Chapter 5

The blacklist and the Cold War

Hollywood’s foray into politics during World War II had major repercussions in the postwar period. It led to standoffs with conservative factions in Congress, fractured the Hollywood community, and prompted the studios to take extreme actions to win back American moviegoers.

HUAC in Hollywood

Even before the United States entered the war, anti–New Deal Republicans in Congress attacked the film studios—singling out Warner Bros.—for pushing the country toward military intervention. After the war, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, became a standing Congressional committee. Opportunistic members of Congress rode a wave of anticommunism and renewed the offensive against Hollywood. The committee hearings were media spectacles, creating front-page headlines and, in the 1950s, a television media circus as well.

Outspoken anticommunist Senator Joseph McCarthy is often mistakenly thought to have been a member of HUAC, but he had his own Senate committee that investigated alleged communist infiltration of the government. Although McCarthy did not participate in the Hollywood hearings, the vicious personal attacks for political gain that came to be called McCarthyism destroyed many promising Hollywood careers, and it boosted the careers of politicians, including future presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

At first, HUAC went after the activities of the Anti-Nazi League and looked for communist messages in Mission to Moscow and other films from the Soviet cycle. But the committee members soon learned that taking on major party donors like the Hollywood moguls was politically messy, and locating hidden communist messages in films was not a clear-cut task.

The committee quickly turned to questioning well-known actors and directors, whose celebrity attracted public interest to their cause. During the hearings, writers, directors, actors, and producers took the stand, forever changing their personal and professional lives. It was a period of soul searching, strained friendships, and often dire circumstances. More than a half century later, HUAC testimony continues to reverberate in the film industry and beyond.

One of the first Hollywood representatives to talk to HUAC was Eric Johnston. Johnston assumed the leadership of the MPPDA—by then renamed the Motion Picture Association of America—from Will Hays. Testifying before HUAC, Johnston read a reasonable statement, claiming that there were in fact some communists in Hollywood and that it was their right to hold radical political views as long as they did not advocate the overthrow of the US government. Johnston may have been both technically and morally right. There were communists in Hollywood (three hundred by one count), and the First Amendment gave them the right to voice politically unpopular views. But as Johnston would later learn, these were extreme times, and even basic constitutional rights were in limbo.

HUAC continued to call witnesses from all sides of the issue. On the government’s side were “friendly” witnesses, who corroborated HUAC’s assertions that communists lurked in the movie industry. Friendly witnesses were largely drawn from the ranks of a Hollywood group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The organization included conservative anticommunist actors and directors Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Clark Gable, Leo McCary, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, King Vidor, and John Wayne.

Of the friendly witnesses only one, Ayn Rand, affirmed that Hollywood films harbored procommunist messages. Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia and immigrated to the United States with her family. She appeared as an extra in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood before achieving bestseller success as a novelist and free market evangelist.

On the stand, Rand wore a gold pin shaped like a dollar sign, just in case her capitalist allegiances were in doubt. And she explained to the committee that MGM’s 1944 Song of Russia promoted communism simply by showing happy Soviet citizens. When Representative John McDowell asked her, jokingly, “Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” Rand answered humorlessly, “Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.”

Rand had hoped to give more extensive testimony, showing that procommunist messages could also be found in William Wyler’s popular postwar drama about American soldiers returning home, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in addition to films explicitly about Russia. But the committee decided not to take on a commercially successful film and limited her to talking about Song of Russia.

If HUAC refused to give Rand the megaphone, she took it herself. In response, Rand wrote a pamphlet called Screen Guide for Americans, which was published by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and reprinted on the front page of the New York Times arts section. The pamphlet taught filmgoers how to identify procommunist messages in films, and it showed lefty screenwriters how to keep their films red, white, and blue.

Other friendly witnesses all agreed that no communist propaganda had yet appeared in Hollywood films, although they worried about the possibility. HUAC questioned Jack Warner about Mission to Moscow more than once. If any Hollywood film was pro-Soviet, it was Mission to Moscow, with its unquestioning defense of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, who personally endorsed the film after its release.

