The Hollywood Ten in History's Spotlight

Looking Back at the blacklist of a half-century ago, the plot takes a different twist

By K.L. Billingsley

Communism is the largest totalitarian movement of this century, but even after the Cold War the study of that movement's history in the United States faces obstacles. This important subject is seldom treated on its own merits but viewed through the dark lens of the McCarthy Era, when anti-Communist hysteria ran rampant. Excessive attention to the zealotry of red-hunters, however, has turned key historical episodes, such as Communist involvement in Hollywood, into a kind of Western.

Fifty years ago the House Committee on Un-American Activities rode into town and tarred a group of writers and directors as Communists. Then they road out of town leaving the Hollywood Ten, as they came to be known, along with hundreds of other idealistic artists, to suffer under a blacklist enforced by the studios.

That's the black-and-white version found in the Hollywood guilds' upcoming commemorations of the blacklist, and in a number of books and documentaries, usually with "inquisition" in the title and the Ten portrayed as persecuted heroes. Screen fare such as Woody Allen's The Front and Guilty by Suspicion (with Robert DeNiro) forms the only knowledge some people have of the subject.

Screenwriter Philip Dunne, a veteran of those times, wrote in 1980 that "the Hollywood Ten have been virtually deified," and admitted what is still true, that the full story had never been told. The blacklist is the sequel to the story of Communism in Hollywood, more akin to an espionage thriller, with Josef Stalin and the Communist Party USA in starring roles.

During the 1930s Soviet dictator Josef Stalin launched a cultural offensive through the Communist International or Comintern, with Hollywood as a major target. "One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda," said Comintern official Willi Muenzenburg, "is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them."

To achieve that goal, the Party launched a two-pronged offensive. One came through the many trade unions working in the studios and played out through a violent series of jurisdictional disputes. The other came through the so-called talent guilds of actors, writers and directors.

John Howard Lawson, prominent member of the Hollywood Ten, emerged from the left-wing theater movement in New York, where he was on record that "I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position, and to do so in the most specific manner." Communist screenwriter Paul Jarrico described Lawson as "an infantile leftist," but that proved no barrier to his advancement. In 1933, Lawson was made head of the reorganized Screen Writers Guild by acclamation and quickly became the most dominant and evangelical Communist in town. The Hollywood Party he led was able to wield influence far beyond its numbers by working through front groups.

These included the Motion Picture Artists Committee, the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. These groups dominated political activity in Hollywood, camouflaging a pro-Soviet stance with populist pieties. As Philip Dunne put it, "All over town the industrious Communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog." But the Communists' anti-fascist stance changed in 1939 when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler and the two dictators invaded Poland, effectively starting World War II.

What the Party had previously promoted as a noble anti-fascist cause now became an imperialist dogfight and intrigue of Wall Street. The Communist Party and the German-American Bund shared slogans such as "The Yanks Are Not Coming." The work of the Anti-Nazi League was taken over by the American Peace Mobilization (APM), whose wholly-owned subsidiaries included groups such as the Hollywood Peace Forum and Hollywood Peace Council. Herbert Biberman, one of the Ten, served on APM's national council.

The most prominent member of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, whom filmmaker Oliver Stone hails as one of his heroes, joined the Communist Party when it was in alliance with National Socialist Germany. The Party serialized his anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, in the Daily Worker. In 1940, while the Nazi forces were sweeping across Europe, Trumbo wrote a novel called The Remarkable Andrew which opposes American aid to victims of the Nazi aggression on the grounds that the ghost of Andrew Jackson would not approve of such actions. "There's no point in cooking up an alliance with a country that's already licked," the resurrected general growls.

The Party line reversed itself again in June of 1941 when Hitler invaded the USSR and, as screenwriter Jim McGuinness put it, "the Communists were given leave of absence to become patriotic." Works of Stalinatry such as Mission to Moscow played to packed houses. Lillian Hellman authored Watch on the Rhine and North Star, which presented glowing portraits of the Soviet Union. So did Song of Russia, written by Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins.

