Blacklist

A Journal of the Plague Years.
by Stefan Kanfer.
Atheneum. 306 pp. $7.95.

In 1947, with World War II over and the cold war begun, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigations into what a former member, the anti-Semitic John Rankin, had called “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government” in “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.” The Committee's investigation into Hollywood still stands, a generation later, as perhaps the supreme paradigm—at once comical and terrifying—of American Yahooism and right-wing hysteria.

Among those witnesses to appear before the Committee, there were few liberals and no anti-Stalinist radicals (a breed which, hard enough to find anywhere during this period, seems to have been virtually extinct in Hollywood). Except for a couple of producers, like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer, the witnesses fell primarily into two groups. On the one hand were the long-time avowed right-wingers (Robert Taylor, Adolph Menjou, Ronald Reagan, the directors Sam Wood and Leo McCarey, etc.), all leaders or members of organizations designed to drive Communism out of Hollywood. On the other hand were the Communists and fellow-travelers, ex-communists and former fellow-travelers. And this second group was divided into what became two warring camps: the “friendly” witnesses and the “unfriendly” ones. The friendly witnesses (who included Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb) cooperated with the Committee. They answered the Committee's questions. They admitted and discussed their past membership in the Communist party or their connections with Communist front organizations, and they gave the names of fellow party-members or of others connected with those organizations. There is no way to measure the amount of personal damage done by these witnesses (in many instances they gave names already known to the Committee), but they undoubtedly helped destroy or arrest many careers and hurt many lives.

The unfriendly witnesses refused to cooperate. Several from the original Nineteen finally did not have to appear, but those who did, known as the Hollywood Ten (they included the screenwriters Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., and John Howard Lawson), took the First Amendment, would not discuss their own or anyone else's histories, and disputed the Committee's right to question them. They were cited for contempt, fined, and sentenced to one year in jail (two of them received six-month sentences). As Albert Maltz has recently stated, the Ten took the stand they did in order to bring the question of the Committee's constitutionality before the Supreme Court and because they expected to win the case and abolish the Committee. Had they expected to lose and go to jail, says Maltz, they would never have adopted those tactics. (In fact the Supreme Court declined to review the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the Ten's convictions.)

The studios were already in trouble from declining postwar attendance and rising costs. Now they were under siege from the Committee, a virulent right-wing press, anti-Communist organizations within Hollywood, and aroused sections of the public. A movement by Hollywood liberals publicly to combat the Red hunt was abortive. Within a month the studio heads capitulated: they announced they would fire the Ten (among whom were some of their most cherished writers) without compensation and would hire no more Communists. The unfriendly witnesses and those with similar reputations were blacklisted until the early 60's. Some began selling their work on the black market, under pseudonyms, for a fraction of their previous fees. Some found work abroad, mainly in England—there too usually working pseudonymously. Some actors managed to find work on the stage in New York. Many simply remained out of work, and many never returned to their previous professions even after the blacklist had dissolved. But the blacklist grew until it affected everyone whose name had been given a bad aura in the hearings and in the press: it extended beyond the unfriendly witnesses to include not only former Communists but liberals and civil libertarians who had criticized the Committee or the blacklist, and others. In at least two cases a man was blacklisted solely because, like Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar, he was mistaken for someone with the same name.

So innocent people were harmed? To speak of the guilty and the innocent here is an impertinence. Not one of these persons deserved one bit of what was done to him—and that includes the friendly witnesses who abased themselves and were cut off from their former friends and associates. Despite their stupidities and excesses, the Committee's investigations into government had some measure of reason behind them and some justification as a help to national security, and they probably did the country some good along with the harm they did. The Committee's investigations into Hollywood had no such justification and did nothing but great harm. The charge that screenwriters were poisoning the American people with Communist propaganda was a joke—unless one accepted the criterion (as indeed did many Hollywood right-wingers and members of the Committee) that it was Communist propaganda to show anything unfavorable about American life. Otherwise, those making the charge could come up with nothing more than three or four pro-Russian movies (e.g., Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia), made, in some cases with the President's encouragement, when the Russians were our allies, and four or five lines of dialogue whose possible pink connotation was ludicrously nullified by their context.

That the public needed to be protected from the work of certain actors was an even bigger joke (though no story emerging from this period is more wonderful than the one about Lionel Stander whistling the “International” in a scene where he has to wait for an elevator). Yes, some of these people—both knowingly and unknowingly—had helped or were helping to bring money into the Communist party. But it was a hysterical leap from this fact to the conclusion that a suspected or proven Communist must be deprived of work because paying him a salary was paying for a conspiracy to overthrow the government.

