The elections of 1946 brought about a political sea change: for the first time in fourteen years, the Republicans had control of Congress and a fresh roster of committee chairmen, ready to take the reins after a long stretch in the wilderness, stepped forward to undo the legacy of FDR. For the newly empowered Republicans, under Speaker of the House John W. Martin (R-MA), the decision to re-animate HUAC was as obvious as the choice of chairman: its longest serving and most media-minded member, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas.
Born in 1895 in Jersey City, New Jersey, the first son of an old-school Irish-Catholic pol, Thomas was a Wall Street bond salesman and investor who in 1925 transitioned to the no less lucrative field of public service as practiced across the Hudson. In 1926, he was elected mayor of Allendale; in 1930, he circled back to Wall Street; and in 1935 he returned to Jersey-style politics as a member of the New Jersey General Assembly. The next year, having earned a reputation as a Republican Party regular, the businessman-politician was elected to the House of Representatives from the seventh district of New Jersey.
Once sworn in, Thomas angled to get on the Dies Committee, cozied up to the chairman, and made uprooting Communism in the arts his bailiwick. In 1939, Dies rewarded Thomas with a plum assignment, appointing him chair of a series of New York-based hearings into the pro-New Deal and often pro-Communist productions of the Federal Theater Project. The revelations led to the elimination of the subsidy for FDR’s theatrical agit-prop from the federal budget that year.1
For critics, the fact that Thomas had changed his name (from Feeney to Thomas) and religion (from Irish Catholic to Episcopalian) was evidence aplenty of his naked careerism and low character: they referred to him as “J. Parnell Thomas nee Feeney” to remind voters of the upwardly mobile apostasy of the formerly right-handed Irishman. Fifty-three years old at the time of the 1947 hearings, Thomas was a natty dresser, well-groomed and well-scented, though his appearance was not imposing. “He is a stubby, balding man with a round florid face,” read the unvarnished portrait in Motion Picture Herald.2 Ironically, shades of red would define the color scheme of his chairmanship: flush-faced fury, a ruddy complexion, and veins bulging in anger, as if he were on the verge of bursting a blood vessel from beating against the currents of the red tide. His enemies assumed the anti-Communist lather he worked himself into was cynical playacting. “I’m going places now that I’m chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” an unflattering profile in PM quoted him confiding to a friend. “Going after Reds is going to make me.”3
Thomas’s right-hand man and attack dog was another veteran of the Dies Committee, Robert E. Stripling. In 1932, Dies had offered Stripling, a student at the University of Texas, a patronage job at $120 a month in the cloak room of the old House Office Building, not bad terms for the times. While attending night school, he made himself indispensable to Dies, an old friend of the family, hence the patronage job. In 1938, when Dies got authorization for HUAC, Stripling offered to serve without pay as committee secretary. Soon he was earning a salary as HUAC’s chief counsel and principle interrogator. For Stripling, Communism was a “cancerous growth” operating “astutely within the texture of our Constitution and the resilient borders of our native tolerance.”4 For the next ten years, except for an interregnum in the army during World War II, he dedicated himself to its surgical removal. His friends called him Strip.
With Thomas as chair and the notorious John Rankin as the ranking Democrat, the rest of the committee was relegated to the role of background extras. In terms of the Hollywood-minded hearings mounted by Thomas, John S. Wood (D-GA), the once and future HUAC chair, was mainly missing in action, dropping in and out and, finally, out. John McDowell (R-PA) and Richard B. Vall (D-IL), undistinguished backbenchers who attended most of the sessions, were dutiful and forgettable. Karl E. Mundt (R-SD), J. Hardin Peterson (D-FL), and Herbert C. Bonner (D-NC) were total no-shows.∗
HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas (right) and committee counsel Robert E. Stripling (left) examine celluloid evidence of Communist “boring from within,” May 28, 1947.
