Table Of ContentTHE
INQUISITION IN
HOLLYWOOD
THE
INQUISITION IN
HOLLYW OOD
Politics in the Film Community
1930-1960
Larry Ceplair & Steven Englund
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
This paperback edition is published by arrangement with the Anchor
Press.
Copyright© 1979, 1980, 1983 by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ceplair, Larry.
The inquisition in Hollywood
Bibliography: p. 487
Includes index
1. Moving-picture industry—United States
2. Blacklisting of entertainers—United States
3. Communism—United States—1917—
I. Englund, Steven, joint author. II. Title.
PN1993.5.U6C4 79i.43'o9794'94'
ISBN: 0-520-04886-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77—25587
Printed in the United States of America
To our parents, and to those
<who resisted.
Acknowledgments
Many people gave generously of their time and effort to assist us in the
completion of this book. We are grateful to the men and women who sub
mitted to our endless queries about their personal, professional, and politi
cal pasts, and indebted to those who read all or part of the manuscript and
commented on our facts and conclusions. If there are errors in this book,
it is not the responsibility of Sonja and Edward Biberman, Lester Cole,
Philip Dunne, William Fadiman, Mimi Flood, Dorothy Healey, Paul Jar-
rico. Ring Lardner, Jr., Alfred Levitt, Lee Lowenfish, Albert Maltz,
Ben Margolis, Abraham Polonsky, George Sklar, or Gore Vidal.
The book has also benefited from the material loaned to us or brought to
our attention by Elizabeth Anspach, Gregory Bernstein, Philip Dunne,
Pauline Lauber Finn, Sheridan Gibney, Dorothy Healey, Albert Maltz, Ed
Medard, Deborah Rosenfelt, David Talbot, and Barbara Zheutlin.
Numerous archivists and librarians have answered our questions, pro
vided us with material, and generally eased our research task. Our thanks
to Allen Rivkin and Blanche Baker of the Writers Guild of America
West, Kenneth Clark and Carolyn Stein of the Motion Picture Association
of America, Gene Gressey of Wyoming University’s Special Collections,
Dione Miles of the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University,
Emil Fried of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Re
search, and the librarians at UCLA, University of Wisconsin Center for
Theatre Research, University of Southern California, University of Cali
fornia’s Bancroft Library, and the Hoover Institution.
We received the excellent editorial assistance of Bob Hutchins, whose
skill, time, care, and attention to the quality of the prose and the validity
of the ideas immeasurably improved the manuscript
CONTENTS
XI
I The Screenwriter in Hollywood i
2 The Founding of the Screen Writers Guild, 1933 16
3 The Communist Party in Hollywood:
Intellectual Ferment Brutalized by Politics _47
4 The Great Popular Front, 1936-39 83
5 The Disintegration of the Popular Front 129
6 The Phony War and the Resurrected Popular
Front, 1940-44 154
7 Prelude to Repression, 1944-47 200
8 The Congressional Hearings of October 1947 254
9 The Influence of Hollywood Communists on
American Films and American Politics, 1930-47 299
IO The Hollywood Ten: From the Blacklist to Prison,
November 1947-June 1950 3*5
X CONTENTS
11 The Devastation: HU AC Returns to Hollywood,
■95I-Î3 Jöi
12 Exile and Return: the Aftermath, ign to Present 398
Afterword 426
Appendices 441
Notes 459
Bibliography 4^7
Index 517
Introduction
He hath disgraced me and hind’red me half a million, laughed
at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation,
thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies
—and what’s his reason?
—The Merchant of Venice, III, i.
“Los Angeles, June 4, 1976. Three filmmakers have been ordered to
appear before a Federal grand jury here concerning a film they are
making on the Weather Underground. Subpoenas were served on
Haskell Wexler, winner of an Academy Award for his work on
4Who*s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’; Emile de Antonio, well-known
leftist documentary filmmaker; and Mary Lampson, a production asso
ciate.”*
They seem to come in waves, these assaults on the moviemakers by
the suspicious and righteous functionaries of the Department of Jus
tice and their counterparts in Congress. In 1920, while still establishing
themselves in Hollywood, the film moguls obediently listened while
cabinet member Franklin K. Lane exhorted them “to combat social un
rest” in their films.1 Jack Warner, Louis Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and
their colleagues spent the thirties and forties parrying government
efforts to censor or license their films and take away their theaters. By
•New York Times, June 5, 1976. The film makers refused to comply.
