In the summer of 1950, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested and charged with masterminding the plot to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb. They were convicted in March 1951 of “conspiracy to commit espionage” and died in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953. Robert, their youngest son, is the founder of the Rosenberg Fund for Children. “I’ve set up this fund to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children whose parents have either been killed or injured or lost jobs or been harassed because of their progressive activities. They’re enduring the kind of a nightmare that I endured, and the way we provide help is to provide a safe haven for them. It took me a long time to get around to it, but it’s a direct outgrowth of what happened to me as a child.”
I remember visiting my parents, but not clearly. I’m told that we visited them at least a dozen times from about the fall of 1951 right up until two days before the execution. So that was an eighteen- or twenty-month period in which we visited them maybe once a month or once every six weeks. I remember, but it’s all like one visit. I remember driving in this big old Buick with plush back seats. I remember driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway along the Hudson River and I remember this sense of danger and foreboding, and yet it was like this fun excursion. I don’t really remember the prison so much. I guess that’s what you block. I remember seeing them in a room and I remember things being ordinary. I remember playing with them, playing word games, and talking with them, and eating a candy bar. I just remember it being kind of ordinary. I don’t remember it being histrionic, I don’t remember it being upsetting. But then again maybe that was part of my whole defense mechanism, and theirs too. I know from their letters and from talking with my brother that they worked very hard to keep things on an emotionally even keel.
That’s my memory of it. You know, it’s very pedestrian. But that’s the way it is. When I think about Hollywood movies and trying to make something dramatic of all this, it didn’t seem dramatic to me. Or maybe the very understatement is the drama.
I often start with the story of my parents’ arrest, but the fact of the matter is I don’t remember the actual arrest. All I can repeat is what my brother has told me. The arrests took place in July and August of 1950. I was just barely over three years old at that point. But my very first memory that’s directly related to the period is also one of the first memories I have at all.
You see, my father was arrested first, and then my mother went to testify before the grand jury in July of 1950. When she completed her testimony that day, she was arrested as she left the grand jury room. She had left my brother and me with a baby-sitter, and the baby-sitter didn’t know what to do with a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. So the baby-sitter took us around the corner and a few blocks down on the Lower East Side of New York City to my grandmother’s house.
My grandmother was trying, with the government’s help, to coerce my mother into cooperating. See, the government had offered my aunt and uncle, David and Ruth Greenglass, a deal, which was if you cooperate and name others, then the wife will not be arrested and she’ll be able to stay home and take care of the children, and the husband will get a prison sentence but won’t be killed.
They took the deal and then cooperated by naming my parents, and my parents were supposed to take a similar deal and cooperate by naming others. And my mother’s mother, who was siding with my mother’s brother, went to my mother in prison and said, “Why don’t you back up David’s story?” And when my mother refused, my grandmother said, “Well then, I’m going to put the kids in an orphanage.” She was using the threat of putting us in an orphanage to coerce my mother. And while I can’t say for certain that the government was putting her up to it, I believe that to be the case.
One of my first memories is my grandmother following through on that threat and telling us we couldn’t live there anymore and she was going to put us in an orphanage. But she didn’t have the heart to say, “I’m doing this because your mother’s not listening to what I say.” She had to make up a story, and that’s where my first memory comes in. She said this is a cold-water flat and the toilet freezes in the wintertime, and it’s not a safe place for children to live. So I remember going into the bathroom and peering down into the toilet to try to find some ice and of course there was no ice, it wasn’t yet winter anyway.
That’s one of my very first memories, and it’s in the context of being placed in an orphanage. We were in this place where we couldn’t leave, with a whole bunch of other kids. The relatives would come and take us out on weekends. My parents were in prison, and here I was, a little three-year-old in this orphanage which I equated with prison. My very earliest memories were of that. Throughout this entire period, there was this sense of foreboding, that something was terribly wrong and frightening. As a four- and five-year-old, I didn’t follow my parents’ trial. Adults tended not to talk about it—they tried to protect us.
Finally, after nine months, we got out of the orphanage and we went to live with my father’s mother on Laurel Hill Terrace in upper Manhattan, and I remember it as a very isolated time. My brother went to school. My memory was of staying in the house and playing and really not doing anything else. I don’t remember seeing other kids, and I guess this was part of feeling that we were somehow in hiding.
My brother was harassed in elementary school. He talked about who his parents were, and his friends’ parents found out. He was thrown out of somebody’s house with the mother screaming at her son, “I don’t want you playing with your Communist friends anymore!”
So when things like that started happening, it was decided that we should be moved to rural New Jersey, to Toms River, where some friends of my parents lived. This was rural chicken-farm country, and there was a progressive Jewish community in that area. We lived in semisecrecy. We still had the name Rosenberg, but we never talked about it. We very quickly learned to shut up.
In fact, I learned that in general. I learned very early on that if I acted upset, adults fussed over me. But it never did any good. It never brought my parents home, it never changed the circumstances of this dread-filled atmosphere that I lived in. Instead, if I pretended I didn’t understand what was going on and acted dumb, then everybody would be relieved. And that made life easier for me. So I quickly developed this defense mechanism of not understanding and of also forgetting. And it was very easy as a five- and then six-year-old to just be focused on playing outside.
I remember one of the myths that in part was perpetrated probably unintentionally by The Book of Daniel,1 the novel and then the movie, is that my brother and I were manipulated by the people who sought to save my parents in order to gain sympathy for my parents. That we were brought out to rallies, and that we were callously used without thought for how this might affect us. That’s just totally untrue. We were not put on public display. We were protected. I remember we went to one rally2 at the very end in Washington at the White House, where my brother delivered the clemency letter to Eisenhower.3 We were really shielded. That was important to us, and yet the shielding was incomplete in the sense that I still felt the fear and apprehension that surrounded us in a gut way, even if I couldn’t in an intellectual way.
For instance, I remember the period just before the execution, which was in June of 1953. I was six then. A special stay of execution was issued by Justice Douglas during the last week of my parents’ lives. I remember hearing on radio that the executions had been put off. Then the Supreme Court was reconvened in special session and the stay was overturned, the executions were set for the very next day. And though I pretended not to, I also remember knowing—on some level I can’t specifically find—that they were executed.
I remember I made up this story, figuring out in my own six-year-old way why this could happen. I believed that their attorney was asked by the Supreme Court to come up with ten reasons why their lives should be saved, and because the attorney succeeded in doing that, the executions were then stayed. And then the Supreme Court asked for an eleventh reason, and the attorney was unable to come up with an eleventh reason and so the executions were then carried out. That’s what I believed as a six-year-old.