The last member of the committee, the freshman congressman from the twelfth district of California, might not have been picked from the line up as the most likely to succeed, but he proved the only star to emerge from the humdrum supporting cast. Richard M. Nixon (R-CA), a thirty-four-year-old Navy veteran and lawyer, aspired “to win recognition as a ‘movie expert’ because of his California background,” opined the People’s Daily World, the Los Angeles-based paper of record for the CPUSA, little knowing how often it would have occasion to typeset the name. “He demands that films show ‘the evils of communism’.”5 Nixon believed that the authentic fifth columnists in the motion picture industry would hide behind the First Amendment, but that the rest of the accused were garden-variety bleeding heart liberals “tinged with pink” rather than the “bright red” of the Communist Party.6
At full strength, the HUAC staff was composed of ten men and thirty women, the latter mostly secretaries and stenographers. “Although there was considerable jealously among the ten men, the 30 girls worked in harmony and we seldom had any trouble with them,” Thomas recalled. He took pride in the multicultural spectrum represented by his employees. “I did not care whether a person was a Republican or a Democrat, black or white, Jew or Christian—all I wanted was results,” Thomas averred, boasting that his was “the only committee staff on Capitol Hill that had Jews and Christians, blacks and whites employed.” Not all his colleagues were as open minded. “Our Negro staffer, Alvin Stokes, was a sincere, extremely loyal, always fine worker,” Thomas noted. “He was, however, never popular with the dyed-in-the-wool Southerners on the team.”7
Once manned and empowered, the Thomas version of HUAC hit the ground running. On January 22, 1947, two days after the swearing in of the Eightieth Congress, the committee met for the first time and voted to give a “good airing” to “Communist influences” in Hollywood. “I intend to make it the most active year in the committee’s history,” Thomas vowed, which in Hollywood sounded like a threat. “Before 1947 is finished, we hope to make disclosures which will astonish the nation.”8
To cries of “witch hunt,” the committee said it was but heeding the will of the people. Rankin claimed to have a list of “thousands of names” of Californians who demanded that a probe of Communism in Hollywood “head the list” of HUAC priorities.9 “Let the chips fall where they may,” Thomas said in a gesture to fair play, tossing off an alliterative quip. “It doesn’t make any difference whether they fall on Columbians, or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Communists.”10
Of course, no Columbians or Klansmen were on the studio payrolls.
J. Edgar Hoover: “Communist activity in Hollywood is effective.”
On March 24, 1947, the curtain opened on a teaser for the most Hollywood-centric season in HUAC history. Though not exclusively concerned with Communism in the motion picture industry, the five days of hearings set the rules of engagement for a decade-long struggle between Washington and Hollywood.
The most important witness to be called was not a Hollywood star; he was bigger: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Inseparable from the federal law enforcement agency built in his image, abetted by a lapdog media eager to print, broadcast, and project his legend, Hoover was at the zenith of a power that was as close to absolute as any unelected official in American history. The “nation’s number one G-man” was serenely incorruptible, briskly efficient, and eternally vigilant, a button-down constable who burned the night oil running gangsters and kidnappers to ground. He took grim satisfaction in scratching the bad guys off a most-wanted list and measuring crime statistics with mathematical precision. Hoover’s FBI was always more about data than gunplay.
The FBI racked up its most impressive statistic during the late war when not a single act of domestic sabotage by either the Germans or the Japanese disrupted the domestic tranquility. As the all-seeing guardian of the homeland, Hoover grew in stature even as the tentacles of his domestic intelligence apparatus spread to meet the wartime emergency. Virtually all of the suspected Communists in Hollywood already had bulging FBI files that would expand exponentially as the Cold War dragged on, the result of tens of thousands of federal man hours spent shadowing their activities, culling their press clippings, and bugging their telephones. By 1947, and throughout most of the next quarter century, Hoover was untouchable, a revered public servant whom few dared cross. When he spoke, it mattered; when he sent out a warning, Americans listened.
On March 26, 1947, in testimony before what was now known as the Thomas Committee, Hoover told a disquieting tale. In 1935, word had gone out from Moscow for American Communists to launch a “furtive drive on Hollywood” that called for collective action on two fronts: “to infiltrate the labor unions and to infiltrate the so-called intellectual and creative fields.” The dual focus—on the workers who built the sets and the idea men who drew up the blueprints—neatly paralleled the distribution of labor in the Hollywood production plant. “Communist activity in Hollywood is effective,” warned Hoover. “The party is content and highly pleased if it is possible to have inserted in a picture a line, a scene, a sequence, conveying the Communist lesson, and, more particularly, if they can keep out anti-Communist lessons.”11 Hoover did not name names, but he did, under questioning, name a film that parroted the Communist line. Mission to Moscow (1943), he said, “was a prostitution of historical facts.”12
FBI head J. Edgar Hoover tells HUAC that Communists have infiltrated both the Hollywood labor unions and the creative fields, March 26, 1947.
Hoover’s seal of approval on HUAC’s work—his assertion that Communism had been seeded in Hollywood and needed uprooting—was a crucial validation. With Hoover in his corner, Thomas had secured the only endorsement that really mattered. Moreover, by emphasizing how Hollywood Communists worked to keep anti-Communist plots and dialogue off the screen, Hoover signaled that HUAC might also indict the studios for sins of cinematic omission as well as commission.
