The Hollywood Ten in history and memory

Film History: An International Journal

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 424-436

  Eckstein, Arthur ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

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EID: 50649100981     PISSN: 08922160     EISSN: 15533905     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/FIL.2004.16.4.424     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. For discussion of the entire sequence of HUAC investigations of Hollywood (not only 1947 and 1951 but continuing in 1953 and again in 1955-58), along with the list of the specific denouncerss, and the list of the hundreds denounced, see Robert Vaughn, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973); the lists can be found at 275-292 (the author is the prominent actor; the book is based on his Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Southern California). The original group of 'Unfriendlies' in 1947 numbered 19, but only 11 were actually confronted publicly by the Committee.
2. See the 1997 interview with Hunt in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (eds), Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St Martins Press, 1997), 318-320. The interviews with blacklistees collected in McGilligan and Buhle are an invaluable resource for the history of the period.
3. See Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York: St Martins Press, 2001), 475-477.
4. Patrick McGilligan, Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters in the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley, 1991), 341-343 for the screenplays written by blacklistees for which Yordan originally claimed and received credit.
5. Da Silva did not return to the screen until his magnificent performance as the psychiatrist in David and Lisa (Richard Perry, dir. ; 1962).
6. Edward Dmytryk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1995;
7. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988);
8. Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (New York: Knopf, 1963.
9. Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003);
10. Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (New York, Knopf, 1996);
11. Alvah Bessie, Inquisition in Eden (New York: Macmillan, 1965);
12. Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965);
13. Lester Cole, Hollywood Red (Palo Alta, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981);
14. Lillian Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman. Pentimento. Scoundrel Time, with new commentaries by the author (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979);
15. Howard Koch, As Time Goes By: Memoirs of a Writer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979);
16. Ring Lardner, Jr. I'd Hate Myself in the Morning: A Memoir (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2000);
17. Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck: An Autobiography (New York: Paddington Press, 1975);
18. Dalton Trumbo, The Time of the Toad. A Story of the Inquisition in America, and two related pamphlets (New York: Harper and Row, 1972);
19. Ella Winter, Not to Yield (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963).
20. For an account of the fiftieth annivesary attack on HUAC and on those who informed, with Billy Crystal as actor Larry Parks, John Lithgow as Sterling Hayden, Kevin Spacey as Paul Jarrico, and including appearances by the actual Paul Jarrico, Ring Lardner, Jr. and Abraham Polonsky, see conveniently Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party: How Commission Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Rocklin, CA: Forum/Prime, 1998), 1-10. On the scene at the Academy Awards in March 1999, see conveniently Billingsley, 283-289.
21. Patrick Bosworth, Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 224-240 and 376 (the quote). For his role in defending the Ten, Crum from 1947 onward was continually persecuted by the FBI. Though a practicing Catholic, a liberal Republican, and then a leader for Truman against the Communist-supported Henry Wallace, Crum was spied on for more than six years, and his passport was threatened several times on grounds of his alleged potential for subversion: Bosworth 1997: 323.
22. Bernstein in McGilligan-Buhle, 48.
23. Lardner, 9-10.
24. Barzman, 96-99. The Barzmans left the US for a rather plush exile in France,where they stayed for 20 years. The best chapter in the book tells how they worked as 'script-doctors' on the troubled production of El Cid (Anthony Mann, dir. : 1961), a film which eventually emerged as the most intelligent of all movie epics
25. Barzman, 85 (quoting her eventual psychiatrst).
26. Paul Jarrico in a 1983 interview noted without much comment that it was a Party rule that no one who was in analysis could be a member of the Party: 'It was a security rule'. This comes right after he asserts that the claims of Party thought-control over its membership are greatly exaggerated. See Jarrico in McGilligan and Buhle, 344-345.
27. Barzman, 72. Lysenkoism was only abandoned by the Soviet government as a theory of genetics in 1965. Barzman also notes with amusement the remarkable similarity of furniture, books, toys and (Central American) artwork in the children's rooms of the houses of herself and her comrades (110).