I started the first grade in the fall of 1953. After four months we were pulled suddenly out of school and sent back to my grandmother’s house in New York, where I then started going to another school. This really bothered me. I hated constantly being the new kid everywhere—every situation I was in seemed temporary and unstable and strange. It was as if my life constantly changed during that period and somehow it was all because of this trouble, but it was never really explained to me.
What I later found out happened was that the school board of Toms River, New Jersey, found out who we were and said that we couldn’t attend New Jersey public school ’cause we weren’t residents of the State of New Jersey. So I was kicked out of the New Jersey public schools at the age of six. In fact, to this day, I think of it as the sort of official version of the friend’s mother saying, “I don’t want you playing with your Communist friends anymore.”
We went to a Christmas party that year, not a Hanukkah party but a Christmas party. We came into this room and there was this giant Christmas tree and all these kids around it. I didn’t know any of the kids. It turned out that this party was for Michael and me, and all the presents, this huge pile of presents, were for us! I couldn’t understand why there were all these kids, but all the presents were for me. I remember being totally dumbfounded by it all. At that party was this couple, Abel and Ann Meeropol, who drove us home and said that we were going to come to live with them and would we like that. I remember sort of liking them, so I said, sure.
We moved in with them. They lived about twenty blocks from my grandmother’s house on Riverside Drive in New York City. I remember our parents’ attorney, Manny Bloch, coming to visit, and things seemed to be very smooth. And then one evening when I was getting ready for bed, there was a knock on the door. It was a policeman. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but the next day we were packed up and taken off to another orphanage in Pleasantville, New York.
What happened was that a conservative group, the Jewish Board of Guardians, had filed a petition with the children’s court saying that we were being abused by the Meeropols.4 That this was a case of political abuse, that we were being taken to rallies, where we were forced to listen to grisly descriptions of executions, that we were being taught to hate our country. None of this had ever happened, it was completely false. But the judge issued the order and the police came to seize us. And that night an argument developed, so the judge was prevailed upon to stay the execution of the order till the next morning. Then we were taken away to an orphanage.5 So once again there was this weird uprooting. And once again we were in school with a new set of kids and not really understanding what this was all about, but knowing somehow it was all connected.
A legal custody battle developed, and we ultimately ended up back with the Meeropols. But for a while we had to sleep at Grandma’s house but we could eat dinners with the Meeropols. A long, complicated set of arrangements that didn’t really all get straightened out until 1957, when the adoption was finalized.
I remember being eight, nine years old, playing on the streets of New York City, and the conversation coming up around what newspaper your parents read. The Meeropols, my parents, didn’t read the Daily Worker, they read the Guardian. But I was very nervous about any paper, so I was scared to say that they read the New York Times, which is what they normally read, because I thought maybe that was bad too because it seemed different from what the street kids were reading. I couldn’t say they read the Daily News because I knew that was the real conservative bad paper, but I thought the New York Post, which was kind of shaped like the News and somewhat like it, would be more acceptable. That was all part of the cover.
I remember at one point, rumors came around that the House Un-American Activities Committee was coming to New York and my father6 was going to be called. He didn’t want the focus on the family, so we pulled up and moved to a friend’s vacant apartment in the Bronx for six weeks. I remember my parents saying, “If someone tries to talk to you, ignore them because they might give you a subpoena.” I didn’t know what a subpoena was, but I just knew not to talk to people and if some strange man wanted to ask me some questions about something I was to ignore him. I remember somebody following me down the street to the subway and me just walking faster and faster and quick running into the subway.
I remember being very nervous when I would be at friends’ houses and there were news programs that recounted the early fifties. I would always try to go to the bathroom or do something to be away when my parents’ case came up. My solution was to try to not be there, to put as much distance as I could between it and me, because it was very unsettling and bad things were associated with it, like being thrown out of school, or being put in an orphanage, or being thrown out of somebody’s house. Throughout there was always the sense that something might happen, that’s probably the best way I can describe it, something might happen. We don’t know what it is—but it’s bad. And the only protection you have is to be quiet.
That’s my own little personal horror story. But there are two sides to it. You see, my parents’ attorney set up a trust fund for Michael and me. This fund enabled us to become children of the movement. It enabled us to live, to become secure and safe. He traveled around the country raising money for us. In fact, in Detroit in the fall of 1953, he described the fund that he was setting up, that it would be another Rosenberg fund for the children. Which I find to this day ironic that I’m now doing something called the Rosenberg Fund for Children, even though when I set it out, I didn’t pattern it on that.
Abel Meeropol was a blacklisted songwriter who wrote under the name Lewis Allan. He wrote “Strange Fruit” and “The House I Live In”7 and a number of other songs. He was in New York with no work, with no money. This fund enabled us to attend alternative high school. I attended the Little Red School House and Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village in New York, progressive alternative schools. People like Angela Davis, Kathy Boudin, Arthur Miller’s kids went there, Norman Mailer’s daughter was there. It was a school at which my parents’ beliefs were not considered extraordinary, and they might be considered heroes rather than villains.
Nobody talked about who we were, but people knew. In fact, there was this charade—we would pretend that no one knew so we could all act normal. In fact, this occurred throughout our entire lives until we became public figures in the 1970s. A friend described the way people used to refer to my brother when he was at the University of Wisconsin in the late sixties—he used to be described as Michael Meeropol You-Know-Who-His-Parents-Were. But nobody would ever say that to him or me, because it was considered impolite, I guess, or maybe that we were still undercover and they didn’t want to intrude. So that gave us some space and actually it was very good.
I didn’t tell anybody who I was, even my closest friends. There were times when I became close to someone and would want to tell them who I was, and I never would.
I was going to get married, and before my future wife came to live with me, I said to her, “Before you do this, you oughta know.” I finally got myself to tell her, and it turned out she already knew. A mutual friend of ours had sat her down and said, “Hey, do you know who Robby is?” Which is exactly how my best friend found out. But she never mentioned it, because she felt it was important for me to be the one.
That kind of thing happened a lot. I suppose it was like being in the closet—well, who knows and who doesn’t know? You could be more open with people who knew. There were people who you really wished knew, and it was always a relief when they did.
A husky man of medium height, soft-spoken and gracious, Dennis was a longshoreman for twenty years until he was injured on the job. His father, Eugene Dennis, was the general secretary of Communist Party of America and in 1949 was indicted under the Smith Act along with other top leaders of the CPA. He was imprisoned for four years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of being at Party conferences, conventions, rallies, May Day parades. There’s an excitement in all that, this constant “You must be so proud of your daddy; you’re going to wear your daddy’s shoes when you get older.” All these people adored him or respected him or were proud of him. I can remember feeling, well, I’m glad they’re proud of him ’cause I’m proud of him, but I don’t know about wearing his shoes! [Laughs.]
