CHAPTER SEVEN

THE TEN

I find Jean Butler, the widow of Hugo Butler and a writer herself, to be a likable woman. Along with her husband, she passed through the Communist Party during World War II, the Browder period: “You have to remember that at the time we joined, it was very easy to agree with the Browder interpretation and just be what you’d always been before—a good liberal.

“What was life in the Party like? Well, I can only tell you what it was like for us, and the way I remember it, there was the most rigid caste system in the formation of the Party’s small groups—what people outside the Party seemed to call ‘cells.’ I never heard the word inside myself. And the funny thing was, the Party’s caste system was based on money. The high-salaried writers were in one group—that was Dalton—and the low-salaried writers were in another—that was Hugo. Again, it was funny to discover that the wives were in separate groups entirely. I found, frankly, that the Communist Party was just as male-chauvinist in its orientation as any group, even the American Legion, I suppose. I was in this study group with all the other wives, but I’m afraid I didn’t go after the first few meetings because I got bored by all the economics we had to read.

“Hugo was a little different, maybe a little more serious about it all than I was. At a certain point he found that all his friends were in the Party, but as it turned out, none of them—Trumbo or Ring or Ian—recruited him. Somebody else did that. In part, I think he joined out of a feeling of friendship and solidarity with his friends who were in. In part, I think he felt a kind of dare to do it. And in part, too, I think, he may have joined because of his stepfather.”

“His stepfather? Was he a Communist?”

She laughs. “No, nothing like that. He was just a guy who had worked most of his life at a United Cigar Store. He was making thirty-four dollars a week when the Depression hit, and his boss wanted to cut his salary to fourteen dollars a week. When Hugo’s stepfather protested, he was fired. His boss told him he had a boy lined up who would do the same job for ten dollars a week. Hugo used to say there’s something wrong with a system that permits that kind of abuse, that kind of cruelty.”

And for her? What was her motive?

“Oh, I went along. You know. But once I was in, I found I developed a sense of fellowship with these people that was very real.… You’d go into a drawing room at a party and see people there who belonged to the Party, just as you did, and you’d have that thrill of fellowship. That was my feeling.

“All this was fairly early in the war, during the Browder period. And things were different then. I remember, for instance, when it came time for Hugo to go into the army, they put him on a leave of absence from the Party because they wanted no feeling of divided loyalty. This was late 1942, as I remember. Then just after the war, when he came out of the army, he went back in. I didn’t. I was advised not to by him. I guess he sensed what was coming and wanted to spare me what he could. I think we all knew that it was going to be different after the war. For one thing, the openness of the Browder period was coming to an end—the honeymoon was over. And then came the Duclos letter, and the arguing began inside the Party. I remember one practically all-night session between Trumbo and Hugo. I finally went to bed, but they got so loud that I woke up to hear Trumbo saying, ‘It comes down to this, if Lenin was right, then Browder was wrong—and vice versa. I prefer to believe that Lenin was right.’ That was Trumbo. He knew how to argue. I thought, ‘Oh, dear,’ and rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, knowing we were really in for it.”

The Duclos letter Jean Butler referred to was a contribution by Jacques Duclos, a French Communist Party official of international importance, to the Party’s publication in France, Cahiers du Communisme, which was published in April 1945. It was an attack on Browderism, and the line of patriotic cooperation during wartime. Duclos was especially bitter about the dissolution of the American Communist Party in favor of the Communist Political Association, and the renunciation of revolutionary goals which this implied. He praised the right-thinking of Browder’s hard-line opponent in the Party, William Z. Foster, and in effect marked Earl Browder himself to be purged. Although it was a month before the Duclos letter appeared in the Daily Worker, the effect it had on the American Party leadership was immediate and devastating. While they had received no prior notice of Stalin’s displeasure, it was understood by Browder, Foster, and the rest that such strong criticism from so high a source had to have been ordered by the chief himself. Browder had no appeal. Within a few months, the Communist Political Association was the Communist Party once more, Browder was ejected from it in February 1946, and the much tougher William Z. Foster was firmly in charge.

Inevitably this shakeup and the sudden change of direction it signaled had an unsettling effect on the rank-and-file membership of the Communist Party—and nowhere more than in Hollywood, where the patriotic line of Browder had attracted many members to the Party who were only a little left of liberal. If Earl Browder could be disposed of so quickly, and the philosophy he represented bumped so unceremoniously, then, they reasoned, the Communist Party was not the liberal body they had been told it was. Many wartime recruits left the Party about this time—many in Hollywood who were subsequently blacklisted; the question, after all, was, “Are you now, or have you ever been…?”

A few chose instead to bring the debate out into the open. One of them was Albert Maltz, who would, in a little more than a year’s time, be identified as one of the Hollywood Ten. More than most Hollywood writers, Maltz had an established literary reputation at the time. He had by then written four novels but had come west from New York on the strength of the work he had done as a playwright for the Theatre Union during the thirties. He arrived in Hollywood in 1941 and worked successively at Paramount and Warner Bros. on a number of big productions. This Gun for Hire was his first screenwriting credit, and he subsequently worked on such important films as Destination Tokyo, Pride of the Marines, Cloak and Dagger, and The Naked City. He was as well established as any writer in the Party when, in February 1946, he published in New Masses a fairly short essay, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” in which he explored quite logically the discrepancy between the writer’s obligation to himself and to the Party. The difficulty, he strongly suggested, lay not so much in the idea of art as a weapon but finally in the refusal of Party intellectuals to place on art any value except that “I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a strait-jacket,” he wrote. It was now understood “that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless or escapist or vicious.”

The storm that broke over the Maltz essay filled the pages of New Masses for the next couple of issues. It should be noted, by the way, that Maltz’s protest against the intellectual and aesthetic restrictions imposed by the Communist Party was published in the Party organ, and that it had appeared even after William Z. Foster had assumed much tighter control. Does this mean that Foster and the new leadership were actually more liberal than supposed? Not at all. It was well known to them that independent notions such as Maltz expressed were quite popular among young Party intellectuals at the time, a legacy from the more liberal Browder era. It must have seemed to them that the best way to deal with these heresies was to get them out into the open—so that they could be denounced as heresies. That way, there could be no doubt where the Party stood on such matters, nor what was the proper line for the loyal Party member to follow. Accordingly, New Masses published attacks on Maltz and his views by the magazine’s editor, Samuel Sillen, by novelists Howard Fast and Mike Gold, and by William Z. Foster himself, among others.

