From Hollywood the Red Scare hit radio and television, attempted an ill-fated run on Broadway, then turned to the print media.
In radio and television, the premier blacklister was Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a regular publication of American Business Consultants,1 a Red-baiting concern founded by three former FBI agents. Behind its garish cover (depicting a red hand reaching for a broadcaster’s microphone) was a list of 151 persons who, the editors claimed, were linked with a variety of “Communist causes.” The “links,” cited in each case, were organizations deemed subversive by the Attorney General, HUAC, California’s little HUAC, and other sources, including the authors of Red Channels themselves.
Despite its claims, Red Channels rarely revealed anything more sinister than volunteerism.2 But its first appearance in June 1950 marked the onset of the most vicious blacklisting in the entertainment industry. Known as “the Bible of Madison Avenue,” the little anti-Red book was huddled over by network executives, advertising agencies, radio-TV packagers, and sponsors. Its belief that Communists were “infiltrating” the airwaves and must be removed became dogma. Accepting Red Channels also meant accepting Counterattack’s political doctrine. As John Cogley observed, “The standards of employability were Counterattack’s; the measure of patriotism was Counterattack’s; ‘pro-Communist’ and ‘anti-Communist’ opinions, acts, and associations, in the last analysis, were judged as Counterattack judges them.”3
The great threat was that unless the listers had their way, a massive consumer boycott of television sponsors would ensue. No such effort ever materialized, but faced with sporadic letter-writing campaigns and criticism from such reactionary columnists as Ed Sullivan and Victor Riesel, the industry buckled to a chimeric fear of lost revenue.
The first to fall was Jean Muir, a film actress contracted to play a lead role on CBS’s The Aldrich Family. Muir was listed in Red Channels. In August 1950, Counterattack organized a protest aimed at Jell-O, the General Foods sponsor of the show, and Young & Rubicam, its advertising agency. At the first sign of adverse publicity, the sponsor replaced the actress.
Security officers soon reigned over network hiring; loyalty oaths and security checks were required for even the lowliest of employees. By 1952, blacklisting was embedded in the industry—and went far beyond the names in Red Channels. Blacklisting rags sprang up like stinkweed, touting an aura of vigilance: Aware, Inc., File 13, and Firing Line. Given the capacity to wound and to heal, the editors of these journals (known as “clearance men”) would work their restorative powers on the listed for a hefty fee.
The rapid breeding exacerbated the already complex industry. In Hollywood, hiring was largely controlled by a handful of studios, but in radio-TV, advertising agencies, networks, program packagers, and sponsors all had a voice in the process. The result was a multiplicity of lists and procedures, with different policies for different agencies. Political screening became a secret maze which required the most arcane knowledge to navigate. An actor might be acceptable for one agency or network, but not to certain sponsors, or to none at all.
In order to work, a blacklistee needed to be “cleared.” Hollywood had its open ritual of humiliation, but the way home in radio-TV was an obscure trail with few markings. Anyone who was “cleared” had to satisfy those who had blacklisted him or her in the first place. Potential employers had to be assured of no difficulties if the blacklistee was employed. Sponsors had to be certain that those who demanded the original blacklisting were placated. To travel this passage one needed a guide, a sort of political Sherpa, who knew the “right people.”
Traveling under the guise of “public-relations experts,” these envoys would first arrange an FBI interview, where the blacklistee was to declare his patriotism and answer all questions. The next step for this “expert” was to discover where his client was blacklisted, who in the industry was blocking employment, and who outside the industry was keeping up the controversy. Each one of these “clearance men” must then be courted and convinced of the client’s repentance and Americanism. This process required multiple “confessions” and tearful private audiences. If all went smoothly, a well-placed phone call allowed the performer to appear on a CBS show, the toughest of the networks, as a general signal that the artist was usable.
In August 1955, HUAC held hearings on “Communist infiltration” in the Broadway theater. Twenty-three witnesses were called, twenty-two of which were decidedly “unfriendly,” invoking not only the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, but the Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments as well. In Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, such a response would have led to professional oblivion, but not so on Broadway. In the main, it was ability and not political conformity that counted in the theater. A number of Broadway performers did have trouble finding work, but there was no organized blacklisting, no “security officers,” no “clearance” system.4 The independent traditions of New York’s legitimate theater militated against political blacklisting.
The most crucial tradition was the freewheeling entrepreneurial nature of theater. The complex financing of Hollywood and radio-TV did not exist on Broadway. Individual backers had to be convinced the show had possibilities, and this was arranged by personal contacts between a producer and his “angels.” Playwright Arthur Miller, banned in Hollywood and television, had no trouble mounting a production on Broadway. Given Miller’s reputation, any investment in his work was considered wise—including his 1953 production of The Crucible, an open attack on political witch-hunting. The audience also played a role. Dedicated New York theatergoers were the last to stay away from a play because of an actor’s politics. Tourists, who might feel differently at home, were on holiday in New York and unlikely to discriminate in so gala a mood.
Outside of the Big Apple, however, offending actors were regularly picketed by the American Legion, and a number of road shows were closed. Provincial theaters were attacked. Seattle’s Repertory Playhouse collapsed under the combined weight of Washington’s little HUAC and the trial of its director for contempt of Congress. But theater resisted here as well. In 1956, Gale Sondergaard was billed to star in Anastasia at Philadelphia’s Playhouse in the Park. Blacklisted in Hollywood since 1951 for pleading the Fifth, Sondergaard was a red flag to the bulls of the American Legion and the VFW; even HUAC arrived in town to subpoena the actress (she took the Fifth again). Yet, in spite of all the publicity, the show went on to become the highest grosser of the Philadelphia season.
Without the enthusiasm of the right-wing press and the timidity of its liberal counterpart, the Red Scare would have made far less headway. The Hearst chain, with its eighteen newspapers, nine magazines, and three radio stations, led the pack. Hearst papers from coast to coast composed their pages into one long Red-bashing howl. Though none could compete with Hearst columnists5 for venom and vindictiveness, the columnists of the Patterson-McCormick chain (with papers in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) were a close second. Hundreds of local papers sustained the panic,6 corning their readers with ever larger portions of hatred, while hunting for secret Reds among the rosters of their rival papers.
On the other hand, the avowedly liberal New York Times offered only token resistance. While sensitive to the civil liberties of anti-Communist liberals, it remained largely numb to the civil liberties of the Left. After March 1947, the Times refused to carry ads from organizations deemed subversive by the Attorney General. Increasingly its headlines reflected the assumptions of the Right: COMMUNIST INFLUX SEEN IN ALL FIELDS. The respectable New York Herald Tribune abandoned its calm mien: THE THREAT OF RED SABOTAGE: SARDINE CANS USED TO IMPORT COMMUNIST MANUALS OF DESTRUCTION.7 The Tribune also ran regular installments of “The Red Underground,” purple tales of Red intrigue penned by FBI informer Herbert Philbrick.
When it came to firing left-wing journalists, the liberal press was no less trigger-happy than its reactionary brethren. Scores were fired from major newspapers and small-town dailies, magazines, and wire services. The American Newspaper Guild offered little support, especially after 1948, when fourteen years of effective Communist leadership went down to defeat in guild elections.
In 1955, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (James Eastland presiding) opened hearings on subversion in the press. Eastland’s star witness was CBS correspondent Winston Burdett, who had once worked on the defunct Brooklyn Eagle. Burdett admitted his past Party membership (1937 to 1940), named thirteen former colleagues and ten others as Reds, then confessed to an astoundingly inept career as a Soviet spy in Europe and Asia.8 On the second round of hearings, Eastland specifically targeted the New York Times, which had long been a bone in the senator’s throat for its strong criticism of his segregationist policies. The subcommittee passed out thirty-eight subpoenas, all but eight of which were directed at the New York Times.
Eastland and SISS claimed that reports of investigative hearings held by Senators Pat McCarran and Joe McCarthy had been twisted in the press. In New York, only the doggedly independent Post sounded the alarm.9 Calling the sub-committee’s tactics “crude political blackmail,” the Post announced that “if the United States press is prepared to have its news columns policed by Senator Eastland, it is headed for total servitude. It is time for publishers and editors to stand up.” Unfortunately, very few chose to rise. One poll reported that out of 190 daily papers in the nation’s largest cities, 112 remained silent on the SISS investigation, thirty-three strongly supported it, and only thirty-five criticized it.
While Angus Cameron, who was forced out of Little, Brown, was perhaps the sole editor to be blacklisted in the publishing industry, works by “controversial” writers were rejected for any number of noncontroversial reasons. Author Howard Fast found his best-selling novels no longer to the industry’s liking. The venerable New Yorker closed its pages to longtime contributor Kay Boyle. Similarly, Nelson Algren, John Sanford, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, Tom McGrath, and numerous others found major publishing houses closed to them. Literary grants were not awarded to radical writers, book clubs rarely selected their works, and radical critics were dropped from the review media. The small presses that took up the slack labored in obscurity, isolated from the media and ducking occasional blows from Red-hunters.10
More than fifteen hundred radio and TV employees were blacklisted, at least nine of whom were pushed to suicide. Three other deaths were a direct result of the blacklist. Thirty-five hit the blacklist in the print media.
A highly successful television producer whose game shows have included What’s My Line, To Tell the Truth, I’ve Got a Secret, Password, and Family Feud. He is cordial, cool, and direct. We meet in a posh office on Wilshire Boulevard.
I’m not sure when it began, but I believe it was early 1950. At that point, I had no connection with the blacklisting that was going on, although I had heard about it in the motion picture business and heard rumors about things that had happened on other shows, like The Aldrich Family. My first experience really was when we settled into a fairly regular panel on What’s My Line? in mid-1950. The panel consisted of the poet Louis Untermeyer, Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, and Hal Block, a comedy writer. Our sponsor was Stopette, a deodorant.
A few months into the show, I began getting mail on Louis Untermeyer. He had been listed in Red Channels. He was one of those folks who had supported the left-wing forces against Franco in Spain. I know that he also had allowed his name to be affiliated with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and had been a sponsor of the 1948 May Day parade. Back in the early 1920s,1 he had written articles for The Masses. But he was certainly not an active political person, at least as far as I knew.
CBS and Stopette also began receiving letters of protest. First, it was just a few postcards. Then it grew. Members of the Catholic War Veterans put stickers on drugstore windows, red, white, and blue stickers, warning, “Stop Stopette Until Stopette stops Untermeyer.”
We didn’t pay too much attention until we got the call from CBS. Untermeyer and I were summoned to Ralph Colin’s office, who was the general counsel for CBS at the time. Louis and Colin knew each other. Ralph asked him why he lent his name to the group. “I thought it was a good cause,” Untermeyer said. “Louis, you’re being very naive. These are very difficult times and you’ve put us in a bad spot. We’re going to have to drop you.” Untermeyer was very apologetic, but the decision had been made. He was let go.
I remember leaving that office feeling embarrassed. Untermeyer was in his sixties, a man of considerable dignity. He was a good American poet and I liked him; he was funny and articulate on the show. What’s more, I had no political ax to grind.
That was the last of that kind of meeting. Soon afterwards, CBS installed a clearance division. There wasn’t any discussion. We would just get the word—“Drop that person”—and that was supposed to be it. Whenever we booked a guest or a panelist on What’s My Line? or I’ve Got a Secret, one of our assistants would phone up and say, “We’re going to use so-and-so.” We’d either get the okay, or they’d call back and say, “Not clear,” or “Sorry, can’t use them.” Even advertising agencies—big ones, like Young & Rubicam and BBD&O—had their own clearance departments. They would never come out and say it. They would just write off somebody by saying, “He’s a bad actor.” You were never supposed to tell the person what it was about; you’d just unbook them. They never admitted there was a blacklist. It just wasn’t done.