I was five or six when I knew something was really wrong. There was a lot of tension at home, and there were photographs in the newspapers. Around ’47, my father was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and he refused to answer questions.1 He was in the headlines, and the talk around the house was about prison and what might happen and what might happen to my parents’ friends. I felt we were under siege.
It wasn’t yet a time of great fear for me, because I was surrounded by other Party adults who were all involved in this big struggle together—us against them. And I was on a scholarship to a progressive school in New York City. So the community that I lived in and went to school in was sort of a sanctuary, but I had this feeling that out there dark clouds were gathering. That was my sense of it, up until the Smith Act indictments2 came down.
Around that time, I went with my mother to the movies to see Ivanhoe with Robert Taylor; and the second feature was a film about the Red Menace, and I was feeling kind of uncomfortable and anxious while it was on. And then came a big shot of my father and the other Party leaders who were indicted, coming down the Foley Square courthouse steps. Then came the anger and fear in this dark movie house. I was glad it was dark. It was one of the first times I had felt that kind of public venom directed at my father. That made me feel the vulnerability that we were in at that time.
When several of the Party leaders went underground,3 the whole issue of surveillance became paramount in a way that it hadn’t before. Children and spouses of Party leaders, people who were friends of people who had gone underground, were being followed in a way that hadn’t happened before. I knew that it hadn’t happened before, ’cause everybody was talking about it. I was given strict instructions on watching behind me, watching out as I was going to and from the playground, or the school bus, or whatever, to see if people were following me. For my own safety—not that I was a child courier or anything like that! [Laughs.] It became a part of my life to be watching out for strangers who were the FBI, who were out to harass us or to try and get the goods on our friends. That’s when the fear started, that whole posture of literally looking over my shoulder. And as I got older, closer to nine or ten, which brings us up to ’51, ’52—my father’s already in prison—I felt hunted, because I was out in the world more myself, it wasn’t just from home to first grade anymore. It was being involved in after-school activities, and going to friends’ houses and moving around New York City by myself. And when I was alone like that, it was scary.
I was followed. There were times I knew that clearly. The older I got, the better I got at identifying these guys. Once, on the street, they flashed a badge and said, “We want to ask you some questions,” and I split. Ran all the way home, and it was a long way.
Friends of mine, other red diaper babies, we tried at times to make sport of it. We knew, for example, our telephones were tapped. I knew this signal—from toddlerhood probably—hand in the air, making circles, pointing up to the ceiling. Adults would make that gesture to say “We are being listened to by the government” and “We just don’t talk, we don’t name names and we don’t talk sensitive politics here in this place.” And so now and then, my friends and I, we would play games with that. One time I called up a friend of mine and said, “I have an envelope for your dad from Gil.” Referring to Gil Green,4 one of the Party guys. “We’ll meet at 160th and Riverside Drive.” So a couple hours later we hopped on the bus and we went by there, and there were feds all over the place! It was hysterical, it was a kick then. We could take it and turn it into some juvenile gang thing, in the cause of the Revolution, or something like that! So it wasn’t all fearful. There were ways I could find amongst kids my own age, and certain adults, a comfort and a humor during that time. But I cannot remember feeling relaxed. I could feel momentarily safe, but never relaxed.
I didn’t visit my dad in prison every time. That was real hard, especially in the beginning. It was hard for me to see him locked up. But I did go. My mother went every month. I think visiting privileges were once a month, and I went maybe every other, or every third. The Party continued to pay his paycheck to us, and then there was some aid through the Smith Act Families Defense Fund or whatever the committee was, which was an ongoing legal-defense and family-support committee that went on all through those years that the various leaders were in prison or underground. So it was always tight for us. By the time my father was national chairman of the Party in ’59, he was making seventy-five dollars a week, which was very, very tight.
I remember when my father was in prison that all kinds of people from outside the Party—at least that’s the way I thought of them, from different unions, ministers, neighbors—went out of their way to take care of us. Not any expression of political solidarity, but just, “We want you to have this television set. We want you to have this money to take a week’s vacation. We want to help young Gene to go to school.” Or “Have some clothes,” or “Here’s some food.” I don’t mean a bag of groceries, but like a cake or casserole. There were just lots of ways that people outside the Party were doing this. Now, they may have been in the Party for all I know, but that was not the way they acted; it’s not the way my mother reacted to them. It was surprise and gratitude that there were people who had respect for my father and sympathy for what our family was going through and expressed that in very nurturing kinds of ways. And that mattered to me. That was something that stayed with me. Even when I was in a lot of tenuous situations politically over the years, I always had the sense that it’s not just us against them.
Two things had changed by the time my dad got out of prison. One was that he had become real thin and all white-haired. And I had seen that transformation while he was in prison. It wasn’t a graceful aging that I saw. I saw a tension in him and a tiredness. I was twelve and a half when he got out, I was becoming a teenager. These two things were going on: my dad’s getting old and I’m becoming a man. And we didn’t have much time to sort all that out. I was proud of him. I was proud of him for having survived. I always had the feeling that terrible things had happened to him in prison that he never told us about.
My memories of before prison were not of any golden years, so I didn’t harken back to some wonderful time in our family that had suddenly been disrupted. It was always hard. And Dad coming home was another chapter in that. He was under restrictions because of parole, and he was frustrated. Within a few years he was seriously ill. He died in ’61, so it was barely five years that he was out of prison before he died. And that all seemed to go quickly. Still, there was a celebration of his coming out of prison, of us being back together, getting away, having some brief vacations together, out of the city.
When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I decided that I was not going to sign the loyalty oath that you had to sign to get your diploma in the State of New York. I was called on the carpet before the principal—me and at least one other student. We decided on our own, and my parents were a little concerned [laughs] about jeopardizing my high school graduation, but I wasn’t going to sign that damned thing. And we went on our own to the ACLU and the newspapers and all that. So the principal called me on the carpet and said that I was going to discredit the school and I had to think about my future. And I said, “If my future has to be built on violating the Constitution of the United States, I don’t want any part of it!” [Laughs.]
I always felt that people like my parents were the real Americans, and this didn’t come from any education in Marxism-Leninism, anything like that. I didn’t get that kind of education at home; the doors were open to me to read and to experience all points of view—political, religious, and every-thing else. My parents wanted me to make up my own mind about things. But I felt compelled somehow to learn more about what had really happened in this country and who was really trying to implement the Bill of Rights and the promises of the American Revolution or the Emancipation Proclamation. I wanted to find out, and I felt that the Left really was. By the time I was halfway through high school I felt there was no doubt that not only things weren’t gonna get better without us—“us” meaning the Left—putting up a fight, but that they were going to get a whole lot worse. My father got out of prison, and shortly after the Smith Act was thrown out for being unconstitutional, but I felt that the guys’ coming out of prison and what seemed to be a loosening of the persecution was going to be temporary. That we couldn’t count on anything, we just had to keep up the good work, keep the faith so to speak, and keep fighting.