Maltz, the Browder surrogate, was, in fact, given treatment rougher than Browder himself had gotten in the magazine. But it was nothing to what he received face-to-face from his comrades in Hollywood. A meeting was called to discuss the issues Maltz had raised which became, in effect, a trial for deviationism. After that evening, as described by Murray Kempton in his book Part of Our Time:

The face of the Party had hardened and never again would the innocent and the uncommitted feel comfortable before it. The recollections of that period for repentant Hollywood Communists are of repetitive plunges into a cesspool. They have forgotten the abstractions of doctrine; they remember only Alvah Bessie “morosely clawing” at Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo “ripping at” Cole, and Cole “tearing at” Lawson. They were walking toward a common grave, hating one another.

Since there is no indication here, or anywhere else, what Trumbo was saying as he ripped at Lester Cole, his memories of the affair are the only record of his feelings at the time. “I was asked to write an article for the New Masses, as a number of others did, on the issue, attacking the Maltz position,” said Trumbo. “I refused to do it. It was not an act of great courage, but I figured, what the hell. Though I didn’t much like [the Maltz article], some of the criticisms of it were so vicious, and you found in them personal differences, or jealousies, or quarrels being translated into ideological principles, which always happens. And this made it the worst of all the episodes at the time. It wasn’t the worst that he recanted. It was a measure of himself, a sign of belief, a sign of loyalty, and there is a virtue in that. However, I think he was essentially right in his original article and wrong in his recantation. But he will to this day defend his recantation and will not defend his original article.”

Later, when I conveyed what Trumbo had said to Albert Maltz, Maltz looked at me severely and asked, “Did he say that? Did he indicate that he hadn’t had much to say at the time?” That, I said, was correct. “Well,” Maltz said, with a shake of the head that conveyed paragraphs of rebuttal, “I suppose I’ll have to let that stand then.”

These events—the Duclos letter and the consequent deposing of Earl Browder as head of the Communist Party, together with the Maltz affair which followed—all transpired against a background of labor unrest in Hollywood which itself had a profound and far-reaching effect on the situation that led to the blacklist. All during the war, there was a series of jurisdictional disputes and actions between the two major craft union bodies in Hollywood, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees & Motion Picture Machine Operators (IATSE), on the one hand, and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), on the other. Herb Sorrell, the leader of the CSU, though not a Communist himself, had been sympathetic to the Communists and had gotten to his position of power there in Hollywood at least partly through their help. On the other side was Roy Brewer, an AFL leader who had had a job with the War Labor Board before coming out to the West Coast to take charge of the union during the war. A strike finally resulted. It was called by Sorrell on March 12, 1945.

The Communist-dominated unions and individual Communists throughout the industry all eventually threw their support to Sorrell. Roy Brewer, the head of the rival IATSE, was aghast at this. Brewer saw the whole thing as a concerted campaign by the Communists to take over the motion picture industry through the convenient agency of Sorrell’s Conference of Studio Unions. He had no trouble selling this conspiracy theory to the producers and studio heads, thus making his position and his unions’ even more solid with them than before. It was a nasty strike, unusually long for wartime. It climaxed on October 5, 1945, just after the war had ended, of course, in front of the gates of the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank. As newsreel cameras ground away and flashbulbs popped, police used tear gas and hoses to clear away the pickets, then waded in with their nightsticks to finish the job.

Dalton Trumbo took an active part in all this. As a member of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, he delivered a speech on October 13, 1945, at the Olympic Auditorium that was in essence an attack on the IATSE. He spoke longest and most eloquently about the union’s racketeer past—there was no getting around that, after all, because Willie Bioff and George Browne had been sent to jail for shaking down the IATSE rank and file, as well as the studios. And although he never mentioned Roy Brewer’s name, he certainly did what he could to sully his reputation in the speech: “After the imprisonment of Browne and Bioff, the public generally assumed that the IA had been cleaned up. But this was not necessarily true. The underlings appointed by Browne and Bioff simply moved up a notch in their absence. The same people in the IA are still doing business at the same old stand.”

Whatever else could be said of Roy Brewer, he was not a crook of the Willie Bioff stripe; Brewer had, in fact, been installed as head of the IATSE to bring reform to a union whose membership had been made victim of the worst sort of labor racketeering and he had been making progress in that direction when Trumbo’s attack was delivered. Naturally he was angry; the speech was intended to provoke anger. Brewer wrote a letter to Trumbo five days later that was not so much a defense of his own reputation or that of his union as it was a counterattack on Trumbo as the spokesman for forces whose evil intentions Brewer clearly understood. We know who you are, Brewer seems to be saying, and we know what your support of the CSU in this strike really means. The underlying assumption is that Trumbo is a Communist (which was true) and that the Communists are, through actions such as the CSU strike, engaged in a conspiracy to take over the motion picture industry (which was not true). There was a heavy emphasis throughout Brewer’s long, three-page letter on the Americanism of the IATSE, and there was a pledge to fight foreign—that is to say, un-American—influence in the motion picture industry.

During this time, Dalton Trumbo had also been making trouble in the pages of the Screen Writer. In the very first issue of the publication, Trumbo had written an article attacking producer-director Sam Wood and the Motion Picture Association for statements Wood had made against the Screen Writers Guild and its executive board. Wood was a violently reactionary man who was, ironically, best known for directing one of the few movies ever made in Hollywood in which Communists were treated sympathetically, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Although he answered Trumbo with a counter-blast in the trade papers, the matter certainly did not end there. He was Dalton Trumbo’s enemy for life.

Under his editorship, the Screen Writer was strongly weighted to the left (for that matter, what union or guild publication did not, at least in its basic stance, face off in that direction?). But Trumbo’s political sympathies were known or suspected by many. The fact that the preponderance of articles in the Screen Writer reflected liberal and radical views on all subjects was automatically attributed to Trumbo’s influence. Yet he insisted, perhaps a little disingenuously, that his only standards were literary quality, general relevance, and respect for the Guild and its policies and objectives. Richard Macaulay, a screenwriter of conservative leanings and a vigorous anti-Communist, put him to the test with an article, “Who Censors What?” on movie content which was in rebuttal to an earlier piece by Alvah Bessie. As editor, Trumbo rejected Macaulay’s article, taking the same shaky position that Herbert Marcuse would two decades later, as he argued, “It is difficult to support your belief in the ‘inalienable right’ of man’s mind to be exposed to any thought whatever, however intolerable that thought might be to ‘anyone else.’ Frequently such a right encroaches upon the right of others to their lives. It was this ‘inalienable right’ in Fascist countries which directly resulted in the slaughter of five million Jews.” Macaulay was incensed. He wrote back accusing Trumbo of rejecting his article simply because it did not follow the editorial line that Trumbo himself had established, one that the Screen Writer had in common, Macaulay declared, with PM, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Clearly, Trumbo had made another enemy.