Following Hoover was a myrmidon in spirit, California State Sen. Jack B. Tenney, who chaired a Golden State version of HUAC in the California legislature, the Joint Committee on Un-American Activities. In certain quarters of the motion picture industry, the Tenney Committee was as despised as the Thomas Committee.
Unlike the men of HUAC, Tenney boasted a background in the entertainment business. A former president of the Los Angeles branch of the American Federation of Musicians, he was in such good standing as a progressive union leader that in 1938 he was named as a Communist before the Dies Committee. Elected in 1936 to the California State Assembly as a liberal Democrat, he exposed Willie Bioff’s racketeering in IATSE and investigated pre-war Nazi agitation in and around Los Angeles, a hotbed of activity for the German American Bund, the Silver Shirts, and sundry Jew-baiting vigilantes. In 1942, he transferred allegiance to the Republican Party and made Communist hunting his legislative priority. Prior to discovering the Communist menace in Hollywood, Tenney was best known for composing the pop standard “Mexicali Rose.”
Tenney repeated his alarums about Communism in Hollywood in his testimony before the parent HUAC. Unlike the circumspect Hoover, he got specific by naming marquee names. Charles Chaplin and John Garfield were fellow travelers and Fredric March and Frank Sinatra were dupes active in Communist front groups.13
The next day MPAA president Eric Johnston, in the first of his two appearances before HUAC that year, stepped forward to defend the industry and, as an impressed Daily Variety reported, “hit back at FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.”14 Johnston pointed out that the best proof of the all-American spirit in Hollywood was the fact that Hollywood films were blocked from import by the Soviet Union—and with good reason. “American films give the lie by visual evidence to totalitarian propaganda,” said Johnston. No wonder “the Communists hate and fear American motion pictures. It is their No. 1 hate.” Sure, there were “undoubtedly” Communists in Hollywood, but the tiny minority exerted no influence over film content.15 Anyone could see that.
Recalling Hoover’s point about the paucity of anti-Communist scenarios in Hollywood’s programming, Nixon asked Johnston if the studios had made any anti-Communist pictures along the lines of the anti-Nazi pictures the studios had produced before and during World War II.
Johnston drew a blank. He sheepishly admitted none came to mind, but he assured Nixon that an example would be forthcoming. Afterward, trade press reporters with better memories upbraided the MPAA president for not being film-smart enough to mention Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939), in which Greta Garbo plays a stiff-necked Soviet commissar loosened up by the champagne and chapeaux of Paris, or Comrade X (1940), King Vidor’s pallid attempt to imitate the Lubitsch touch.∗ Johnston also confessed he had never seen Mission to Moscow.
However, Johnston’s most serious blunder was to disagree with the opinion of the reigning authority on the topic at hand:
I wish now to comment on an observation made before this committee yesterday by Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He described how the Communists have reached out to employ the radio and the motion picture in their propaganda activities. Mr. Hoover said that several years ago the Communist underground directed its agents, in effect, to infiltrate Hollywood and do everything possible to poison the screen.
But if the Communists set out to capture Hollywood, they have suffered an overwhelming defeat.16
Johnston’s uppity dissent did not sit well with the FBI director.
Nor was the irascible Rankin impressed with the blithe assurances from Hollywood’s glib frontman. Unless Hollywood cleaned house—both below and above the line, in the unions and up on the screen—Congress would take matters into its own hands and force a “purge” by legislative fiat.17 Rankin’s rebuke was the first outright threat of retaliation against Hollywood from an official of the U.S. government.
“I do not think we are ready yet for concentration camps in America,” Johnston shot back. “A man has a right to make a living.”18
Thomas was no more mollified by the MPAA president than Rankin. “I was disappointed in Johnston’s whole testimony,” he said, deploring the admission that Communists existed in Hollywood “but that the industry had done nothing to eradicate them.” Johnston’s testimony was “one naïve statement after another.”19 Thomas was also disturbed that Hollywood had failed to bankroll a single anti-Communist picture. How passionate could the motion picture industry be about anti-Communism if it had not drafted its flagship product into the fight?