Robbie Bridges’s father was Harry Bridges, the legendary leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). Suspected of being a secret Communist, Harry was brought to trial four times in twenty years. The Supreme Court was so repelled by the government’s 1945 attempt that Justice Murphy denounced it from the bench: “The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man’s intolerance of man.” Robbie Bridges has worked for the fire department of Bay Area Rapid Transit for more than two decades. A tall man, composed and articulate, he speaks of his father with great pride.
In 1954, when I was about seven, my parents got a divorce and my mother moved from San Francisco back to New York. I was uprooted from my father and became very saddened by that. It was a very difficult time. As far as I can remember they were always fighting—over the phone, during visits—and yet, my mother, having been with my father during his trials and his battles with the government, with all her anger with him, still made me realize that an important person he was and the important things he had done.
I was put in New Lincoln, a progressive school which I don’t think exists anymore. I was very lucky, my friends’ parents were very labor-conscious, very social-minded, and a lot of them were in the same boat. I went to school with Zero Mostel’s1 children. A good friend’s father was Martin Luther King’s lawyer. Susan Sontag’s children were there. A lot of them were friends of my father, which is probably one reason I was there.
At times, it could be embarrassing, because I was expected to be a labor expert. When any question came up of who Walter Reuther2 was or John L. Lewis3 or anybody like that, my teachers always singled me out to answer the question—and I had no idea what they were talking about. I wasn’t that interested in labor, although I was always interested in what my father was doing.
I always respected my father, considered him one of my heroes, and his heroes became my heroes. I remember in 1959, when John Kennedy was such a great hero to the other kids, and to me he was a real antihero. He had said publicly he was going to get my father, and so had Bobby Kennedy, and I didn’t appreciate that.
I had heroes that nobody else seemed to have, like Fidel Castro and Jimmy Hoffa.4 It was kind of confusing. I understand why my father felt that way. He recognized the qualities these people had, that the press totally negated. He believed the important thing was to try and find work for people and to improve everybody’s life. He believed that Castro and Hoffa, with all the bad things about them, still had that as their main goal.
When I was growing up in New York, he would come back for business and meetings. I was lucky that he had that opportunity, or else I would never have seen him. He was very casual, he always stayed in cheap hotels, he traveled on weekends to save money. There was nothing extravagant about him. People had all kinds of crazy ideas. They always assumed he lived in a big house in Hawaii, which of course he never did. He never had a big house anywhere. Never made a lot of money, made a point of always making as much as the highest-paid longshoremen—who were probably making more than him with their overtime.
I had friends who laughed at me for not realizing that my father had people killed because of the powerful man he was. Friends I quickly dropped the friendship with. They thought I was real naive. I was just incredulous, I couldn’t believe with the knowledge that people had about my father that they would think that. I heard a lot of ideas from friends who were way off the beam.
Other times, I would come out to the West Coast and stay with my father. One time in the late ’50s, he was telling me about a battle that ensued when he was at Sally Stanford’s5 restaurant. I was pretty young, and when I think back to how impressionable I was, it wouldn’t be the kind of thing I would tell my children. [Laughs.] He was in the rest room apparently, and was attacked by a couple of men—goons, he called them—who tried to gouge his eyes out. He was very specific about that, and to this day I wonder why he would tell me. I guess he wanted to impress upon me how serious people were. It turned out that Sally came into the rest room to help him out.6
I wasn’t sheltered, I knew he was facing danger. My mother always warned us that people were tapping the phones and people were following us. I was always careful asking who was at the door. I always assumed the phone was tapped, although I certainly wasn’t afraid of what we could be talking about.
In 1976, I went to a friend’s wedding. Her stepfather had been a CIA agent, and he confided in me that years ago, he had tried to kill my father, taken a shot at him. I remember he was laughing about it—not that it was funny, but it was just amazing to him that here he could tell Harry Bridges’s son this.
Of course, I asked my father about it, and he just shrugged it off, like “Nah, it never happened.” I think it did, and he just didn’t want to worry me. The funny thing was, I heard another story about it later, that it happened in a rest room again and they assumed my father was standing up and apparently he was sitting down and that’s why they didn’t hit him.
I left New York very happily in 1966 to go to Berkeley, and got thrown into the middle of all the antiwar demonstrations. That caused some problems with my father. He didn’t support the war in Vietnam, but any position he took he saw as the union’s position.7 He felt most of the longshoremen supported the war. He didn’t think it was correct to go against the police—he felt there was more important things to protest.
In those summers I was working down on the docks as a casual clerk and was in an interesting position with my long hair and being looked upon as a hippie. In the morning the guys would give me a hard time, they would wonder what I was doing down there. And then by lunchtime, when they found out who I was, it was all backslapping and having a great time: “Your father’s a great guy.” So I was in a very strange position. I’d come upon graffiti that said bad things about my father and I’d rub it out.
He was very much a pacifist. Growing up, it was difficult for me to be interested in model airplanes. All my father would say when he saw them was, “That’s a weapon of war, you shouldn’t be interested in that.” I still have a fascination with airplanes. I go to air shows and I can’t help but feel a little guilty.
I learned that I had a family name to uphold. A lot of people didn’t understand that. But throughout my life I always felt there was a certain image to uphold, and it was difficult. I kept a level head about my working-class background. I didn’t have expectations of becoming a rich person. Probably the most important thing I remember my father talking about is to have the security of a job for life, and his goal was to see that people had that.
I consider myself lucky today. I have a house. I’ve got a good job, probably for the rest of my life—which is important to me and I credit that to values I got from my father. I think it is important to do a good job and to do an honest job. That certainly was one thing I heard over and over and over—that and his feeling that the Soviet Union was never our enemy. He impressed upon me that he was always communicating with Soviet labor leaders, that the workers in Russia were in power and that they always assured him there would never be any more war, especially with the United States, and that was important to him.
I wonder what he would think today.8 I don’t think he would be too impressed with what happened to the Soviet Union. He probably would point to Yugoslavia and all the problems there and say, “That’s what happens when you don’t have a strong system. That would have never happened under Communism.”
He was pretty blind to problems in the Soviet Union. I remember when he went to Rumania, he had a few complaints about his treatment, but all in all he had nothing but praise for the system. No inflation in the Soviet Union, everybody’s got a job, everybody gets an education, everybody gets medical care. He was their champion. You couldn’t pin him down on that one. His gripes were with this country and the problems we have here.