One of the many “letterhead organizations”* operating in Los Angeles at the time was the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Reformed and expanded from the Hollywood Democratic Committee in June 1945—an organization which Tenney also claimed to be a Communist front—HICCASP, as it was known (believe it or not), seemed designed as an umbrella big and shapeless enough so that individuals of all shades and persuasions, from Ronald Reagan to John Howard Lawson, might stand together under it in relative comfort.

If the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions were a Communist front organization, then as such it would have been an utter failure, for in 1946 a strong faction within the organization began a movement to transform it into a militant anti-Communist unit. In this group were Reagan, the embryonic politician; Dore Schary, then production head of RKO; film composer Johnny Green; actress Olivia de Havilland; and screenwriter Ernest Pascal. And apparently it was none other than Dalton Trumbo who was responsible for the situation that converted them into aggressive anti-Communists. It all turned on a speech Trumbo wrote for Olivia de Havilland, as an official of HICCASP (she was listed as vice-chairman of the organization), for delivery at a function in Seattle in June 1946. In fact, she never gave the speech that he wrote for her, which he learned only some weeks later. He wrote her a testy note on June 24, 1946, citing what had happened and asking for the return of his work. She sent back two speeches then, the one he had written and the one she had given, explaining that she had wanted to speak more in her own person and that a friend had helped her to prepare the remarks she had made in Seattle. That friend turned out to be screenwriter Ernest Pascal. Pascal had not merely rewritten Trumbo’s fiery and very partisan radical oration, he had practically turned it inside out and provided her with a speech which contained “an attack on and a repudiation of Communism”—as Trumbo described it—“which consumed exactly one-fifth of the entire speech.” Trumbo was furious at Pascal, or he must have been to use such rhetorical overkill in denouncing him in the letter he wrote: “I think I understand your motives, Ernest; and to understand is, in some degree, to forgive. But don’t you occasionally wonder, alone and late at night, who butchered the women of Europe and buried their living children and burned their men?”

By 1947 it began to look as though the movie capital were divided completely between two camps: the Communist and the anti-Communist. That, anyhow, is the way the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals wanted it to look. The word was out: you’re either with them or with us. What and who was the Motion Picture Alliance? It was the anti-Communist body that had been formed by the Motion Picture Association to fight those elements in the movie industry that the producers were unable to control. Roy Brewer, whom Trumbo had offended, joined the Alliance because it seemed to him a potentially effective force in fighting what he now saw as the Communist conspiracy to take over the industry. Sam Wood, of course, was a member already, one of the most outspoken and bitter opponents of communism—and of Dalton Trumbo. Richard Macaulay was soon also to be a member of the Alliance, along with most of the other young conservatives among the members of the Screen Writers Guild, as well as all Trumbo’s old opponents from the Guild’s battle with the Screen Playwrights—men like Morrie Ryskind, James Kevin McGuinness, and Rupert Hughes. And finally, the anti-Communist contingent from the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions joined forces with arch-conservatives from the Screen Actors Guild, such as Adolphe Menjou, adding to the enterprise a sprinkle of the glitter that only movie actors and actresses can provide. In a way, Dalton Trumbo made a very special contribution to the creation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals: he had made personal enemies of all its most prominent members.

It is possible, even likely, that the Hollywood Communists could have achieved a sort of peaceful coexistence with the reactionary elements in the motion picture industry had they maintained the Browder line of cooperation and accommodation, and there would have been no blacklist. If the Communist Party had actually worked out a design by which to take over the movie industry by infiltration, wouldn’t it have been in the Party’s best interest to proceed about the job as quietly and inconspicuously as possible? Instead, the Hollywood Communists organized mass rallies for various causes, mounted the podium, and made themselves visible and audible. They took out ads in the trade papers to which they signed their names. They contributed articles to “dangerous” publications, such as People’s World, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Was that any way to subvert the movie industry? They did their fighting as much in the open as Party discipline permitted. Of them all, none fought harder and more openly than Dalton Trumbo. He plunged into the 1946 Democratic campaign of Will Rogers, Jr., for the United States Senate. When he was about to give a speech to the HICCASP membership urging them to endorse Rogers, he wrote to Carey McWilliams, the campaign manager, urging the candidate to go on the attack. It was especially important, he declared, because of the “developing situation”—the impending pressure from the House Committee on Un-American Activities: “Rankin is one of the most unpopular men in America, and an attack upon his committee by Rogers can also be tied in with the Negroes, anti-Semitism, FEPC and a whole host of liberal issues. Rogers must understand that an attack… is not an act of political magnanimity on his part, but a political necessity to destroy the effect of an investigation which is aimed to destroy all liberal forces which support him; and which, if successful, will result in his own defeat.” Trumbo was a shrewd strategist. Rogers declined his advice, and William F. Knowland beat the Democrat handily. The House Committee on Un-American Activities directed its attention to Hollywood, just as Trumbo predicted it would, though not until 1947.

Carey McWilliams, the liberal California lawyer, watched it happen just as Trumbo predicted it would: “The more I was exposed to it, the more concerned I became.” He wrote the first book on the ensuing persecution. Witch Hunt was published in 1950, just as the blacklist and the McCarthy era were getting under way. “I must say that in retrospect some rather silly books have been written about the period. People forget how desperate the situation became for thousands of people. It’s all been reduced, more or less, to a pile of yellowing clips. People would be stunned at the suicides from the period, and just incredible things that happened then. It wasn’t merely some Walter Mitty aberration, as, for instance, Richard Rovere wanted us to think it was.”

A few months after the book was published, Carey McWilliams was invited to New York to edit “How Free Is Free?,” a special civil liberties issue of the Nation, the liberal weekly for which he had often written. They liked him so well they asked him to stay, and he was there as editor of the magazine until he retired in September 1975. That was where I found him the afternoon I came to call—there in the magazine’s offices in the West Village, just below Sheridan Square.

He greets me, sits me down, and talks to me with his chair swiveled back and his hands clasped behind his head. It is somehow an editor’s posture, and, ex officio, Carey McWilliams talks to me first about his editorial relations with Trumbo.

“He is an astonishing writer,” says McWilliams. “A polemicist! If that talent had really been harnessed, there’s no telling what he could have done with it. He could write other things, too, of course, but I can’t help but feel it’s a great shame he couldn’t have done more with it, turned himself loose on a whole range of situations and people.”