Some fairly substantial names were off-limits—big stars like Leonard Bernstein, Harry Belafonte, Abe Burrows, Gypsy Rose Lee, Judy Holliday, Jack Gilford, Uta Hagen, and Hazel Scott. Everyone, from the stars to the bit-part actors, was checked. We once did a show in California called The Rebel, and we used wranglers to take care of the horses—we had to clear all of their names. CBS, in particular, asked for loyalty oaths to be signed by everybody, making sure that you were not un-American. So far as I know, no one ever refused.
In 1952, I’ve Got a Secret got a new sponsor, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, with its advertising agency, William Este. When they came aboard, someone from the agency called me and said, “Please get rid of Henry Morgan,” one of the regular panelists on the show. Morgan had been named in Red Channels. I had known Henry for a long time; he was one of those young curmudgeons who was acidic at times, but he was by no means a Communist. His wife was involved with radical politics, but they were getting a divorce, and to some extent his name was just smeared.
I went to the agency and told them that they were crazy to try and get rid of Henry Morgan. They agreed that the charge in Red Channels was absurd, but they said they couldn’t take the risk. That was the main thing—mail accusing them of being pro-Communist was not going to sell cigarettes. They gave me an ultimatum: dump Morgan or face the show’s cancellation.
So I went to Garry Moore, the MC of the show and an established comedian. He was a conservative, a Republican from Maryland. I knew that he liked Morgan. I said that if he’d be willing to back me up, I’d tell the agency I’d do the show without a sponsor. He agreed without hesitation. I phoned up William Este and said, “We’re not going to do the show without Henry.” The people at the agency were flabbergasted. It was virtually unheard-of to have this kind of confrontation. They told me they’d think about it, and in the end, they actually backed down. The show was not canceled, and some weeks later Morgan’s name simply vanished from Red Channels.
Morgan never even knew. When I wrote the article about my experience,2 Henry called me. “I did not know that I was about to be dropped,” he said. “I knew I was in Red Channels and I was outraged about that, but I didn’t know I was about to be dropped.” It was a revelation for him.
The Morgan episode was my first act of resistance. It was not something my lawyers ever encouraged. The watchword in the business is “Don’t make waves.”
The studios and the advertising agencies didn’t have to subscribe to Red Channels. It was one of about a dozen publications. There were several private lists, and the major agencies and networks exchanged lists, most of which had several names each. I’d help you out by giving you my list and you’d help me out by giving me your list. There was a big interchange of listings. A fellow called Danny O’Shea was in charge of the listings at CBS, an ex-FBI man. Red Channels would maybe have a couple of hundred names, but there might be on the other list at CBS several hundred more. Anybody could show up on a list, stars, technicians, cowboys.
Faye Emerson was a regular panelist on I’ve Got a Secret around the same time. Faye was a liberal, very attractive actress who was also hostessing a show called Author Meets the Critics, It was a show like Meet the Press, with a series of critics dealing with a book. On one episode, they discussed a book that advocated the United States’ possible recognition of Red China. For the most part, the critics agreed with the author. The show went on the air live. The very next day I got a call from the William Este Agency, the same people who had protested Morgan. They told me to drop Faye Emerson, that, because of what she had said, she was a Red China sympathizer. I said, “It doesn’t make any sense. We have no control over what Faye Emerson says on a different show.” We stood up and said, “No, we won’t drop her.” And for some reason, they ended up listening to us. But she could very easily have been cut.
Anna Lee was an English actress on a later show of ours called It’s News to Me. The sponsor was Sanka Coffee, a product of General Foods. The advertising agency was Young & Rubicam. One day, I received a call telling me we had to drop one of our panelists, Anna Lee, immediately. They said she was a radical, that she wrote a column for the Daily Worker. They couldn’t allow that kind of stuff on the air. They claimed they were getting all kinds of mail. It seemed incongruous to me that this little English girl, someone who seemed very conservative, would be writing for a Communist newspaper. It just didn’t sound right.
I took her out to lunch. After a little social conversation, I asked her about her politics. She told me that she wasn’t political, except she voted Conservative in England. Her husband was a Republican from Texas.
I went back to the agency and said, “You guys are really off your rocker. Anna Lee is nothing close to a liberal.” They told me, “Oh, you’re right. We checked on that. It’s a different Anna Lee who writes for the Daily Worker.” I remember being relieved and saying, “Well, that’s good. You just made a mistake. Now we can forget this.” But that wasn’t the case. They told me, “We’ve still got to get rid of her, because the illusion is just as good as the reality. If our client continues to get the mail, no one is going to believe him when he says there’s a second Anna Lee.” At that point I lost it. I told them their demand was outrageous. They could cancel the show if they wanted to, but I would not drop somebody whose only crime was sharing a name. When I got back to my office, there was a phone call waiting for me. It was from a friend of mine at the agency. He said, “If I were you, I would not lose my temper like that. If you want to argue, do it quietly. After you left, somebody said, ‘Is Goodson a pinko?’ You could get yourself a very bad label around town.” That would have caused me a lot of trouble. All I had to be was in Red Channels myself.
Abe Burrows was a regular panelist on The Name’s the Same, a show we had on ABC in 1952. The sponsor was the Swanson Foods Company. Burrows was a brilliant comedy writer, a nice round-faced fellow whose big hit was a radio show called Duffy’s Tavern. During the war years Burrows had apparently taken part in cultural activities sponsored by Communists in California. To clear his name, he appeared twice before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They released him from further questioning, apparently cleared. But when he went down to testify, it made headlines, and if you made headlines, you got in Red Channels. It wasn’t long after we booked him on the show that the protest mail began to roll in.
ABC was a brand-new network at the time and didn’t have a clearance department. So I would just take the mail and quietly throw it away. One day I got a call from one of the Swanson brothers. He asked if we were getting mail on Burrows. I said we were. He said they were getting a lot of mail. I said we were getting some. He asked if Burrows was a Communist. I said, “I don’t think so.” “Then why is he in Red Channels? Why is he getting this mail?” I said, “I think that a long time ago, during the war, he wrote some stuff that was pro-Russian and once belonged to some very liberal groups.” Swanson sounded relieved. “If he’s not a Communist now, then forget it,” he said.
Six months later, he called me back. He said, “Are you familiar with the Johnson Supermarkets up in Syracuse, New York?” I had heard about them. Although Mr. Johnson only owned three markets, he was famous for influencing policy throughout the country in the grocery business.3 When-ever a “controversial” performer appeared on television, he hung signs over the sponsoring company’s goods, warning the public that they employed subversives. Swanson told me that Johnson had put out ballots in the store that said, “Do you want any part of your purchase price of Swanson Foods to be used to hire Communist fronters? Vote yes or no.” Of course, nobody said yes. They took the ballot and marked no. Then Johnson gathered all these ballots together and sent copies of them to stores all over the country. They began getting rid of all Swanson Foods products.
Swanson said, “Look, we love you, we love Burrows. We would like to be liberal, but we’re not going to let our business go down the drain for one man.” I said, “I understand.” That was the end of Abe Burrows, at least on television. Abe understood completely. Luckily for him, he had a major Broadway hit at the time called Guys and Dolls, so he did not suffer. The people who suffered the most were the ones who had little or no names. Every once in a while, they’d get a part in a theater on Broadway, but basically they just vanished.
It was difficult to get people to stand up against this. The people who did stand up were your conservative friends, like Garry Moore and in the beginning, the Swanson brothers. I can understand that. The more liberal the network, the more frightened they were. CBS, after all, was concerned because in Congress, CBS was being called the Communist Broadcasting System. All three networks were run by Jewish Americans. They were concerned with being thought of as un-American. The first major company to break the blacklist was Ford Motors, with a broadcast of a Leonard Bernstein concert. They were strong enough and conservative enough that nobody could accuse them of anything.
I think it’s very important to note that I was not really dealing with Communists. I was dealing with people who were being tarred with the brush at a time when it was dangerous to be liberal. That was basically it. Whether I would actually have gone to bat for someone like Paul Robeson, an avowed Communist at the time, I don’t know.4
My life had been apolitical, I had never been involved. I was just operating out of a sense of not wanting to see people pushed around. I did not do it from any ideological point of view, except out of a fairly liberal, centrist position. My lawyers, nice liberal guys, certainly did not advise me to stand up and get involved. Most people looked at the names in Red Channels and said, “Somebody says they’re left-wing and that’s that. We don’t want to get into trouble.”
You can’t know what it was like. Nobody today has any feeling of what the atmosphere was like then, to know that one remark in Jack O’Brien’s television column in the Journal-American could hurt somebody badly. We were all scared.
Mark Goodson died on September 18, 1992, at the age of seventy-seven.
An articulate, considered man, with traces of Brooklyn still in his voice. “I do talks on the blacklist at various colleges. The kids are fascinated by it, they sit there spellbound. The blacklist is now more than forty years ago. So to them it’s an academic thing, and suddenly somebody says, ‘I was part of it. I lived through this.’ Well, it’s a revelation.”
I came out here cold in ’42. Luckily I got a job at MGM. At the commissary, I found myself at what was known as the Red Table, sitting with Dalton Trumbo, with Paul Jarrico, all the lefties. It was a marvelous experience for me, these people were much more established than me, I was just a beginner. But because of the political affiliations I was their peer. I must tell you, with everything that’s happened and horror of the blacklist, I don’t regret one minute of it. I got to know people I’d never gotten to know otherwise, people that I admired and respected a great deal. I got my money’s worth out of it, I certainly did, despite the fact that the shit hit the fan.
I joined the Party in the mid-forties. I was never that actively involved. I went to meetings. I had my reservations about what was going on at the meetings, but like many of us it was, “Okay, there are things we’re not too happy about, but overall it is very important, very good, and well-intentioned,” and so you overlook a couple of things, including some very boring sessions—very boring!
I was blacklisted for about twelve years. I wrote with fronts and phony names for twelve years. David Lang and Pauline Townsend named me.1 The breach between the friendly and the unfriendly witnesses was like a wall coming down—to this day. We don’t talk to each other, we don’t acknowledge them as people. They are pariahs. They destroyed lives. It’s as sharp a division as can be. They don’t exist.
I was subpoenaed in the late fifties, maybe in the last batch, but I had left the Party long before. It was not fear that did it, I just stopped going. Around ’51 or ’52, I just lost interest. When I appeared, I took the Fifth Amendment. I was totally uncooperative. I never doubted what I would do. There was never any question that I was going to be other than an unfriendly witness.
The practice of the committee was not to reveal a name until they had served a subpoena. So you were not blacklisted until you were named. Now if you had a clue—and most of us suspected sooner or later they were going to get to us—what you tried to do was work as long as possible and avoid the subpoena—evade it really. I knew they were looking for me, and when I was working on a job, I knew what I earned might be what I was going to live on for I didn’t know how long. So it became essential not to get served.
When my wife and I would come back from an evening out, we would stop the car about a block or two away from where we lived. I would get out and she would drive on to the house to see whether anybody was lurking there. And if it was clear, she would wave me on and I would come running into the house. I had done nothing, but I was living like a fugitive.
I never answered the doorbell. Never. We had a housekeeper at the time and she answered the door one day and there were the two guys with the hats. She was smart enough to say I was not home, then she came and said, “There were those two men there, and I think you should know that they’re looking for you.” I knew they were out with a subpoena for me, so I began to really avoid the thing very actively. It became very important not to get that subpoena, or to hold out as long as possible.
They finally caught up with me. I was at a studio writing a television show called I Married Joan, with Joan Davis. Getting onto a studio lot was impossible if you didn’t work there, but the investigator for the committee had no trouble getting on the lot. He served me in my office. I was immediately fired, not only by the studio but by my agent, the William Morris office. In ten or fifteen minutes, there was a wire—“We no longer represent you.” It was that clear-cut.
You’ve heard about the clearance process. If a show was going to hire any writer, actor, director, or anybody, the names went somewhere—somewhere at the networks, somewhere in the studios—to someone. And the list would come back with names crossed out and names not crossed out and the crossed-out ones simply were not hired. Nobody was in a position to hire without submitting these names. It was a marvelously well organized operation, and they were hitting people in their most vulnerable area, which was their livelihood. Dreadful things happened to people—you just couldn’t work.
