The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
The five congressional officials who checked into the stately Biltmore Hotel across from Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles in early May 1947 had subversion on their minds. Representative John Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; fellow congressmen John McDowell of Pennsylvania and John Wood of Georgia; and two staff members had come to Hollywood to launch an inquiry into the evils of Communism and its malignant and growing influence in the capital of American popular culture. Thomas, a former insurance broker, bond salesman, and small-town mayor, was a jowly, balding self-promoter, a man in love with the spotlight and the grandstand. His partner in the pursuit of dangerous left-wingers was committee chief of staff Robert Stripling, a lean, intense Texan known as “Strip,” with plastered-down hair and white supremacist notions. Stripling’s investigators had compiled thick dossiers on the purported communistic activities of at least seventy-five Hollywood personalities, most of them screenwriters. He talked about these flabby, desk-bound writers as if they were Superman’s evil twin—“brilliantly trained, fanatically dedicated, physically brave, and industrious beyond the comprehension of Americans who wishfully insist that we are at peace with all lands.” Both he and Thomas believed that large parts of the New Deal had been a Communist plot and that the federal government was riddled with Reds. Like J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, they drew no meaningful distinction between liberals and Communists: they viewed both species as dangerously subversive.
The committee’s return to Hollywood was one marker of the tectonic shifts in American politics and culture following the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the end of World War Two. The old FDR coalition, which had remained united for a decade first by economic hardship and later by the war effort, was beginning to unravel. While the economy was booming for many Americans, it also suffered from an outbreak of strikes by trade unions seeking to make up for lost ground during the war, and from annoying shortages of consumer goods and foodstuffs as the country made the massive shift from a wartime command economy to peacetime. The glorious victory over the Axis powers had been overtaken by new fears as relations with the Soviet Union plunged from wary to hostile. Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, focused on the Soviet colonization of Eastern Europe and captured the popular mood of disappointment. “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war,” Churchill declared. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” Those on the political right—who had opposed both the New Deal and the war against Fascism but who had been forced to lie low as America fought and won a global conflict—were now resurfacing. They wanted their country back, and they wanted the outsiders and subversives who had stolen it to be exposed and punished.
Surging after fourteen years of electoral setbacks, the Republicans in November 1946 won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration almost two decades earlier. Five months later, President Truman issued executive order No. 9835 requiring that all federal employees be screened for loyalty, which led Attorney General Tom C. Clark to compile a list of organizations he deemed “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive.”
The backlash now had official sanction from Washington.
State and local governments throughout the country swiftly adopted similar disloyalty orders, in what historian Henry Steele Commager called “a revival of the Red hysteria of the early 1920’s, one of the shabbiest chapters in the history of American democracy.”
Screenwriters James K. McGuinness and Jack C. Moffitt, two of the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, kicked off the parade of friendly witnesses who visited the Biltmore to pay homage to Chairman Thomas and his Red hunters. Jack Warner, the only major studio head to appear, gave an extraordinarily emotional performance. Warner Bros. was known as the most politically liberal of the big studios and had been responsible for Mission to Moscow, the most blatantly pro-Stalin movie in Hollywood’s history, and perhaps Warner felt especially vulnerable in the new age of the Red Scare. He blurted out the names of sixteen screenwriters whom he branded as Communists, and claimed to have fired all of them. Warner’s list included a number of non-Communists, including Julius and Philip Epstein (coauthors of the screenplay for Casablanca), Sheridan Gibney, Emmet Lavery, and Howard Koch (who had co-written the script for Mission to Moscow at Warner’s personal request). Warner later admitted he had “made a mistake” in naming Koch and the others. In fact, he had never fired any of the people he named. But the damage was done.
The sessions took place behind closed doors, but each day Thomas and Stripling emerged to faithfully report the testimony to waiting reporters. Matinee idol Robert Taylor told them that government officials had prevented him from entering the Navy in 1943 until he completed his role starring in Song of Russia—buttressing the committee’s theory that secret Reds in the government had ordered up pro-Soviet propaganda pictures from willing dupes in a servile film industry. Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, said her movie-star daughter had refused to speak the line “Share and share alike—that’s democracy” in the film Tender Comrades, written by Dalton Trumbo, because it was obvious Marxist propaganda (in fact, Ginger did say the line). And dapper B-list actor Adolphe Menjou called Hollywood “one of the main centers of Communist activity in America.”
“Communists in the film industry,” Menjou added, “are so powerful that many little people in the industry—innocent people—are afraid to move or speak out against them.”