During the latter years of the blacklist, Carey McWilliams provided Dalton Trumbo with his most direct line to the embattled liberal community in America. Trumbo did a mini-series of essays on social topics—everything from the movie black market to the quiz show scandals. At one time, the writer was contemplating doing enough such pieces to collect them into a book, a personal sort of message on the state of the union. “The fact of the matter is,” says McWilliams, “I needled him to do far more than he actually did for us. If he did five I must have asked him to do twenty-five.”

He sighs and fidgets for a moment with a pile of papers on his desk. “You touch here on a subject that is close to me and one about which I have come to have mixed feelings.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, there are so many of the very talented out there who get caught up in motion picture writing to the neglect of all else. Trumbo is one of them. John Fante is another—a wonderful writer whose books were all done in a few years before he began working in motion pictures. The industry was the undoing of both of them as writers. Once they’ve begun making money, they think they’ll find time to do another book, but they never quite find it. There are scores of them. It’s a pattern.

“With Trumbo it’s especially frustrating because he was such a keen observer of the scene—and I don’t mean just his journalism. Just think what a fantastic collection of potential novels the man lived! Imagine a good novel about the Hollywood Ten with that showdown at the Guild with Dore Schary. Or imagine a novel about IATSE and the Hollywood labor battles of the thirties and forties—it would take somebody with Dalton’s appreciation to capture that crook Willie Bioff as a character.”

“Was that how you came to meet Trumbo?” I ask. “During the labor troubles?”

He looks away, frowning in concentration, for a moment. “I met him before the IATSE business, but we were both caught up in it, so that’s how we really got to know one another. The reality is this. He and I were never close personal friends. I was in his home often for meetings and we’d get together for lunches and so on. But at the same time we were good friends. I worked well with him. It was an intellectual friendship—political and, oh, I guess social in its basis. I personally admired the man’s style very much. I’ll never forget the Christmas card he sent out one year during the blacklist. The greeting on it was, ‘Fight mental health!’” Carey McWilliams breaks off and cackles in appreciation.

“When you look back at the McCarthy era,” I say to him, “and remember what passed for sanity then, that slogan makes a lot of sense.”

“Exactly! The man played all kinds of wonderful fandangles like that. He kept his sense of humor through it all. But he was political, too—in the best sense. Altogether, I thought he was a fine influence in Hollywood. It was a very difficult situation, and he behaved very well. The whole left political movement in Hollywood was a good thing, if you ask me. You know, they talked a lot at the time about swimming pool Communists. But the thrust goes the other way. These people were not idiots. They knew they were taking chances, and some of the things they were doing and saying did not endear them to the moguls, even in the period when there was no overt blacklist. There was nothing silly about leftism in Hollywood. They saw the danger—real danger—to the people in the industry posed by the labor practices of the period. And they knew the Nazis were not playing make-believe. I think they deserve some credit for the stand they took.”

In the beginning, it wasn’t the Hollywood Ten, but the “Unfriendly Nineteen.” This was the number of subpoenas issued to those designated in advance as “unfriendly witnesses,” directing them to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington, D.C., on October 23, 1947. Only eleven of the nineteen were actually called before the Committee. The eight who were not called up to testify were screenwriters Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, and Waldo Salt, directors Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel, and Robert Rossen, and actor Larry Parks. One called before the Committee who was not subsequently one of the Hollywood Ten was Bertolt Brecht. The German playwright double-talked the investigators so reassuringly that he managed to avoid the contempt of Congress citations that the other ten received. He then quite sensibly flew to Europe and left the fast-developing atmosphere of paranoia in America behind him, but found an even faster-developing atmosphere of paranoia when he arrived in East Germany.

Everybody in Hollywood knew the subpoenas were coming. Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, Representative John McDowell of Pennsylvania, and Committee investigators Robert Stripling and Louis Russell had been out earlier in the year interviewing “key Hollywood figures,” all of whom turned out to be members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Stripling later declared that “we obtained enough preliminary testimony to make a public hearing imperative.” And those from whom they obtained that preliminary testimony were the very ones called first before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as its “friendly witnesses,” all of them members of the Alliance.

Alvah Bessie, one of the Ten, gives an amusing account* of a visit to the Lazy-T just after the arrival of the subpoenas. Trumbo greeted Bessie and his wife and daughter there, playing lord of the manor, exuding optimism and good cheer as he took them on a tour of his palatial frontier estate. He had tried to put them at ease by telling them earlier, “Don’t worry about the subpoena—we’ll lick them to a frazzle.” But Bessie’s wife was skeptical:

“Do you really think we’ll lick them to a frazzle?” Helen Clare asked.

He took a swallow of his drink and said, “Of course not. We’ll all go to jail.” A realist to the end, Trumbo began the ordeal with his eyes wide open and his spirits remarkably high.

There were meetings, endless strategy meetings, between the nineteen who had been subpoenaed and their attorneys. Every alternative was explored. Nobody wanted to go to jail. But for both practical and political reasons, they decided to make a cause of their plight. From a practical standpoint, many of them needed money. There would be trips to Washington and what looked to them like an endless future of legal fees. Two of the nineteen were unable to contribute anything at all to their defense and had to be carried by the rest.

They also felt it was important to bring the issues before the public. What they wanted to make clear was that the essential question involved here—and ten of them went to jail on this very point—was freedom of speech. Besides themselves, the movie industry was most directly concerned. If the House Committee on Un-American Activities succeeded in intimidating Hollywood in these hearings, then it would be the beginning of motion picture censorship in America. Extreme as that may sound, it proved, in a covert and rather subtle way, to be correct.

The Committee for the First Amendment was formed in Hollywood to give support to the nineteen and to publicize their predicament. For an essentially liberal organization which sprang into existence practically overnight, this one boasted more than the usual illustrious sponsors—four U.S. senators; Thomas Mann; Robert Ardrey; a major film producer, Jerry Wald, and (as Louis B. Mayer boasted of M-G-M) “more stars than there are in the heavens.” They contributed their names, their time, and their money in defense of the nineteen. By the time the nineteen were to leave for Washington, there was a great deal of popular support for their cause. It had become, as they hoped it would, a national issue. On the eve of their departure, the Committee for the First Amendment held a rally for them at the Shrine Auditorium. No fewer than seven thousand attended.

They left the next day, preceded by a star-studded deputation from the Committee for the First Amendment, which flew in a chartered plane direct to Washington to keep public attention focused on the case and draw sympathy to those who had been labeled “unfriendly.” For their part, the nineteen flew by way of Chicago and New York, where they spoke at rallies. In New York there were further councils of war, where strategy was argued and re-argued among them. And there, too, another lawyer was added to the legal team that accompanied the witnesses to Washington.