Represented by the Southern California chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union, and supported by a petition signed by thirty-two Holly
wood film notables, Wexler, de Antonio, and Lampson publicly resisted
this effort at “prior restraint of artistic expression.” The Department of
Justice withdrew the subpoenas.
xii INTRODUCTION
1947 the men in Washington, expanding the scope of their project,
sought to expose the “subversive” nature of Hollywood films and
film makers. Subpoenas (printed on pink paper) flowed out to screen
artists of all categories. Four years later, a second, more extensive bom
bardment nearly demolished organized radicalism in the film industry.
The times change, the names change, the films change; above all, the
tactics and strategy of repression change, as they are continually
refined. Only the goal of government remains the same: control. Inter
est has recently flared in the era of “subversion” that was the late for
ties and early fifties. A spate of books focusing on the spy trials, the
loyalty oaths, the Attorney General's lists, and the notorious blacklists
has appeared, each attempting to depict and explain the spirit of the
times.
Many of the victims of that earlier era in Hollywood, after years of
struggle, have enjoyed a comeback of sorts in the late sixties and
seventies—not only within the movie industry which had so un
ceremoniously dumped them, but also in public opinion. As this book
was taking shape we witnessed an event that symbolized this mood
change. A local group of radical students of the media staged a “Black
list Evening” which included the presentation of a film produced by
the Hollywood Ten followed by a panel discussion with five former
blacklistees: Karen Morley, Wifi Geer, John Randolph, Paul Jarrico,
and John Bright. The auditorium was jammed with people, all of them
listening intently to these elders who spoke about the dangers they had
faced and survived—dangers which most of the people in the room
knew only at third or fourth hand.
Events such as this are increasingly frequent. The blacklisted are in
demand as panelists and sages. One of the Ten, Albert Maltz, displayed
a rack full of cassette recordings of interviews which he had granted
to students of repression in the preceding five years. This partial reha
bilitation of the outcast is as long overdue as it is pathetically insuffi
cient, but the task of learning anything significant and endurable from
the Ten's experience has barely begun. And there is a vast amount to
be learned; for despite the renewed interest in the 1947-62 period,
very little systematic research or historical analysis has appeared in the
growing bibliography about the repression of radicals and radicalism
in the Hollywood film industry.
Virtually all accounts overlook the pasts of the men and women
who were blacklisted, as well as the larger political and professional
contexts in which these people lived and thrived for the generation be
fore the coup de grâce of 1947. Most writers devote a dozen or so
xiii
INTRODUCTION
pages to a brief review of the thirties and forties, studding them with
familiar anecdotes and conventional judgments and conclusions. Their
accounts usually open, in fact, in a congressional hearing room in 1947«
from which proceeds yet another recounting of the dramatic confron
tations between the House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC) and those most “unfriendly” of witnesses, the Hollywood
Ten. In opening their stories where they should have concluded them,
these writers deprive the reader of the real drama and, more impor
tantly, the real point.
What is overlooked in focusing only on 1947 ls that the blacklisted
Hollywood artists were, in many important ways, successful radicals.
The men and women who were cut down in the late forties had spent,
many of them, the better part of two decades giving of themselves
personally, professionally, and financially to a host of progressive and
radical causes. Their selection as targets in 1947 was not, therefore,
random; they were not naive and innocent victims, nor had they been
playing at radicalism. The label “Communist subversive” was pinned
on them only in part because they were members of the Communist
Party (CPUSA). The real charge was that for ten and twenty years
the film people had worked effectively for causes regarded as anath
ema by the new conservative or reactionary majority in Congress, as
well as by most of the press and several powerful national interest
groups. As the pendulum of history began its swing from Rooseveltian
liberalism to McCarthyite reaction, the Hollywood activists were
standing direcdy in its path, and, in the persons of the Hollywood Ten,
were the first to be felled.
In spite of the frequency of blacklists in many professions and many
parts of the country, this phenomenon came to be associated in the
public mind with Hollywood. A letter to the New York Times rightly
noted that “the blacklist probably never would have gotten noticed if,
say, it were coal miners rather than movie stars involved.”2 Yet coal
miners, auto workers, janitors, professors, and lawyers—anyone as
sociated with the progressive movements of 1935-48—became en
meshed in the strands of the Cold War “internal security” dragnet:
informing, investigating, prosecuting, recanting, oath taking . . .
blacklisting. Hollywood was not unique on this score, but it was
unique. The atmosphere of hysteria which HUAC utilized to sweep up
the anonymous small fry from other industries and professions could
not have been generated by a congressional hearing which peered into
the political past of, say, a “Harlan County Ten.” Hollywood was more
an image than a place, a mythmaking machine feeding the fantasies of
