Amid the early days of the Cold War and growing hysteria about communists in the United States, the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched an investigation of communist influence in the motion picture industry. The resulting blacklist, or ban on employment of alleged communists, hurt both individual careers and the morale of the film community as a whole.
During World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States were allies against Nazi Germany. When the war ended in 1945, a rapid worsening of Soviet-American relations turned the American Communist Party,
Dalton Trumbo (front, second from left) stands with other members of the Hollywood Ten, shortly before he reported to prison in 1950.
The American Communist Party had been more popular in the 1930’s, when massive unemployment at home contrasted with apparently full employment in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and when Stalin opposed German expansion and helped the Spanish Republic battle fascist rebels. The party’s respectability, diminished by the German-Soviet Pact of August, 1939, was restored when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941.
Communism had special appeal for writers, who found Hollywood to be an oasis of good pay in the economic desert of Depression-era America. After talking pictures were introduced, journalists, playwrights involved in New York City’s struggling left-wing theater, short-story writers, and even some who had never written before found scriptwriting jobs in the film industry. Many of them joined the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party, which helped organize the Screen Writers Guild. The industry’s profit orientation, however, left Communist writers little chance, except during World War II, to give films an ideological slant.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities
When the rude behavior of some of the Hollywood Ten at the hearings turned public opinion against them, the heads of the major studios became frightened. In November, 1947, the Motion Picture Association of America announced that the Hollywood Ten would be dismissed from their jobs at the various studios and that no known member of the Communist Party would be hired in the future. This ban on employment, the blacklist, later was extended to all who refused to cooperate with HUAC, whether they were proven to be Communists or not. The American Legion exerted pressure on motion-picture studios to maintain the blacklist; other private organizations and individuals smoked out Communists, publishing lists of supposedly subversive entertainers and writers.
Liberal actors and directors who once had vocally opposed the HUAC investigation now stopped doing so, fearing for their careers. The president of the Screen Actors Guild, a young actor named Ronald Reagan
In 1951, HUAC, with John S. Wood of Georgia now its chairman, resumed its investigation of Hollywood communism. This probe continued through 1951. Some of those summoned refused to cooperate, citing the Fifth Amendment; others, including stage and motion-picture director Elia Kazan, cooperated willingly, naming past associates who had been Communists. Either because of eagerness to leave prison and resume his career or because of a genuine change of heart, Dmytryk publicly renounced communism, giving the names of past associates who were Communists. He was the only one of the Hollywood Ten to do so.
In the late 1950’s, HUAC suffered some setbacks, and its investigatory zeal began to flag. In 1958, Arthur Miller
Many blacklisted writers continued to write screenplays under assumed names. Indeed, Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for The Brave One
The effects of the blacklist and of the era of suspicion that it exemplified were many. The blacklist is estimated to have claimed about three hundred victims. It certainly harmed individual careers, although not all blacklistees were hurt equally. Scriptwriters could keep working in several ways: by leaving the United States and working for foreign film studios; by arranging to have someone else, a “front,” pretend to be the author of scripts that they had written, while still receiving at least some of the monetary reward; or by writing under a pseudonym. Some blacklisted scriptwriters ultimately regained their careers in the American film industry, but many did not.
Actors who refused to cooperate with HUAC or who were revealed by informers or professional Communist hunters to have had past associations with Communist Party causes usually saw their livelihoods ruined. Working under pseudonyms was impossible, as their faces would appear on screen. The film industry shunned them; the nascent television industry, dependent on corporate sponsors for advertising revenue, was even more determined to steer clear of politically tainted performers. One actor committed suicide, possibly because of problems caused by the blacklist. Left-leaning African American singer and actor Paul Robeson
Playwrights, such as Lillian Hellman (who had written Hollywood scripts in the 1930’s and 1940’s) and Arthur Miller, did not suffer as much financially from their refusal to cooperate with HUAC as did other creative professionals. Playwrights had an outlet for their work on Broadway, which the blacklist never affected as completely as it did cinema and television.