For years, we had a pretty rough relationship. We never saw eye to eye on anything. No way you were going to talk him out of a position. It was like negotiating a labor contract. I had the same trouble everybody did—his ex-wives, his counterparts across the negotiating table—he was a tough person to deal with, very stubborn, very principled. He would take a position and that was it.
But our relationship changed rapidly in the late ’70s. I wrote him a letter explaining how proud I was of him as my father and as a person, and put down a few things in writing I had always wanted to say. That seemed to break the ice. Soon after, I got married and started a family. I guess he felt that I was being responsible enough and was proud I had a stable marriage, which, of course, didn’t last too long. My marriage ended in a terrible divorce, so I guess things tend to repeat themselves. I was kind of saddened by all that. I wanted to prove to him how stable my life could be. Afterward, when we talked about my divorce, he and I would compare notes and I tried to learn from the problems he had with my mother and not to repeat the same mistakes.
I was having enough problems just dealing with my marriage falling apart, I couldn’t imagine having the pressures he must have had. He was separated from his children and had a continuous battle with my mother, and on top of that, the persecution from the government, problems with the union, and on and on.
Being the son of Harry Bridges, I did run into some flak. I remember in 1968, I was dating a girl whose father was a wealthy doctor. He called me in one evening and said, “I don’t approve of who your father is,” and that was the end of that relationship. I was kind of surprised. He warned me he would send the police after me if I continued to see his daughter. I think deep down I kind of enjoyed it. I wasn’t totally in love at that point, and found it interesting that my father still stirred people up after all that time.
But that was pretty rare. Most people idolized him and appreciated what he had done. But a lot of people had no idea. He kept a low profile, he never advertised who he was, wasn’t on TV much. If you weren’t aware of the labor scene, you didn’t really know that much about him. Most people, even today, think I am related to either Art Bridges, who sells cars, or Lloyd Bridges, the actor. Very rarely will they ask me if Harry was my father. Most of the time they think he was a car salesman. Around labor circles, of course, people know. At work I never mention it. Usually other people point it out and say, “You’re kidding,” and I have to tell them it’s not something you make up.
I’ve always tried to memorize the trials and all that. He was in court so much that it is hard to remember, and every time you read about it in the newspapers they change it around—now is it three times to the Supreme Court? Actually, two times in all. But he’s never given too many interviews. There’s not too much written about it, because he didn’t feel they would get it right. John L. Lewis once told him, “You will never be able to tell the story, because no one will believe the truth.” So he was very careful about that.
I’ve tried to teach my children about their grandfather. He was pretty much bedridden when they were younger, but they are aware of what he did, and now they are under the microscope in school. The teachers know who they are, and the kids seem to handle it real well. They speak about their grandfather, and they brought to school a videotape of one of the documentaries that was done on him. They are very proud of him and they still miss him.
Chris Trumbo’s father was Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter and novelist, who served a jail term as one of the Hollywood Ten.1 As a blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo wrote eighteen cut-rate scripts under various pseudonyms. Using the name Robert Rich, he garnered an Academy Award for The Brave One, to the utter embarrassment of the industry.
My sister and I were both aware of what was going on right from the beginning. It was hard to keep information away from us It was the first time the Committee had gotten involved in Hollywood, and there was the Committee for the First Amendment,2 which was strongly in support of the Ten, up to a point. So the hearings were all over the papers and in the newsreels.
Around 1947, because of the hearings, my parents decided they would explain to us what these things were about, rather than have it be a mystery. I was seven at the time. They described communism as “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his contribution.” Capitalism was one man hiring another man as cheaply as possible to sell a product for as much as possible. My sister took to Communism, but I kind of liked the idea of capitalism! [Laughs.] It seemed to me that in the struggle between the Right and the Left, the Right was winning and we were on the wrong side somehow. [Laughs.]
I caught flak from peers—that was unavoidable. At least it was for me. We moved from Beverly Hills to a place we had in the mountains to get away from what my parents thought might be tough times for us in the big city. But it was unavoidable, no matter where we went.
When my father was writing for the black market, he had different names for different producers. You’d answer the phone and deliver messages, and he was a different name for everybody. He also had a series of different bank accounts for each of them. He’d set up the accounts, but he didn’t like the idea of driving around all over the place simply to deposit money when you have a son who’s able to do these things. So I’d go and deposit checks for all the different accounts. They were mostly to protect the producer from any kind of casual inquiry. Any serious inquiry into the matter would’ve exposed the whole scheme. But that would have involved the federal government and income tax records.
When The Brave One won an Oscar and there was a missing writer, my father decided that he could make political capital out of the situation. Not through a legal or philosophical exposition, but by making fun of the Academy, by making the blacklist an object of ridicule. And that’s what he was able to do. His theory was that people really don’t like solemn arguments about “Gee, how you have injured me. This is a terrible thing you’ve done to me.” But that they would find it amusing that people were secretly writing and producing scripts and as hard as the studios tried to blacklist them, they would surface in odd ways.
We moved to Mexico in 1951. My sisters and I went to a private American school there, in Mexico City. We didn’t speak the language. It was difficult. As far as I was concerned, we were on the run, in hiding. This was not a choice, not a matter of “Well, let’s go live in Mexico, what a pleasant place. The people are friendly and you can learn a foreign language in your spare time.” It was by economic necessity. Albert Maltz3 was already in Mexico. So was Gordon Kahn.4 There was a community of American writers and artists, and there was a feeling among them that they could make a living in the Mexican film industry. Some of the blacklisted managed to stay in Mexico and do all right for a while—George Pepper and Hugo Buder produced one or two documentaries that were really quite good. But for my father, that didn’t work out. It also happened to a number of other people who tried living in Mexico. Ian Hunter,5 and Ring Lardner, Jr., and John Bright6 was there for a while. None of them found it satisfactory. People who went to London and to Paris found it much easier. We came back in 1954. We were under observation, but I never paid attention. I was never overly watchful about it. It doesn’t pay. There’s nothing you can do about it.
The blacklisting changed our family lifestyle. But it’s hard to say how, because what happens is it becomes your present. For instance, wherever we moved or wherever we went, someone would eventually discover the name and make the links. That was inevitable. The responses varied. In Additional Dialogue7 there’s a long letter to the principal of my little sister’s grammar school outlining the outrages that were more or less committed against her, which was ostracism. Being put in Coventry, as it were. The teachers got involved in the process also.