The Communists came to control the Hollywood Writer's Mobilization, a clearing house for scripts and supplier of materials for speeches and troop shows. The Ten kept busy writing patriotic and militaristic films. Dalton Trumbo wrote Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and John Howard wrote Lawson Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara. Albert Maltz penned Pride of the Marines and Destination Tokyo while Alvah Bessie contributed Objective Burma. At this time the Hollywood Party maintained a blacklist against non-Communist writers largely by circulating false rumors about them. Trumbo bragged about the Party's success in preventing anti-Stalin works, such as Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar, from reaching the screen.

After the war Stalin shifted the Party back to its anti-Western class hatred. In Hollywood the Party followed suit, attacking American and Allied policy and defending or denying Soviet atrocities, including the military occupation eastern Europe. Trumbo railed against the "cult of the New Liberalism," which he also called the "non-Communist left. As Stalin swung the USSR back to its traditional anti-Semitism, Trumbo claimed that 3.5 million Jews lived peacefully in the Soviet Union "under the protection of laws which ban discrimination of any kind."

An investigation of Soviet agent Gerhard Eisler brought the House Committee to Hollywood, where Gerhard's brother Hanns worked as a composer. There the Committee found a number of people disposed to help them because of the treatment they had received from the Communists during the war. In contrast to these "friendly witnesses," others refused to cooperate. The "unfriendly 19" eventually became the "unfriendly 10," then the Hollywood Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

Dmytryk was a director and Scott a producer; the rest were writers of such fare as Little Orphan Annie (Ornitz) and Charlie Chan's Greatest Case (Cole). Clearly the Committee did not, as some have charged, single out the best and brightest. As director Billy Wilder quipped, only a few were talented, the rest were just unfriendly.

During the October 1947 House Committee hearings on Communism in the motion picture industry -- three years before McCarthy began to hit stride -- many in Hollywood expected the Ten to defend their Party history. After all, it had never been illegal to be a Party member and the USA had fought alongside the USSR during the war. Instead the Ten defied the Committee in angry speeches, with Trumbo warning about "the beginning of the American concentration camp." Director John Huston, who organized Hollywood Fights Back to support the Ten, later discovered the reason for the antics.

The Ten had previously testified they were not Communists, so to admit that now would have left them open to perjury. "And so, when I believed them to have engaged to defend the freedom of the individual," Huston wrote, "they were really looking after their own skins."

As many an aspiring writer, director and actress has learned, no one has a right to a lucrative job in the movies. After the 1947 hearings, it was the producers' decision not to hire Communists, just as it was their practice during the 1930s to keep German director Leni Riefenstahl from working in Hollywood.

The Ten served brief sentences for contempt of Congress and without doubt suffered economically because of the producers' stand. However, the blacklist notwithstanding, Trumbo, Lardner and others continued to enjoy a substantial if not luxurious lifestyle. Some worked abroad, others under fake names. They were also free to work on the New York stage, book publishing and journalism, where no blacklist operated.

It was the business of the producers whom they hired and it was the personal decision of various writers and directors whether or not they cooperated with the Committee. Those who did, such as Elia Kazan, have been vilified by the Hollywood left to this day. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Hollywood hearings, the question for posterity is how the Ten should be regarded, according to movie legend or the historical record.

The Ten rejected democratic principles of in favor of Marxism-Leninism. They placed allegiance to a totalitarian dictatorship above loyalty to their own country, in which they gained fame and fortune. They prostituted their talents in the services of Josef Stalin, the worst mass murderer in human history. They remained silent while Stalin threw their fellow writers into the Gulag, from which most never returned. With the exception of Ed Dmytryk, booted out of the Party by Lawson for hiring a writer unapproved by the Party, none had serious misgivings.

They were, in short, dutiful and unrepentant Stalinists. More than fifty years after the fact, the uncut version of the Ten's acts of collaboration still awaits a full release, in living color. Maybe some day a filmmaker will prove up to the task.

--K.L. Billingsley

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