Nixon seconded Thomas’s call for Hollywood to join the battle with a slate of anti-Communist pictures, but demurred about the need for a full-dress investigation into the industry. “There are more important places to direct our immediate fire,” he said. “First, the government, and second, the labor unions.”20
Heretofore, Hollywood had won all of its face-to-face confrontations with the amateur actors on Capitol Hill, but the hangover from the bout in March left a queasy feeling around town. “Thomas and his committee were not pleased with Eric Johnston’s effort to whitewash the picture business,” wrote Billy Wilkerson, eyeing the storm clouds from his desk at the Hollywood Reporter. “They laughed at his statements, intimating that there is no Communistic infiltration here, when everybody knows, or should know and can know, that our studio payrolls are loaded with Reds and their sympathizers.”21
Roy M. Brewer also seized the chance to stick the knife in. The on-site representative of IATSE wanted it known that his union was the moderate, pro-business partner in the capitalist enterprise, that it was the radical, Communist-infiltrated CSU that incited disruptive strikes and manned violent picket lines. Accusing Johnston of being part ostrich, part dodo bird, Brewer called on the MPAA to “stop burying its head in the sand and look at the facts”—namely that Communists had made serious inroads in Hollywood and Hollywood was rewarding the traitors with fat paychecks.22
Sensing that fences needed to be mended, Johnston phoned the FBI to ask Hoover to lunch “some noon at your convenience…to discuss with you the whole problem of Communism in Hollywood and the motion picture industry.” The call was taken by a Hoover aide who passed the invitation on to the director. The FBI head curtly rebuffed the MPAA head. “It would have been much better if he had gotten his facts first before popping off as he did at this Congressional hearing,” Hoover scrawled on the aide’s memo. “He has one view and I another and oil and water don’t mix.” Johnston tried again to make amends, repeating his invitation, and Hoover snubbed him again. “I don’t intend to meet him,” he wrote, leaving his aide the task of brushing off Johnston. “He pops off and deprecates Communism in films and now he wants my advice.”23
Tangible proof of how seriously Johnston and the moguls took the threat from HUAC was not long in coming. Plans for an anti-Communist thriller were announced within days of the pointed questioning from Nixon and Thomas. On April 9, 1947, “inspired by J. Edgar Hoover’s recent report to the Un-American Activities Committee,” Twentieth Century-Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck sent out a press release trumpeting the production of a semi-documentary film to be titled The Iron Curtain. It would be a ripped-from-the-headlines exposé of attempts by Soviet agents in the U.S. and Canada to subvert North America culture. Zanuck promised to supervise the picture personally.
Commenting on the first—but not the last—motion picture he inspired, Nixon expressed satisfaction. “I am greatly pleased to learn that one of the major studios is planning to produce a film based on the dangers of Communism and more particularly on the insidious infiltration of this revolutionary philosophy into the every-day lives of Americans.”24
More tribute from Hollywood would soon be offered up.
Victor Kravchenko: “More than anything else, the Soviet fears the making of a film that portrays truthfully, in every detail, the conditions in Russia today.”
From the moment Chairman Thomas was first given a gavel by the Eightieth Congress, he had promised a grand hearing into Communist penetration of the motion picture industry. Washington would provide the location, Hollywood the cast.
First, however, the groundwork had to be laid. For seven days, beginning on May 9, 1947, as if trying out a show on the road before opening on Broadway, a subcommittee of HUAC convened in Los Angeles for a run-through. As a preview of the dramaturgy to come, the session was not quite a full dress rehearsal—more like a first reading of the script to acquaint the actors with the dialogue and plot. It was a closed set, held behind locked doors, by invitation only.
Advance men had come to town to prepare the way. “FBI agents are busy combing Hollywood highways and byways relaying evidence for the forthcoming Congressional hearings but they are not paying much attention to the stars, directors, or other biggies,” whispered Daily Variety, ear close to the ground. “It’s those little anonymous characters who have been infiltrating key unions in the industry for the last half dozen years and you’d be surprised to hear how hard it is to locate them now. Most of them have gone back into the woodwork.”25
The gossip was only half right: it was not just “those little anonymous characters” but the big famous characters who were being interviewed. Moreover, the FBI agents combing through the highways and byways were not always FBI agents; three of the investigators were dispatched by HUAC.
Daily Variety’s confusion was understandable. To gain credibility and borrow an aura, HUAC hired ex-FBI agents to do its legwork, men whose manners and methods were indistinguishable from their former colleagues and who were often conflated with them. The distinction was sometimes lost on the press and anyone on the receiving end of a visit. To the people being interrogated and investigated, the polite, just-the-facts-ma’am men in off-the-rack suits and brown shoes, all came clothed in the vestments of the federal government.
Moreover, in 1947, an unusual overlap occurred between HUAC and the FBI. Though the FBI had kept a file on Hollywood and the CPUSA since 1942 indexed as “Communist Infiltration—Motion Picture Industry” (COMPIC), Hoover maintained a firewall between his executive branch men and the legislative branch investigators. Protective of his turf, he balked at sharing information.