Jack Warner had different explanations for the movie on different occasions. First he blamed it on Washington but then recanted the position that the government had been involved in the film’s production. Later, Warner explained that Mission to Moscow had been made to have a particular effect at a particular moment in the war just as US ships carried food and arms to Russia, an American ally at the time, but might not have aided the Soviet Union later. For the most part, HUAC went easy on Jack Warner, who was instrumental in encouraging the committee and the FBI to investigate Hollywood.

When identifying communist propaganda in films proved complicated, HUAC switched its focus to hunting communists in the industry, and the committee quickly learned to go after the biggest names it could find. When HUAC subpoenaed American icon Walt Disney as a friendly witness, he was still stinging from his animators’ strike. Before the committee, Disney swiftly brushed aside any suggestion that his studio’s films could be tinged with communism, claiming that Russia had sent back Disney cartoons, because “they didn’t suit their purposes.”

Instead, Disney used the public forum to tell the members of Congress how one malcontent in his studio, Herbert K. Sorrell, who Disney thought was probably a communist, stirred up all of the trouble that led to his animators’ strike. Disney told a cautionary tale of Sorrell threatening his business and upsetting his employees, who were now, he was glad to say, back to being “100 percent American.” It was a well-dramatized parable about how even a single communist could infiltrate and destroy the most American of institutions—exactly what one would expect from a Disney story. Ironically, when Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein visited Disney’s studio in 1941, he praised it as a perfect workers’ collective, with everyone laboring toward the same goal.

Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, offered testimony that perfectly echoed Disney’s. Even before testifying, Reagan had been an active informant for the FBI, alerting the agency to potential communists in the industry. On the stand, Reagan claimed that a “disruptive element”—he avoided the word communist—had infiltrated the guild and attempted to use unscrupulous tactics to convert other members. Reagan inferred that as much as 10 percent of the guild had such disruptive leanings. Later, Reagan insisted that all guild members take an oath expressing their loyalty to the United States, as did many other businesses at the time. Cecil B. DeMille lobbied for the Directors Guild to adopt a loyalty oath, but his motion failed, and it provoked lifelong feuds. Although Reagan worried about the presence of communists, he assured HUAC that there would never be any left-wing propaganda in Hollywood films.

Conservative Hollywood leaders like Warner, Disney, and Reagan were valuable, but reformed communists were the most prized friendly witnesses. When suspected communists were called before the committee they had to answer two questions. First they were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” It was not enough to admit membership, however. If a witness admitted Communist Party affiliation, he or she also had to name other members (“name names”). These were often names of people already known to be involved with the party, but it could still be very troubling to point a finger at a friend and colleague. Some of the famous actors and directors who admitted party affiliation and named names of other communists include actors Lee J. Cobb and Sterling Hayden (who deeply regretted his decision), director Edward Dmytryk, and writer Clifford Odets.

HUAC questioned some of the biggest names in Hollywood, but the committee ran into a public relations disaster when it subpoenaed Lucille Ball, the star of the top-rated television show I Love Lucy (1951–1960). Just months before her HUAC testimony, the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy gives birth drew a larger audience than President Eisenhower’s inauguration the following week. If the committee drove everyone’s favorite program off the air, it would certainly have made HUAC unpopular. Ball had not been a member of the Communist Party, but, following the lead of her socialist grandfather, in 1936 she filed a form indicating that she intended to register to vote as a communist.

Even this flimsy leftist history was enough to destroy an actor in the anxious climate of the 1950s. But Lucy was special, and HUAC arranged for her to give private testimony in Los Angeles, in which she told her story and named some already well-known communists. When I Love Lucy was filmed later the same day (the show was filmed rather than broadcast live like most others), Ball’s costar and husband Desi Arnaz told the studio audience, “The only thing red about [Lucy] is her hair, and even that is not legitimately red.” In a brilliant ploy, Arnaz gave the quote to reporters, and he changed the conversation from politics to hair dye. And both HUAC and Lucille Ball retained their popularity.