After a week’s worth of friendly witnesses, Chairman Thomas pronounced himself enlightened by what he had heard. He solemnly informed the press that “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.”
But the May executive sessions were a preliminary round. The main event was to be played in October with full-scale public hearings before a packed house in Washington.
In preparation, Thomas sought the help of FBI director Hoover at a meeting on June 24. “I told the Congressman that of course we wanted to be as helpful to the Committee as we could,” Hoover dictated in a memo later that day, “but that the Bureau could not be publicly drawn into the investigation nor be called to appear in it in any capacity. The Congressman assured me faithfully that he understood that and would never embarrass the Bureau to that extent.” A satisfied Hoover designated one of his top aides as a liaison to the committee and pledged to review the bureau’s files “to see what help we might be able to be … insofar as submitting leads and material that might be used as a basis of interrogation.”
“I do think it is long overdue,” Hoover concluded, “for the Communist infiltration in Hollywood to be exposed.”
In response to Thomas’s request, the bureau compiled and delivered to the committee “blind memoranda” on eleven alleged Hollywood Communists providing background information, associations with front organizations, and other incriminating material. Richard Hood, the special agent-in-charge in Los Angeles, also provided photostats of party membership cards of twenty-five alleged Communists. These were materials the FBI had collected during its illegal break-ins of the party’s Los Angeles office in the mid-1940s.
With Hoover’s blessing, the committee hired former FBI agent H. Allen Smith to help plan its new set of public hearings by lining up “friendly witnesses” to speak about the Communist menace. Among the celebrities he interviewed privately were Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, and Gary Cooper. Reagan had been an FBI informant for several years, but he told Smith that he was a New Deal liberal who did not agree with some of the members of the Motion Picture Alliance, most especially Jim McGuinness, whom Reagan called “a professional Red baiter.” Reagan also said he resented the claim of Adophe Menjou that Reagan was a “reformed Leftist.” Still, Smith came away recommending Reagan as a potential witness. “He has no fear of any one, is a nice talker, well-informed on the subject, and will make a splendid witness,” Smith wrote.
Cooper had little factual information to offer, Smith reported. He said he had been approached in 1936 by someone who attempted to recruit him to the Communist Party because “men like Cooper, who had been around, driven buses, worked on farms, etc., were in a position to know more about the condition of the country than a star who has not done that, and accordingly they can best help the masses.” But Cooper refused to name the person and Smith assured him the committee would not ask him to. Otherwise, all Cooper could offer was his “overall opinion … that from his experience, observation, and conversation … he is convinced that there are a number of people who are either Communists or followers of the Party line.” Cooper again refused to name any names, but Smith didn’t mind. “Mr. Cooper presents an excellent appearance, and will testify in a smooth, even, soft-spoken, unexcitable manner.”
Also in June 1947, Counterattack, a right-wing newsletter devoted to exposing what it called “the hard cold facts about American Communists and their stooges,” published its first issue. The weekly newsletter, staffed by three former FBI agents, was based in New York but focused much of its attention on Hollywood. It was the first of several publications that became an essential component of the Red-hunting machine by feeding names and allegations to the FBI and the committee and by passing on information they themselves were fed by those same institutions.
The committee subpoenaed forty-three witnesses for the October hearings, commanding them to report to the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building just across Independence Avenue from the U.S. Capital. Opened in 1908, the ornate hall was a beaux arts masterpiece, featuring paired Corinthian pilasters and a double-high ceiling decorated with rosettes and a Greek key border. It was crammed with ninety-four reporters, four radio networks, countless microphones and newsreel cameras, and—like a visitor from the future—a lone television camera. Light bore down from four crystal chandeliers and six spotlights, rendering the room as “shadow-less as an operating theater,” according to screenwriter Gordon Kahn. Hundreds of movie fans, most of them women, lined the solemn hallway for hours ahead of time hoping to get a seat inside or at least a glimpse of a movie star striding by. Chairman Thomas, sitting atop a red cushion placed over a District of Columbia telephone book, wielded his gavel like an ax. “He reminded me of an assistant director I had known who fell in love with a bullhorn,” recalled director Edward Dmytryk, one of those summoned to testify. “… Without it he was a short, dumpy, very average human being.”
As for the rest of the committee, author David Halberstam describes them as “a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons.”
Jack Warner again led off the parade of friendly witnesses. The head of Warner Bros. was in full metaphorical mode. “Ideological hermits have burrowed into many American industries, organizations, and societies,” he solemnly told the committee. “Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund … to ship to Russia people who don’t like our American system of government and prefer the communistic system to ours.” Warner, undeterred by his previous imprecision, rattled off more names of writers whom he had heard were Communists.