Yet so urgent was the present emergency that Hoover permitted a departure from longstanding FBI practice. When Thomas came to Hollywood, he contacted Richard B. Hood, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, and requested assistance. Hoover, uncharacteristically, told Hood to channel information to HUAC, but with the stipulation that the FBI’s sub rosa assistance be kept strictly confidential. “Expedite,” Hoover wrote at the bottom of Hood’s letter of inquiry, italicizing his order. “I want Hood to extend every assistance to this committee.”26
Knowing the law enforcement hierarchy, Thomas’s men—head investigator Louis J. Russell, who had made a previous site visit in summer 1945 for John Rankin, and the two-man road team of H. A. Smith and A. B. Leckie, both former FBI men—checked in regularly with the FBI. In turn, the FBI shared information with the HUAC men—but always on the QT. “Such material is furnished strictly for their confidential information and with the understanding that under no circumstances will the source of this material ever be disclosed,” Hoover told Hood.27
Sometimes too, both sets of investigators fed information to favored journalists and informants. The former published specific and incriminating evidence on alleged Communist artists in Hollywood; the latter came before HUAC well briefed, supporting documents in hand. Not until decades later would Freedom of Information Act requests reveal the extent of the interlocking networks—if not always the identities, still redacted well into the next century, of the loquacious moguls, stars, screenwriters, journalists, and union leaders who, assured of confidentiality, free-associated about their colleagues and named names to Hoover’s agents and Thomas’s investigators.
With the advance team having prepared the way, the dignitaries arrived with due ceremony. On Thursday, May 8, 1947, Chairman Thomas, Representative McDowell, chief counsel Stripling, and committee investigator Russell rolled into town for what a front-page alert in the Hollywood Reporter called the “long threatened probe of Communists in Hollywood.” Upon disembarking from the Santa Fe Chief at Union Station—luxury rail travel was still the preferred mode of transcontinental transportation—Thomas said he planned “an extensive and all-inclusive investigation.” His purpose was simple. “We want the facts. We don’t intend to make this a ‘quickie’ investigation.” Georgia Democrat John S. Wood was reported to be arriving later by air, but never showed up.
While no public hearings would be held, Thomas promised to meet the press at least once before the group left the city, teasing that “he might have something interesting to say.” In truth, Thomas would meet the press every day immediately after taking testimony.28 The chairman was always very available to the press.
Thomas and Stripling got to work the next day. The base of operations was a conference room at the Biltmore Hotel, whose ornate Renaissance Revival digs served as the command center for the investigators. Over the next week, fourteen witnesses were called. The doors being closed to press and public, reporters relied on spontaneous press availabilities by the chairman, the witnesses, and the witnesses’ attorneys for a sense of what went on in the shuttered but not very secret sessions. Thomas being Thomas, he also allowed the doors to be opened for a photo opportunity with an amenable and newsworthy witness.
The first two witnesses—called “friendly,” a nomenclature that stuck—were James K. McGuinness, MGM producer and story editor, and John C. (“Jack”) Moffitt, screenwriter and film critic for Esquire. Both were veterans of the Hollywood writers’ wars of the 1930s, on the losing side of the battle between the SP and the SWG.
J. Parnell Thomas opens the closed-door sessions at the Biltmore for a photo opportunity with Robert Taylor. Left to right: Taylor, Thomas, Rep. John McDowell, and Robert E. Stripling. (Los Angeles Public Library).
The pair spent a congenial ninety minutes discussing Communism in Hollywood with Thomas, McDowell, Stripling, and Russell.
Upon emerging from the committee room, McGuinness spoke to the waiting press. “This is no witch hunt and no innocent people would be hurt,” he insisted, despite the crying out. “But anyone who says there are no Communists in the motion picture industry is either an ostrich or a fool.”29
Over the weekend, though not in formal session, the committee interviewed willing informants. “The Thomas party shrouded its moves with much mystery,” said Daily Variety, trying to shed some light. “Officially, the investigators no longer are registered at the Biltmore Hotel, although it is understood group is still housed there and all day yesterday [Sunday, May 11] interviewed members of the film colony who wished to report information on subversiveness within the industry.”30
On Monday, the first witness was Roy M. Brewer, IATSE’s international representative. Accompanied by two business agents for Hollywood unions, B. C. “Cappy” Duval, who represented the IATSE prop men Local 789, and Harry Shiffman, who represented Local 44, Brewer spoke at length about how the Communists had hijacked elements of a once all-American labor movement.