This is not to say that Communism did not affect Hollywood films in this period. Of course it did. One of the most powerful political and intellectual currents in this country, particularly among writers and artists, it could not have failed to. But although the Communist party line at any given moment may have been a model of simplicity, the effect of Communism on Hollywood films—when combined and diluted by other forces, especially the main consideration that goes into the production of Hollywood films (the desire to entertain and win a large audience)—was subtle and complex. (In this it was analogous to the effect of Communism on American life in general.) Only a mentality which saw thought and culture in simplistic partisan terms, and as phenomena to be controlled and legislated, could see this effect as a matter of simple propaganda. And the effect of Communism on films, like the impulses which gave birth to Communism, was both good and bad: it brought both truth and lies. Nor were the lies emanating from Stalinism necessarily more pernicious than the more traditional Hollywood lies, nor were they necessarily incompatible with them. On the contrary: in many cases they were virtually indistinguishable from them.

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In his chronicle of the blacklist, A Journal of the Plague Years, Stefan Kanfer—an associate editor and former film critic for Time magazine—covers extensively the part of the story related to the hearings. He brings in an abundance of material, some from obscure published sources and some, based on interviews, which has never appeared in print before. And simply to remind people of what happened is useful. We seem, in fact, to be in the midst of a public recollection of these events: witness not only this book, but also Eric Bentley's documentary play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? and the film The Way We Were (whose treatment of the events is superficial, inaccurate, and confusing). But this part of the story is already documented at least fairly well in far better books than Kanfer's, such as Walter Goodman's The Committee and Eric Bentley's Thirty Years of Treason (which consists of transcripts from the hearings, very well-selected and well-edited, with other relevant material and with commentary by Bentley); and it has been all along, however dimly, a part of the public consciousness.

The most valuable service Kanfer's book performs is calling our attention to, and informing us about, a crucial aspect of these times that is not well known: the activities of what Kanfer calls the “secular blacklisters,” men like Vincent Hartnett and Lawrence Johnson, who operated through organizations like American Business Consultants and Aware, Inc., and publications like the volume Red Channels and the periodical Counterattack. The Committee's main province was the movie industry; that of the secular blacklisters was television and radio. However shameful, the Committee's hearings were at least carried out by elected officials and in public, where it was possible to see them for what they were. The secular blacklisters were self-appointed vigilantes who operated insidiously behind the scenes. They would sniff out “subversives” and denounce them; they would encourage letter-writing campaigns against them and would pressure sponsors and producers to drop them. At the same time they turned their organizations into almost the only channels through which a black- or gray-listed performer could successfully rehabilitate him-self. Their standards were severe. Mere proof of innocence was seldom enough. Confession and a public avowal of patriotism in Counterattack or a similar organ were often required. These moral cretins wielded ruthlessly their enormous illegitimate power throughout the first half of the 50's and damaged or ruined hundreds of careers and lives.

Kanfer is very good at selecting telling incidents and quotations. At the height of the television blacklist, a CBS executive remarks: “The trouble with people who've never joined anything and therefore are ‘safe’ for us to use is that they usually aren't very good writers or actors or producers or, hell, human beings.” A witness writes to one of the Ten (a superlative instance of Sartrean mauvaise foi): “I have come to recognize that I was not formed in the heroic mold. Unfortunately, my father and mother bred a moral weakling. I'm truly sorry, but because I am what I am I'm going to work and get paid for my cowardice.”

Unfortunately the book is seldom much more than a stringing-together of quotations and anecdotes. There are some acute observations, and some honest, forceful indignation, but there is little analysis and no shaping idea or form other than chronology. At the same time, many remarks are characterized by a brutal reduction of psychological and political nuances and complexities. Moreover, the book is extremely slovenly in both factual accuracy and style. In a list of the original unfriendly Nineteen, three are given the wrong profession (e.g., “producer” for “scenarist,” etc.). In the first sentence of a two-sentence quotation from an essay by Robert Warshow, there are three mistakes in wording. Such errors in matters I know make me mistrust Kanfer in matters I don't know about. Worse than this, most of the book is written in a vulgar, cluttered, Time-derived style—replete with hyperbole, epithets, cumbersome metaphors, fuzzy diction, and obscure words—whose tone of nagging sarcasm serves Kanfer as a substitute for an idea. This style, as Peter Biskind has remarked, seems to have its own autonomy: it goes along on its own, often at odds with the material, blurring and distorting it. The sarcasm colors everyone and everything indiscriminately. Although the book is ostensibly meant as a gesture of commiseration with the victims of the blacklist, in its treatment of them it is often like those Hollywood movies (e.g., The Detective) which, under the guise of tolerance for some oppressed group, miss no opportunity to mock and caricature it. Sometimes the style is simply out of control. Kanfer describes the late Stanley Prager, a comedian, as “a born survivor, a round cork of a man who would bob to the top of an ocean or a sewer.” Who would ever imagine that Kanfer means to praise Prager? But apparently he does. In the introduction, he expresses his gratitude to Prager, one of the few who survived professionally without giving names, for relating his experiences “openly, without rancor or regret. His life was a model of grace under pressure.”