His father “went to Washington with a prepared speech, but he got nervous and fell apart,” said Jack Warner Jr. “You could see the sweat running off his face. The cameras and the lights were on him, and he knew he was making a fool of himself … We walked out together afterward with a couple of our lawyers, and he said to me, ‘I didn’t do good, did I? I shouldn’t have given names. I was a schmuck.’”
Warner’s melodramatic testimony set the tone for many of the twenty “friendly witnesses” who followed. Over five days they painted a portrait of a Hollywood under siege by Communists and their allies. All of them agreed that the Reds had sought to create labor strife in order to seize control of the unions, tried to infect movies with their twisted ideology, and created a reverse blacklist in which Reds and their supporters got jobs while non-Communists were excluded. Many of the witnesses named names, even while affirming they lacked proof of their claims. After screenwriter Fred Niblo Jr. fingered Gordon Kahn as a Red, he added, “I cannot prove it any more than Custer can prove that the people who were massacring him were Indians.”
But there were subtle distinctions among the witnesses. Warner and fellow studio boss Louis B. Mayer of MGM insisted they had successfully blocked any attempts to inject Communist ideology into their pictures by constant vigilance. Others disagreed. Former screenwriter John C. Moffitt recalled the advice he had received from John Howard Lawson, leader and purported chief ideological enforcer of the Hollywood Communist Party: “As a writer try to get five minutes of the Communist doctrine … in every script that you write. If you can, make the message come out of the mouth of Gary Cooper or some other important star who is unaware of what he is saying.”
Moffitt outdid Warner by naming more than a dozen screenwriters he accused of being Communists. Charles Katz, one of the lawyers for the accused, rose to demand the right to cross-examine him. “You have said you want a fair hearing,” he pleaded with Thomas. “Cross-examination is necessary.” But the chairman gaveled Katz down. “Will you take this man out of the room, please?” Thomas ordered security guards. “Put him out of the room.”
Both Warner and Mayer found themselves on the defensive over the propaganda films extolling the Soviet Union that they’d made during the war. Mayer tried to justify MGM’s Song of Russia, insisting that the final script was “little more than a pleasant musical romance—the story of a boy and girl that, except for the music of Tchaikovsky, might just as well have taken place in Switzerland or England or any other country on the earth.”
But novelist and libertarian icon Ayn Rand, the stern anti-Communist ideologist who had fled the Soviet Union in 1926, demolished Mayer’s claim. “The mere presentation of that kind of happy existence in a country of slavery and horror is terrible because it is propaganda,” she told the committee. “You are telling people that it is alright to live in a totalitarian state.”
Robert Taylor, who starred in the film, told the committee how much he had hated it. He added that he would refuse to act with anyone who was suspected of being a Communist. “If I were even suspicious of a person being a Communist with whom I was scheduled to work, I’m afraid it would have to be him or me, because life is too short to be around people who annoy me as much as these fellow travelers and Communists.” An indignant Taylor neglected to mention that his new picture, The High Wall, had been co-written by Lester Cole, one of the best-known party members in Hollywood.
Not all of the friendly witnesses parroted the same alarming line. Ronald Reagan denounced Communism and said he had fought its influence both in the Screen Actors Guild and in the craft unions. “I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column and are dishonest,” said Reagan. Still, when a committee member asked if he would support banning the party outright, Reagan backed off. “I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology,” he told the committee. “… However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party … then that is another matter.”
Reagan’s careful tap dance was overshadowed that afternoon by the crown prince of ambivalence. Gary Cooper looked sharp in a double-breasted gray suit, white shirt, and light-blue tie, and hundreds of fans squealed and shouted his name as he made his way through the crowded hearing room, smiling and nodding like the guest of honor at an awards banquet.
Cooper said very little, but did so with insouciant humility, as if he had rehearsed his lines for maximum entertainment value. The performance began with his first answer. “What is your present occupation?” asked Stripling. Cooper paused, smiled, slightly lowered and then shrugged his well-padded shoulders. “An actor,” he offered apologetically.
Then, after providing some autobiographical details, Cooper was asked if he’d noticed “any communistic influence in Hollywood or in the motion picture industry.”
“I believed I have noticed some,” he responded. There had been statements of “pinko mouthing,” Cooper explained, such as “Don’t you think the Constitution of the United States is about one hundred fifty years out of date?” and “Perhaps this would be a more efficient government without a Congress.” The latter was received with twitters from the audience.