After the testimony, Thomas disclosed that Brewer had accused the NLRB of acting as “an accessory to the Communist party.” Brewer confirmed Thomas’s account, telling newsmen that he revealed how “the Communists had stuck their noses into the Hollywood strikes.”
After Brewer’s testimony, the prosaic representative of studio labor made way for a prestigious Hollywood artist. He was not exactly a marquee name, at least for his work in the motion picture industry, but he was prominent enough for a single-card on-screen credit: film composer Hanns Eisler. HUAC had labeled Eisler a “philosophical Communist” and announced in advance he would be brought in for questioning.31
Eisler was part of the thriving German-Jewish refugee community in Hollywood, a nomadic band of artists who had fled Nazism in the 1930s. After being put on a Nazi hit list in 1933, he had escaped to Great Britain and then, in 1938, moved on to New York, where he provided the soundtrack for Popular Front gatherings, Soviet-themed music recitals, and plays by his close friend and fellow exile Bertolt Brecht.
Prospering in exile, Eisler accrued the rewards of decadent American capitalism, receiving a twenty-thousand-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and a music professorship at the New School for Social Research. However, his residency status was precarious and the war in Europe made finding a secure berth imperative. In 1940, under circumstances HUAC found highly suspicious, he was granted a prized non-quota residency visa by the U.S. Department of State.
During the war, Eisler graduated from composing motion picture scores for politically engagée documentaries to conjuring the mood music for Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Clifford Odets’s None But the Lonely Heart (1944). At the time of his testimony, he was working for RKO on the score for Jean Renoir’s oddball noir The Woman on the Beach (1947).
Such fame as Eisler possessed outside of Hollywood was by association. His brother was Gerhart Eisler, not just a known Communist but a known Communist superspy, “the guiding hand of Communism in the United States,” and “Moscow’s number one political agent in this country,” as he was regularly described.32 Gerhart had been an influential apparatchik in the Communist party in Germany, a concentration camp prisoner in France, and, since his arrival in America, a shadowy figure of many aliases who ran espionage rings for the Soviet Union. Utterly ruthless, speaking with the lethal authority of an emissary from Stalin, Gerhart was the face of Soviet espionage in America, villainized in the Hearst press and lionized in Communist and fellow traveler circles.33
Over the weekend Stripling had driven out to Eisler’s Malibu beach house to personally serve the composer with his HUAC subpoena.34 Eisler claimed that only his Hollywood connections and “the coincidence of my family ties” had made him a political target.35 In a puff piece in the New Masses by screenwriter Alvah Bessie, who by September would be handed a HUAC subpoena of his own, Eisler made the inevitable comparison. The prosecution of his brother Gerhart was “the beginning of a campaign against the liberal and progressive forces in this country. It does not surprise me. I have seen such campaigns before—in Germany. Before 1933.”36
At 11:00 A.M. Monday morning, May 12, Eisler reported to the Biltmore as ordered. Thomas kept him cooling his heels while he chatted with Roy Brewer inside the conference room.
“Bald, bespectacled, and diminutive,” cursed with a pair of outsized bunny ears, Eisler fit neither the image of a sinister Soviet spy nor a flamboyant European maestro. At his side was Ben Margolis, a civil rights lawyer who was to become a fixture on the defense teams of Hollywood artists subpoenaed by HUAC.
The session—on this everyone agreed—did not go well. Behind the locked doors of the Biltmore conference room, Eisler and Margolis engaged in “a heated verbal battle” with Stripling. They squabbled for about an hour before the questioning was cut short: Eisler was truculent and Thomas and Stripling were getting nowhere. An angry Eisler bolted from the room, with Margolis hot on his heels. “I am offended as a scholar, a scientist, and a composer,” Eisler told the waiting press corps. “I am offended as a gentleman. I don’t like to be pushed around.”37
After the committee recessed, Thomas invited the press into the chamber for a post mortem. “We had Hanns Eisler here today as the result of a subpoena,” he said. “We have voluminous evidence of all of Eisler’s activities—evidence of his activities not only in the United States but also abroad.” He said the composer pled “inability to remember when asked about numerous past jaunts in and out of the country, as well as his activities.”38 Thomas shook his head: “In my eight years on the committee, I have never seen a witness so evasive.”39
The day’s interrogations ended with lengthy sessions with James McGuinness and Jack Moffitt, who, having proven friendly and talkative, were both called back for additional testimony.