“I remember very well how I happened to get involved in the case. I was at a World Series game with a bunch of their lawyers. It was 1947, of course—the Yanks and Brooklyn—and this was the game where Cookie Lavagetto hit his double. Well, here I was sitting beside Bob Kenny, who was the president of the National Lawyers Guild then and a former attorney general of California. Naturally I was interested in what had brought him east. He told me and said he felt I could help, particularly since I was based in Washington.”

This was Martin Popper talking, the husband of Katherine Trosper Popper, who knew Trumbo since his single days at Metro. Martin, of course, did not know him nearly so long but nevertheless considered Trumbo a friend. He is a New York lawyer and has been one all his life when I interview him. “But at that time,” he explains, “my firm had an office in Washington, and so for this case I was the local man, more or less.”

In an interview earlier Albert Maltz had asserted that those called as witnesses knew very well that they could have pleaded the Fifth Amendment and escaped the contempt of Congress citations they received. Maltz explained that they took the First Amendment instead, reasoning that under the right to free speech was also understood the right to keep silent. I ask Martin Popper about what Maltz had told me and if it was as sound legally as it seemed politically.

Popper nods emphatically. “Well, yes,” he says, “some such thinking had gone into it, and it might have worked. Because, you see, if the Court had sustained our contention that the Committee had no right to inquire, then it would have been the end of the Committee. It was a gamble, a calculated risk.”

There is nothing pedantic in his manner. He is simply trying to make it clear. “You see,” he continues, “the First Amendment is the arch—no, say, the keystone in the arch—of the entire Bill of Rights. When these amendments were framed, the principle they followed was that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. This was held inviolate. And from that fundamental right flowed the right to join political parties, to form organizations. Here was the Committee apparently ready to interpose itself between the individual and that right. What the Committee seemed to represent here was a point of view on the relationship of the individual to the government quite the opposite of the one represented in the Bill of Rights.

“Now, the witnesses in this case thought they were standing on strong constitutional and philosophical grounds. So they were ready to take the First, rather than the Fifth. It was only as a result of the Supreme Court refusing to hear the Hollywood Ten case that the Fifth was so widely used afterward. So what I’m saying is that it wasn’t strictly a matter of the First Amendment covering the right to keep silence. I don’t mean it was not that, but that it was something else as well.”

“Do you think they would have had a chance before the Supreme Court?” I ask.

“Yes—as it was constituted when they appeared before the Committee. It was that Court they were betting on. But then Justices Rutledge and Murphy died. They had always given individual liberties a preferred position. We could have been almost optimistic. With them died our petition for cert.”

It all happened more than a score of years ago, of course, but it is important to Popper still. “Yes, I know what some of these guys went through during the hearings and afterward—the blacklist and all. I was the man in Washington, of course, and I had to see them off to jail. I remember visiting Dalton after his first night in the D.C. jail. He told me that in the middle of the night the police had brought in a guy who was supposed to be part of a gang. He was charged with some heinous offense—assault with a deadly weapon or something. This is what he told Dalton. Then this gang member asked him what he was in for and Dalton told him. This tough guy shrank back. ‘Holy Jesus!’ he said. ‘Contempt of Congress!’ He was impressed, overwhelmed, as most people are. But let’s make no mistake about it. Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, nothing more.”

The hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the “Communist Infiltration of the Motion-Picture Industry” were gaveled to order by Chairman J. Parnell Thomas on October 20, 1947, with the testimony of the “friendly” witnesses. It was quite a lineup. The parade began with Jack L. Warner, head of Warner Bros. Studios, and among the others there were actors Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou, and novelist (formerly screenwriter) Ayn Rand. It would be wrong to attempt to characterize the testimony of these or the other “friendlies” who appeared before the Committee with the usual cant adjectives, such as “reactionary.” There were great differences in the quality and style of testimony given by them, from the reckless Red-baiting of Jack Warner and Robert Taylor, to the somewhat more responsible manner of Reagan (who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild), or to the uncomfortable reticence of Gary Cooper. Testimony varied with each witness. But the picture that emerged from the early days of the hearings, the one the Committee members themselves sought to paint, using the testimony of individual witnesses as colors on their canvas, was one of a Hollywood caught in the grip of the Communists; of studios and guilds virtually at the mercy of militant Reds who took their orders from Moscow; and of directors, and especially writers, who managed to twist the message of their movies, to coax Communist propaganda out of even the most modest material.

Richard M. Nixon was there as a freshman congressman, then sitting on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was to have his first big triumph the following year as he pressed the case against Alger Hiss; this would provide him with the springboard that would shoot him into the Senate, and then into the vice presidency. He owed his career, such as it was, to the Red Menace.

This is probably the only time that he and Dalton Trumbo were ever even in the same room together. When the “friendly” stars left the stage and the “unfriendly” witnesses came on, writers and directors all, Nixon vanished, suddenly finding other legislative matters more pressing. But the nineteen had their own contingent of stars on hand, the group from the Committee for the First Amendment who had made the trip to Washington to demonstrate their support. It included Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Jane Wyatt, John Huston, and Sterling Hayden, among others. To their credit, they hung right in there during the testimony of the “friendly” witnesses, kept right on giving interviews and holding press conferences which were intended to alert America to the clear and present danger, etc. Somehow, though, the members of the Committee for the First Amendment hadn’t been prepared for the testimony of the Ten. They expected them to be more polite, to remember that, bad as it was, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was nevertheless a unit of the Congress of the United States and if only for that reason deserving of respect. Well, when John Howard Lawson was called on October 27, 1947, he gave the Committee none. Although all of the “friendly” witnesses had been granted the right to read statements, Lawson (the first of the Ten to appear) was denied that, and the few minutes he spent under the lights in the caucus room were consumed, for the most part, in a shouting match with Chairman J. Parnell Thomas over the question of whether or not his statement might be read. When, at the end, he refused to answer the big question: “Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” many of the group who had come to offer moral support were profoundly disturbed. Following Lawson’s appearance, the support of the Committee for the First Amendment began to erode very swiftly. Those who had come across the country together, so full of high purpose, began leaving in ones and twos, feeling vaguely betrayed by the very men whose cause they had come to Washington to fight for.

Except for Lawson, Dalton Trumbo was probably the Committee’s least cooperative and most “unfriendly” witness. He came to the stand on October 28, 1947, at ten-thirty A.M., just one day after Lawson had caused such an uproar in the caucus room. Trumbo was met by hostility from Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, and he gave as good as he got. The two began with a preliminary skirmish on the question of whether or not Trumbo might be allowed to read the opening statement he had brought with him. Thomas inspected the statement, conferred with the other members present, and refused him, telling him the statement was not “pertinent to the inquiry.”