Now for a writer, for me, it was not as devastating. For actors and directors who had to appear on stage, obviously, they were in terrible trouble. A writer could work at home and manage to get somebody to front for him, which I did a great deal of, but I was very lucky.
In television, there were only a handful of us doing comedy. We all knew each other very well. So I had no trouble getting fronts. I never paid for a front, but a lot of people did. There was a going business on it, in New York especially.
I was working through a front within six months. I knew a writer who knew Sheldon Leonard,2 and he recommended me to Sheldon. He said “Okay, do me a script for The Danny Thomas Show.” Which I did, and apparently he liked it well enough to continue doing it. He hired me despite the blacklist, taking a big big chance.
At that time he and Danny Thomas owned The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show. They were kings of television. Now Danny was not political at all, and if anything his friends were sort of on the Right. So I asked Sheldon at one point, “Does Danny know?” And Sheldon said, “I would never have done this without telling Danny.” So Danny knew, and it got to the point where I used to go to rehearsals and Danny would see me and let me know that he knew I was there.
There’s a very funny story on that. The problem with working with fronts was that the front’s name was officially the writer, which meant the withheld tax was in his name, the withheld Social Security was in his name, and there was no way to get it back. So one day Sheldon said, “Look, let’s establish a pseudonym for you and we’ll avoid the front situation. For the first one I’ll have to give you a couple dollars less as a new writer, and then the second one, you’re right back on top of the scale.” I said, “That’s a marvelous idea.”
So I had to go find a name, and it’s not easy to pick a name. But my son’s name was Eric Shepherd Tarloff. So I figured I’m Eric Shepherd. Sheldon had to submit the name to the William Morris office. So he says, “I’m going to hire Eric Shepherd.” The William Morris office gets in touch with Sheldon, he was a very big client then, and says, “Sheldon, don’t do it, there’s too much at stake here. This is such a phony name. It’s obviously a phony name. There is no Eric Shepherd as a writer. You are jeopardizing major television shows.”
So Sheldon said to me, “Pick a name that sounds like every other comedy writer.” Now at that time, I would say ninety-nine percent of the comedy writers were Jewish. If there was a non-Jew, he was like a freak in this thing. We were all Jewish. So I picked a name, David Adler. And he submitted it. I knew it was the right name when a very funny thing happened.
I was having lunch at Schwab’s, the old Schwab’s, with a fellow named Henry that I was working with as David Adler. Two writers came in who knew me very well, ’cause they were also writing The Danny Thomas Show. They say, “Hi, Frank. Hi, Henry.” Then they turned to him and say, “Who are you writing with these days?” And he says, “David Adler.” They say, “He’s wonderful.” [Laughs.] It sounded like a comedy writer, you see—so I knew it was the right name.
At first there were fronts and then there was the David Adler pseudonym. But apart from whatever psychological trauma there was, and my wife being frightened and uneasy, I suffered probably less than almost anybody else out of this thing. After six months, I was in there earning as much as I could, as much as was earnable. I simply couldn’t have wanted more—except it was not under my name.
If the studios had said no to the committee, what could they do? Nothing, it would’ve been over. But they buckled, and it was fear that did that whole thing. And to me, one of the major villains of the piece was Dore Schary. The major liberal in town at that time. A major screenwriter-producer, very liberal man. I think they bought him because he went to the Waldorf meeting in Washington and when they said, “Give us the Ten and that will be it,” he bought it. He came back and became head of MGM.
When we were going up before the committee, we went with lawyers, of course, and we had to raise money for the legal fees. People would give me twenty-five dollars or something like that.
Now some marvelous things happened and some terrible things. I said to a guy I knew very slightly, we had just met, “We’re raising money, and I hope you’ll give me something.” He said, “Meet me here on such-and-such date.” He came in with two hundred dollars, and I said, “Jesus Christ! This is too much.” He said, “Take it.” He became a friend of mine for a long, long time.
On the other hand, a very close friend of mine refused to give me any money. Even though it was just between me and him. He didn’t have to say why. He was scared. What if it got out? That’s the thing that is hard to grasp—the fear. Because one wrong move, and you’re in my position. It was not a happy moment, I’ll tell you that. But on a very small other hand, I could understand it, because everybody was scared shitless. Important people in the country wouldn’t say anything, until later on.
A lot of people, friends, wouldn’t come to our house when we invited them. Nor would they invite us to their house. And the reason why? It was strongly believed that investigators for the committee, if they knew there was a party, went taking down license-plate numbers of cars that were parked in front of my house. Or if I would go to somebody else’s house, my license number. Now, whether that was a fact or not, I don’t know. But that’s what kept people from doing it. They were afraid that someone’s going to take down the license number of their car in front of the house of a suspect and thereby become suspect themself. It got that crazy.
In the late fifties, I went to England, and began to write pictures there. I wrote one for an American producer who was living in England, a picture that has become a kind of a minor classic, School for Scoundrels, with Alastair Sim and Ian Carmichael. The prick producer put his name on it. One of the shits of the Western world. I sued him and won a huge judgment, but I’ll never see a penny of it.
Once Trumbo was hired publicly on Spartacus, the blacklist began to open. If they could hire Trumbo, then Mike Wilson and Albert Maltz could get hired. In effect it trickled down to those of us who were less well known. So that, in 1964, I did Father Goose for the same producer I did School for Scoundrels. I got an Academy Award for that. It was the first time my name was used.
Students I talk to sometimes ask, why did I become an unfriendly witness? Why did I risk this thing? I tell them I knew that someday it would be over for me. It was longer than I would have hoped, but I knew it would be over. For those who talked, it’s never over. Their whole lives they carry that pain of having informed, and not out of principle. Not one person, I guarantee you, cooperated with that committee and named names out of principle—not one. They did it out of self-preservation, and if in the process it meant destroying other people who were close friends, they did it.
Taking the moral position, while maybe painful and unfortunate, is in the long run the preferable one. Even the kids carry the taint of the fathers that did this thing. You have a father whom you are supposed to respect and admire, and you get to be sixteen, seventeen, and you read a book and it’s says your father finked. That does not give you a lot of stature with your children.
A charming and eloquent woman and the author of more than forty-five works of fiction, essays, and poetry. For seven years she was a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. Her husband, Baron Joseph von Franckenstein, was an OSS officer during World War Two serving behind German lines. A military government officer during the occupation, he was second in command of public affairs in Frankfurt and Bad Godesberg. After 1952, when he was denounced as a security risk, they were both blacklisted. We meet in a retirement community in Mill Valley, California.
Just toward the end of the war, my husband was captured by the Gestapo and tortured. He never revealed that he was an American officer, which was extraordinary. They talked to him in English; they refused to speak German to him. They said, “We know where you were trained,” and they gave him the place in Virginia outside Washington. They knew all these things. He spoke German with a heavy Austrian accent. He kept saying, “I’m just a poor Austrian peasant. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So he was put in prison and sentenced to be executed the next day.
That night, he escaped with another man who’d been sentenced to death. The other man was shot in the forest where they were hiding, and my husband got to Innsbruck, which was his hometown, and the Americans were coming in on tanks. He jumped up on every tank, hugged and kissed the soldiers. And he was at the mess that evening in a tattered German uniform! [Laughs.] He said he was absolutely unconscious of it, he was so deliriously happy to see the Americans, you know. And these GIs didn’t seem to notice it, until an officer came over and said, “You know, we like you a lot. We think you’re great, but [laughs] could you get another uniform?”
He could’ve come home almost immediately, that was something like two or three weeks before the end of the war, but he was so interested in getting a democratic government in Innsbruck, and he worked on that. There was a man in Germany who I really think caused all the trouble about my husband. He was an elderly man, and he’d been head of the Communist Comintern1 in Central Europe years before. He was through with Communism by the time the Americans hired him. I think he was hired probably because he spoke English. He had published several political books with Faber & Faber, and took for granted that when I joined my husband there, he would be able to meet me, because I also was published by Faber & Faber. But I was working very hard and I wasn’t encouraging any kind of social activities at all. Apparently a bitterness built up in him.
He was my husband’s assistant in Marburg. Marburg was a lovely little university town where all sorts of hideous things were going on underneath. In the university gymnasium the students were doing military things, which they weren’t supposed to do, of course, as it was during the American occupation. They were slashing each other’s faces in the old Teutonic tradition of having scars.
But this man complained to everyone—especially to higher-up people—that my husband was not trying to work on the Communist question at all, that he was working on which men had been Nazis and in power. This man worked up a lot of people. My husband told him, “My directions from Washington are de-nazification. That’s what I have to do.” And at that time, of course, the Soviet Union was still our ally. But all that worked very much against him, obviously. If I had known I probably would’ve been a little bit more social, because there was another man who was very jealous of my husband, envious of all his gifts, and they, he and his wife, asked me to dinner several times, and I was writing a book, and I just said I couldn’t do it. So he became very annoyed and he took on the battle too, of saying that my husband really should go after Communists.
One day, when we were on home leave in New York, I was having lunch with Roger Baldwin,2 and on the front page of the Herald Tribune there was a list of names, including mine. A list of people who had been friendly with fellow travelers, or something. And Roger, who of course was a terrifically intelligent lawyer, said, “Kay, you have to write a letter to the Herald Tribune.” And I said, “But Roger, why should I bother? It’s ridiculous.” And he said, “It’s very important,” and I didn’t do it. It might’ve made a slight difference if I had. Who knows? The whole thing seemed to be so absurd. I was accused of having given ten dollars to the Committee of One Thousand,3 and about the same amount to a Bill of Rights rally in Central Park, sponsored by Paul Robeson.
Then Louis Budenz testified that I had attended Communist Party meetings with him every Saturday night in New York City, while my husband was in the Army during the war. And I never attended a political meeting anywhere, either Democratic or Republican or anything at all. But apparently—I don’t know where I learned this, but I think it’s accurate—he was paid one hundred and fifty dollars for every name he turned in. You know, he was working with the FBI, and when he got to me he was sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel. He’d run out of names.
In 1952, we were in Bad Godesberg. My husband got a letter from the State Department saying that charges were going to be brought against him.4 And he could either stand trial for them or he could resign and nothing would happen. And so both of us said, “Well, of course, we’ll fight it,” you know. And that’s what we did.
So then our lawyer suggested we should go see John McCloy, the high commissioner. Benny Ferencz was our attorney. He was the head of the Jewish Restitution Committee in Germany, one of the great people I met in my life, absolutely wonderful. He said, “We should go together, the three of us.” And so we did. We went up the stairs for our appointment, and the secretary said, “I’m terribly sorry, but Mr. McCloy had to cancel all his engagements; he’s not here.” So then we went down the stairs and from the stairs we could see into a little hallway, partly blocked with a screen, and we looked down and there was Mr. McCloy hiding behind the screen.
The strange thing was, my husband had to read all the newspapers that were in German or French, and he would start at six o’clock every morning and he would have to have a complete résumé of them on McCloy’s desk by nine o’clock. And even when he was under suspicion of being a Communist! If he wanted to, he could’ve, you know . . . It was absurd.
The questions at the hearing were so extraordinary. They knew everything about you. They knew when I lived in the French Alps and that it was very near Geneva, Switzerland. The prosecutor knew that the Spanish Loyalists had toured famous Spanish paintings all over Europe, and I think they were going to go on to America too, to raise money for their cause. So this prosecutor asks me, “When you were living in the French Alps, did you ever go to the shows of the Spanish painters in Geneva?” And I said, “Yes, I went several times, and took my children.” And he said, “Had you been aware that those exhibitions were sponsored by the Spanish Loyalists, would you have?” But how they find out these things about one is amazing.