Moffitt was invited back for a third appearance the next day. Sequestered with the committee for most of the afternoon, he was the sole witness. To Thomas’s delight, Moffitt dropped name after name. We’re “getting some great stuff” from Moffitt, exulted the chairman. “He’s giving us much more than we expected and he’s really crowding our record.”40
The fourth day finally brought some high-intensity star power to the Biltmore: screen heartthrob Robert Taylor; journeyman actor Richard Arlen; star-by-maternity Mrs. Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger; and non-star Henry Ginsberg, general manager of Paramount Pictures. Though all testified obligingly, it was a revelation from Taylor, then at the height of his matinee-idolness, that caused the first mini-sensation of HUAC’s Hollywood year.
Emerging from the committee room, Taylor did not make the revelation himself, saying only “If there is anyone against Communism, it is I. I’m agin ’em.”
Thomas was not so circumspect. Taylor’s testimony had given him a piece of information that was both red meat and smoking gun. He couldn’t wait to blurt out the news to the reporters waiting outside the hearing room.
“When Robert Taylor was asked in 1943 to take the lead role in the motion picture Song of Russia, he protested to the management of MGM studios on the grounds that the story was Communist propaganda,” Thomas revealed. “The portrayal favored Russia, its ideologies, its institutions, and its way of life over the same things in America.” However, the objections of the patriotic actor were overruled “primarily by the visit here of an agent of the [Roosevelt] administration who came here for the specific purpose of seeing that Taylor played the part.”41 Thomas quoted Taylor as saying “the ultimatum was laid down to him in the presence of Louis B. Mayer by ‘a War Production Board agent.’ ” Later, when the head of the wartime agency in question, Donald P. Nelson, denied the charges, Thomas identified the “agent of the administration” as Lowell Mellett, who had headed up the Motion Picture Bureau of the OWI from 1942 to 1943.42
From Washington, Mellett labeled Thomas’s charges “too damned silly to deny” and then denied them. He insisted he “certainly didn’t compel Taylor or anyone else to do anything.”43 Mellett wasn’t alone in finding Taylor’s coercion scenario dubious. “Joe Skeptic wants to know who forced Taylor to appear in Undercurrent,” snarked Red Kann at Motion Picture Daily, referring to the tepid melodrama then in release.44
In damage control mode, MGM released a statement from Louis B. Mayer. “I am assuming that the excitement brewing out of Robert Taylor’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities subcommittee was due to the mistaken belief that the film, Song of Russia, was Communistic in plot and action,” stated Mayer. “The film is at the studio unchanged since it was released in 1943 [sic] and subsequently shown throughout a large portion of the world.” Not yet hip to the postwar ethos, Mayer explained that Hollywood was but a harmless entertainment machine. “Song of Russia is simply a love story about an American symphony conductor who was invited to Russia to direct a series of concerts,” Mayer said. “It is true, of course, that Russia was our ally in 1943, and that our government was very friendly to the Soviets. But that is not why Song of Russia was made.”45
Of course, being friendly to the Soviets was precisely why Song of Russia was made. Mayer’s simply-a-love-story line—the fallback stance that had always served the industry so well when confronted with the real-world impact of its product—had been obliterated by Hollywood itself. The war had given every GI and home front moviegoer an education in how Hollywood shaped and transformed American values, in how cinema might be marshalled for political ends. The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement, and a dozen other films on the marquee that very year were proving that the disingenuous pose was no longer a protective shield.
HUAC fixated on Song of Russia—and soon the other two pillars of the pro-Soviet troika, Mission to Moscow and The North Star—because their ideological currents required no special film smarts to navigate and because government pressure from the Roosevelt administration had unquestionably been brought to bear on the industry. Unspooling Exhibits A, B, and C allowed the Republicans on HUAC not only to tarnish Hollywood but to indict the Democrats for being too cozy with Moscow then and too casual about the threat from Communism now. No matter that the first indictment was all ex post facto: to make the case stick required only a willful act of historical amnesia.
On May 15, Jack L. Warner, actor Adolphe Menjou, director Leo McCarey, screenwriter Rupert Hughes, and a special surprise witness testified.
Warner was accompanied by Blayney Matthews, chief of studio police at Warner Bros., another sign that labor unrest no less than celluloid subversion was on the committee’s mind. “I think that the Un-American Activities Committee is doing an excellent job here and I am happy to have had the opportunity to cooperate with its members,” Warner said after testifying. “Whatever I may know about subversive elements in Hollywood, I shall tell the committee.” In fact, Warner had named a number of subversive elements, forgetting that, during his allegedly secret testimony, a stenographer was taking down every word he said, words that would be read back to him during a future appearance before HUAC.