The next point went, surprisingly, to Trumbo. As it turned out, it was the only one he would score. The “Mr. Stripling” who addressed him here is Robert Stripling, counsel and chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities:

 

Mr. Stripling: Mr. Trumbo, I shall ask various questions all of which can be answered “Yes” or “No.” If you want to give an explanation after you have made that answer, I feel that the committee will agree to that.

However, in order to conduct this hearing in an orderly fashion, it is necessary that you be responsive to the question, without making a speech in response to each question.

Mr. Trumbo: I understand, Mr. Stripling. However your job is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. I shall answer “Yes” or “No” if I please to answer. I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered “Yes” or “No” only by a moron or a slave.

The Chairman: The Chair agrees with your point that you need not answer the question “Yes” or “No.”

Mr. Trumbo: Thank you, sir.

 

It was then that Trumbo sought to introduce into the record twenty screenplays that he had written. While this may have seemed a rather outlandish thing to do, it was really nothing of the kind. The hearings had supposedly been called by J. Parnell Thomas in order to substantiate his charges that Hollywood films—and in particular, those films on which the “unfriendly” witnesses had worked—had been packed full of Communist propaganda (a point never proved by the Committee). The work Trumbo had done in the movies was under attack; there was no defense to offer, really, except the work itself. But the chairman denied him the request: “Too many pages.” He also blocked Trumbo’s attempt to have read into the record various commendations of his work by personages above suspicion (even by the Committee) such as General H. A. “Hap” Arnold, wartime head of the Army Air Corps.

The two clashed next on the question of whether Trumbo was or was not a member of the Screen Writers Guild—another simple question which, as he saw it, was not nearly so simple as it seemed. Chairman Thomas himself had announced to the press in Los Angeles on an information-gathering sortie earlier that year that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists.” Well, if Thomas believed that, then Trumbo could certainly tell in what direction they were headed:

 

Mr. Trumbo: Mr. Chairman, this question is designed to a specific purpose. First—

The Chairman (pounding gavel): Do you—

Mr. Trumbo: First, to identify me with the Screen Writers Guild; secondly to seek to identify me with the Communist Party and thereby to destroy that guild—

 

Then, after the two had sparred a few minutes over that point, Robert Stripling hit Trumbo with the Sunday punch: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Trumbo never answered that, either. Instead, discussion between them dissipated into a wrangle over whether or not Trumbo would be allowed to see an alleged “Communist Party Registration Card” made out to “Dalt T” which Committee investigators had earlier shown to the press. Of course he was not shown it, though it was entered into evidence minutes later. Not, however, before Trumbo was led away from the witness chair, shouting his anger at the Committee and its chairman:

 

Mr. Trumbo: This is the beginning—

The Chairman (pounding gavel): Just a minute—

Mr. Trumbo: Of an American concentration camp.

The Chairman: This is typical Communists’ tactics.

 

For refusing to answer two questions, “Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” and “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Trumbo was, immediately after his testimony, voted “in contempt of the House of Representatives of the United States” by the members of the Committee then present.

So it went, with two major exceptions, through the witnesses who remained to be called before the Committee. All those who followed were somewhat more subdued than Trumbo and John Howard Lawson had been. Ring Lardner, Jr., managed to inject a bit of his own wry humor into the proceedings when he was asked repeatedly by Chairman Thomas if he were a Communist and at last responded, “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.” A few were even permitted to read the statements they had prepared. But in the end, there were ten—the Hollywood Ten*—who refused to cooperate with the investigation. All were cited for contempt of Congress.

The exceptions noted earlier were Emmet Lavery and Bertolt Brecht, both of whom were apparently expected by the Committee to show the same belligerence and lack of cooperation as the rest. Both were assumed to be Communists by Thomas and his investigators. Lavery, who was president of the Screen Writers Guild, had been attacked by a number of “friendly” witnesses. One of them, Morrie Ryskind, had told the Committee that under Lavery’s leadership the Guild “was under Communist domination”; another, Rupert Hughes, called him “a Communist masquerading as a Catholic.” Emmet Lavery was interested purely in preserving the Screen Writers Guild and making sure that, even if it meant sacrificing a few members—or more than a few—the Guild would survive the assault of the Committee. The tactics of an Irish politician. As the lawyer he was, Lavery gave exemplary testimony before the Committee—direct, cogent, and informed. He denied being a Communist. He refused to engage in speculation, to repeat hearsay, or to blacken the names of those who had already testified to save his own neck. But he was chiefly interested not in saving himself but in preserving the integrity of the Guild: “Mr. Stripling, they do not have control of the Guild, and, if they did have control of the Guild, I would have stayed home long ago.” He did not sell out the Ten before the Committee; he did that, unfortunately, later on back in Hollywood.

The last witness to testify during that round of hearings was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. At the time he appeared he had been in the United States over six years, had taken out his first citizenship papers, and had declared his intention to remain permanently in the country. During that period in Hollywood he had had his name on the screen only once—an original story credit for the film Hangmen Also Die—although he had worked on a number of other movie projects. These years were fruitful for him, however, in his career as a playwright. He wrote a number of plays, revised others, and saw one of his finest, The Life of Galileo, mounted in an excellent English-language production which starred Charles Laughton in the title role. Brecht did indulge in a good deal of double-talk with Stripling and Chairman Thomas, the point of which was to make him seem a good deal more cooperative and less radical than he really was. On one point, however, he gave in completely:

 

Mr. Stripling: Now, I will repeat the original question. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of any country?

Mr. Brecht: Mr. Chairman, I have heard my colleagues when they considered this question not as proper, but I am a guest in this country and do not want to enter into any legal arguments, so I will answer your question fully as well as I can. I was not a member, or am not a member, of any Communist Party.

 

There is, incidentally, no reason to believe that Brecht was telling anything but the absolute truth when he said this; no proof has ever been offered to the contrary, and when he subsequently returned to East Germany, Brecht certainly did not behave as a fully committed Party member might have been expected to.

That last day of the hearings, on which Bertolt Brecht appeared before the Committee, was October 30, 1947. The Ten who had refused to respond to the question put to each of them regarding their membership in the Communist Party had all been cited for contempt of Congress. All would eventually serve prison terms on the charge. But a harder punishment was being prepared for them by leaders of the motion picture industry. Major producers and studio executives met late in November at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to discuss the embarrassment to the industry caused by the Hollywood Ten. They conferred for two days. And while there is no record of what was said inside their meetings, the document that came out of them, the notorious Waldorf Agreement, said loud and clear that people like Dalton Trumbo and his fellow “unfriendlies” were, in effect, no longer employable in the motion picture industry.