Cooper then allowed that he turned down quite a few scripts because they seemed “tinged with communistic ideas.” But when pressed by his interrogators, he could not name a single one. He read most of the scripts at night, he explained, and if they weren’t any good he didn’t bother to finish them and sent them back whence they came.
Was Communism on the increase? “It is very difficult to say right now … because it has become unpopular and a little risky to say too much. You notice the difference. People who were quite easy to express their thoughts before begin to clam up more than they used to.” It was impossible to tell whether Cooper found this change of atmosphere positive or regrettable.
It was over in fifteen minutes. Cooper had managed to be at once charming, patriotic, anti-Communist, and completely unenlightening. Most of all, unlike many of his fellow witnesses from the Motion Picture Alliance, he had named no names—neither of writers nor of scripts. It was undoubtedly his most nuanced performance of 1947. Still, he had managed to sum up a general popular feeling that Communism should not be taken seriously as a legitimate ideology because “I didn’t feel it was on the level,” meaning that Communists were dishonest about what their beliefs were and who they owed their loyalty to.
It’s impossible to know for certain what Cooper was really thinking that day, to know how much of his behavior was premeditated and calculated and how much was ad-libbed by a man who knew his celebrity and often-avowed conservatism made him politically bulletproof. Apparently he had learned from his clumsy and unsuccessful intervention on Thomas E. Dewey’s behalf against FDR. A few weeks after he testified, Cooper was quoted as saying, “I feel very strongly that actors haven’t any business at all to shoot their faces off about things I know we know damn little about.”
The nineteen “unfriendly” witnesses subpoenaed by the committee had waited for a week to be called to testify. They had taken rooms at the Shoreham Hotel, where the FBI secretly listened in on their phone calls and recorded their conversations with their lawyers. “We were in our own capital, yet no foreign city could have been more alien and hostile,” recalled screenwriter Howard Koch, one of the nineteen. “All our hotel rooms were bugged. When we … wanted to talk with each other or with our attorneys, we either had to keep twirling a metal key to jam the circuit or go out of doors.”
The second week of testimony was supposed to begin with Eric Johnston, a former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who was now leader of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Washington-based trade association representing the major studios. Johnston had met with the nineteen’s lawyers and assured them that the studios would support their right to free speech and association. “Tell the boys not to worry,” he told the lawyers. “There will never be a blacklist. We’re not going to go totalitarian to please this committee.”
The cause of free speech also had the vocal support of Hollywood’s liberal establishment. Directors William Wyler and John Huston and screenwriter Philip Dunne organized the Committee for the First Amendment to oppose the committee’s inquisition, gathered names and celebrity endorsements, and chartered a flight to Washington to protest the hearings. David Chasen volunteered his famous restaurant as headquarters and dozens of people met there every day to make phone calls, lick stamps, and stuff envelopes. Ava Gardner poured coffee, while Charles Einfeld, who ran the powerful publicity department at Twentieth Century-Fox, brought in his entire staff to write press releases and position papers. The delegation to Washington was led by Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Gene Kelly. They made stopovers in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh for public rallies and photo sessions, and there were lively drinking contests aboard the plane. Back in Hollywood, celebrities like Judy Garland, Robert Young, John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson, and Lucille Ball cut tapes for “Hollywood Strikes Back,” a two-part ABC Radio program attacking the committee. “Who do you think they’re really after?” actor Fredric March asked his national audience. “They’re after you.”
Meanwhile, the nineteen (with the exception of German playwright Bertolt Brecht) sought to work out a common strategy for their testimony. Their choices were limited and all were fraught with danger to themselves and their cause. They could refuse to answer the committee’s questions and invoke the First Amendment’s right of free political association, but that would undoubtedly earn them a citation for contempt of Congress. Or they could invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, but that would make it appear as if they had something to hide. Liberals like Philip Dunne and Dore Schary suggested a variation of this idea: invoke the Fifth to refuse to answer questions, then hold a press conference immediately afterward and reveal that they were indeed Communists. This too was rejected. Their lawyers argued, quite correctly, that if any of the nineteen publicly admitted they were Communists, they would be inviting prosecution under the 1940 Alien Registration Act, which made it a federal crime to belong to an organization advocating overthrow of the government. Also, the committee could have issued each of them a new subpoena and required them to testify again and held them in contempt if they refused to answer. Once they admitted being present or former Communists, they would have no legal protection against answering the committee’s next question: who else was a member?