The debonair Menjou spent about an hour huddled with the committee. Voluble and quotable, he was in fine fettle, speaking to newsmen both before and after his testimony. “I believe that Hollywood is one of the main centers of Communist activity in America due to the fact that our greatest medium of propaganda—the motion picture—is located here and that it is the desire of the ‘Masters in Moscow’ to use this medium for their purpose—which is the overthrow of the American government.”46 Menjou’s ambition was “to be the Paul Revere who sounds the alarm because Communism is out to destroy America.”47
After Warner and Menjou testified, Thomas revealed that “both of these men named names,” a phrase soon to enter the lexicon.48
The afternoon session was led off by director Leo McCarey, who remained closeted with the committee for only half an hour. The usually garrulous Irishman was tight lipped upon emerging, saying only, “I have nothing to say. I came down only because I was glad of the opportunity to cooperate with the committee.”
The day’s fourth witness, Rupert Hughes, another veteran of the defunct SP, was still fighting the battle of 1937. The SWG was “lousy with Communists today,” he told reporters before walking into the conference room. He dredged up a turning point in history that, for him, was still a vivid memory. “When the Hitler-Stalin pact was in force, the Communists in the United States opposed all ideas of conscription and Lend Lease, but as soon as Hitler invaded Russia, they demanded immediate conscription and Lend-Lease.”
Thomas saved his prize catch of the day for last, a witness who had more symbolic value in the twilight struggle between America and the Soviet Union than anyone on a studio payroll: Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko.
Kravchenko had come to the United States at the outbreak of World War II as a representative of the Soviet Purchasing Commission assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Seduced by American freedom, he broke with the party and his country and, in 1946, published a best-selling memoir, I Chose Freedom. He was the most famous defector in the nation, reassuring proof that, when given the chance, any Russian would risk all to embrace the land of liberty. Kravchenko had nothing to do with Communism in Hollywood (or almost nothing: he had come to town in hopes of getting his book made into a “realistic” motion picture by an “honest Hollywood producer”), but rumors of Soviet assassination squads dispatched to prevent his testimony lent his appearance the frission of a spy thriller.∗ Not since Leon Trotsky, murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1937, had the Soviet dictator so wanted a man dead, bragged Kravchenko.49
Kravchenko testified in the final session, accompanied by screenwriter Howard Emmet Rogers, who hoped to adapt I Chose Freedom for the screen. “More than anything else, the Soviet fears the making of a film that portrays truthfully, in every detail, the conditions in Russia today,” Kravchenko told the press. “This they will go to any lengths to stop.”50
After Kravchenko testified, Thomas brought HUAC’s site visit to a close. “It is only fair to say that the subcommittee members are amazed at revelations made by all witnesses, particularly those connected to the Hollywood angle,” he said by way of summation. “The situation is serious. I’ve been on many field trips for [HUAC] and the Military Affairs Committee but on none of them have I received such a voluminous amount of revealing testimony as this subcommittee has received in the last ten days.”51
However, despite Thomas’s upbeat self-evaluation, the reviews for his road show were brutal. “The best low burlesque to come out of Hollywood since Mack Sennett was in his prime,” taunted New York Post film critic Archer Winsten. Variety also went with the reliable metaphor: “In toto, the Hollywood hearings wound up as a ‘B’ production, according to major opinion here.”52 Even at Motion Picture Herald, a bastion of conservative opinion, editor Terry Ramsaye was cynical about HUAC’s motives: “Perhaps it would have been expecting too much of a Congressional investigating committee to overlook and pass [up] an opportunity to get publicity attention by the involvement of the motion picture and the magic of a Hollywood dateline.”53
A genuine Hollywood star also added her voice to the jeering section. Speaking at a rally for left-wing darling and soon to be presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, Katharine Hepburn decried the secret session at the Biltmore. “Today, J. Parnell Thomas of the Un-American Activities Committee is engaged in a personally-conducted smearing campaign of the motion picture industry,” she declared. “He is aided and abetted in this effort by a group of Hollywood super-patriots who call themselves the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. For myself I want no part of their ideals or the ideals of Mr. Thomas.”54
Ominously, though, few others in Hollywood were as outspoken as Katharine Hepburn. The arrival of federal investigators and aggressive congressmen had knocked the town off kilter: the Dies Committee had never managed to mount a major on-site visitation, never corralled a brand-name mogul and top stars, and never turned the screws on a suspected Communist with major screen credits.