Well, our character witnesses were incredibly wonderful. Janet Flanner came down from Paris.5 She’d known me for twenty-five years. And she was so wonderful, because Janet always has to speak absolutely truthfully and wittily. She was absolutely marvelous. And the prosecutor asked her if when we would have dinner together in Paris, sit in cafés talking, were there many Communist writers with us? And she said, “Well, you know, Kay and I never thought too much about that, because one doesn’t in France. A very good young writer may be a member of the Communist Party, but you know, it doesn’t make much difference. You don’t talk about it, you’re not interested in it. We haven’t got the same approach to this that you people have in America.”
And one of my husband’s immediate superiors was there, in the Intelligence Service, and he was really terrific. He said that he was chief of the Intelligence Service, and he said, “Sometimes I wonder why we call it that, when we are questioning Joseph Franckenstein.” And who else was there? Oh yes, then Bill Clark, he was the head of all the American courts in Germany, was also a character witness for my husband. And his wife, she was an American journalist. She testified for me. So we had many terrific people speaking out for us. The members of the Consular Board were weeping, because they were men we knew, who’d been to the house for cocktail parties and that sort of thing.
My husband was completely cleared in the loyalty-security hearing.6 And then Cohn and Schine came on the scene.7 And it was really shocking. The first night they were there, they had a woman in a very nice hotel, in Bonn I guess, and apparently they got very drunk and they swung from the chandelier in their hotel room and the chandelier came down. Then the next day they went to see the high commissioner. They had an appointment with him at something like nine-thirty or ten o’clock. They had terrible hangovers apparently, and of course all this is hearsay, but I think it’s a lot of truth. They had such hangovers that they had one jacket that belonged to another suit, and the pants the other man was wearing! And they really looked like derelicts.
But another thing was very interesting—in the American enclave where we lived in Bad Godesberg, people would come up to us, State Department people that we didn’t know at all, and say, “I’d like to shake your hand for fighting this out.” Yes, it was really extraordinary. People we didn’t know at all. We had terrific support, it was really very wonderful.
Long before the hearing started, I wrote to the Whites [E. B. and Katherine]. I didn’t know them terribly well, but I knew them well enough to write to them. And of course Harold Ross was dead then.8 Now he would’ve just raised hell; he was such an extraordinary person. And he was always so badly treated by the other people on The New Yorker. We had lunch at least once a week all the time I was living in New York. I just found him fantastic. I’d pick him up at the office sometimes—and the way William Shawn9 and the other people would be treating him. Then when I had dinner with the Whites, they would always make derogatory remarks—“Oh, poor Harold,” as though he were a country bumpkin and didn’t know what he was doing. It was really very sad.
So I wrote to Katherine White. I said that we were going to have a hearing and that I would appreciate it very much if I had a letter from them. And she wrote back and said, “Kay, darling, you couldn’t possibly be a Communist. Why don’t you just forget about the whole thing?” Just slithering out.
Then William Shawn withdrew my accreditation.10 I’d been seven years a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. Harold Ross had been very anxious for me to write stories for him, which I did. And everything I wrote, they published. And then Harold died, of course.
I called my agent in New York and I said, “Tell William Shawn that never in my entire life do I want to have a word of mine published in The New Yorker.” So what does William Shawn do, when people go and talk to him about that? “Well, what could I do?” he says. “Out of the blue she said that she would never have another word . . .” He twisted it around.
Janet Flanner almost lost her mind when William Shawn withdrew my accreditation. She was just irate about this thing. When she testified for me, Shawn wrote her a very nice letter—she showed me the letter—and said that he was very sorry she had done this and that she had put The New Yorker in a very strange position and all that. She was enraged. She said to me, “Kay, I think you know what I want to do. I want to resign from The New Yorker and never write anything for them. But I can’t do it. It’s my one source of income.” And I said, “Well, it’s not necessary to do it, don’t.” But she really felt terribly that she didn’t do it. She was a great person.
When we came back to States11 my husband was teaching at a girls’ school in Connecticut. I had an agent, and she didn’t have the same requests for my work that we’d had before. And then one day she called me up in great excitement—some television company wanted my story. And she said, “It’s wonderful! You’re going to get six thousand dollars.” I said, “Oh, marvelous.” And then the next day she called me and said, “Apparently the man who was preparing the contract for it, another editor spoke to him and said no.”
We fought for nine years to clear my husband’s name. Our lawyer in New York was retired General Greenbaum. He was very active and very wonderful. He got out a booklet of letters from people who believed in us and all that. And with the help of William Shirer and also Ed Murrow, they wrote all sorts of letters to the State Department. So after nine years my husband was reinstated with apologies. He was sent as the cultural attache to the embassy in Tehran. Well, I was so happy about it, it never occurred to me till I read Bill’s memoirs the other day, he said it was just about the most insulting place that they could send him—even then, after all those years!
My husband went to Tehran in 1962. My son and I were going to join him in August, I think it was, or June, 1963. And when we got over there, he was dying. No one had realized it, because they said that he insisted on always coming to his desk, although they thought he didn’t look very well. He was a heavy smoker, cancer of the lungs. He died at the Presidio in San Francisco.
I remember when we were having our hearing, which lasted three days, we’d come back at night to our apartment in the American enclave and I would open the windows—it was summer—I’d open the windows and I’d put on Paul Robeson singing “That’s America to Me.” You remember? It’s a beautiful song, really beautiful.12
Kay Boyle died in January 1993 at age ninety.
A prominent Washington lawyer and civil libertarian, Joseph Rauh was also a founder of Americans for Democratic Action. One of his many clients was the radical playwright Lillian Hellman. (For more on Rauh, see under “The Purge of the Civil Service.”)
In 1952, Lillian Hellman1 came to see me. She handed me her subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I explained to her all her options. She said, “I’m not the kind of person that can go to jail. On the other hand, I don’t want to plead the Fifth Amendment.”
I said, “Madam, that makes you a very difficult person.” She wouldn’t tell about others, she wouldn’t plead the Fifth Amendment, and she wouldn’t go to jail. It would be a rather complicated performance.
If you tell about yourself, you have waived the privilege as to others. That’s what was wrong with the whole idea. If Lillian Hellman had gone in and said, “Sure, I’ll tell you about myself—I was a Commie,” then when asked, “Who else was in your cell?” had answered, “I’m not going to tell you that. I plead the Fifth Amendment,” the plea is no good. She has waived it by having told about herself.
I tried to explain to her why she wouldn’t get away with it. Finally, we decided that she would plead the Fifth and then hold a press conference saying she only pleaded it because of the waiver: “I was ready to tell them all about myself, but I couldn’t because I would have waived my privilege.” So she and I are working on drafts of what we’re going to say when suddenly I had this idea: “Why don’t we have this out with the committee? We’ll write them a letter saying, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you everything about myself. All I want is your assurance you won’t ask me about other people.” She agreed, and I wrote the letter. It is very famous for one sentence, “I cannot cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” which I didn’t write; Lillian did.
We delivered the letter to the committee. Three hours later we got a snotty reply: “We do not make deals with witnesses.” So we decided as follows: when they ask her if she’s now a Communist Party member, she’s going to answer no. When they say “Were you last year?” as was their practice, she’d say no. “The year before?” No. “The year before that?” “I plead the Fifth Amendment.” It’s a technique referred to as the “diminished Fifth."2 The theory behind it is that there’s enough period within the statute of limitations that she can plead the Fifth Amendment after two denials of the present. It is not a waiver. She’s going to answer some questions, but she’s not going to answer any more questions about her Communist relationship.
On the way to the committee, we agree that the proof of whether we’ve won or lost is going to be the headline in the New York Times. Does it say, “Lillian Hellman Pleads the Fifth Amendment,” or does it say, “Lillian Hellman Refuses to Name Others”?
As the committee began their questioning, my associate handed out to the press the letter explaining what we’re doing. The committee gets mad as hops about that. Their lawyer’s screaming at me that I’m in contempt, she’s in contempt, everyone’s in contempt. Yet all we were doing was passing out a letter. It’s pretty hard to be in contempt when you’re passing out a letter.
Finally, they dismiss her. I told my associate to take Lillian to a bar and I’d meet them in a few minutes. I didn’t want her to talk to the press. So he ran out with her, and I went and explained this whole thing to the press in even more detail. I was trying to be careful, giving them lots of facts, the names of cases where you’d waive your Fifth Amendment rights.
The next day, the New York Times headline said, “Lillian Hellman Refuses to Name Names.” We had won.3
Joseph Rauh died on September 3, 1992, at the age of eighty-one.
Miller takes time from the household chore of laying tile to spend an hour on the phone. One of the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights, Miller is the author of more than a dozen plays, as well as numerous works of reportage, essays, fiction, screenplays, and autobiography. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesman and again in 1955 for A View from the Bridge. In 1953, he wrote The Crucible, a courageous treatment of the Salem witch trials of 1692 as a parable for America during the Red Scare. His most recent work, Broken Glass, opened on Broadway in 1994. Blacklisted for years from film, television, and radio, Miller was convicted in 1957 of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before HUAC.
I drew some attention when I became involved with the Conference for Peace at the Waldorf in 1949.1 That was a kind of crossroads, I guess, at the time: when the Russians were—in fact, up to that moment almost—our allies and then suddenly they were turned into our enemy, and that conference was very important from that point of view.
At the time I was not working in films, or for any broadcasting companies, or advertisers, so the effect on me was more obscure. It was simply that I would be attacked in the press from time to time. But I had no job to lose, so it was quite a bit different than it was for a lot of other writers who had either actual jobs that they would be thrown out of, or contracts with publishers that would have been affected. I didn’t have anything like that, and obviously the Broadway situation was quite different, because we didn’t have any big corporations investing in Broadway, there were just a lot of small investors who threw in their money to put a play on. So they were not so easily tampered with as the big companies were in Hollywood or the broadcasting industry. They could maintain more independence.
They had blacklists of writers, and as it later turned out, practically every American writer was on it. But not all of them were out front the way I found myself, because they weren’t putting plays on, especially not in the Middle West. So the impact was greater on me than it would have been on, let’s say, Steinbeck or somebody else.
We had a road company of Death of a Salesman in the Middle West that we finally had to close down. The American Legion especially, and I think the Catholic War Veterans, picketed it so heavily everywhere that people were intimidated and they didn’t come. So there wasn’t much business. They were attacking the play and me as being an anti-American.2
Death of a Salesman questioned the ethos of the business civilization, which the play intimates has no real respect for individual human beings, whereas the going mythology was quite the opposite: in that nobody of any competence ever fails and that everything was pretty sound and terrific for everybody. So to put a play on where somebody who believes in the system, as Willy Loman does to his dying minute, ends up a suicide, it was rather a shock.
In fact, when they made the film they made Willy appear crazy. That was the whole drift of the film; that’s why it was such a bad film in my opinion. They made him into a lunatic, and consequently you could observe him with the same distance you observe any crazy person, you don’t really identify with him. In my opinion that was to make the play politically more palatable, but there were other artistic problems with that production which I disagreed with, but certainly this was the major one.
Columbia Studios actually made a short, cost them a couple of hundred thousand dollars, which they wanted to run before each showing of the film in the movie theaters. The short was shot at City College in New York City and was basically a very boring set of lectures by business administration professors who made it clear that Willy Loman represented nobody and that the play was really quite absurd and that the system was altogether different than as it was portrayed in the play and that the salesman’s job was one of the best imaginable careers that a person could have and indeed that the system was based on salesmanship. When they got finished with this kind of analysis you wondered why they had produced the play at all as a film. I managed to make an empty threat that I would sue them if they did this, but in fact I think they themselves saw that the absurdity of the whole thing was even too much for them. They may have shown it, somebody told me that he had seen it once in some theater, but I don’t think it was very widespread.