There was an award for each grade in high school, and I was nominated for the tenth-grade English award. I was told of this by a teacher who was as new as I was at the school. She didn’t know any better and discovered later she wasn’t supposed to have told me. I asked a couple months down the line what had happened, and she said, “Well, I’m really sorry.” They had given it to somebody else because of my family background. Unfortunately, I had told my father about this potential award, and he eventually inquired what had happened! [Laughs.] So I had to tell him. He went down and spoke to the principal. He wanted to know what was wrong with our family background, considering they’d never met us. Eventually, we shared the award! [Laughs.] But I always regretted having mentioned it to my father. You just can’t bring in your parents. You have handle those things by yourself, one way or the other.
There was the day in junior high when I was suddenly swept off my feet by some kids and thrown in the furnace. It was on at the time, and they closed the door behind me. I was all the way inside. I remember thinking, “Jesus, here I am inside a goddamn oven! What the hell’s going on?” I got out when the teacher arrived. [Laughs.] It burned my eyebrows, and the eyelashes were missing. It also burned a pair of hands.
Things like that made me angry, not fearful. I wasn’t afraid to go to school the next day. My mother remembers me coming home, singed, burned, changing my clothes, being really angry, and going back to school. She never asked! [Laughs.] She thought, “Well, I guess he’s handling whatever’s going on.” It’s something I never mentioned to anybody until years later.
My father broke the blacklist in 1960. What happened was that two pictures came out with his name on them. One was Exodus and one was Spartacus. Strange things happened. Organizations like the American Legion would boycott pictures of people that they disapproved of, if their names were on them. They set out to boycott Exodus, which opened in Boston, and found themselves picketing the picture along with the Nazi Party, which was there because the film was nice to Jews. Ironies like that were constantly cropping up. Opposition to him and to his working continued in the industry. If you look at the Hollywood Reporter, you’ll find objections to him working on Hawaii, and on and on. So it was a constant battle for him, and then it stopped. But the blacklist continued for other writers.
To get unblacklisted was not difficult at that point. You merely signed a letter saying that you weren’t currently a member of the Communist Party. That’s all you had to say. The more they wanted you, the less you had to do. They just wanted symbolic capitulation.
There were a number of people who never did it. And there were a number of people who did do it. But that was a personal choice. And there were a number who did do it without ever naming anybody else’s name. Which was the fine point there. It was only people like my father and Ring Lardner, Jr., and Waldo Salt that were unwilling to go that far even, because they felt the government had no right to compel this in any way and neither had their employer. So they just wouldn’t move an inch. And that was the ethical decision that they made.
In 1963, I was in New York with some people at an all-night restaurant across the street from Columbia. I was going to school there at the time. One of my friends started talking about how he had been up at Sarah Lawrence and had met Norman Cousins’s daughter. This guy, Mike, who I didn’t know, said, “So what? Dalton Trumbo’s son goes to Columbia.” My friends and I looked at each other, and said to him with one voice, “Who’s Dalton Trumbo?” [Laughs.] He gave us the whole rundown on him, the Stalinist screenwriter. Then I asked, “What is his son like?” He says, “Oh, he belongs to a Southern fraternity and hates his old man.” Peculiar, never had that opportunity again. I think Mike was a member of the Progressive Labor Party8 and later he turned out to be a stool pigeon. So I wasn’t welcome in the New Left either because my father was some-how a Stalinist! [Laughs.]
My parents’ politics really had to do with American populism and almost nothing with Communism itself. They both came from poor backgrounds. My mother was part of a kid vaudeville act, then she was a carhop. My father worked in a bakery. Their experience was not middle-class, not hopeful. During the Depression, they were at the mercy of an economic system that didn’t give a shit about you. Basically they were more in opposition to what they considered to be the horrors of American government than they were in adherence to a philosophical political system.
Most of my parents’ friends were Communists. And the Party provided my father with intellectual stimulation. He went to college at various points, but never got a degree, never considered himself to be educated. The Party had a lot of intellectuals in it, and he respected that. In those days, in the forties in Hollywood, it was a very dynamic group.
I remember these people coming over to the house, once a week. My older sister and I were teenagers, and we always wondered why these people were coming over, since we knew that my parents didn’t care for them personally. One week my sister says, “They’re walking down the driveway to father’s study,” and I burst out laughing and say, “Guess what? It’s a cell meeting!”9 I had figured it out! This was just their regular meeting. It wasn’t a secret, but they had never told us. When I said, “That’s what you’re doing,” they said, “Sure!” I don’t think they called them “cell meetings,” I must have picked those things up from I Led Three Lives,10 or something. [Laughs.]
My parents believed that organized social action was the only way to get anything done. And that’s why my father was interested in helping to form the Screen Writers Guild and labor movements in general. Our family never had a great identification with Mother Russia. When the Khrushchev revelations occurred, they didn’t startle me. But they bothered my father, they bothered him a great deal.
My father didn’t join the Party until 1943, and then quit several years later. Later, he got angry at the shoddy treatment of the California Smith Act victims and wrote The Devil and the Book, a pamphlet in their defense, and rejoined the Party. Then he quit again sometime in the fifties. There was an [laughs] impulsiveness that ran through it all. The idea of him taking direction from the Party was laughable. He wasn’t that kind of person.
I don’t think he left the Party with rancor. He believed absolutely in their right to exist and would do what he could to support their existence. He disliked a lot of people in the Communist Party, but a lot of people outside the Party as well.
How did all this affect me? At one time I would have said the blacklist didn’t affect me at all. Later on, I said, “Oh, wait a second, I just didn’t know it.” I’m not particularly social and forthcoming. I’m just not that open to new acquaintances. You tend to learn, at least I did, that you will go to a new school or a new neighborhood, you will make some friends, and then months later, suddenly those people aren’t your friends anymore. They’ve learned who you are. “Don’t you know that’s so-and-so?”
A dark blond woman with strong features, Becky Jenkins, now in her fifties, is the granddaughter of Maynard Dixon (a Western painter) and the daughter of Dave Jenkins (see under “Red-ucators”).
I can’t remember when I became aware that we were different. But it was really early. When I was very little, my parents had a policy of not telling me that they were in the Communist Party. They believed there was too much danger and the less I knew, the safer I would be. There is no question that on some level I knew it. But when I asked the direct question “Are you members of the Communist Party?” they did some sidestep and actually said, “We’re not going to tell you.” So it was perfectly clear.
I was very political when I was a little girl. My father’s prominence in the movement impressed me a lot, and I was crazy about him. In the forties, he was the director of the California Labor School,1 a hub of great activity during the heyday of the Old Left. I had a sense of being a part of an embracing community of people who shared a worldview and who were my friends.
The labor school was an incredible phenomenon. I’ve often wanted to figure out some way to duplicate it, without the dominance of Party politics, of course. I took dance lessons there as a little girl. There was an active theater and an art department, endless other classes. It was the combination of art and politics.
