Ping.
Right--they act as if he set up HUAC, despite the fact that A) it was the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee, not the SENATE (and he was a sentor) and B) He didn't really start his anti-Commie campaign until 1950...
Are the Münzenberg’s men still alive?
read later bump
Grandpa Walton was among those blacklisted in Hollywood. He a member of the Communist Party.
Fits neatly into my long-held theory that Follywood detested the HUAC not for outing Communists (the Hollywarped crowd were proud of their beliefs) but b/c the HUAC placed their outrageous behavior under the spotlight and exposed these self-centered, egotistical types to be hateful, petty little red-stained rodents.
True, and the thrust of his anti-communist investigation was the State Department and Department of Defense, which just happened to have been infiltrated by numerous communist activists and sympathizers. It's interesting to note that the left bashes those who have been the most successful in their anti-left campaigns, such as McCarthy, Reagan, Coulter, etc.
I was floored when I learned that Grandpa Walton was a gay commie.
Being a dem/lib/socialist these days is a badge of honor in Hollywierd, especially when you have willing accomplices in Washington.
Of the 10 listed as the Hollywood 10, is there any freeper commenting on this thread who can point to a crime than any one of them committed?
I await the flames that surely cometh.
Read "Reagan's War"- it begins when RWR was president of SAG.
Great read.....as are many of the books written about the HUAC.
Oh yeah....Harry Hay and his band of radical faeries or something.
I believe he's one of the reasons SF is a hotbed of gay activism today.
The leaders of his original network are probably mostly dead by now, but there are lines of descent that can be traced in Hollywood as well as in Communist youth groups, the civil liberties movement, and the antiwar movement, where he was also active.
I doubt very seriously that we would have handed China over to the Communists if not for Communist agents and fellow travelers in our government and media at that time.
Is this a "crime" by any particular Communist agent of influence? I don't know. But it is certainly something that anyone with a conscience ought to feel extremely guilty about. It resulted in the Korean War, the Vietnamese War, the Vietnam War protests that handed Southeast Asia to the Communists, and infinite suffering in China itself.
It can also be argued that it is a crime. Ezra Pound was punished for doing propaganda for Mussolini in the Second World War. These folks were doing propaganda for Stalin in the midst of the Cold War, when it was clear to most people that the Soviet Union was our enemy and an enemy to the peace and stability of the whole world. We are talking here about card carrying members of a party that had been declared illegal.
Donald Ogden Stewart (1894 - 1980)
Occupation: Screenwriter, playwright, novelist
Born: November 30, 1894, Columbus, OH
Died: 1980
Education: Yale
After WW I service in the Navy and travels in Europe, he settled in New York and began writing satirical novels, which were quite popular in the 20s. In 1928 he was introduced to the theater by a college chum, Philip Barry, who wrote the part of socialite Nick Potter in his play Holiday with Stewart in mind. Stewart played the part on Broadway.
Fascinated with stage life, he wrote his first play, Rebound (1930), in which he also played one of the leading parts, and followed this with a musical Fine and Dandy (1930). As early as 1925, Stewart had been assigned to adapt one of his own novels for the screen, but the project was shelved and instead he wrote an adaptation of the play Brown of Harvard, which was released in 1926.
In 1930, Stewart settled in Hollywood as a screenwriter, following an appearance in a supporting part in the film Not So Dumb. He soon gained a reputation for his sophisticated screenplays and sparkling dialogue. He won an Academy Award for the script of The Philadelphia Story (1940), which he adapted from the Philip Barry play. After Hitler's rise to power he became involved in the political activities of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
This association came back to haunt him during the McCarthy era, when it was claimed the organization had been a cover-up for a Communist cell. Blacklisted, he left Hollywood for good in 1951 and settled in London, where he wrote his autobiography in 1970.
Biography from Katz's Film Encyclopedia
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Not much has changed, it seems.
Get it? No work for ten years because of what someone else said about him...that's not right.
These same, uh, "intellectuals"---when asked about being associated with the CPUSA---asserted they had no idea Communism would become an enemy of the USA. Duh. I wonder if these intellectuals wanna buy a bridge---cheap---in Brooklyn.
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Really? What about Howard Da Silva? Ten years without work because of something someone said about him.
i threw my tv in the dumpster in 1994 when i saw how the big 4 networks were protecting the clingons.
i go to no movies, nor do i rent them.
i read, visit friends, listen to talk radio.
i don't need their propaganda.
Why didn't he cooperate? Just curious. I don't know who the guy is.
Joe found a buttload of "witches".. and burned a few before the "witches" burned him..
Its all in Ann Coulters book, "TREASON"..
Washington D.C. is NOW a coven not a government center at all..
Thanks. There's more on Stewart in his FBI file, which identifies him as "one of the principal leaders of the Communist element in the motion picture industry" from 1936 on. About that time he became chairman of the League of American Writers, the American affiliate of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, a Comintern front.
Red
Something similar happened to Jeff Corey. He and his wife were invited to a political meeting by a friend, were disgusted by the rhetoric they heard, and left after just a few minutes. Years later, someone remembered seeing him there, and he was instantly blacklisted.
"... that henceforth no studio would knowingly employ any member of the Communist Party, or the members of any other group which advocated the overthrow of the United States government by revolution."
I say if Hollywood does not want to hire those who advocate the overthrow of the United States government by revolution, then they should have that right. Don't you agree?
Now, what are you talking about? Holding an unpopular idea? Crimes?
Maybe you're thinking of the Spanish Inquisition, not HUAC?
Joe was not perfect, but he sure was right about the commies and the left. If anything, he just underestimated their penetration and their ruthlessness.
Jow was doing the right thing, but he went about it in the wrong way........the lefty media hastened his destruction.
While they may not be celebrating the Soviet Union these days, the anti-American leftists certainly associate themselves with the idea that they are more well informed and forward thinking.
If he wasn't guilty and had cooperated he wouldn't have been blacklisted. If I was called before Congress, I think I would open my mouth and cooperate.
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