Remembering the Witch Hunts
This year marks 50 years since the height of the Hollywwod
witch hunts. From today’s perspective it is difficult to imagine that the USA
once had a powerful progressive and left-wing movement and a strong Communist Party
that attracted numerous prominent figures to it. Before the poisonous paranoia spread
by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), followed by
McCarthyism had infected the country with its deadly fever, the United
States was widely respected for its
political freedom and progressive spirit.
Despite the
rise of fascism in Europe and right-wing gangsterism in
the USA, the
period during the thirties and early forties, shortly before the blacklist, was
also a time of left-wing optimism and successes. Although Hollywood
was not dominated by left-wingers, they were not without clout. The Communist
Party had, at an estimate, around 300 members and at least double that in terms
of sympathisers, many in well-paid and respected positions. But, it wasn’t all
serious politics; the parties and fun that was had by these Lefties is perhaps
surprising under the circumstances, and the invitation lists read like a Who’s
Who of Hollywood celebrities.
The leadership
provided by the Communist Party of the USA in combating fascism, its commitment
to anti-racism and minority rights and success in building the trade union
movement unleashed the hatred of the capitalist class and right-wing
politicians. The infamous HUAC hearings were used to suppress and make illegal
not just the Communist Party but anyone associated with it as well as any organisations
in which it avowedly had influence. As a result, tens of thousands were
blacklisted, careers and lives were destroyed and families broken. The country
was plunged into a nightmare of fear, hysteria and red-baiting from which it
never properly recovered. Party officials were, under the Smith Act, deemed to
be foreign agents and subject to draconian sentences; in Texas
they even faced the death penalty.
Because of
their prominence, celebrity status and ability to articulate ideas, those film
workers in Hollywood who became the
focus of attention for the witch hunters are the ones most talked about. Many
books have been written about the Hollywood blacklist,
but Tender Comrades by Patrick
McGilligan and Paul Buhle is one of the best. Such books are a chilling
reminder of just how neo-fascism and the emergence of a totalitarian security
apparatus can lurk just below the surface in an apparently open and democratic
society.
Many of
those who became leading figures in the motion picture industry in Hollywood
during the thirties and forties and were also members of the Communist Party or
fellow travellers, came from poor, immigrant Jewish backgrounds. This
experience gave them an understanding of ordinary people, of their struggles
and of life as lived ‘at the bottom of the pile’. It gave many a strong sense
of solidarity, of sympathy with the underdog and with discriminated minorities.
It is also one of the chief reasons why such people were so sought after in Hollywood
as writers, because they could turn in believable dialogue that encapsulated
the tragedies, humour and resilience of ordinary people. They were able to
endow what were often banal original stories with the necessary human interest,
drama and social relevance that would make them successful box office
hits.
Most of the
big picture moguls of the time – who ruled their studios with the iron fist of
feudal lords – had little idea of how to make films, but had the money to hire
those that did. They invariably had clichéd outlooks, right-wing politics and strong
Puritanical moral pretensions, but ironically, they employed many Communists or
left-wingers who knew how to write and create the films that made them their
money.
The
well-known character actor Lionel Stander, commenting on life in thirties America,
said: ‘To paraphrase Dickens, it was the best of times and it was the worst of
times – the best of times because you were young, and the worst of times
because of the actions of Hitler and Mussolini, etc. Hollywood
was the Mecca for nearly every
worthwhile intellectual in the 1930s from all over the word. You saw a lot of
what was happening through the eyes of the German refugees – actors, writers,
directors, technicians, and artists – who came here and through the activity of
mass organisations like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, etc. The power of the
left existed because it said all the things that everybody believed in and
wanted to hear; it represented every person who believed in human decency,
justice, and equality and was against racism and bigotry. And the Communist
Party always took the frontal position.’
Betsy Blair
Reisz, a dancer and actress, married first to Gene Kelly and later to the
British film director, Karel Reisz, has an unusual biography in that she tried
to join the US Communist Party after the war but was told by the leadership
that she could be more effective outside, and if she were to join it could harm
Gene’s career. Gene Kelly was, and remained a solid left-winger, who supported
many progressive causes - a ‘social
democrat’ Betsy called him. She won critical acclaim for her film roles and a
Best Actress Award at Cannes. Once
blacklisted she left the USA
first to France
and then the UK.
In Europe, she acted in films made by leading progressive
directors like Antonioni, Tony Richardson and Costa-Gavras.
One
interesting tit-bit revealed in the book – which has resonances with the
surveillance being carried now - is how the FBI used psychotherapists. Many
Americans, even at that time, used psychotherapists the way Catholics use the
confessional or others use the bus, so the Party insisted that anyone visiting
a psychotherapist leave the Party. One of the chief FBI informers was a ‘lefty’
psychotherapist called Phil Cohen to whom many left-wingers in Hollywood
turned.
Many of those
black-listed were talented, humane and fascinating individuals. Their life stories
provide a depiction of the Hollywood
‘dream factory’ in its heyday and a historical narrative very different from
the mainstream one. They also offer fascinating little vignettes of many of the
famous celebrities and villains of that time from John Wayne, James Cagney,
Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan,
Walt Disney and Sam Goldwyn among many others.
Norma
Barzman, another Hollywood blacklistee who found refuge in France
and Britain
wrote the book, The Red and the Blacklist
(2003), about that period of blacklisting and exile, also reveals the comic
side. Her friend, the blacklisted writer John Barry, responding to her query
how things were: ‘It's hell,’ the communist director said of exile. ‘I live in Paris,
meet beautiful women and go out to dinner with Jean-Paul Sartre.’ For actors,
of course, it was much more difficult than for writers who could use pseudonyms
and ‘Fronts’ The actor Zero Mostel noted that, unlike scriptwriters, he
couldn't hide from the blacklist by adopting pseudonyms: ‘I am a man of a
thousand faces, all of them blacklisted,’ he said.
Through the
words and stories of these individuals it also becomes clear how different the
United States could have been if the right-wing had not been successful in
suppressing the left-wing and creating such a climate of fear of all things
communist or associated with it. It managed to achieve a ‘brain-washing’ of generations
of US citizens, imbuing them with an irrational fear and a distorted ideology
that enabled capitalism to run rampant and imperialism to wage wars unhindered.
Those of us elsewhere in the world who lived through those oppressive decades
at the height of the Cold War also paid the costs.
END
1261 Words
John Green
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