A few years later, I wrote The Hook, a screenplay about the corruption in the waterfront union in New York, Brooklyn actually. Elia Kazan3 and I went to Hollywood to try to get a producer for it, and Columbia Pictures definitely wanted to do it. But they submitted it to the FBI, which promptly declared that it was a dangerous film because it would tend to alienate the dockworkers, upon whom shipments to Korea were dependent. Then, of course, the main union guy in those days was a man named Brewer4 who controlled all the Hollywood unions and was a very good friend of the head of the New York waterfront union, a man named Joe Ryan who was a big shot in the AF of L. Anyway, this Brewer pronounced the script unreal and dangerous and fake because there was no corruption in the Brooklyn waterfront. And they wanted me to change the gangsters to Communists, in which case they would then proceed to produce the movie. Within about a year and a half from that point, Ryan went to prison for racketeering. But that didn’t change anybody’s mind. The film never did get made.5
Later, I was approached by a young guy who wanted to make a film about what was then called juvenile delinquency, namely, gang warfare, which was very widespread in Brooklyn. So I wrote a script for that with the cooperation of the City of New York, because the city was interested, of course, in curbing that kind of crime. To make a long story short, I began being attacked by the World-Telegram,6 which was a Scripps-Howard newspaper in New York, to the point where Mayor Wagner got cold feet and they had a meeting of all the heads of departments of the City of New York and they voted, I think it was twenty-two to twenty-one, to cut off any relation with this film.7 So that film got destroyed, because you needed to have the cooperation of the police department to make it, since the early agreement that this producer had with the city was that they could enter city facilities like the police department in order to shoot the picture.
Oh, yes, they didn’t like The Crucible either. [Laughs.] As soon as they smelled what that play was about, they froze like water in January. A play about the seventeenth-century witch hunts, which in my opinion the same basic process was taking place.
I wasn’t there, but I was told about an incident at some performance where at the point when John Proctor is executed the audience all stood and observed a couple of minutes of silence. It was the same day the Rosenbergs were executed.
However, I have to say that the original production was faulty. The director was trying to make what he called a Dutch painting out of it. But even so, it was pretty strong anyway. But for the times, it was just too tough; the times were against it. But it’s my most-produced play in the last twenty-five years, certainly. And it goes on all around the world all the time. But that time, when it opened, I was really out in the cold.
You know, I don’t even remember anymore which of my plays got picketed and when. But they were being picketed very often. Not in New York, I would say; New York is a different thing. At least, I don’t recall any picketing in New York, but certainly out of town in the rest of the country. The attacks were terrible. Of course, within a year after we opened The Crucible here, it opened in Brussels, for the first time in Europe. And the State Department wouldn’t give me a renewal of my passport. They said it was not in the best interests of the United States. So I couldn’t attend the performance at the invitation of the Belgo-American Association, which is an association of Belgian and American businessmen. When the time came to take a bow, the American ambassador stood up and bowed, and a lot of people thought he was me. It wasn’t until the next day that they were aware that I’d been prohibited from traveling. It took five years to get my passport back. I applied many times. But it was only after the Un-American Activities hearing that I managed to get one.
I was called before the committee because about five years before, I’d attended a couple of meetings,8 and they wanted to know who was in the room, and whether certain particular people were in the room. They named the people and I was supposed to corroborate what they had. I told them I wasn’t going to talk about anybody but myself. I was cited for contempt and convicted in a federal court after a trial of a week. I don’t think they would have come after me excepting that I was about to marry Marilyn Monroe.9 They thought they’d get some quick publicity on it.
Then the whole thing was thrown out by the court of appeals on the grounds that the committee had overstepped its charter or legitimate right to demand certain answers from me. There had been a case called the Watkins case just before this, and my lawyer, Joe Rauh, had argued that case, and the point was that Congress couldn’t ask questions at random on these matters unless they were directly connected with proposed legislation, and of course there was no such thing. So on the basis of the Watkins case they threw the whole thing out.
I think the roots of all this lie in that the Right had been out of power since 1934, and the prospects were bleak that they’d ever get back into power on the presidential level. They were defeated time and again, and this was a terrific way of reversing the whole liberal trend in the United States, which they succeeded in doing. They managed to create this atmosphere, which was basically a ploy by the right wing of the Republican Party from the outset, and also some of the Democrats, to turn the country to the right. They managed to turn back everything that had happened since Roosevelt started the New Deal. It was basically a domestic political struggle, which they won for a long time.
We still suffer from the effects. We’re still wasting our time arguing stuff that the rest of the world disposed of thirty, forty, fifty years ago—the whole place of trade unions in the society. After all, they broke the union movement here. The women’s movement now is the only bold sign of a resistance to this rightism.
The ostensible reason and part of the emotional background was the victory of communism in China, which took place in ’49. Before China went Communist, China was generally referred to as ours. This is like a mouse owning an elephant, but that was generally the conception among even very intelligent intellectuals who thought that we could and should and would always call the shots in China. So when that went, it created a kind of a pathos in the country toward those who would tell us that we had to act at once lest the entire world turn to communism. And the best evidence imaginable was that the largest population in the world was now Communist. That gave it a real shot of steam.
The cultural effects are all over the place. They’re obvious in the theater, for example. For the longest time until even now, the idea of a theater which is engaged with the society gradually withered away until theater became just mere entertainment and lost its audience, by and large. It no longer was engaging the great moral issues that the society throws up, that O’Neill tried to deal with, that a number of other people tried to deal with. O’Neill went out of style along with—for the most part—the very idea of reaching into the gut of the audience in order to reach into its mind. Instead, there has been far too much aping of abstractions-for-their-own-sake. But it will change again. It always does. And something genuinely felt and perceived with artistic clarity will surely survive.
A tall man with a wide, ready smile, Randolph doesn’t tell stories so much as they burst forth from him. A much-respected actor on Broadway, in television, and in films, Randolph was blacklisted for ten years. We meet in a borrowed apartment in New York City.
This was 1955, I was in Much Ado About Nothing up in Cambridge when I got my subpoena. I was also up for a part in a play called Wooden Dish. Now the same day I got the subpoena, my name appeared in the paper in the theatrical section: “Amongst those actors subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee were . . .” and then my name. The column next to it, by a drama editor of the time, said that Wooden Dish was going to be done on Broadway, starring Louis Calhern,1 and the producer was a guy that I knew in Hollywood, a son of a bitch.
After I saw the newspaper, I came in to New York to see the executive secretary of Actors’ Equity to tell him that I was going to fight this thing. He was so scared—“Well, you got to do whatever the committee says. We have nothing to do with it.” I said, “Well, I think we do. And I expect you to object to it, and I certainly will.”
While I was in New York, my wife came to me with the contract that they wanted for Wooden Dish. I would be playing opposite Louis Calhern, I would get four hundred bucks a week.
I know that this producer’s gonna see that item in the paper and then he’s gonna to see this other item. And as soon as I get that telegram from the committee, I’m going to get another telegram from the producer and it’s going to say, “We’re giving you your five-day notice and canceling your contract.” I knew I was in trouble.
Then I got the telegram from the committee. It was by a guy named Don Appell2 for the committee to appear on such-and-such a date. I had to go back to do the show that night. And all the way out on the train, I’m thinking, “I’ve got to write a statement that will be printed and I’ll send it to four thousand people. I have a right to believe in what I want to, I’ve never done anything harmful.”
I’m writing all the way from New York to Boston. And all the time I know I’m screwed. I know that I’m going to get a telegram at the theater, and I got a wife and a kid. Then I come to the theater, and there’s the stage manager with a telegram [laughs], and my fucking heart began to beat faster. The reality was more terrifying than I thought. Let’s face it—it means you may not work for a long, long time. And I opened the telegram and it said, “Just want you to know, very happy to have you in the show. Know we’ll have a splendid engagement together. Signed, Louis Calhern.”
He had to know what was happening, just like I did. It was the most wonderful telegram. I still have it in my scrapbook.
I was feeling good when I went in front of the committee. I knew I was finished, it didn’t make any difference. At least I said what I had to say. My wife was called too, and she was wonderful. They asked all the same questions. A lot of nonsense about the money that was spilling from the coffers of Broadway actors to the Soviet Union. With eighty-five percent unemployed at any given moment? Out of a salary of forty dollars a week? If you were lucky to be working. It was that kind of idiocy.
I wasn’t allowed to read a statement, but my wife managed to make one. She said, “Now look, I’ll answer all your questions, but my ancestors who were Presidents of the United States and signers of the Declaration of Independence [laughs] would not look with favor on this committee.” They got her off so quick it was incredible.
One of my best friends is James Whitmore. He and I were in Command Decision, a big hit play right after World War Two, and we roomed on the road together. Whitmore went to Hollywood right away and became a big star. After the hearings, he called my mother he was so worried. He said, “This is Jimmy. How’s John doing? I know he was in front of the committee.” And she said, “Oh, he got the first laugh!” Because when the committee asked me, “What are you doing now?” I answered, “Without any reflection on this committee, I’m in a play called Much Ado About Nothing” [Laughs.]
There were many different aspects of the Red Scare. I’m talking about things that happened to people who were very progressive. One of them was this kid who was more radical than I was. We all had come out from the war together, and he became very successful in voice-overs.
By now, my name and my wife Sarah’s is smeared across the headlines of the newspapers as defying the House Committee on Un-American Activities. One night we were in the kitchen and there was a knock at the door at midnight, and we’d had that before. The last knock at the door around that time was by a HUAC investigator who wanted me to fink. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? You never know what the knock is. Anyway, it was this kid and he said, “Listen, I just walked from my house, 55th Street, all the way up here to 163rd. I feel terrible and I want to help out.” He said, “Your name appeared in the New York Times, pictures of you and Sarah. I was at the studio, and one of the guys said, ‘You know these jokers?’ and I said, ‘No, no, I don’t know them.’ I felt like a shit. I felt sick. How could I do that? Yes, I’m making twenty-five thousand dollars a year. I never made that kind of money in my life. I was afraid that this guy was one of those people on the Right who’d finger you if you said you knew John Randolph or Sarah Cunningham.” He says, “I just kept saying ‘I don’t know them.’ So I’d like to give you a hundred dollars”—a hundred dollars in those days was a lot of money—“to help towards the lawyers. And I just want to tell you that I don’t feel good about it.” You talk of the Red Scare, now that was an idea of what was going on with your friends.
The other thing was the disavowing that you’re a Communist, every time you got up to speak about anything. You want to talk about an issue, you say, “Look, I’m not a Communist, but . . .” And always disavow the most incredible things that were labeled as Communist. Medical care for poor people, housing, all Communist, right? Every good thing that ever came was labeled Communist. After a while, if you’re smart, you say “Listen, I’d better find out who these Communists are, because they’re saying a lot of things that I believe in.”
Once, my mother came to sit and talk with me. Very worried, as a mother. She sits in the kitchen and says, “Listen, I know you’re a nice boy. You really believe in the violent overthrow of the government? You can tell me, I’m your mother.”
“Ma!” I said. “Everybody in the service got a medal for sharpshooting, I almost killed myself! I can’t handle a gun. I’m so busy rehearsing all day and fighting the committee. At night, I don’t have time to overthrow the government!” She said, “I know. I just wanted to ask ’cause I knew you’d tell me the truth.”
When I was in The Wooden Dish, I was picketed by the Brooklyn Un-American Activities Committee, set up by Godfrey Schmidt and Roy Cohn. When that happened, I found myself really unemployable in every way. I mean, I couldn’t work on radio; I couldn’t work on television; I couldn’t work in movies; I couldn’t work in anything you could make any money on. And the stage was the last resort, and here I am, picketed in the flesh. And I was not famous. Well, I figured I’ll never work again. The show closed in two weeks. I had Christmas coming up. I had thirty-eight dollars in my pocket and I was trying to get a job. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old kid. I have Sarah, not working—she’s blacklisted too. So it was a very rough time.
Now when I got into Inherit the Wind, I then saw something new. This was 1955; it still took me ten years after that to really get back to work. The guy who hired me is a guy by the name of Herman Schumlun. Herman Schumlun was in jail a year because he refused to give names of those who contributed to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. And this guy was a big producer. When I spoke to him, he said, “Listen, John, you know, I’ve lost a couple of actors who didn’t want to work when they heard that you were in the show. They said you were a Communist or a radical. But I insisted on hiring you. You’re the best person for this job. But do me a favor, don’t make waves.” [Laughs.]