The most outspoken friendly witness—and still the most controversial—was Elia Kazan. Kazan had been a member of the Communist Party for two years in the 1930s, and he had a brilliant career as a left-leaning theater and film director. When called to testify before HUAC, Kazan did more than admit to his past party membership and identify eight of his former colleagues in the Group Theater as communists; Kazan also launched a campaign to justify his actions. At his own expense, he placed an ad in the New York Times, claiming that it was every American’s duty to share information they might have about the “dangerous and alien conspiracy” afoot.

Kazan then went on to make On the Waterfront (1954), in which Marlon Brando plays a dockworker who informs on his corrupt friends and relatives. The powerful film makes the ethical case for informing, and it responds to The Crucible (1953), a play written by Kazan’s old friend and collaborator Arthur Miller. Miller’s allegorical play about the Salem witch trials explores how mobs (like those that supported HUAC) can distort reality and be led to a collective evil that no one person might be capable of on their own. In contrast, On the Waterfront celebrates whistleblowers who tell the truth for the benefit of society even when it may hurt them personally.

8. In this scene from HUAC friendly witness Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (Columbia Pictures, 1954), Marlon Brando makes the case for informing.

Of course Kazan benefited from his testimony. He went on to create an impressive body of films after appearing before HUAC, but he did it by supporting a movement that destroyed the careers of his friends and colleagues. And both Kazan’s actions and the HUAC investigations remain an open wound in Hollywood. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Kazan an honorary Oscar in 1999, half of the audience clapped while the other half sat on their hands.

The Hollywood Ten and the blacklist

Many witnesses were not friendly, and the members of the Hollywood community who took the other route, who stood up for their First Amendment rights or who refused to incriminate others, lost the opportunity to work in the film industry; they were blacklisted. For the most part, they did not go on to make more films, and their legacy is their resistance to an unjust crusade rather than a long filmography.

The first group of unfriendly witnesses is known as the Hollywood Ten. In 1947, HUAC called before the committee eleven witnesses who indicated that they would refuse to answer questions. When playwright Bertolt Brecht returned to his native Germany, ten unfriendly witnesses were left: Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. This group revealed the anti-Semitic zeal that drove Mississippi congressman John Rankin and other HUAC members. Six of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish, and three of the remaining four had recently completed Crossfire (1947), a cinematic condemnation of anti-Semitism. Personal prejudice mixed with political anxieties to make a potent combination.

Progressive Hollywood celebrities rallied to the defense of the Ten. John Huston, William Wyler, Danny Kaye, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and others formed the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew to Washington and marched to protect the constitutional rights of the Ten. But when the witnesses spoke before HUAC, they did more than just refuse to answer questions; they were belligerent and alienated some of their most ardent defenders. HUAC found them to be in contempt of Congress, and studio leadership quickly distanced themselves from the Ten.

Executives met with Eric Johnston at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and released what became known as the Waldorf Statement. The new statement contradicted Johnston’s earlier defense of freedom of speech and thought. It said that the studios would “not knowingly hire a communist,” and with that the blacklist began, banning anyone suspected of subversive affiliations from working in Hollywood. It gave the studios broad latitude to dismiss employees regardless of contracts or collective agreements with talent guilds. Many moguls, like Jack Warner, truly feared communist infiltration. But the anticommunist hysteria also increased the studios’ power over their employees.

Two members of the Ten, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, appealed their contempt conviction in court, convinced that the Supreme Court would have to uphold their constitutional rights. But the US District Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, upheld the contempt charge. The Lawson-Trumbo decision referenced the high stakes of the political atmosphere, as if that somehow put the Constitution on hiatus. “No one can doubt in these chaotic times,” the decision read, “that the destiny of all nations hangs in the balance in the current ideological struggle between communist-thinking and democratic-thinking peoples of the world.” It went on, like the 1915 Mutual decision had, to give Hollywood special status as an opinion maker. The court described movies as “a potent medium of propaganda,” and the decision warned that Hollywood “plays a critically prominent role in the molding of public opinion.” Hollywood filmmakers’ free speech rights were once again deferred. The Supreme Court, newly stacked with conservative justices, declined to hear the case, and the members of the Hollywood Ten each served six months to a year in prison.

