COLLUDI OBLITI
Elizabeth Bodine
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
I was born in the 50s. My mom was 19 and my father — I think — was 20. I’m pretty sure neither of them was much concerned with the early ’50s political scene.
But surprisingly at this late date, I’ve concerned myself.
On the advice of my better educated history and film friends, I rewatched for, like, the millionth time, ON THE WATERFRONT.
Does a movie get any better?
I hope it’s not a surprise that I’ve loved this film since I was a movie-worshiping adolescent. Of course: it’s great movie from a great director featuring great actors.
Nevertheless, ON THE WATERFRONT just didn’t seem to shine as brilliantly for me once I learned the great director — Elia Kazan — voluntarily sat before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952 as a “friendly” witness.
Kazan provided that unconstitutional body the names of eight artists he designated as having dangerous (Communist) leanings. All of them were his friends and colleagues. These artistist were blacklisted. Their careers and lives were destroyed.
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ON THE WATERFRONT paid homage to the rat. The stool pigeon. Like Kazan. He later defended his action as a patriotic stand against Communism. He was himself tainted by early Communist activity but that was of no consequence when he was faced with possible inclusion on the blacklist.
It was a terrible thing that he did.
In reaction, playwright Arthur Miller, a close friend of Kazan, deeply disappointed by the director’s decision to voluntarily testify, wrote THE CRUCIBLE, a play and later movie focusing upon the Salem witch trials, and the innocent but executed victims.
I was aware that in 1999, at the big deal Academy Awards, Kazan was granted an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and that a statistically significant portion of the audience (actors,writers, directors and so on) refused not only to join the standing ovation but remained in their seats, not even clapping. At the time, I had a mild idea of what that was about, but I really knew not very much.
It wasn’t hard to educatate myself. HUAC and the blacklist have been the subject of scholarly, artistic, and culturally popular works for decades.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities was created in1938, with a mission to find and weed out radical activists both left the right. By 1945 that ideal had been abandoned and the Committee had concentrated its focus on socialist and potential or actual Communist groups.
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By 1947 the HUAC turned its attention to Hollywood, allegedly investigating Communist infiltration of the entire motion industry.
The first two supporting witnesses right up front in 1947 were Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild. A union.
As it turned out, It wasn’t just Kazan singing. Writer Budd Schulberg, actors Sterling Hayden, Lee J. Cobb, Adolph Menjou, Larry Parks (who named names but was blacklisted anyway), all knuckled under to their fear of being themselves targeted.
(Unlike Kazan, Hayden later regretted his actions. “I was a stoolie, a rat. The names I named of those close friends were blacklisted and deprived of their livelihood,” he said publicly.) Similarly, Lee J. Cobb subsequently admitted that as he then had a new family to support, he could not face professional and economic exile.
But the Committee’s investigation didn’t go over in complete quiet.
John Garfield (later blacklisted); Humphrey Bogart; Lena Horne; Myrna Loy; Lauren Bacall; John Huston; Henry Fonda; Bette Davis; Gene Kelly; Judy Garland; Vincente Minelli; Katherine Hepburn; Billy Wilder; Edward G. Robinson; Ira Gershwin; Groucho Marx; Lucille Ball; Danny Kaye; Robert Ryan; Frank Sinatra and more film professionalsformed The Committee for the First Amendment.
Good intentions. Came to nothing.
Ultimately, more than 200 talented actors, screenwriters, directors and producers were blacklisted not because they were Communists, but because they refused to testify and “name names.”
The original HUAC victims, called the “Hollywood 10,” were mostly writers. All served prison sentences for Contempt of Congress. (Originally there were 11, but director Jules Dassin fled the country.)
Many blacklisted screen and televion writers, including the brilliant Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10, wrote under pseudonyms, or the names of other writers, or even non-professional friends.
(I urge you to see if you have not, a 1976 Woody Allen movie called THE FRONT. Allen’s film fields the idea that some writers used actual people to peddle scripts.) Nearly every actor in Allen’s movie was blacklisted in the 1950s.
And, as if the weight and pressure imposed by a Congressional committeee wasn’t enough, a private group of American businessmen, calling themselves American Business Consultants, being fed information by the FBI, produced their own private list.
These men disseminated their list via a weekly newsletter called Red Channels, naming on no particular authority over 151 artists they believed required blacklisting. One was screenwriter and playwright Lillian Hellman, who didn’t work in Hollywood again until 1967.
A short list of the Hollywood professionals ultimately blacklisted by HUAC in the 1940s includes: Lee Grant; Paula Strasberg; Mortimer Offner; Zero Mostel; Leo Penn; Clifford Odets; Walter Bernstein; Paul Robeson and Richard Wright.
In the 1950s, the blacklist expanded to encompass John Garfield; Charlie Chaplin; Orson Bean; Harry Belafonte; Herschel Bernardi; Ruby Dee; Delores del Rio; Eddie Albert; Frances Farmer; Sam Levene; Sidney Kingsley and Martin Ritt. My lists are by no means complete.
Why am I talking about this? Who cares? That was in the ’40s and ’50s. This is 2020. The next millenium.
We have to care. Particularly now. We can’t afford to forget. I had to learn but now I’ll never forget. Demagoguery and tyranny: they are always waiting for an opportunity to rise up and overpower us. Building power through lies, innuendo, threat, inspiring blind fear in those of us with nothing to fear: Terrible times are always just around the corner. Of course it’s 2020. Still, we just can’t forget tyrants if we hope for a future without them.