In the end they chose another equally hopeless option: they decided they would answer the committee’s questions but do so in their own way. They wanted to turn the tables on their interrogators by using their answers to attack and undermine the committee’s legitimacy, invert the political theater, and somehow make the hearings work to their advantage.
When the session opened on Monday morning, Chairman Thomas had a surprise of his own: instead of the sober-sided Eric Johnston, he chose to call first to the stand screenwriter John Howard Lawson. It was a clever tactical move. Lawson, the leader of the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party, was an intelligent man but also the most strident and pompous-sounding of the nineteen.
Bushy-browed and dressed in a rumpled sport coat with a pencil and pen protruding from its breast pocket, Lawson looked more like an ill-tempered professor than a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. He began by demanding to read a written statement. Thomas sounded amenable until he heard Lawson’s opening sentence: “For a week this Committee has conducted an illegal and indecent trial of American citizens …” Then Thomas ruled it “not pertinent to this inquiry,” pounding his gavel to drown out Lawson. The session quickly deteriorated into an exchange of poorly aimed artillery fire between two loose cannons. Lawson insisted that questions about his political affiliations and membership in the Screen Writers Guild were “an invasion of the right of association under the Bill of Rights.” Thomas replied, “Now you are just making a big scene for yourself and getting all het up.”
Then Stripling took over and posed the cosmic HUAC question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
Lawson replied by not replying, accusing the committee of invading “the rights and privileges and immunity of American citizens” and of “using the old technique, which was used in Hitler Germany in order to create a scare here…”
Lawson wasn’t finished. “It is unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach the committee the basic principles of American—” but the rest was cut off by the pounding of Thomas’s gavel. The chairman ordered his security men to eject Lawson from the witness table.
Then Thomas called on committee investigator Louis J. Russell, a former FBI agent, who recited the information that had been secretly supplied by the FBI: Lawson’s party registration card, number 47275, issued on December 10, 1944. Russell also submitted an eight-page résumé of Lawson’s purported Communist activities. Meanwhile, outside the hearing room, Lawson read the rest of his opening statement to reporters, solemnly alleging that the so-called evidence against him “comes from a parade of stool pigeons, neurotics, publicity-seeking clowns, Gestapo agents, paid informers, and a few ignorant and frightened artists.”
It was not a popular performance. Carl Foreman watched newsreel coverage at a Los Angeles movie theater and saw a middle-aged couple in the row in front of him react violently to Lawson’s indignant fulminations. “Jack seemed sly, cunning, shady,” recalled Carl, who was personally very fond of Lawson. “Suddenly the woman in front of me yelled, ‘Kill him, kill him!’ She thought he was a man who wouldn’t tell the truth.”
Having catapulted Lawson from the hearing room, Thomas finally called Eric Johnston, who offered a more measured critique of the hearings. “A damaging impression of Hollywood has spread all over the country as a result of last week’s hearings,” Johnston complained, adding, “It must be a great satisfaction to the Communist leadership in this country to have people believe that Hollywood Communists are astronomical in number and almost irresistible in power.”
“We are tired of having irresponsible charges made again and again and never sustained,” he added, speaking for the entire film industry. “If we have committed a crime we want to know it. If not, we should not be harassed and badgered by congressional committees.”
After that, the committee fielded a steady parade of unfriendly witnesses, each of whom sought to answer its questions with his own special blend of anger and contempt. A few managed a touch of humor. Ring Lardner Jr. replied most famously after Thomas asked him for the fourth or fifth time if he was or had ever been a member of the party. “I could answer it,” said Lardner, “but if I did I would hate myself in the morning.” After each witness finished, Russell was called to the stand to describe the party card and alleged subversive activities and affiliations of the newly departed.
On the second to last day, Thomas took a break from the ongoing parade of party members and called RKO’s Dore Schary to the stand.
As a liberal, Schary found himself in no-man’s-land without a map to navigate the hearing’s open warfare between left and right. The various Hollywood Ten witnesses—present or former Communists all—had come and gone, dispatched with fury and ridicule by Thomas and Stripling. Schary knew he himself was considered by the FBI and by Jim McGuinness and other right-wingers to be in league with the Communists.
Like a man on the high-wire, the head of production at RKO gave a cautious but balanced performance. Committee members demanded to know why Schary felt it was acceptable to hire known Communists. He replied by drawing a careful distinction between being a member of the party and advocating the overthrow of the government by violence or other means. He would not hesitate to hire the former if that person were best qualified for the job at hand; he would fire the latter. And he suggested that in any case a Supreme Court ruling prohibited him from denying employment to anyone for purely political reasons.