There is some irony in the fact that Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, was chosen to announce the Waldorf Agreement to the world. Irony because Johnston had given repeated assurances to the press, to the “unfriendlies,” and to their counsel, that the motion picture industry and Johnston himself would stick behind them all the way. Even when J. Parnell Thomas had announced to the press that movie producers had agreed to establish a blacklist, Eric Johnston came around (as reported in Alvah Bessie’s Inquisition in Eden) to reassure the “unfriendlies.” He declared: “That report is nonsense! As long as I live, I will never be a party to anything as un-American as a blacklist, and any statement purporting to quote me as agreeing to a blacklist is a libel upon me as a good American.” Evidently he meant that, at least when he said it. However, like most of the industry’s leaders, he was intimidated by the Committee. All were subjected to pressure, as well, from the bankers and brokers on whom the studios and independent producers depended for their flow of production capital. The industry was told to clean house or to expect grave consequences.

On November 26, 1947, Eric Johnston read the movie industry’s pledge to the press. The heart of it was this:

We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.

On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood, our members are likewise prepared to take positive action.

We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.

Whatever private protocols had been, or would be, put into effect, the Waldorf Agreement was the document which made the blacklist a public fact. They tried, in the wording of the document, to put the best possible face on what was to be a witch hunt. They promised not to be “swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source”—while intimidation and hysteria were what had occasioned the meeting and the Agreement in the first place. They appealed hypocritically to “the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives; to protect the innocent; and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened.”

When you were with Robert W. Kenny you had the feeling that you were in the presence of a historical personage. The public offices that he had held were not so high that they would have conferred any degree of grandeur on the man. He had been a state senator, the attorney general of the state of California, and he then a judge of the Superior Court of the county of Los Angeles. Still, a quality of something close to greatness clung to the man. He conveyed the feeling that even if he himself might never quite have achieved all that he might have wished, at least he had influenced those who in turn had influenced history. It was this quality that Carey McWilliams touched upon in his obituary tribute, “The Education of Earl Warren,” in the Nation, when he credited Kenny and Pat Brown with initiating the long process of liberalization that reshaped Warren from the conservative, small-time politician who started out in California to his position of leadership in the most liberal Supreme Court in American history.

Physically, Robert Kenny is not a very prepossessing figure when I first see him. He has a lame right side and moves with a little difficulty around his courtroom on the sixth floor of the County Building in Los Angeles. But he is very much in command, and having heard both sides in the civil case that is before him and indicating to me with a nod from the bench that he is aware of our appointment, he does not hesitate to call a recess. He makes for his chambers, and I follow.

“Just let me get out of this black muumuu and into civilian clothes,” he says, “then we can talk as long as you want to.” That he does, again with some difficulty, for it becomes a matter of his left arm doing the work of both left and right. His resigned manner tells me that he has been through it all thousands of times before and that help would not be welcome if it were offered.

He settles down in the sofa opposite me and we talk. “I got into it, I suppose, as attorney for the Screen Writers Guild,” he tells me. “My partner, Morris Cohen, handled most of the Guild work. When we started out I was in the State Senate and then I became attorney general. As far as Trumbo was concerned, I only got to know him after the subpoenas went out in October 1947. We had less than thirty days to prepare for the hearings and a mountain of work to do beforehand. Quite reasonably, they wanted to be told what to say when they got there, and there were meetings on that. But there were a hell of a lot of other things to do. We needed the time, for one thing, to get a PR campaign of our own going, this Committee for the First Amendment thing. And there were also just details of the mundane kind, like buying transportation for us all, making reservations, deciding whether we traveled by train or plane, or what. I remember Gordon Kahn, one of the original nineteen, had the last word there. ‘We’re going by tumbril,’ he said. I think that shows both the seriousness with which they looked at the situation and the way they kept their humor in spite of it.”

“How detailed were these strategy sessions? Was it Trumbo’s idea that all of them should challenge the Committee’s right to question them—and in effect plead the First Amendment?”

“Not exactly.” Then Judge Kenny explains: “I was playing it pretty cautiously because the Committee’s technique had taken a nasty turn in the case of Dr. Edward K. Barsky and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. He was asked to give them his membership lists. He refused, and they tried to develop a case of conspiracy which would have meant a sentence of years, not months. Ultimately what we—I and the other attorneys involved—did was to put the options before them. We were determined that they would arrive at their own decisions of conduct before the Committee. That’s really what happened, too. The decisions were their own. And it was not a collective decision, though it came after intermember deliberation.

“Nevertheless, there was a lot of animosity between the Committee and Committee staff on the one hand, and us on the other. Thomas tried to get me for conspiracy. I guess that shows pretty clearly in the transcript. What we actually tried to do was treat the hearing as though it were a court trial—and Stripling and Thomas as though they were officers of a kangaroo court, which of course they were.”

Would it be accurate to say they pleaded the First Amendment, then?

“Our position in Washington was that we’re not refusing to answer. We had just not completed our reasons for providing the answers we were giving them.”

At this point Judge Kenny pauses, grins, and shakes his head. “We had more angels hopping around on the heads of pins there, didn’t we? What difference does it make what amendment you use for your defense as long as you keep out of jail? And we didn’t even manage to do that. All we managed to do was put the lawyers’ children through college with all that litigation. No, that’s not all really. Because after the Ten went to jail, we had a jail-proof defense in the Fifth Amendment. People knew they had to use it then, and they used it. In effect, we bought time for hundreds of people.

“Before the Ten actually went off to the pokey, nobody believed anybody was going to jail. Even the judges who handed out the sentences thought this was nothing more than a test case. Contempt of Congress—it’s just a high-grade misdemeanor, anyway—a year and a thousand maximum. Nobody had served time on the charge since the 1920s. That was when Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil did thirty days for his behavior during the congressional investigation of the Teapot Dome affair.”

Since, in a way, the Ten did just about what they set out to do before the Committee, when was it that things started to go wrong?

“Well, I’d say we were pretty successful until the Waldorf Agreement, when the major producers got up the courage to screw the Ten and everybody else. Eric Johnston told me before the Waldorf Agreement that there would never be anything as un-American as a blacklist advocated by the producers. Well, we saw what happened then. The Ten were fired and we brought suit immediately on all the contracts. What really killed us, though, what put an end to it all, was when the Supreme Court turned down our petition of certiorari and refused to hear the case. That was 1949. That ended it. The boys went to jail. And though they were all pretty complimentary about the prisons and the lack of any sort of special treatment they received, favorable or unfavorable—it was still jail, time out of their lives, a blot on their record, a shameful injustice.”