As the witch hunt heated up, my father resigned as the director of the labor school and he began to fly around the country doing defense work for various unions, Left unions, that were under siege. These were men and women who had devoted their lives to working people. Many of them were in the Party, I’m sure, but a lot of them weren’t.
Also it was a time of terrible sexism. Even though these people were way in advance of other sections of the population, and even though there were some exceptional women leaders, men had the focus and dominated the leadership. I figured out years later how deeply that affected me as a little girl. I think it explains some of the bitterness of many women from the Old Left who were in less significant positions of power.
I was terrified when it really started to heat up. Quite often, the FBI were parked in front of our house, sometimes to serve subpoenas on my parents. My parents were both summoned in front of the California Burns Committee,2 and I don’t know what other committees. The grown-ups will have to tell you! [Laughs.]
The FBI was a presence. There was no question the phone was tapped. The phone would go dead, you’d get the head operator by mistake, things like that. We made jokes about it. Once my father demanded to speak to a phone company supervisor and said, “Look, if you’re going to tap the phone, just do it correctly, so my calls aren’t interrupted.”
There were periods when people went underground, people would disappear. Friends of my parents would just be gone. There was pressure not to see psychiatrists because of the fear of telling things that would be used against you. Paranoia was rampant, most of which was justified. The job of sorting out the real fears from the imaginary ones was a terrible strain. There was this sense of being isolated and misunderstood by the people around us. On top of that, we were Jews but we weren’t religious. We were atheists, which would have been enough to ostracize us in our lower-middle-class white neighborhood. And then we were secret Communists but public radicals, although everyone knew or suspected the truth. It was a mess of confused identities, secrets, and danger.
Then there were times when my parents appeared before committees, when their names were in the newspapers. While my father was escaping a sub-poena, he ran over some rooftops and fell through a glass skylight into the Yellow Cab garage! I mean, things like that were news. [Laughs.] There was no way to be anonymous.
In retrospect, I did things that were pretty obnoxious. I would stand up every day in my seventh-grade class and report on the Harry Bridges trial. I was educating my classmates. I must’ve been just a frightful drag. Kids would be encouraged to bring in newspaper reports, and I would bring in big political news. I feel two ways about it—that I was a pain in the ass to my contemporaries, and that it was a terrible burden on me, as a little person, to feel so obligated to change the world.
I was the oldest one in the family. I think my brothers and sisters remember this period quite differently, although my sister Margie, who’s a dancer, just told me an interesting story. She was being sued by a disgruntled dancer in her company. She’d just been served with some papers. And she said that after some tough old lady came and gave her a subpoena, she went upstairs and sobbed. She realized that it frightened her and it reminded her of her childhood.
There was no doubt I was alienated from other kids. Our house was full of books, paintings, and music. We all took dance and music classes. I was not one of the gang. I always had friends, but I think I was considered strange. I certainly felt strange. There were all the problems of just being an adolescent. With my big body and big Russian face, there was no way I was going to fit that fifties standard of beauty. But there was a small group of friends and teachers who I liked and who seemed to appreciate me, and they saved my life.
When I was in high school, things got even more terrifying. I was in high school from 1950 to 1954, which was the height of McCarthyism as well as the collapse of the Left in America. My community began to disintegrate around me. The whole thing moved into a really emotionally dark and catastrophic period.
When I was in my first year in high school, the Korean War was going on. In a social studies class, I said something about it being a civil war and America should stay out of it. The teacher responded with “That’s the position of the Communists!”3 and the class started to laugh and scream and hoot at me, yelling “Commie!” I ran home from school sobbing, just humiliated. My father came to school the next day and insisted on a meeting with the principal, the boys’ and girls’ deans, and the teacher, Miss Keeley, and said to them, “I’m a taxpayer. I want my child protected in school. I know all of you have signed the loyalty oath, and these are frightening times, but you may not persecute my kid.”
There was no question that among a certain group of teachers I was labeled a Communist, and I was treated accordingly. Various friends would tell me over the proceeding years that teachers would take them aside and say, “Becky Jenkins, look out for her. She’s a Communist. You can tell she’s a Commie; she has so many black friends.”
I hung out a lot with black kids, and that was a combination of things. One was my politics, right? I was obsessed with black oppression. And also black men really liked and appreciated me. Their aesthetic included big women—big bodies and big personalities. I have to be completely honest, it was sexy and more fun to be around them. Also the black kids tended to be more politically sophisticated. Their instincts were to go for the under-dog. They were a very important part of my life and development as a person.
Anyway, it was a nightmare for me. When I had my sixteenth birthday party the football team came and broke up the house looking for signs I was a Communist. My father was out of town fund-raising at the time. There was no defense against these guys. They tore out lighting fixtures in the bathroom and wrote on the walls. It was terrifying. It all had the patina of the Red Scare, that we were Commies, we were bad, and anything that happened to us we deserved. When I went to my twenty-fifth high school reunion, a lot of people came up and apologized to me. Came up and said, “You know, I’ve thought about you often. I’m really sorry.” That was very, very nice.
Add to that this adolescent alienation; I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. And the heat was on around my parents. But I had a group of friends who were the children of radicals. We hung together in a group, so there was some support outside of school. There were some people in the neighborhood who were quite heroic, and liked us in spite of how different we were. Those few stood out.
Eventually, the Left couldn’t withstand the pressure, and it became even more sectarian. A lot of its problems and weaknesses intensified as it got more isolated. There seemed to be a direct ratio between the pressure from the outside and the foolishness inside the Party. This is from my perspective. My father—I don’t think I realized this at the time—was in trouble with the Party a good deal of the time. He thought a lot of Party policy was crap, and because of that he was being kicked out and then asked to come back.
Then the Khrushchev report4 came out. I was a freshman at State and I remember it was as if the whole world shifted on its axis. My parents left the Party, as did most of their friends. I was involved in the Labor Youth League.5 I left and hit the bars. I started to hang out in North Beach and got involved in the Beat scene in earnest, I felt safe there. I wasn’t a band chick, but I was close. I worked as a waitress and went to jazz clubs. And again, black people were a refuge for me. At one point I sought out prostitutes and burlesque musicians who worked in the strip joints along Pacific Avenue. There was a feeling of wanting to hit the bottom, look around, and not operate out of any of the old premises.
And again, it corresponded with a period in my life where I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be when I grew up—and it was not all right in my family to not want to be something. I had a sense of falling out of my extended community, a world community of socialists, good people that were fighting for social justice. It was gone. Feeling a part of a world community is hard to explain to people, although I suppose Catholics must feel it, as do most Jews.