Schary’s response infuriated Chairman Thomas. The two New Jersey natives then squared off. “I want to tell you something,” Thomas lectured Schary. If Americans didn’t wake up to the Communist threat, he warned, they would end up like France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and other countries facing Communist domination. “It is the Rip Van Winkle opinion that has been permitting Communism to grow through the world the way it has,” said Thomas.
Schary stood up to Thomas’s alarmism. He had opposed Communists all his working life, Schary said, and had helped defeat them in the Screen Writers Guild and other organizations. “I don’t think Communism has anything to offer the American people, and that is why I don’t think it is as dangerous as some people do,” he testified. “… I don’t think they have any weight, either in the organizations of Hollywood or in the actual things that appear on the screen.”
Schary’s realism clashed repeatedly with the committee’s fantasy of Communists run amok. He walked a careful line, seeking to make the crucial contrast between dissent and subversion. A democratic society had to allow room for the former, no matter how hard it cracked down on the latter.
Thomas finally let him go. “Thank you very much, Mr. Schary,” he concluded, “and don’t forget what I said about Rip Van Winkle.” The audience chuckled.
The next day was the final round of testimony with Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, and the enigmatic German playwright Bertolt Brecht, soft-spoken, polite, and dedicated to Marxism, who repeatedly claimed that he had never been a member of the Communist Party and was praised by Thomas as “a good example” for his supposedly candid testimony. A few weeks later Brecht hopped a plane to Paris and made his way to East Berlin, never to return to the United States.
Eight other witnesses were scheduled to be questioned, but Thomas surprised friend and foe alike by suddenly halting the proceedings. He said the committee still had sixty-eight alleged party members to interrogate, and that the staff was also engaged in an “extensive study” of Communist propaganda in films. “We will resume the hearings as soon as possible,” he pledged.
It didn’t happen. Stripling later wrote that the committee had stopped because the hearings were taking on “the overtones of a broken record,” and that they had heard through reliable sources that Communists from New York were planning to descend en masse and pack the hearing room with protesters. But the real reason, many believed, was that Thomas and Stripling feared their bullying tactics were creating sympathy for the unfriendly witnesses.
Thomas concluded with a final warning to the film moguls. “The industry should set about immediately to clean its own house and not wait for public opinion to force it to do so.”
The Hollywood Ten returned home to cheering crowds and the support of mainstream newspaper editorial pages like the New York Times and Washington Post. Paul McNutt, counsel to the Motion Picture Association, claimed “a complete vindication of our position.” But the victory was illusory. The Ten’s futile efforts to out-shout and out-insult committee members clearly had backfired. They sounded like men who had something to hide. And indeed they did. The party membership cards and numbers that Russell presented were convincing evidence that all of the Ten were Communists either past or present.
The Ten have come under much criticism in the years since for their stridency and miscalculations before the committee. Some critics accused them of following orders from hardline party leaders in New York—and presumably Moscow—who were more interested in creating political martyrs than in helping the Ten avoid prison (this would become Carl Foreman’s view). But there’s no evidence such orders were ever given. In truth, the Hollywood Ten were the first of their kind to undergo this particular type of public inquisition. They had no established blueprint to follow, no coherent and well-tried strategy to deal with the unprecedented legal and verbal assault they faced. Under such circumstances, it’s hard to imagine any strategy that could have succeeded.
Eric Johnston, sensing the winds of change and bowing to them forthwith, led the industry into full retreat. The head of the Motion Picture Association had pledged there would be no blacklist. But Johnston knew the film studios were vulnerable because of the changing economics of the industry and the changing politics of America. Even a localized boycott of certain films by the American Legion or other pressure groups, he feared, could ignite a nationwide wildfire.
Johnston wasted no time. He called for a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for November 24. Some eighty studio executives, producers, and lawyers gathered. Johnston told them they only had two choices: retain the Hollywood Ten and issue a public statement pledging to keep all subversive material out of their movies in the future, or fire them and announce a policy of never again employing known Communists or subversives.
Johnston supported the latter alternative, citing the threat of an American Legion boycott and noting unconfirmed reports that an audience in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, had thrown rocks at the screen of a theater showing a film starring Katharine Hepburn, an outspoken critic of the committee. He also reported that RKO and Twentieth Century-Fox had already decided to fire three of the Hollywood Ten.
