The Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare

I have a confession to make: I once voted Communist.

It’s not that I hold communist views, or feel any particular affinity with Marx and Engels. It was 1984, and neither Ronald Reagan nor Walter Mondale had much appeal. When I stepped into the voting booth, looking at the other candidates on the ballot, I saw that Gus Hall was once again on top of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) ticket. Hall, the longtime general secretary of CPUSA, had been a perennial  presence in presidential races, so much so, he had become the Harold Stassen of the American left. I figured he’d earned my vote — for persistence, if nothing else. And I wanted to see what would happen if I pulled the lever for the Communists — would an alarm go off somewhere, red lights flashing? I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t disappointed when none of that happened to me, or, I imagine, to the other six people in my district who gave their all to Hall.

I can joke about this now, but 75 years ago, even joking about voting Communist would have been enough for people to lose their ability to work. That era is covered by the Skirball Cultural Center’s comprehensive new exhibition, “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare,” on view through September 3rd.

For Cate Thurston, the coordinating curator of the exhibit, “The Blacklist” set out to accomplish a couple of things. Most important, she said, is “placing the blacklist into a larger context of ‘red scares’ in America … It wasn’t a one-off.”

“The Blacklist” covers the era from May 1949, when J. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.), the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and ranking member John Rankin (D-Miss.), first met with studio executives to discuss the communist infiltration of the Screen Writers Guild, (the precursor of the Writers Guild of America [WGA]) until the mid-1970s, when the Screen Actors Guild dropped its loyalty oath requirement.

HUAC broadened its inquiry into ferreting out “subversives” in the entertainment industry. Seventeen screenwriters, producers and directors were subpoenaed to appear. Ten of them (screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott) refused to answer the now-infamous question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” on First Amendment grounds. They were found in Contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and sentenced from six months to a year in jail. They became known as the Hollywood Ten.

Soon, an industry rose up to keep movies, TV and radio free of “subversives”: The Blacklist.  Red Channels, a pamphlet published in 1953 by the rabidly anti-communist journal Counterattack, initially identified 151 entertainment professionals as either “Red Fascists” or their “sympathizers,” a list that by the 1960s expanded to thousands of names. To clear their names, show the sincerity of their patriotism and be allowed to work again,  people had to “name names,” or identify other “reds.”

The exhibit points up how much the blacklist was driven by antisemitism. Six of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish, and to HUAC, “Jewish” might as well have been synonymous with “Communist.” Rankin in particular, was blatantly antisemitic, pointedly referring to Jewish actors Edward G. Robinson and Danny Kaye by their given names: Emmanuel Goldenberg and David Daniel Kaminsky, respectively. “He wanted to make Jews sound foreign, distant, un-American,” Thurston said. “That was his intention right there.”

“The Blacklist and Antisemitism” section includes a never-before-seen memo detailing a conversation Rankin had in the congressional lunchroom. HUAC was going to do a “quick job on Hollywood. We’re going to particularly go after the screenwriters,” the memo reported.  “When you see the artifacts laid out,” Thurston said, “it would be impossible to deny that antisemitism didn’t undergird some of the actions of HUAC and certainly shaped the experiences of Jewish creatives who were blacklisted.”

The artifacts on display range from the media of the day (The Hollywood Reporter was especially fervent in their hatred of “Reds”), to clips of the Ten testifying before the committee, to copies of Red Channels and leaflets, posters, and magazine stories both for and against the Ten, to the more personal — letters from their families sent to Trumbo and Bessie in jail, correspondence from talent and literary agents dropping their blacklisted clients because representing a blacklisted person could get them blacklisted. “We really wanted to underscore the lived experience of those involved,” Thurston said. “I think when history feels really macro, you lose what’s so dynamic about history — that these are people with real lives, not so different from our own.”

She points to the exhibit’s treatment of those who “named names.” Thurston made sure the exhibit’s treatment of them isn’t sympathetic, but “humanizing.”  The exhibit’s goal, she said,  was “never to vilify the actions of anyone, but to add context in the same way that we wanted to make it understandable why folks were attracted to communism and why people cooperated with HUAC.” You don’t have to “agree with their actions,” she said, “to look at the conditions that affected the choices they made.” The material concerning Richard Collins, one of the earliest people to name names, “really showed him struggling with his decision to participate.”  She’s emphatic that “it would be a disservice to history and a disservice to the exhibition if someone tries to cast anyone as the bad guy when, really, the circumstances were the bad guy.”

“We wanted to make it understandable why folks were attracted to communism and why people cooperated with HUAC … You don’t have to agree with their actions to look at the conditions that affected the choices they made.”—Cate Thurston

Thurston’s family was affected by the blacklist. Irwin Shaw, her great-uncle, was blacklisted, and her grandparents — who were both story analysts and screenwriters — were “graylisted,” which she defined as “guilt by association.” Shaw fled to Switzerland, but her grandparents went from “having a very nice life to my grandfather fishing and trading the fish for vegetables.” She appreciates their hurt and anger, but said her job as a historian is different: “To create a round, complicated picture … to show the sharp edges and contours of history.”

Joe Gilford, the son of blacklisted actors Jack Gilford and Madeline Lee, is not a historian. A playwright, author and professor, you can intuit his opinion of those who named names from the title of his 2013 play, based on his parents’ story: “Finks.” He bristles when discussing the blacklist, and practically spits out the name Elia Kazan, the writer/director who famously named names. Kazan was not a victim of the blacklist, Gilford insists. “Why did (he) sign a deal with Columbia and go direct ‘On the Waterfront’?”

“Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is also, sadly, relevant. It’s hard not to see the parallels between the blacklist and today’s cancel culture, where politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle demand the repudiation and silencing of anyone who dares to hold an opinion that goes against their dogma. It’s not too far a jump to see Ron DeSantis’ using his office to punish Disney for disagreeing with his policies and pledging to wage war on “woke” as a 21st century Red Scare.

“If the American democratic project is to work, we can’t see people we disagree with as our enemies.” —Cate Thurston

For Thurston, what makes “The Blacklist” relevant is that Americans have a blind spot —  we’re not good at forging across difference. “If the American democratic project is to work, we can’t see people we disagree with as our enemies.”