All kinds of things happened in my parents’ extended community. People got divorces, friendships ended, people left their jobs. It was fascinating to watch, in a horrible way. The personal and political were absolutely connected. Secrets were revealed, secret love affairs, acrimonious divorces. The whole fabric of life rearranged itself. I realized many people had been living lives they didn’t like in the name of political commitments they suddenly no longer had to keep. The net holding them all together disappeared. For some it was a tragedy and for others it was a new freedom.
1By E. L. Doctorow (New York: Random House, 1971).
2Meeropol remembers only one, but actually attended two others: one in 1952, at which his older brother, Michael, against the wishes of the adults, pulled Robert onto the stage; another in 1953, where the boys remained largely unnoticed in the audience.
3Eisenhower was convinced that a pardon without an admission of guilt would be a political-warfare victory for the international Communist movement, leaving America to appear “weak and fearful’” in the face of subversion. In response to a clemency letter penned by ten-year-old Michael that was delivered to the White House two weeks before his parents’ execution, Eisenhower wrote that “they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purposes” (Cook, p. 162).
4The petition was actually filed by the New York Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children and joined by the Jewish Board of Guardians.
5Throughout the night the police guarded the street, the corridor outside the apartment, and even the roof. The next morning a phalanx of officers escorted the family to court, where the children were secretly remanded to an institution. The Meeropols were forced to file a writ of habeas corpus to discover where the children had been taken and to have them placed instead with their grandmother. According to Evelyn Williams, the probation officer assigned to the case by the children’s court, Judge Jacob Panken threatened her with dismissal unless she recommended that the children be institutionalized.
6Abel Meeropol, his adopted father.
7Recorded by Billy Holiday and Paul Robeson, respectively. For lyrics to “The House I live In,” see Kay Boyle, footnote 11, under “Arts and Entertainment.”
1Dennis refused to appear. He was convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to one year in prison.
2On July 28, 1948, twelve members of the National Board of the Communist Party were indicted on two counts of “teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the government.”
3Immediately after the Supreme Court upheld the convictions, four of the Party leaders, acting on the collective decision of the leadership, jumped bail and disappeared, accompanied by thousands of Party members. For more on the Communist underground, see “Five Minutes to Midnight.”
4One of the convicted Party leaders who had jumped bail.
1Zero Mostel (1915–77), comedic actor best remembered for his portrayal of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, was blacklisted from 1951 to 1966.
2Walter Reuther (1907–77) was an influential labor leader, instrumental in the rise of the United Auto Workers.
3John Llewellyn Lewis (1880–1969) was the longtime leader of the United Mine Workers. He founded the CIO in 1935 (it was expelled from the AFL in 1936) and remained as its president until 1940.
4James Riddle Hoffa (1913–75) was the controversial leader of the Teamsters Union. Convicted under various charges of corruption, Hoffa was imprisoned from 1967 to 1971, when his thirteen-year sentence was commuted by President Nixon. He disappeared four years later, presumably murdered.
5Sally Stanford (1903–82) was a celebrated madam of prewar San Francisco. With the close of World War Two, she sensed the end of San Francisco’s freewheeling ways and opened the Valhalla, a plush Sausalito restaurant richly furnished from her defunct bordello. In 1976, she was elected mayor of Sausalito; she served one term.
6According to Bridges’s biographer Robert Cherny, this incident occurred in the early 1950s. The two thugs were from the right-wing Sailors Union of the Pacific, headed by Bridges’s nemesis, archreactionary Harry Lundeberg.
7In 1965, the ILWU convention overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire, withdrawal of troops, and negotiations. This sentiment was years ahead of its time, especially in labor circles. That same year the AFL-CIO heartily resolved to support the war.
8Harry Bridges died on March 30, 1990, at the age of eighty-nine.
1In 1947, the Hollywood Ten became the first of filmland’s many artists and workers called before HUAC. Electing to defy the Committee, the Ten relied on the protection of the First Amendment and refused to reveal whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party. They all served time for contempt of Congress. For more on the Ten, sec Ring Lardner, Jr., and Edward Dmytryk under “The Hollywood Blacklist.”
2The CFA was a civil liberties defense group that sprang up in reaction to the persecution of the Hollywood Ten. It was composed of such prominent Hollywood artists as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Houston, and Edward G. Robinson. CFA members flew to Washington to support the Ten, but within weeks, the group was flying for cover as the Red smear threatened to tinge their own careers. “I’m No Communist” headlined the article Bogart published in Photoplay magazine in March 1948, although the actor admitted that he was a “dope.”
3Screenwriter, one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted from 1948 to 1969.
4Screenwriter, identified in 1947 as one of the Hollywood Nineteen, the original group to be called before HUAC, out of which were culled the Ten. Kahn had twenty-eight screen credits from 1937 to 1949, then none.
5Ian McLellan Hunter, screenwriter, blacklisted from 1953 to 1969.
6Screenwriter, twelve screen credits from 1937 to 1951, then two abroad, none in the United States.
7Dalton Trumbo, Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–62 (New York: Evans, 1970)
8Early New Left group identified as Maoist in persuasion. Although Maoists would not view the designation of “Stalinist” in a negative light, a Trotskyist certainly would. Perhaps Mike was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, an anti-Stalinist splinter of the Socialist Party founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 and still active in the 1960s.
9The designation of “cell” to describe a local group was abandoned by the Communist Party in 1920 in favor of “branch” or “club.” The popular media, however, along the FBI and its allies, held to the earlier term for an extra dash of the sinister.
10A nationally syndicated television show based on Herbert Philbrick’s lurid memoirs of life as an FBI mole in the Communist Party. Soaked with all the melodrama of a B-movie thriller, Three Lives was sent to Europe, where bewildered viewers, long used to pluralism in politics, weren’t sure if they were to take it seriously.
1For more on the California Labor School, see under “Red-ucators.”
2California’s little HUAC, under the chairmanship of Senator Hugh H. Burns, a former undertaker.
3The official version follows a simple sequence: in June of 1950 the North Koreans, at Stalin’s order, suddenly attacked an innocent and defenseless Republic of Korea. The Left, however, believed the conflict to be a civil war provoked by South Korea with the cooperation of the United States.
4At the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, with Stalin safely three years in his grave, Premier Khrushchev officially exposed the crimes committed under the direction of the former dictator. The report stunned the Communist world and effectively dismantled the American Communist Party by sparking a mass exodus of disillusioned and embittered members. Ironically, this was an event the FBI and its allied forces purportedly had wished to accomplish for more than a decade.
5The Labor Youth League was formed in 1949 as a successor to the Young Communist League. With two hundred chapters and up to five thousand members, the LYL opposed the Korean War, the Cold War, and racism and supported the eighteen-year-old vote, more school funding, and a higher minimum wage. The Party dissolved the LYL in 1957 amid the upheaval provoked by the Khrushchev report.