The damage done to the film industry by the blacklist was ameliorated by the extent to which the blacklist could be circumvented. The practice of writing under a pseudonym not only allowed some blacklisted screenwriters to keep writing; it also allowed motion-picture companies to take advantage of the blacklistees’ skills at reduced rates of pay. The Hollywood studios sometimes were permanently deprived of the services of blacklisted writers who found employment in foreign film industries; Joseph Losey, who carved out a career for himself in Great Britain, is an example. Similarly, the stigmatization of playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman as communist sympathizers meant that Hollywood studios deprived themselves of the talents of these two first-rate dramatists, even as their careers continued on Broadway. The banishment of actors for past political actions did cost the film industry some talent. In an industry with a surplus of fresh new faces always eager to break in, however, the loss was small.
One sometimes overlooked effect of the blacklist was the loss of foreign-born talent. Some of the German refugees who had been living and working in Hollywood during World War II went back to Europe to escape harassment for their political views. These included dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who had coauthored a screenplay, novelist Thomas Mann, and composer Hanns Eisler. Charlie Chaplin, the once-beloved British-born film comedian, was hounded out of the United States for a while because of revulsion against both his allegedly left-wing political views and his supposed moral peccadilloes.
Not only the employees but also the bosses of the Hollywood film empire were frightened by the specter of anti-Communist vigilantism. The type of films produced, therefore, was to some extent affected. The trend toward daring films of social realism that had been evident in the late 1940’s was halted, at least for a while. There was a spate of pointedly anti-Communist films
The first Hollywood films to discuss the blacklist explicitly, The Way We Were (1973) and The Front (1976), were released after the era was safely over. Two films made during the blacklist era, however, dealt in a disguised form with the issues involved in the blacklist and the anti-Communist witchhunt. High Noon
The decision of some Hollywood figures to cooperate with congressional investigators by naming names, thereby exposing others to the blacklist and perhaps even destroying such people’s careers, created rifts in the Hollywood community, and in the entertainment world in general, that lasted for years. Elia Kazan, for example, would spend the rest of his life defending his decision to “name names.”
-
Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Extensive discussion of every significant work of film and television worked on by a blacklistee in the second half of the twentieth century. Bibliographic references and index. -
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. An exhaustive study of the Hollywood Ten, the investigation of 1951-1952, and the fate of the blacklistees. Especially informative on the pre-1947 Hollywood communist subculture. The authors view Hollywood’s communists with a mixture of criticism and admiration. Bibliography, endnotes, index, and photographs. Relies heavily on interviews. -
Cole, Lester. Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole. Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1981. The life story of a screenwriter who never beat the blacklist and who never recanted his faith in communism. Although obviously biased, it provides a good victim’s-eye view of the post-World War II purge of the film world. Filmography, photographs, and index. -
Kanfer, Stefan. A Journal of the Plague Years. New York: Atheneum, 1973. A film critic’s chronicle of blacklisting from 1947 to 1958, showing its effects on radio, television, and Broadway as well as Hollywood. Especially informative on the private individuals and organizations that helped HUAC by ferreting out show-business Communists. Sympathetic to blacklistees. Photographs, annotated bibliography, index, no notes. -
Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. In this lengthy but briskly written autobiography, covering everything from childhood to professional life to love life, Kazan vigorously defends his decision to cooperate with HUAC in 1952. Provides some insights into communism in the 1930’s New York City theater. Photographs and index. For the general reader. -
Lardner, Kate. Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Ring Lardner’s daughter provides a personal account of the effects of blacklisting on her father and her family. -
Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. Reprint. New York: Hill & Wang, 2003. A journalist examines the ethical dilemma faced by those who named names for HUAC, thus avoiding their own blacklisting but causing others to be blacklisted. Excellent chapter, based on interviews, on informers’ motives. Rejects anticommunism as a morally valid rationale for naming names. Endnotes, list of interviewees, index. For the general reader. -
Schwartz, Nancy Lynn. The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. A history of the Hollywood Communist screenwriters’ subculture during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The author expresses nearly undiluted admiration for that subculture. Supplements but does not supplant the book by Ceplair and Englund. Endnotes, photographs, index, and filmographies of more than thirty blacklisted and investigated actors and writers. For scholars. -
Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Views the blacklist as part of a general trend toward conformity in the United States during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Especially useful for its examination of how blacklist-era anxieties affected the kind of films made. Excellent bibliographical essay. Index; no notes.
Kazan Brings Naturalism to the Stage and Screen
HUAC Investigates Hollywood
Premiere of High Noon
The Crucible Allegorizes the Red Scare Era
On the Waterfront Wins Best Picture
M*A*S*H Satirizes Warfare