Here a guy himself that had been put in jail was scared. And in a way he wanted to protect me. We were threatened with a picket line by Ed Clamage, the head of the American Legion group in Chicago.3 Because of Schumlun and me and Melvin Douglas, all Commies.
Luckily for us, a guy by the name of Goldberg, who was our company manager, knew all of the gangsters all over the world, wherever it was. He said, “Let me handle this.” And got ahold of a friend of his in Detroit who was the head of the Teamsters Union and says, “I’m in a theater group here, a nice group of people, and they threaten to picket.” The Teamster said, “Well, what’s the name of the guy?” He says, “A guy by the name of Clamage. He’s a florist.” He said, “Leave it to me, Harold.”
Now I don’t see no picket lines. They never showed up. I said to Goldberg, “What happened?”
“Well,” he says, “my friend just called ’em up: ‘Listen, Clamage, you give trouble to my friend Harold Goldberg who’s handling Inherit the Wind, and the trucks won’t roll, and you ain’t gonna get any delivery of flowers or anything.’ ” [Laughs.] So Harold said, “I told him thanks very much. He says, ‘Nah, they’re gangsters.’ He says, ‘They only know one kind of language.’ ”
We toured across country. We played every town. Right up from Chicago; we played Detroit, we played Cleveland. We played right to the West Coast. I had not realized how the shades of McCarthyism had darkened the land. I had a whole list of names of people, from the National Guardian, at that time a progressive paper. I thought, I’ll contact these people, we’ll talk. It was a time for change. And boy, I mean I hit towns—big towns where what had been done under the banner of anticommunism and witch hunts; doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, deadly afraid, even then, when already we were beginning to fight back.
Whenever I could, I’d call people on that list. I have never heard such fear. Farmers, lawyers—“Who are you?” “Just let me tell you; I know you’re scared. I just defied the House committee just before I took this show on,” I said. “I think there’s a fresh wind blowing across this land. I’d like to meet you and tell you what went on.” Some people were glad. Some people were just careful. Probably the most wonderful experience was in Cincinnati, where I met a bunch of coal miners and I ended up talking to them. But it was hard to get anybody to organize—they were afraid. Hollywood was the only place where at least they got people together.
When we hit Hollywood I insisted on talking to the people who’ve been blacklisted, to tell them how we fought in New York and to give them encouragement, because they weren’t reading it in their papers. I went to a house, they were actors that I knew in the old left-wing days. They went to Hollywood, made a fortune in radio and voice-overs and acting. And there were a lot of people, including a guy named Frank Wilkinson who had also gotten the shaft.
I went to this house, and I’m talking a beautiful home, swimming pool, more Mercedes-Benzes than I’ve ever seen in my life. And the room—I swear, all the shades were drawn—it was like the entrance to Death itself. I got more nervous there than I did when in front of HUAC because I look at all these glum people. But the more I talked about what was going on, the eyes began to sparkle. ‘Cause they hadn’t given up the hope to fight back; they were just terrified. The devastation in Hollywood made New York look like kids’ stuff. Writers giving four hundred names. Actors finking, writers finking, directors finking. I mean, it was incredible. And the list spread—there was the guy who was head of the committee to defend Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a stoolie. He gave the names of everybody in that movement. I don’t blame them for being scared.
For me, the blacklist showed itself very simply. There was a guy named Sidney Lumet,4 who was directing me in a live television show with Anthony Quinn. You rehearsed, and then you’re put on live. We’d been rehearsing all week. In the middle of the rehearsal, the day before we were to go on the air, the vice president called up and wanted to talk to Sidney and the producer. I didn’t know why we had a half-hour break. They came back very subdued. Sidney Lumet is a very fine person, and I didn’t know what happened. At the time, we never knew quite how the blacklisting worked. But the producer was a nice man and he took me aside and he said, “John, we just came back from the vice president. And he said he’d gotten a call from Young & Rubicam”—which was the advertising agency of the show—“to get rid of you.” They’d gotten a call from a guy name of Johnson in Syracuse, had three supermarkets, head of the Legion branch there, and then I think Amm-i-dent toothpaste was one of the sponsors of the show. And Johnson was putting a sign up in front of every toothpaste display that Amm-i-dent toothpaste hires Communists and that television shows had to blacklist.
I mean, to not buy Amm-i-dent toothpaste in three supermarkets in Syracuse? Well, that was enough to send Young & Rubicam, and they didn’t even know who the hell I was. But they got in touch with the CBS vice president and he called Sidney and said, “Get rid of him.”
Sidney said, “We can’t. We’re paying John five hundred bucks for the show, and it’s live television. He’s got a big part. We got to go on the air tomorrow.” And the vice president said, “Well, you hire John Randolph again and you’re finished.”
Matter of fact, I didn’t work again for him for twenty-seven years, until I did Serpico with Al Pacino. I don’t think it was because he was afraid. I just think that you’re out of their mind as an actor. You just disappear.
Phil Loeb was a wonderful trade unionist. He was one of the few people, along with Sam Jaffe,5 who had won a lot of things in our union—rehearsal pay, for instance. We had a resolution against blacklisting then and against loyalty oaths. At CBS, you had to sign a loyalty oath. There were one hundred and sixty subversive organizations you couldn’t belong to.
We were going to make a big fight around Loeb being kicked off The Goldbergs. He played Papa Goldberg. He was going to stand up in front of what we called a TVA meeting. TVA was then the temporary union that was formed of all three unions in the field to cover the area of television. And Loeb was supposed to speak at this union meeting.
Loeb came in front of a packed meeting to introduce a resolution with George Heller, the executive secretary, and proceeded to say that he had made a settlement which we didn’t know about. He couldn’t do anything else because of circumstances, and he started to cry.
We introduced a resolution anyway, setting up the Committee to Investigate Blacklisting in TVA. Every one of us on it ended up being blacklisted. Later on I spoke to Phil Loeb. He said that his son was a schizophrenic, was being treated and doing well, but that he ran out of money because he was blacklisted. He needed several thousands of dollars, otherwise they were going to send his son to the mental institution that we have up in Rockland. A terrible, terrible place. He couldn’t do that to his son. That was why he did it. He was a good union man. Not long after, he committed suicide.6
What’s the residual of it? Fear. It stopped the thinking, it stopped the fighting. Took the heart out of a lot of progressive people, and a lot of other people were frightened and just didn’t want to get involved. Now it’s the other way around. Now you’re honored. Now you get tributes. That’s gratifying in some ways, but I’m sorry for those people who didn’t live to see it, who committed suicide or who died out in the middle of this thing, whose heart was taken out of them. These are the casualties that we don’t talk about anymore. They’ve been dead a long time. So many good people paid a terrible price.
Forced out of Little, Brown in 1951 and blacklisted from the industry, Cameron joined with Albert Kahn to form Cameron & Kahn, Publishers. Their first project was Harvey Matusow’s False Witness. In 1955, they were charged by the Justice Department and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee with participating in an “international conspiracy” to discredit the FBI’s professional witness program.
We read Matusow had gone to Bishop Oxnam, the Methodist bishop—and a kind of progressive bishop he was, too, although he didn’t act very well in front of one of the committees.1 Anyway, Matusow went to him and to Drew Pearson, a famous Herald Tribune columnist in Washington, and admitted that he had lied. Matusow had testified not only for the Department of Justice, but for McCarthy too. So we decided, hell, we’ll get that book, we can make these bastards eat crow. Have you looked at False Witness? Well, it’s not a bad book, had a tremendous influence.
We knew the FBI was watching the Chelsea Hotel, where Matusow stayed while he was working on the book. We didn’t make any effort to hide it. We knew that they would know about it. When the book was in galleys, they decided to stop it. They did get our suppliers to give up. When the binder and the printer and the distributor all backed out of the agreement to publish the book, we pressed them and they said they’d been visited by the FBI. But finally we got hold of one printer—he was a wonderful character! [Laughs.] When the FBI came to visit him he said, “You interfering with an American’s freedom of business? What the hell, I’m allowed to publish anything I want—you guys must be a bunch of Communists!” He was wonderful! Anyway, he went ahead with the book.
So the Justice Department began to investigate this, and they called a grand jury to discover whether this was part of a Communist conspiracy to discredit the FBI system of informers. But really what they were doing was trying to stop the book. They subpoenaed all materials and us, the two publishers. It backfired on them, of course, because the press was fairly sympathetic to us.
When they got us in front of the grand jury, they had it rigged so they would have one of us in front of the grand jury and then in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, by that time under that senator from Arkansas, McClellan. We would appear before the grand jury and two days later we’d get subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. We figured out very quickly that the grand jury was breaking the law by letting the Senate committee have testimony.
When we went in to the grand jury the first day, we were met on the steps of the courthouse by the press. We elected to really take them on. We said, “This is purely a freedom-of-the-press issue, because they have subpoenaed every piece of paper having to do with this book, including all copies of the manuscript, page proofs, galley proofs, and in effect they’ve stopped the publication of the book.” And this is the line we took with the grand jury.
The grand jury had on it the husband of a former publisher of the New York Post. Also a broker in the back row, who was a real ignorant, redneck reactionary. The chairman was a kind of an innocent, but the vice chairman was a middle-class black woman. She was real reactionary, just incredible. Anyway, we had decided we would open by asking if we could make a statement, or if I could make a statement, ’cause they had us in separately. I asked the foreman if he had ever operated before with a grand jury. He said no, and I said, “Well, this grand jury should be investigating the U.S. attorney sitting there.” There’s a precedent for it, because after World War One the grand jury did investigate the U.S. Department of Justice because of its illegal activity in the Palmer Raids.2 I said we’re not the ones who used this paid liar; the U.S. attorney is the one who used him, and Senator McCarthy. Well, this threw a little confusion into them. Finally Attorney General Brownell came up to replace this young U.S. attorney whom we had handled like a child.
At one stage I said to Brownell, “Since you people don’t let people who testify here have counsel with them, I can only count on you. You tell me, should I answer that question or should I take the First and the Fifth Amendment?” And he answered, “Well, you should take those amendments.” Oh, yeah! So that freed me with the grand jury—everybody figures if you take the Fifth Amendment you’re guilty as sin of everything, but this made it a little different.
I can’t remember now how many times I was shuttled back and forth—three, I think—between the grand jury and the Senate committee. It’s real tricky—you’ve got to remember exactly what you’ve said. Not that I lied, but you can never tell when you can be trapped in a compromising situation, because you have to remember exactly what you said. It’s hard to do. In the end, they found no bill against us. The Justice Department would love to have had the grand jury find that we had conspired to get Matusow to lie, that’s what they were trying to show.
They were also investigating Matusow, of course. Matusow testified that Roy Cohn had instructed him as to what to say on the Trachtenberg case.3 Cohn, of course, denied it, and they got Matusow for perjury and sent him up for five years.
When they sentenced him, I went in with Albert Kahn and I said, “I’m going to be on tenterhooks here, because they’re going to give him a chance to deny this.” So when they asked him if he would have anything to say, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if Matusow had retracted the whole thing. But no, he stuck by his guns and he went to jail for it, because naturally they took Roy Cohn’s word instead of Matusow’s.
Anyway, the book came out, sold fifty thousand copies. The Saturday Review of Literature ran a major review by John Steinbeck. The headline on his review was “The Death of a Racket.” Later, about a third of the press services and the news stories and editorials considered that the book was a Communist conspiracy, but two-thirds of them were wonderful. You could tell that the people that wrote them had been censoring themselves for years and hadn’t said any of the things they knew were the case, and now they had a chance to speak out, just in reporting it, and some of them spoke with enthusiasm!
The general view was the same as Steinbeck’s; the book at that time had a real impact. The Justice Department never recovered from it—they never were able to use these informers again. Matusow’s recanting did get Jencks off, you see. But Trachtenberg and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,4 that grand old woman, it didn’t get them off.