With the Supreme Court’s tacit endorsement, the blacklist was in full force, and it destroyed the careers of a generation of talented writers, actors, directors, and producers. Blacklisted director Joseph Losey moved to England, and director Jules Dassin moved to France. They were the lucky ones who found work outside of Hollywood. Screenwriter Lester Cole worked in a warehouse, and screenwriter Sidney Buchman operated a parking garage. Other stories ended in tragedy. Television star Philip Loeb committed suicide after being blacklisted, and rising star John Garfield died of a heart attack brought on in part by the stress of being blacklisted.

The blacklist was not a published list of names. Hollywood trade papers tried to compile lists of communists, and a 1950 book, Red Channels, attempted to identify communists in the broadcast industry. Many people named in these lists were called before HUAC and stopped working. But the blacklist was more insidious. Studios distanced themselves from writers, actors, and directors based on reputations. Appearing as an unfriendly witness before HUAC would certainly destroy someone’s reputation. But whispers about connections and affiliations were also enough to damage careers.

Some writers were able to continue working through fronts, nonblacklisted writers who sold scripts for them. Fronts took a big risk associating with blacklisted writers, and the ruse could be difficult to keep up in the small company town of Los Angeles. Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front, starring Woody Allen, perfectly dramatized both the appeal and dangers of the situation. The front in the film, played by Allen, enjoys fame, money, and success on the work of the blacklistees until coming under HUAC scrutiny himself.

One of the most successful writers to use fronts and pseudonyms was Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo had been a highly regarded writer before the blacklist. His HUAC defiance had serious ramifications, and he spent time in jail, ran out of money, and moved to Mexico at one point. But Trumbo was dedicated to his craft. He kept writing, and he sold scripts through many fronts, accepting far less in payment than he would have using his own name and selling to producers directly.

Eventually, Trumbo’s covert writing became an open secret. At the 1956 Academy Awards, the screenwriting Oscar went to Robert Rich for The Brave One. When no one came to the stage to accept the award, everyone in the industry seemed to know that Trumbo was the real author. Trumbo even suggested as much in a television interview the next day. Four years later, and thirteen years after his HUAC testimony, Trumbo became the first blacklisted writer to receive screen credit. His name appeared in the credits of two films that year, Spartacus and Exodus. Dalton Trumbo broke the Hollywood blacklist, but the blacklist itself never officially ended. Many blacklisted writers, actors, and directors never worked in the industry again.

Cold War films

In the 1950s, Hollywood fought communism onscreen and off. Shortly after the MPAA issued the Waldorf Statement in 1947, all of the studios set to work producing explicitly anticommunist films. These were rarely big-budget, star-studded movies, but they served a number of political and commercial ends. They demonstrated the studios’ commitment to fighting communism just as Hollywood was coming under attack as a haven for left-leaning artists. The anticommunist cycle also connected with American Cold War anxieties, and the films in the cycle were generally successful at the box office and occasionally on the awards circuit.

Between 1942 and 1953, Hollywood released dozens of film about the “red menace” of communism, including William Wellman’s Iron Curtain (1948); The Red Menace (1949); The Red Danube (1949); Conspirator (1949), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor; My Son John (1952), directed by outspoken Hollywood conservative Leo McCary; Red Snow (1952); and The Steel Fist (1952). By 1953, director Samuel Fuller’s noir crime film Pickup on South Street showed, communist spies had replaced gangsters as generic Hollywood villains.

Other films took up Cold War themes and the blacklist more metaphorically. Force of Evil (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky and starring John Garfield shortly before they were blacklisted, used number running as a metaphor for capitalism. The opening shot of Wall Street solidified the metaphor. The film presents a dark view of a world in which the only choices are between different corrupt institutions. The Production Code Administration—always worried about strong political films—insisted that the film have a moral center, which is provided ambiguously through a voice-over. The PCA also rejected the screenplay’s framing device of telling the story through witness-stand flashbacks, because in 1948 that would have brought HUAC too clearly to mind for audiences, just as the filmmakers had intended.