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To someone reading the history of this period, and reading the excerpts of the testimonies in Thirty Years of Treason, perhaps the most striking and saddening thing is that almost no one comes off well morally and intellectually. If there are acts of considerable moral courage (such as the Ten's defiance of the Committee) and if there are witnesses who give extremely informative and even cogent narratives of the past (this is true of a number of friendly witnesses), there is almost no individual who comes anywhere near being a model of both intellectual candor and moral courage. Why is this?

Well, for one thing, these people—among them men and women of considerable talent, intelligence, and good will—were not intellectuals nor really political people, and of course we will be disappointed if we expect them to have behaved as if they were: they were actors, directors, and screenwriters whose political thought and activities were a virtuous sideline. (It's worth remarking that the two people whose postures before the Committee probably came closest to being exemplary—Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller—were play-wrights with only a tangential relationship to Hollywood.) This is one reason (others were the Popular Front and the war) why the line between fellow-travelers and liberals who wanted things to go well with the Russians was so hard to draw. Often there was no such line; these people's politics were not thought-out or well-defined. And it was precisely because they lacked the intellectual's creed of free inquiry that the orthodox Communists among them managed to remain so as long as they did—in some cases not recognizing or acknowledging the truth about Stalin until Khrushchev made it acceptable to do so. Conversely the party, by its policies of secrecy and its rigid ideological prescriptions, made truth and candor virtually impossible for these as for all its members. The Communists among the Nineteen had admirable reasons for refusing to be candid with the Committee; but as a rule they were not candid anywhere else either, for reasons that were not admirable.

The contention that the hearings and (in some cases) the blacklist were in the national interest was of course implicit—and in many cases quite explicit—in the testimonies of the friendly witnesses. But there is a significant difference between the two groups of friendly witnesses—the right-wingers and the ex-communists—in the spirit in which this contention was made. In the mouths of right-wingers like Adolph Menjou and Leo McCarey this contention, however idiotic, was evidently sincere. In the mouths of the ex-Communists, despite their legitimate grievances against the party, this contention was hypocritical, a complete rationalization: these men's testimonies were completely self-serving, motivated solely by fear and a desire to go on working.

Yet here, too, remembering that they were not intellectuals or really political people helps us understand the lamentable posture of both groups, not only the stupidity and callousness of the one but the moral, intellectual, and political emptiness of the other. An intellectual's function is to tell the truth, and he can still perform his function as long as he can write or speak. In a sense, he can perform his function even by being silenced, even by dying for what he believes. But the function of these men was to work in movies, and if they couldn't do that they had no function. And when it comes to men like Elia Kazan and especially Robert Rossen, who at their best were among the few genuine artists in Hollywood, along with repugnance for their behavior one can feel a certain sympathy. They may have felt they needed to make a lot of money, but one can also believe they really needed to direct movies—in a way that Dalton Trumbo, who seems to have worked in films only to make money, and whose work shows it, did not need to write them. And in movies like Rossen's The Hustler and Kazan's On the Water-front (a sophisticated rationalization for informing but also a very good movie) their work is its own justification.

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But finally most of the blame must go to the Committee, the blacklisters, and the hysteria which gave birth to them. For they created a climate in which the cost of virtues like honor and candor was exorbitant or in which it was practically impossible to practice such virtues. It was impossible to be honest before the Committee without being an informer and causing others to be blacklisted. It was practically impossible to refuse to be an informer without, at the very least, being blacklisted and perhaps going to jail. It was (after 1951) virtually impossible to refuse to be an informer without being silent about one's own past (by the ruling that “disclosure of a fact waives the privilege as to details”—see Lillian Hellman's testimony). In this sense, in Hollywood at least, to have ever been a Communist was truly to be damned: you were damned if you did inform and damned if you didn't. Eventually it was virtually impossible, within the Hollywood community, publicly to attack the legitimacy of the Committee or its methods, to defend the Ten, or to speak out against the blacklist without being blacklisted oneself. Is it any wonder, then, that although this period gives us some truthful words and some saintly acts, no real saints emerge?

Losses like these are not made up in a generation. The losses of this period are our losses too.

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