At the time we were subpoenaed, along with all of our stuff, I wrote a letter to eight publishers, to Bennett Cerf, Alfred Knopf, Arthur Black of Doubleday, the head of Viking, and four others, saying that the government was overthrowing the First Amendment, and I thought that no matter what they thought about us, they should take a position against this. Never heard from one of them. Not one. [Laughs.] And it was never mentioned between Alfred and me—I never mentioned it and he didn’t either—when he finally hired me five years later.
Short, somewhat rumpled, Barnet carries the distracted air of a man fighting a long-standing injustice. In July 1955, Barnet was fired by the New York Times for pleading the Fifth before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. We meet in a Federal-style residence just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan.
In 1955, Winston Burdett came forward to testify about his previous associations. He wanted to clear his skirts so that he could keep his job as a CBS correspondent. Burdett and I had worked together as writers on the Brooklyn Eagle. He was a good man, a Harvard man too, about a year ahead of me. We lived together for about a year before I got married. He was the best man at my wedding.
Burdett went to Europe around 1939. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had some notion about being useful to world Communism. He was going to snoop around abroad, look for an assignment from Russia and tell them what he saw, I think especially in Finland, what the mood in the population was, stuff like that. He thought that as a reporter he might be helpful to the movement. From the point of view of the Comintern, it was well-intentioned. But he never did succeed in finding out anything about anything. It was a farce.1 He succeeded in painting himself Red, especially in the eyes of the FBI. Ultimately they caught him; he confessed everything.
Burdett didn’t warn any of us before giving our names. He was not going to keep correspondence with his old Red acquaintances. In his testimony, he spoke well of us. We were the cream of the earth, doing the best we could. He didn’t exaggerate our involvement. He was as honest as he could be, considering he was peaching on everybody he knew.
Now, before Burdett’s testimony, a friend of mine on the Times by the name of Charles Grutzner told me that he was going to be named by Burdett, and probably other people too. What he had decided to do is to plead the Fifth Amendment not against self-incrimination, but against self-degradation. He had a wild notion that you didn’t have to testify in a way that would incriminate or degrade you. I told him that if it ever came to my turn, I would plead the Fifth Amendment, I couldn’t see any other way to do it.
When Charlie found out he couldn’t plead non-self-degradation, he spoke to Louis Loeb.2 Later, Charlie told me, “We’re not going to have any dinners together anymore,” because he was going to cooperate. I say this now, Charlie being dead. He didn’t want to lose that house that he just had bought in Palisades, it was very important to him, as was his Times job. He was an old newspaperman, and this was his crowning achievement. He wouldn’t hurt anybody, but he was going to cooperate, and he advised me to do the same.
Actually, when it came to naming names, he remembered about three. Two of them were dead, and one or two others were well-known Communists in New York. So he really wasn’t hurting anybody, but of course it might have hurt somebody. Some of these people did lose jobs, actually. I knew one guy that worked for the Polish Cultural Bureau3 in Washington who lost his job. Not that they didn’t know that he had earlier on been a Communist, but nobody likes to have people in their employment accused of being a Red, even if they hired them because he was a radical. So that was Charlie’s position, and it was the end of a beautiful friendship. I told him I wasn’t going to name anybody. We were both naive, for starters. He was naive about self-degradation. I was naive about freedom of speech and the New York Times.4
I was working at the copydesk when I was called to the committee.5 I had a meeting with Ted Bernstein, the managing editor, Frank Adams, the city editor, and Louis Loeb, the Times attorney. They said, “You’ve been named by Burdett—what are you going to do? We don’t want you to defy any congressional committee. We won’t stand for that.” Meantime, they had never fired anybody for this particular offense. I started out very adamant—“If I am or ever was a Communist, I won’t tell you. It is legal, for God’s sake! I do my job and you pay me for it. My politics are my own business”—from which I beat a fairly hasty retreat. My lawyer, Lenny Boudin, said, “That’s very principled, but you’re only going to get fired, not for pleading the Fifth Amendment, but for lack of candor.”
I said, “I don’t want to be fired for lack of candor. If they fire me for pleading the Fifth, they should take the rap.” He said, “They’re not going to admit that. Tell them enough about yourself to satisfy Louis Loeb.”
So I did. I told Loeb that I had joined the Communist Party in 1937. I went to meetings, I left the Daily Worker on subway seats. I advanced to the best of my ability the Communist line. But I have not been a member of the Communist Party since 1940. He said, “Yes, this is what I want. This is candid enough for us.”
In further meetings, management pressured me to not defy the committee. They said, “Don’t rack your brains. You don’t have to remember everybody you ever went to a meeting with. But you must satisfy the committee that you are cooperating. They will not brook defiance, and neither will we.” I said, “I’m not going to give one bloody name. You’re satisfied with my candor. The rest is my own business.” They repeated themselves. “Do not defy this committee. Louis Loeb will tell you how much you have to remember.”
I did not know when I went down to Washington whether I would get fired or not. I didn’t think they would dare. I would pin Fifth Amendment firing on them, and they had repeatedly expressed sympathy with Fifth Amendment pleas in editorials. But still, I couldn’t be sure. During my testimony, the committee even asked, “Are you going to get fired for this?” And I said, “I don’t know. I hope not.”
I had a brief session. They called us the Brooklyn Eagle cell, the fifteen of us that Burdett had named. Burdett had not racked his brains. I could have done better than he did in dredging up names from the remote reaches. The testimony is uninspiring. I pleaded Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment.
Toward the end of the testimony, they asked me to tell about myself. I had gone through almost the whole testimony without my Party membership getting on record. I finally slipped it in. I told the committee that the Times knew about it. When I got down off the stand, an office boy came up and said, “They want to see you at the office.” I hotfooted it over there and was handed a letter from Sulzberger, prewritten no doubt. “Ever since your name was first mentioned in connection with Communist membership and the Brooklyn Eagle, you have pursued a course of conduct that has caused the Times management to lose confidence in you. As a result, please collect your pay and beat it.”
Jimmy Wechsler at the New York Post was sufficiently sympathetic to write an editorial, “The Silent Copy-Reader.” He knew well enough that I’d been fired for pleading the Fifth Amendment, but he didn’t want to tangle with the Times. He did, however, want to maintain a liberal position. So he wrote a weasel-worded piece saying, “It certainly looks as if the Times has fired Barnett for pleading the Fifth Amendment. If they did so, that was a naughty thing for the Times to do. On the other hand, if in fact Barnett had pursued a course of conduct etc., it’s understandable why the Times did that.”6 He went back and forth, but he essentially got my point of view across. When I saw him, Wechsler told me, “You know, you caused a lot of trouble there amongst the higher-ups. They didn’t know what the hell to do with you.” Apparently there was some controversy on the Times board. They must have wished to hell they had just kept me on. It would have simplified everything.
I took the case immediately to the grievance committee of the New York Times. It was their job to help people who’d been fired unjustly. They put on an appearance of being very friendly. In fact, the grievance committee and most of the employees of the New York Times were strongly against me from the start. Most Times people think that the Times can do no wrong. When the Times says someone was fired for misbehavior, nine out of ten will believe them. The grievance committee behaved in a friendly fashion. They got me to make what they thought were damaging statements. But I would have made them without cross-examination.
For example, one of the Times’s charges was that I kept the fact that I had been a Party member a secret. I said, “Telling people you’re a Communist when you’re looking for a job is not a smart idea. I don’t think they would have hired me if I’d told them I had been a Communist.” They said, “Then you lied to the Times from the very beginning. You didn’t tell them about yourself.”
This was one of the reasons the Times unit of the guild refused to handle the case. Meanwhile, the New York guild had issued a statement critical of the Times. On several occasions they said it should go to arbitration. But when I pushed them for it, I was told, “We’ve taken four similar cases to arbitration already. We can’t get to first base with them. Do you really want us to try again?” I wanted them to because this case was different. I worked for an ethical publisher not the Enquirer but the New York Times.
The Times grievance committee and the Times unit refused to make a grievance out of the case. For the next two years the Times unit of the guild and the New York Newspaper Guild were at odds. They argued over who had the authority to determine whether a case goes to arbitration: was it the Times unit, or the New York Newspaper Guild? The case went as high as the State Supreme Court and ended up being a compromise. The Times unit said, “Okay, we agree that the New York Newspaper Guild has the authority.” In return for which the New York Newspaper Guild said, “Okay, concede us that authority and we’ll drop the Barnet case. Now that we can take it to arbitration, we won’t!” [Laughs.]
When I was first fired, the ACLU issued a statement deploring what seemed to be a firing for the plea of Fifth Amendment. The Times replied that it did not fire me for pleading the Fifth Amendment. It ran in the Times: the ACLU’s complaint, the Times response, and then an ACLU statement: “We are happy to learn that the Times, despite appearances, does not fire anybody for the Fifth Amendment.” When I saw that, I was furious. They never questioned me. I complained to the ACLU, “Why didn’t you ask me something?” They told me, “Send us your stuff and we’ll see.” I sent them the letter that I had given Loeb about my Communist membership and anything else that justified my case. The head of the New York ACLU, Patrick Malin, said, “You have good reason to believe you were fired for pleading the Fifth Amendment. We’ll get back in touch with Sulzberger and try to renew this debate.”
Later he told me, “Sulzberger doesn’t want to continue the argument. He says your case probably will get into the courts via arbitration and now is not the time to try it on the pages of the New York Times.” I said, “But it’s never going to go any further. They have to try it on the pages of the Times.” He said, “You’ve made a prima facia case, but we can’t do anything further. In your case, you pursued a course of conduct, not the Fifth Amendment.” I said, “You are making me a scapegoat for this achievement of getting the Times on record.” They said, “It is an achievement and we did get the Times on record. Maybe you are a scapegoat, but there’s nothing further we can do. We have achieved our purpose. You’re just one guy—here’s a whole fucking principle that has been laid down. Nobody gets fired for pleading the Fifth Amendment on the Times anymore! That’s something that you’ve accomplished.” Of course, the very next time they had a chance to fire anybody for pleading the Fifth Amendment, they did.
I went to work for William Douglas McAdams, a medical advertising agency. They put out medical newspapers and magazines. The president of McAdams was Arthur M. Sackler, a big philanthropist, and he let his people hire some guys who were desperate for jobs. Now most of these were experienced newspaper editors looking for jobs at cut rate, happy to take anything.
Jack Schafer worked for McAdams also. He got the ax from the Times not for the Fifth, but for being unable to make up his mind whether he wanted to be a Communist or not. He joined and dropped out, and then joined and dropped out again. The Times said, “We hired him and what assurance do we have that he’s not going to rejoin?” What an offense that would be to the world at large if he joined the Communist Party while reading cable copy for the New York Times.7
There had been a number of firings—Bill Price on the News, Danny Mahoney on the Mirror, Willie Goldman on the Mirror. Some of the cases had gone to arbitration. The guild units wouldn’t fight for most of them. If they got named, they got fired.
It’s been thirty-six years since the Times fired me for pleading the Fifth Amendment. They have never issued an apology, never made any kind of restitution or offered compensation. They never said they were wrong in any respect. I’m sure if you asked the Times why they fired Barnet for pleading the Fifth Amendment, they would tell you, “No, he was fired for following a course of conduct that caused us to lose faith in him.” A couple of years ago, New York revived the old teachers union cases and they sent out checks to victims’ families. The attorney general of the state decided that they were fired wrongly and there should be some kind of restitution, even if only nominal. I wrote a letter to the Times and said, “The attorney general of the state is able to confess error and do his best to make up for it. How about the Times saying that they made a mistake in the Barnet case and they’re sorry?” I never heard from them. Nothing. They never even printed the letter.
1Also the publishers of Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts to Combat Communism.
2In 1945, actress Ireene Wicker lent her house for a benefit for Spanish refugee children. For this, she garnered a mention in Red Channels and was banned from television.