A cycle of westerns, always a highly allegorical genre, took up the politics of informing and mob rule, although today it is possible to watch many of these films without noticing any reference to the blacklist at all. In Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) a posse forces an outlaw to identify a tavern owner, played by Joan Crawford, as a conspirator, even though most of the townspeople know she is innocent.

The Gary Cooper western High Noon (1952) also addressed Hollywood’s response to HUAC. If there were political debates on the set of High Noon, they must have been heated. Cooper had been a friendly witness before HUAC and was a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Other actors in the film, Lloyd Bridges and Howard Chamberlain, were later blacklisted. Screenwriter Carl Forman was also slated to be blacklisted, but apparently Gary Cooper successfully fought to keep him employed by the studio until after the film was over. Producer Stanley Kramer was an outspoken liberal, yet he chose to feature a theme song by reactionary Republican Tex Ritter.

With the full political spectrum represented both in front of and behind the camera, one might expect High Noon to be a film with mixed messages, and indeed it is an allegory open to multiple readings. In the film, Cooper plays the lone marshal of a western town, trying to protect it from three villains. The key line of the film comes when Cooper enters the church and asks for help, only to be met with excuses from everyone in the community. In a 1950s western, a marshal asking for help was a major genre twist, a sign of weakness in the lone hero. The most common reading of the film, and the one that prevailed at the time, is that Cooper represents a subpoenaed witness left to fend for himself against the HUAC villains. But in another interpretation, the villains could stand in for communists, with Cooper as the defender of American values. The meaning may have been up for debate, but the film was clearly seen as a Cold War allegory, and John Wayne called it the “most un-American movie” he had ever seen. Wayne responded by making Big Jim McLain (1952), which glamorized HUAC investigators.

Westerns had always been canvases for ritually working through American transformations. In the 1950s, science fiction films also seemed to absorb the anticommunist anxieties of the period, with popular cycles of alien invasion films and giant insect infestations. Director Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) quintessentially exploited one of the most frightening (to their opponents) aspects of communists: they look like everyone else. Communists are only different on the inside, and even your neighbor or boss or child could be a communist. Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays on this fear, and in the film aliens grow pod people to replace townspeople with identical doubles who take orders from the aliens.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anticommunist fears became the subject of parody. In the musical Silk Stockings (1957), Fred Astaire woos Soviet functionary Cyd Charisse, and everyone succumbs to the excesses of Parisian nightlife. In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), paranoid general Jack D. Ripper, played by former reluctant friendly witness Sterling Hayden, worries about communists neutralizing his virility though fluoridation. And Cold War cultural diplomacy reached the level of high farce in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), in which James Cagney graduated from playing 1930s gangsters and World War II soldiers to starring as a Coca-Cola executive–diplomat in Cold War West Berlin.

During this period, Charlie Chaplin shed his Little Tramp character and became a politically engaged filmmaker for the sound era, making some of his funniest and most trenchant films. He also had the last word in Hollywood’s standoff with HUAC. In 1940, The Great Dictator lampooned Hitler as a setup for a humanistic call for peace delivered at the film’s climax. In Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Chaplin plays a Bluebeard character, serially marrying and murdering women across Europe. Just when he seems morally reprehensible, Verdoux turns the tables, explaining that, compared to the mass murderers leading the world’s nations, his killing spree makes him an amateur.

In his penultimate film, A King in New York (1957), Chaplin finally gets to act out the HUAC testimony that he avoided in real life. HUAC subpoenaed Chaplin several times, but he never took the stand. Chaplin did, however, have continued friction with the FBI, and when promoting his film Limelight abroad in 1952, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service insisted that Chaplin be interviewed before returning to the United States. Chaplin refused the interview and stayed out of the country for two decades.

In A King in New York, Chaplin plays a deposed monarch living in New York. The king is mistakenly suspected of being a communist, because of his associations, and he is summoned to appear before HUAC. On the way to the committee room, Chaplin gets his finger caught in a hose, which is still attached to him as he raises his hand to take the oath before the committee. When someone connects the other end of the hose to a water faucet, Chaplin inadvertently drenches the committee members, and his view of HUAC becomes clear: they are all wet.