28. Most of the original 19 Hollywood figures who refused to testify voluntarily to HUAC in 1947 eventually went to jail; but only 11 (including Bertolt Brecht) appeared at the famous public hearing overseen by Parnell Thomas in Washington DC in October 1947. Brecht left the US the very next day, denouncing it as a concentration camp, and settled in Stalin's East Germany,which he pronounced a most satisfactory environment.
29. The most famous non-Communist Hollywood leftist who was persecuted is probably Edward G. Robinson; another example is Marsha Hunt (above, n. 2).
30. Thus the Party in the 1930s was experiencing close to a 100 per cent turnover in its rank-and-file membership every three or four years. On the average size of the Party in this period (33,000 in the 'good year' of 1936), and the short average length of stay, see Harvey Klehr, John Haynes, K. M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 348 (employing information drawn from Soviet files on the American Party).
31. Thus when Ring Lardner, Jr. writes in his autobiography that 'I felt anyway of helping spread knowledge about the horrors of Nazism was a wartime contribution', he means he sought any way to do this after 22 June 1941: see Lardner, 107, and compare with Lardner, 101 (the 1939-1941 period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and 'the peace movement'). Similarly, after late 1945, Lardner accepted the new CPUSA position that the primary political task was now - once again - to 'avoid war', 113-114. Translation: the United States must be prevented from opposing the expansionist actions of the Soviet Union.
32. As in the title of Peter Hanson's recent book, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001).
33. The fundamental situation was laid out long ago: see Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: The Viking Press, 1957);
34. cf. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
35. Draper's conclusions (supported by Klehr) have since been decisively confirmed by the opening of the Soviet archives following the fall of the USSR in 1991, which demonstrate how totally controlled the CPUSA was from Moscow: see Harvey Klehr, John Haynes, F. I. Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Klehr, Haynes, Anderson.
36. On life in the French Communist Party, see, e. g. J. Jenson and G. Ross, The View From Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis (1985). Thus to point out that American Communists ate hot-dogs and enjoyed baseball, as if this meant something 'American' at some fundamental political level, is wrongheaded. Lots of French Communists enjoyed soccer - but the PCF adhered with total rigidly in its policies to whatever was the current line of the Soviet Union.
37. See Jarrico's interview in McGilligan and Buhle, 398.
38. Bessie interview (1983) in McGilligan and Buhle, 98.
39. Dassin interview (1983), in McGilligan and Buhle, 209.
40. The number is now at least 300 Party members (Klehr, Haynes, Anderson, 1998). For Browder's role as a provider of spies for the USSR, see Shrecker's 'The Spies Who Loved Us?', The Nation, 24 May 1999 (who also now accepts that the use of American Communist spies provided massive amounts of economic, technical and military information to the USSR and accelerated the Soviet development of an atomic bomb by two years).
41. Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (Boston, 1999), 238-240. Bernstein, naturally, remembers this incident differently - but it is difficult to disbelieve the obvious meaning of the NKVD agent's report.
42. See Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 20.
43. See, e. g. John Bright interview (1983) in McGilligan and Buhle, 145.
44. See the comments of Barzman, 65 (it is a situation of which she is proud).
45. See Barzman, 104 (Joseph Losey).
46. Lardner, 141. This writer, a child in the 1950s, remembers The Adventures of Robin Hood (starring Richard Greene) very well.
47. Bessie, in McGilligan and Buhle, 103.
48. Dmytryk, 11.
49. An example is Betsy Blair, the wife of Gene Kelly, Betsy Blair, The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood and Paris (New York, 2003), 132-133. There were also super-secret CP members, prominent people who never even attended cell meetings but who knew what to say: an example is Dorothy Parker, according to Lardner, 100.