3John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting (Fund for the Republic, 1956), Vol. 2, p. 2.
4One unforeseen result of blacklisting was the rapid growth of off-Broadway theater. With the glut of blacklisted artists from Hollywood and television, top talent filled small theaters with productions of Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov. Of course, there was an equal reaction to this as well. Now talent wishing to make it in Hollywood and TV found themselves blacklisted for appearing in off-Broadway productions.
5George Sokolsky, Howard Rushmore, Westbrook Pegler, Victor Riesel, and J. B. Matthews were among the leading Red-baiting journalists of the era, active not only in destroying careers but also in reviving them in their equally lucrative careers as “clearance men.”
6The Miami Daily News discovered Red Army plans to make Miami its first port of call. One Cincinnati Enquirer headline read: COMMUNISTS MARK 12 CITY PLANTS FOR SABOTAGE!
7In 1949, a sailor clearing spoiled goods from the hold of a ship in Philadelphia harbor opened a sardine can in which he found thirty-three tiny pamphlets published in Spanish in 1946 and 1947. Purported to be sports handbooks, they contained instructions on how to sabotage public utilities. The cargo was intended for Spain, where resistance groups still battled the forces of fascist dictator Generalissimo Franco.
8For more on this story, see Melvin Barnet in this chapter.
9Not until January 5, 1956, the last day of the hearings, did the New York Times respond editorially to its predicament. Entided “The Voice of a Free Press,” the editorial accepted the propriety of an investigation of the press by a government agency, unless it was “motivated by ulterior purpose.” Further, the Times would not “knowingly employ” a Communist in its news or editorial departments. All such employees would be summarily dismissed. The editorial asserted, “It is our business to decide whom we shall employ and not employ. We do not propose to hand over that function to the Eastland Committee.” Regrettably, the Times had already fired three editorial employees who had refused to inform before the sub-committee. For the story of one of them, see Melvin Barnet in this chapter.
10For the trials of one small press, see Angus Cameron’s tale in this chapter of publishing Harvey Matusow’s False Witness.
1Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977) began publishing his poetry in The Musses in 1913. During World War One, the magazine’s antiwar position ran afoul of the Postmaster General, who revoked its mailing license under the Espionage Act of 1917. The Masses’ editors were vindicated in court, but lost access to the mails through a legal technicality. The magazine was succeeded by the Liberator, which ran until 1924.
2New York Times Magazine, January 13, 1991.
3By the early 1950s no one worked in radio or television without the consent of Laurence A. Johnson. He and his family monitored all network programming and took down the names of those actors, writers, and directors whose politics were considered offensive. Working in concert with a local American Legion post, Johnson threatened the sponsors of the programs with a consumer boycott of their products unless the artists he named were fired. It was the implied support of the American Legion (and its millions of members) that made him such a powerful figure. Johnson died in 1962 at the age of seventy-three, a few days before the courts awarded radio personality John Henry Faulk $3.5 million in a suit against him and Aware, Inc.
4Robeson, although very close to the Party and to the Soviet Union, denied under oath in 1946 that he was a member.
1Pauline Townsend, screenwriter, gave eighty-three names on March 12, 1953. David A. Lang, screenwriter, listed seventy-five names for HUAC on March 24, 1953.
2A former stage actor who played character parts in dozens of films, usually the gangster. He later became a successful television producer and director.
1Communist International, established in 1919 and dissolved in 1943.
2Roger Nash Baldwin (1884–1981), founder and director (1920–50) of the American Civil Liberties Union.
3An organization created to raise defense funds for the Hollywood Nineteen, declared in 1948 to be a “Communist front” by the California Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities.
4The charges were (1) that he had been a swimming instructor at a youth camp in New Jersey which was Communist-sponsored; (2) that Kay Boyle had been a friend of Alexander Trachten-berg, a leading Communist official (Boyle had never met him); (3) that Kay Boyle had sponsored several organizations which appeared on the Attorney General’s list; and (4) that Franckenstein and Boyle had been guilty of “immoral conduct” before their marriage.
5Janet Flanner (1892–1978), New Yorker correspondent in Paris, contributed to the magazine from its founding in 1925 until her death. She wrote under the name Genet.
6One week after Franckenstein was cleared, State Department security officers were already preparing the ground for the charges to be reinstated. In a letter to John Sipes, legal counsel to the loyalty-security board, from Huston Lay of the general counsel’s office in Bad Godesberg: “Quite apart from the questions before the Board, Franckenstein is not Americanized. . . . We did not delve into the relations between the two in respect to the child born before their marriage, although we probably should have.” Seven days later, again to Sipes: “Unquestionably, [Kay Boyle] was a ‘parlor pink’ with a possibility that she was a member of the Communist Party. . . . Franckenstein appeared to be to be almost wholly European in his outlook.” Lay closed with the observation that should the board’s decision be reversed, he would “certainly feel that there has been no injustice done.”
7One month after Joseph Franckenstein was unanimously cleared by the loyalty-security board, two of Joe McCarthy’s aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine, passed through on their infamous junket ferreting out Communists from the ranks of American officials abroad. Franckenstein, along with every other Foreign Service officer who had been tried, was declared “surplus” and suspended pending further inquiries in Washington.
8Harold Wallace Ross (1892–1951) was founder and editor (1925–51) of The New Yorker.
9William Shawn (1907–92) became the second editor of The New Yorker upon the death of Ross and served until 1987.
10Shortly after her firing by Shawn, the American Civilian Occupation Forces in Germany posted a ruling that no wife of a Foreign Service officer could be accredited as a journalist. The Stars and Stripes noted that this ruling would affect only two people: Sonia Tomara (Mrs. William Clark), correspondent for the Herald Tribune, who had testified for the defense in the Franckenstein hearing, and Kay Boyle.
11Upon his return, Franckenstein applied to the State Department for clearance. The department then refiled the same charges of which he had just been cleared. A request for a hearing was denied, and Franckenstein was then declared a threat to the security of the United States under Executive Order 10450.
12“The House I Live In” (Arr.: L. Allan-E. Robinson)
What is America to me?
A name, a map, or a flag I see
A certain word. Democracy
What is America to me?
* * *
The place I work in, the workers at my side
The little town or city where my people lived and died
The howdy and the handshake, the air of feeling free
The right to speak my mind out
That’s America to me
1Lillian Hellman (1905–84) was a well-known playwright and screenwriter; her works include The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Watch on the Rhine (1941). She also wrote Scoundrel Time (1976), an account of her experiences during the Red Scare. Hellman was the longtime companion of novelist Dashiell Hammett, see page 453, footnote 3.
2For how this technique was arrived at, see John Sanford under “The Hollywood Blacklist.”
3While Hellman did not go to jail, she remained on the Hollywood blacklist until 1961.
1Sponsored by the left-liberal National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace was held in March 1949 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. The conference was heavily picketed by right-wing groups and harassed by police and government agents. Many of the international delegates were unable to attend because the State Department refused them visas. Eighteen thousand people attended the closing peace rally at Madison Square Garden.
2Vincent Hartnctt (a founder of Aware, Inc., a major blacklisting concern), while addressing a Conference to Combat Communism held in Peoria, declared the work to be “a Communist-dominated play.”
3Stage and screen director who in April 1952 reversed his unfriendly stand before HUAC and gave eleven names. Perhaps his best-known film is On the Waterfront, written by Budd Schulberg, who gave fifteen names. Marlon Brando played Terry Malloy, a longshoreman and potential informer, who is torn between his loyalty to his friends and the moral imperative to squeal on the mob. There are those who say the film is an attempt by Kazan and Schulberg to justify their HUAC testimony.
4For Roy Brewer’s take on this story, see under “Hounds.”
5After Miller declined to bowdlerize his script, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia, cabled him: “It’s interesting how the minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.”
6Along with the Journal-American, Aware, Inc., the American Legion, and the Catholic War Veterans.
7One city commissioner who voted against Miller explained, “I’m not calling Miller a Communist, my objection is that he refuses to repent.”
8In 1947, Miller attended “four or five” meetings of Communist writers in order to “locate my ideas in relation to Marxism. . . . I went there to discover where I stood finally and completely. I listened and said very little.” (Testimony before HUAC, June 21, 1956).
9Committee chairman Francis Walter offered to call the hearing off if Miller would permit a photograph of Walter standing with Miller and his soon-to-be bride, Marilyn Monroe.
1Louis Calhem (1895–1956) was a romantic lead in early silents and later became a powerful character actor for MGM.
2Investigator for HUAC, legman for Nixon in the Chambers-Hiss case.
3Edward Clamage, a member of many a Legion antisubversive committee, was the leading spokesman for his point of view in the Chicago area. He once declared stripper Gypsy Rose Lee to be a Communist. By 1956, he was stale copy in the Windy City.
4Film and television director who started out as a child actor on radio and Broadway. His films include 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network.
5Sam Jaffe (1891–1984) made his stage debut in 1915. He went on to make twenty-one films, including Gunjja Din, Lost Horizon, and The Asphalt Jungle. He also portrayed Dr. Zorba in the Ben Casey TV series.
6A working actor for forty years, Loeb was cited in Red Channels seventeen times. He was fired and blacklisted in 1951 after CBS and his sponsor, General Foods, received a total of four letters protesting his appearance. In 1955, broke and despondent, he checked into New York’s Hotel Taft and took an overdose of sleeping pills.
1Bishop Oxnam appeared at his own request before HUAC on July 21, 1953. A liberal anti-Communist, Oxnam wished to refute HUAC charges that he “served God on Sunday and the Communist front for the balance of the week.” At the close of the hearing, in an amiable mood, he and the chairman posed for the press shaking hands.
2The centerpiece of the post-World War One Red Scare, the Palmer Raids were a nationwide roundup of nearly ten thousand citizens and immigrants on the night of January 2, 1920. Sponsored by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and orchestrated by his young subaltern J. Edgar Hoover, the raids were noted for their conspicuous brutality and a virtual absence of due process. In the ensuing backlash, Palmer and Hoover partly justified their actions against the aliens in purely racist terms, saying that “from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type.”
3Matusow testified that Cohn had suborned perjury in the 1952 Smith Act trial of thirteen Communist leaders. See Harvey Matusow under “Hounds.”
4Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1964) joined the Industrial Workers of the World at sixteen and became its most illustrious orator and organizer. Christened “the Rebel Girl” by IWW bard Joe Hill, Flynn was instrumental in founding the ACLU, only to be expelled in 1940 for her Party membership. In spite of Matusow’s recantation, she served three years in Alderson Federal Penitentiary.
1Burdett testified to considerable time spent waiting in hotel rooms and on street corners for contacts who rarely showed up. He said his mission to Finland at the close of the Finnish-Soviet War was to discover how the Finns felt about the war—apparently they did not feel good about it. He went also to Ankara, where his mission was to find out if the Turkish government was really neutral. It was, he determined. At this point, the Russians should have asked for a refund, since it was plain beyond a doubt that the Turks were pro-German.
2Counsel for the New York Times.
3Cultural representatives of the Polish People’s Republic.
4Two years previously, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the Times, delivered a speech at John Carroll University in which he suggested that anyone who had parted company with the CP or its fronts no later than the Berlin airlift (1948–49) should benefit from a moratorium. Sulzberger asserted, “Nor is it the super-zealots who bother me so much in all of this—it is the lack of plain old-fashioned guts on the part of those who capitulate to them.” He added that he was determined to allow no witch hunt at the Times.
5Barnet and twenty-nine other Times staff members were subpoenaed by SISS in 1955.
6Describing himself as a “responsive but not a friendly witness,” Wechsler had already appeared before Joe McCarthy’s committee on April 24,1953, and again on May 5. On his first appearance, when he was asked for the names of fellow members of the Young Communist League, he responded, “Do you want a long list? A short list? How do you want this?” On his second visit, he supplied the long list.
7Schafer, who pleaded the Fifth before SISS, told an arbitrator he had been a Party member in the years 1940–41 and 1946–49.