“Well,” I ask, “if the Waldorf Agreement was the beginning of the end, what about the blacklist that came out of it? Was it legal?”

“Of course not!” Judge Kenny seems irritated, not so much by the question as by the memories that it brought up of all the angry, fruitless arguments he had made decades before. This was territory he had been over again and again and again.

“Look,” he explains patiently, “the blacklist was a violation of the Sherman Act. It’s simple. If A hires B to do work for him, then it’s no damned business of C’s whether B has been hired or not. If C is allowed to influence A in hiring—or in firing—then it is a violation of the Anti-Trust Act.”

He sighs, lapses into silence as though suddenly exhausted by the effort. He is not a strong man. Aged seventy-two, he looks every year of it. Along with the memories of all the old battles, he bears scars from the wounds suffered in them. Judge Robert W. Kenny seems a very tired man.

“So you see,” he begins again, gathering himself to sum up, “the issues involved in all this were important. They were real issues. I was proud to be involved in it. I only wish it had turned out better for the Ten.”

I ask Judge Kenny about Earl Warren: “You were on the opposite sides of most battles during your years in California politics, yet in the end were much closer philosophically than when you both started out.”

He agrees: “That’s right. You can never figure out the voters in this state. The same voters who elected Earl Warren attorney general elected me state senator. And the same voters that elected me attorney general elected him governor in 1942. I ran against him in 1946, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t lay a glove on him. He cross-filed—you could do that here then—and got both parties’ nominations.” Kenny smiles ruefully, time’s triumph over chagrin.

I ask, on a gamble, just how he thinks the Ten’s appeal might have fared before the Warren Court.

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any question of it. It takes four votes to get a petition of certiorari granted, and I think there were certainly four justices in that court who would want to have the case heard. Earl would have voted for certiorari because it involved an important constitutional question. And that was his strength as a justice—he never ducked the important ones. So we would have gotten before the Court. We would have argued it, and we would have won.”

Why?

“Because we were right, dammit.”

Time did not stand still for Dalton Trumbo during this period, although it may have seemed to him and to his family as though it had. When he became one of the Hollywood Ten, his life was changed profoundly. Trumbo’s public life consumed his private life almost completely. The telegrams of congratulation poured in: “To Dalton Trumbo in support,” “Your Washington performance and that of others was most gladdening,” and so on. There were poison-pen letters, as well. And Dalton Trumbo concentrated, to the exclusion of almost all else, on the role in which he had been cast.

So much so that it is necessary to look beyond him for personal responses to the situation. Trumbo was what the record indicates. He was totally the man quoted in the Congressional Record. Cleo and the children had nothing to say about that moment. They remained for the most part up at the Lazy-T, where they were out of reach of the newspapers and the wire services. They just listened to the radio news in which the progress of the hearings was followed closely. They listened and waited for Trumbo to come home.

His sisters and his mother listened, too. And his mother read the Christian Science Monitor. True to its liberal viewpoint, the newspaper offered objective accounts of the day-to-day events: “Like Mr. Lawson, Mr. Trumbo argued that a congressional committee has no right to inquire into a man’s political affiliation, thereby presenting a point that probably will go to the Supreme Court. Whatever Mr. Trumbo’s own connections he appealed for protection in this instance to those rights of free expression and belief and to those civil liberties, which are noticeable by their absence in Communist countries.” And in its editorial pages, too, the Monitor gave the “unfriendlies” its qualified support.

What conclusions did Maud Trumbo draw from what she read in her newspaper about her son and what she herself knew of him? This is how Elizabeth Baskerville, Dalton’s sister, remembered it: “I think Mama was outraged because she felt her son was right. He may have fallen in with bad companions, but she felt he was right. And really, we all supported him. The prospect of it must have been very threatening to her because as she was hearing Dalton testify she must have had the feeling that all her security—that was Dalton—was going down the drain.”

And how did Trumbo view the future? As one of endless litigation, probably. He returned to the West Coast with the contempt of Congress citation over his head and with the feeling that time was running out for him. He was at that time engaged with producer Sam Zimbalist in a film project for Metro, Angel’s Flight, that was intended to star Clark Gable. It proved to be Trumbo’s last assignment at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; since it was never produced, nobody seemed to recall much about it. He reported to the M-G-M lot and had a couple of conferences on the script, then went off to join Cleo and the children to work on it up at the Lazy-T. He had always had a great affection for Zimbalist, whom he had known for years and with whom he had worked on the best of his M-G-M films, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. He felt he had better get this one done in a hurry for Sam.

But time ran out. On Thanksgiving Day, 1947, the producer brought him the news. It would have been impossible for Zimbalist to call. In spite of the many improvements Trumbo had made at the Lazy-T—and it was now only a little less than a palace nestled up in the Ventura Mountains—there was still no telephone; after all, the idea in moving up there in the first place had been to get away from the telephone, to make him inaccessible. But Sam Zimbalist had the kind of news he would have felt obliged to deliver in person, anyway. Trumbo recalled: “I was cooking mince pies in the kitchen and Sam came in and said, ‘It’s all over, batten down the hatches, it’s going to happen. All of the Ten are going to be blacklisted.’” He offered his sympathy and his promise to help, personally, in any way he could. But there was very little more to be said.

This was the only real warning Trumbo received prior to the Waldorf Agreement. Not that knowing in advance would have helped much. There was only one hope for the Ten, and that was that the talent guilds might be persuaded to fight the blacklist—to stand up, as unions should, and protect their membership. A meeting of the Screen Writers Guild was called. Dore Schary, who was, ironically, one of Hollywood’s most vocal liberals, came as the producers’ representative and made an appeal for the Guild’s cooperation. Trumbo had been chosen by those of the Ten who were members of the SWG (which was most of them) to speak for them at the same open meeting. He did so, savagely attacking the producers and the Waldorf Agreement and predicting quite accurately what lay ahead if the Guild cooperated. He also made an appeal for the support of the Guild membership. All to no avail. The Screen Writers Guild cooperated with the producers in the implementation of the Waldorf Agreement.

Had they held out, the producers might have been forced to reconsider and alter their position. In fact, it would probably be accurate to say that the blacklist could not have been instituted, nor could it have been enforced, without the assistance of the Screen Writers Guild and the other Hollywood talent guilds.