50. Jarrico in McGilligan and Buhle, 345-346.
51. On manipulation, secrecy and betrayal , see the comments of the Unfriendly Ten's lawyer Bart Crum, in Bosworth, p. 4. Similar (covering the same events) is Dmytryk, 36-38. Smugness: John Howard Lawson, Herbert Biberman, and Albert Maltz were the most notorious.
52. For instance, there was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, which Adrian Scott, later one of the Ten, warned Edward Dmytryk not to read - on pain of denunciation and expulsion from the Party (Dmytryk, 14).
53. Bright, in McGilligan and Buhle, 150.
54. Bercovici interview (1988), in McGilligan and Buhle, 37.
55. See the bitter comments of Jules Dassin (1983) in McGilligan-Buhle, 212.
56. The complete texts of Maltz's article in the Feb. 12, 1946 issue of New Masses, the major attack on Matlz by the Communist functionary Mike Gold in The Daily Worker, and Maltz's recantation-article in The Worker in April can be conveniently found in Billingsley, 295-311.
57. Lerner in Barzman, 73.
58. On Maltz and Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, see Dmytryk, 22-23.
59. Dmytryk, 18-21. Lawson kindly told them that they might perhaps be rehabilitated 'when you decide you can accept Party discipline' (21). Dmytryk also claims that it was the treatment of himself and Adrian Scott that led Maltz to write the plea for artistic freedom in The New Masses.
60. Rossen's response to the thought-control court of 1949 was: 'Stick the whole Party up your ass!' (Dmytryk, 115). Rossen himself had run with the wolves against Maltz in the Party inquisition of spring 1946 (Bernstein interview in McGilligan and Buhle, 46). Now he had had enough.
61. Example: Walter Bernstein in McGilligan and Buhle, 45. Dmytryk only denounced the Party after serving his term in Federal prison as one of the Ten for contempt of Congress. As with Rossen and Schulberg, the attacks on his character have been continual: see, e. g. Bernstein in McGilligan and Buhle, 46-47 (Rossen); 53-54 (Dmytryk).
62. Polonsky interview (1997), in McGilligan and Buhle, 494.
63. Polonsky remained an active member of the Party at least into the 1960s. It is unclear when, if ever, he left.
64. See the draft of Trumbo's letter to the FBI in Dalton Trumbo, Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962 (New York: E. Mann, 1970), 26-31.
65. Schlesinger's article in Saturday Review of 16 July 1949
66. and Trumbo's letters to the editor in response: Trumbo, Additional Dialogue, 124 and 135-136.
67. Part of the CPUSA prosecution dossier, entitled 'The Fifth Column Role of Trotskyites in the United States', can be found in Philip Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), 50-52.
68. See Klehr and Haynes, 127.
69. See Trumbo, Additional Dialogue, 30: 'I share with the men of your organization a sincere desire to see the end to all such seditious propaganda as criminal slander of the Commander-in-Chief, defeatism, pacifism, anti-Semitism and strategies designed to assist the German cause. Which, of course, was why I called on you when I possessed evidence of such activity. '
70. John Howard Lawson: 'You believe in freedom of speech for Communists because what they say is true. You do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists because what they say is a lie'. Dmytryk, 114.
71. Jarrico in McGillian and Buhle, 345-346. The way some post-modern scholars like to describe this situation is to say, approvingly, that the American Communists 'had transcended the nationalist meta-narrative'.
72. This is how the CPUSA sought to depict things (Dmytryk, 36). Over the long term, of course, they were successful.
73. Trumbo, 29 (Trumbo's emphasis).
74. See Buhle and Wagner, 2001 (a main theme of the book); or Navasky in the introduction to Lardner's memoir (Lardner, viii-ix).
75. Lardner, 174. For a more general study of the phenomenon, see Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Knopf, 1988)
76. Rapf interview (1986) in McGilligan and Buhle, 527. Lardner, 98, expresses somewhat similar feelings about the amount of political work Communist writers were expected to be doing.
77. This is the negative verdict of Bercovici, in McGilligan and Buhle, 42.