Several of the studio heads supported him. But Samuel Goldwyn, an independent film producer and outspoken maverick, dissented, telling the group there was an air of unjustified panic in the room. Dore Schary noted there was no proof that any of the Ten had advocated the overthrow of the government, and since Hollywood’s executives had all claimed there had been no Communist propaganda in their films, it would dishonor the industry to launch a witch hunt. But James Byrnes, a former secretary of state whom Johnston had hired as outside legal counsel, reminded the meeting that the morals clause in virtually every studio contract gave them the power to fire anyone at any time in order to protect the reputation of the industry. Johnston, who’d been slapping his hotel room key on the table as he spoke, now slammed it down harder and said he would quit unless the meeting agreed to take action.
No vote was taken; the consensus was obvious. Johnston had won. Schary allowed himself to be drafted onto the committee to write the new policy statement. “Do it, maybe they won’t go crazy,” Goldwyn pleaded.
The statement was a mishmash of contradictions, reflecting the lack of true agreement among those involved. The first paragraph deplored the action of the Hollywood Ten in refusing to answer the committee’s questions, and the second paragraph announced their firing and pledged not to rehire any one of them “until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.” It went on to pledge that the studios would not knowingly employ a Communist or any member of a group or party that advocated the overthrow of the government.
“In pursuing this policy, we are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source,” the executives solemnly declared, although hysteria and intimidation were in fact the causes of their surrender. The statement recognized the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. “We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear,” it concluded.
That same day, the House of Representatives voted by 347 to 17 to uphold the committee’s contempt citation against Albert Maltz and 240 to 16 against Dalton Trumbo. The citations against the rest of the Ten were confirmed by voice vote, authorizing the legal proceedings that would lead to their arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment.
Schary, producer Walter Wanger, and MGM executive Eddie Mannix—all of whom had opposed the firings—were assigned the unenviable task of meeting with each of the three artistic guilds to explain what the studio heads had done and elicit the guilds’ support. The Screen Writers Guild was the hardest audience. Seven of the Hollywood Ten were in the room to hear them out. Schary, himself a former guild member back in his screenwriting days, did most of the talking for the studio heads. “We do not ask you to condone this,” he began.
But Dalton Trumbo expressed the fury he and the other members of the Ten felt. “These three men have come here to force their weasel-minded policies down the throat of this Guild,” declared Trumbo. “I want to denounce them for what they are—liars, hypocrites, and thieves…”
“I was clobbered,” Schary would recall.
The Hollywood Ten hearings of 1947 were one of those pivotal moments in American political history that helped set the direction for the country for more than a decade. They introduced a trio of aspiring young politicians to the national scene—future presidents Richard Nixon (a HUAC member) and Ronald Reagan, and future U.S. senator George Murphy, who, like Reagan, was a leader of the Screen Actors Guild. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, preparing to launch his own brief but incendiary career as the nation’s loudest and most unprincipled Red baiter, stopped by the proceedings as well. “I just came over to watch the very excellent job you gentlemen are doing,” he told Chairman Thomas.
Richard Nixon started out before the hearings as a gung-ho Red hunter. He promised the Hollywood Reporter that the testimony would be “sensational,” exposing a “Red network” running from top to bottom of the film industry. But Nixon kept a low-key profile during the hearings themselves, asking simple, logical questions and showing sympathy for the studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, who later became one of his financial supporters. During the second week of the hearings Nixon vanished altogether. The Committee for the First Amendment had hoped to meet with him in Washington, since he was the only congressional member from California on the panel. Nixon’s staff told the group he had been called home unexpectedly to Southern California. But William Wyler, who had remained in Hollywood during the hearings, couldn’t find Nixon either at his office or home. “Somehow he had managed to disappear into thin air,” recalled Philip Dunne. Nixon had other priorities; his glory days over the Alger Hiss case were soon to come.
The lessons were clear: that the committee was determined to conduct its anti-Communist campaign without regard to anyone’s legal or constitutional rights; that the ultimate goal was to force the industry to bend to the power and will of the committee and purge itself of suspected subversives; that this was a very large category that included many liberals as well as Communists; and that the Communists’ imperative of maintaining secrecy had proven self-defeating by giving the strong impression they had something to hide.
