WHEN fact meets fiction, Hollywood usually prefers to take the more picturesque route to the box office. Nowhere more so, alleges an outspoken new book, than in the portrayal of the “blacklist” years of the Cold War. It was, without question, the film capital’s darkest hour. Summoned before congressmen investigating Communist infiltration of America’s main institutions, movie-makers were encouraged to name names of colleagues who had been sympathetic to left-wing causes. The tempest of claim and counter-claim in the late 1940s paved the way for the rise of the red-baiter Joe McCarthy a few years later. Over the decades, film-goers have grown accustomed to seeing the objects of the blacklist — symbolised by “The Hollywood Ten” — portrayed as victims of all-American hysteria. Countless books have been published about the era, while films such as The Front have recreated the fearful atmosphere generated by the anti-Communist witch-hunts.
Newsreel footage of beleaguered actors, writers and directors trying to defend their constitutional rights in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is ingrained in Hollywood’s consciousness. Some artists, barred from the studios, were forced to work anonymously. Others left the US altogether and sought new opportunities in Europe. Careers — and lives — were ruined.
But was the issue as straightforward as we are usually led to believe? Were the black hats and the white hats really so easy to distinguish in this epic drama? Red Star over Hollywood, written by the husband-and-wife team of Ronald and Allis Radosh, sets out to provide a more nuanced and critical account of Hollywood’s darkest hour. The picture that emerges is far from reverent. Little wonder that Tom Wolfe has gone as far as declaring that the book will extinguish “the poignant myth of the Hollywood blacklist”.
The Radoshes pull no punches. While they condemn the blacklist itself as a restriction of free expression, they argue that the tragedy was ultimately not the fault of hectoring congressmen and spineless studio bosses. The real villains, in their view, were politically committed members of the film-making community who manipulated their colleagues, thus besmirching the reputation of scores of people with no real connection to radical politics.
As the Radoshes put it in a recent article: “The Hollywood Ten were among the most committed of the party faithful, yet they’ve been wrapped and protected in a romantic haze, allowed to wear their appearance before HUAC as a badge of honour. The blacklist was a godsend, enabling them to reinvent themselves as heroic victims rather than what they really were: die-hard defenders of Stalin who accepted every twist and turn of the party line, whether it was the Nazi-Soviet pact, the invasion of Finland or the purge trials.
“Today, we seem to have forgotten the credible reasons that led some disillusioned former Communists to reluctantly appear as friendly witnesses before HUAC . . . The blacklist was an abomination. It was wrong to deprive artists of their livelihood because of their political views. But its most malicious contribution to postwar history was to obscure for ever the truth about Communism in Hollywood. The most astute former blacklisted screenwriter came to understand this. Dalton Trumbo explained that it was the party’s ‘secret’ organisational structure that gave rise to the blacklist.”
This is not quite the version of reality we generally see in the movies or in much of the literature. That America’s Communist Party — slavishly following every twist and turn of Stalin’s policies — regarded Hollywood as a significant source of influence and funds rarely figures in fictional portrayals of the era. And as the Radoshes make clear, many Hollywood liberals — who had been sympathetic to Communist campaigns during the “Popular Front ” era of the 1930s — had lost patience with their left-wing colleagues even before HUAC relaunched major hearings in 1947.
The turning point had been the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Communists who persisted in trying to defend the indefensible ultimately alienated progressives such as the actor Melvyn Douglas. By the time the HUAC rattled into view, trailing lurid headlines in its wake, Communism was already falling out of fashion amid the cocktail set. One of the great ironies of the entire sorry story is that the HUAC’s strong-arm tactics (not to mention the anti-Semitic leanings of some of its key members, such as the Mississippi segregationist John Rankin) actually generated sympathy and support for the Hollywood Ten.
“The party quickly moved to transform the Hollywood Ten into an asset,” the Radoshes conclude. “The Ten dutifully trudged from one party event to another, speaking about their plight and serving as opening acts for other causes that the CP wished to piggyback on theirs. As Trumbo realised, this strategy further dehumanised and marginalised them.” Ronald Radosh has already acquired a reputation as a debunker of myths as the author of The Rosenberg File, the definitive book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple sent to the electric chair as Soviet spies. While their supporters have long maintained the couple’s innocence — a belief that Radosh himself shared for many years — the book established that the Rosenbergs were indeed part of a spy ring.
A former left-wing activist who has moved to the Right, Radosh came of age at the height of the Hollywood controversies. Indeed, his childhood friends included the son and daughter of Lester Cole, a member of the Ten who played a leading role in launching the Screen Writers Guild.
“Lester Cole had always encouraged me to become a CP apparatchik when I grew up,” Radosh explained to me in an email interview. “I had the same feelings about the Ten as I had about the Rosenbergs. The Rosenbergs were framed and innocent; the Ten were martyrs for free speech. I believed they all were blacklisted simply because they were progressives and pilloried for their ideas, and had done nothing wrong at all as Hollywood Communists. I can’t pinpoint when I changed my view about them. I simply realised a few years ago that the Ten’s martyrdom was the last unsullied myth of the Old Left.”
Whether Hollywood will be listening is another matter. As the screenwriter, author and A-list blogger Roger L. Simon points out, opinions that deviate from the norm are not welcome around the dinner tables.
“Most people in today's Hollywood do not want to debate politics seriously because politics has been conflated with religion for them and is therefore an object of faith. If you express a view outside the church, you are simply not heard, at least at first.”