Jews too were back in the firing line. Six of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish, including John Howard Lawson (whose family name originally was Levy). Congressman John Rankin, perhaps the House of Representatives’ most virulent Jew baiter, did not sit on the subcommittee that held the hearings, but he appeared before the House soon afterward to help tie a self-satisfied bow on the package. The Committee for the First Amendment was actually a Communist front organization, he told his fellow congressmen, and many of its celebrities were hiding behind stage names that concealed their true ethnic identity. Citing the committee’s petition opposing the hearings, Rankin noted, “One of the names is June Havoc. We found out from the Motion Picture Almanac that her real name is June Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out that his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky … Another one is Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Edward Iskowitz. There’s one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg. There is another one out there who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg.” Rankin never used the word Jew, but he couldn’t have been clearer if he’d read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the Congressional Record.
Ten of the fifteen movie producers who signed the Waldorf Statement were also Jews. And the chairman of the committee that drafted the statement was Mendel Silberberg, an entertainment lawyer who was the unofficial leader of Hollywood’s Jewish community. While it was easy, writes cultural historian Neal Gabler, “to view them as arrogant and stupid and reactionary … they were also in the grip of a deep and legitimate fear: the fear that somehow the delicate rapprochement they had established between themselves and the country would be destroyed, and with it their lives.”
“They were frightened to death,” screenwriter Jerome Chodorov said of the studio heads.
But the decision to pull the plug on the Hollywood Ten wasn’t made by the moguls alone. The studios were increasingly dependent on New York investors. Chase Bank owned Twentieth Century-Fox, Rockefeller interests controlled MGM, Irving Bank was heavily invested in RKO, and other East Coast firms had large stakes in Warners and Columbia. Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, told Philip Dunne that he personally had opposed the decision but had been overruled and ordered to fire Ring Lardner Jr. “He hinted that the actual decision had been made on Wall Street by the money men who bankrolled the movie companies,” Dunne recalled.
Still, it was the studio executives who proceeded to summon talent agents to their offices and virtually command them to inform their clients that the studios would no longer tolerate public stances by performers on controversial issues. Even Humphrey Bogart, one of the nation’s most popular and highly paid movie stars, got the message. He felt compelled to declare “I’m No Communist” in a flustered and apologetic article for Photoplay Magazine. In it, he recounted how his old friend, newspaper columnist and veteran Red-baiter Ed Sullivan, had warned him that after his appearance in Washington, “the public is beginning to think you’re a Red! Get that through your skull, Bogie!” The article went on to assure his readers that he “despise[d] Communism,” and that he had gone to Washington not to defend the infamous Hollywood Ten, but “solely in the interests of freedom of speech…”
“We may not have been very smart in the way we did things,” the great Bogart confessed. They “may have been dopes in some people’s eyes,” he added, “but we were American dopes!”
At a meeting at Ira Gershwin’s house, Bogart was less contrite and deeply furious with those he felt had betrayed him by persuading him to join a lost cause, shouting at Danny Kaye, “You fuckers sold me out!”
Edward G. Robinson, another celluloid tough guy, also caved, authoring a piece for the American Legion magazine headlined HOW THE REDS MADE A SUCKER OUT OF ME. Robinson sounded a pathetic note of contrition as he detailed all the ways he had been misled by people he believed were good-hearted liberals but who had turned out to be nefarious Communists. “I have changed from a trusting man to a suspicious one,” wrote the rueful Little Caesar. “And I blame the Communists for that change … They slandered their enemies with innuendos and half-truths … to obscure their aim of world domination, oppression, and slavery.”
As for Dore Schary, he said Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk—who respectively had produced and directed Crossfire, his most favored film—had lied to him when they denied they had ever been members of the party and he felt no sense of obligation to them even though he felt bad about their firing. Schary “seems completely aware of the situation in its fullest implications,” wrote director Joseph Losey, himself a Communist Party member, to his friend Adrian Scott. “He acts dazed and looks sick.”
Schary’s view was that all three parties to the hearings had behaved badly. The committee had acted with malice and had flouted the civil rights of the witnesses; the Hollywood Ten had been badly advised by their lawyers and had participated unwittingly in their own legal martyrdom; and the representatives of the industry—presumably including Schary himself—had “behaved cowardly and cruelly.”
Still, Schary was not about to sacrifice his gold-plated career for two recalcitrant former Communists. In his memoirs, Schary says he decided that he could do more good fighting the blacklist from within his company, RKO, than from outside. But he may have been more frank at the time when he told New Yorker writer Lillian Ross, “I like making pictures. I want to stay in the industry. I like it.”
The Ten should have stood up and publicly declared their Communism, he told Ross. “That’s all they had to do. As it is, ten men have been hurt and nobody can be happy. We haven’t done any work in weeks. Now is the time for all of us to go back to the business of making pictures.”