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For reasons still unclear, HUAC only called 10 of the 19 to testify. Some have speculated that the 10, later infamous as the "Hollywood 10," were the most vulnerable: Some were Communist Party members; not one was a military veteran (who were still national heroes at the time). More significantly, however, nine were screenwriters. And not just any screenwriters. Many of the 10 had been either founding members of the Screen Writers Guild or involved with it from its inception. Worse, they had also been the most vocal supporters of the Conference of Studio Unions. Thus Lester Cole, John Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr. and six of their guild colleagues along with one director, who also wrote screenplays, found themselves in HUAC's crosshairs.

"No coincidence," says author Ceplair, who now teaches history at Santa Monica College in Southern California.

At this point, irony took the spotlight. Being a Communist was still not illegal. HUAC's ostensible purpose was to root out Communist subversion of the movies, specifically in the form of Red propaganda flickering on screens across the country. The evidence? Ayn Rand cited an image of smiling Russians in a then-contemporary movie, and she, a Russian immigrant, knew that Russians had no reason to smile under communism. Lela Rogers pointed out that in a script by one of the 10, later filmed with her daughter Ginger in it, there appeared the shockingly devious line "Share and share alike, that's democracy."

Even the studio heads, who despised the Hollywood 10 as much as anyone else, testified repeatedly to the committee that despite an infrequent "pro-Communist" passage turning up in a script, no such material ever made it past the editing hatchet of the producer, who still wielded control over content.

But the most damage to the 10 was done, in a way, by the 10 themselves. Obnoxiously attacking the committee's lack of authority, sometimes to the point of being ejected from the hearing room, the 10 created a public-relations disaster, which, in turn, led to a professional-relations disaster. Capitalizing on the perception that these men were at the very least undesirable, if not dangerous, HUAC cited them with contempt. More extreme measures might now be necessary, such as legislation regulating film content.

With the threat of censorship on one side and the possibility of a public boycott of movies on the other, and with New York banks, which lent heavily to the studios during the Depression, pressuring them to avoid anything that might impair their ability to repay the loans, the producers were in a corner. A blacklist seemed like the best, if not only, way out.

Other forces were certainly pushing the producers. While television was in its infancy, the threat it posed to stealing movie audiences could not be underestimated. Also, still pending, but looking bad for Hollywood, was a federal antitrust suit against the studios for their monopoly of production, distribution and exhibition; execs feared, rightly as it turned out, that the Supreme Court would force a breakup, thus weakening the studios' market dominance even more.

Moreover, not to be discounted was, as Neal Gabler noted in his book "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," the producers' fear of a new round of anti-Semitism. Most of the studios were run by Jews; most of the Hollywood activists and Communists were Jews. If the public linked the two camps together, a boycott would be the least of producers' worries.

In November 1947 the studio heads issued the "Waldorf Statement," named after the New York hotel where they drafted it, which announced, among other things, their intention to no longer employ the Hollywood 10, nor anyone else who refused to cooperate with the HUAC investigation, nor any Communist.

Given the poisonous atmosphere of the time, a blacklist of some sort was probably inevitable. The fact still remains that this particular blacklist began with 10 men fed to HUAC because their labor activism had initially outraged some of the industry's most powerful and virulent labor-haters.

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As the political clouds darkened over Hollywood, producers actually thought the skies were clearing. Less than two weeks after issuing the Waldorf Statement, studio heads met with officers of the three talent guilds "to further explain [the studios'] future policy with regard to the employment of communists," according to minutes of the meeting kept by the Screen Actors Guild.

The producers essentially argued that they were not starting a blacklist, that, instead, by getting rid of the Hollywood 10, they were preventing the need for any similar future action. It appears the producers genuinely believed that the worst of the troubles were over. "But this means they did not read well at all the political climate and had no insight into what was coming," Ceplair says. Indeed. Not only a blacklist but an even more insidious weapon, the graylist, certainly did develop and expand.

The blacklist was essentially compiled from HUAC, which released names of uncooperative witnesses as well as names of people identified as Communists by cooperative witnesses. The graylist was primarily the work of a pamphlet called Red Channels, a privately published organ that identified either suspected Communists or sympathizers. Frequently, though, the named were simply people the right wing despised, feared or both. Historians estimate as many as 500 people in the entertainment industry were either black- or graylisted.

As those lists were growing, the studios found they fit rather nicely with their longstanding hatred of unions -- in particular, of course, the Screen Writers Guild. For example, the blacklist did the job that the studios couldn't do by other means -- bringing the dreaded screenwriters to heel. "If you purge a union of its radical elements, which the blacklist very effectively did, you don't need to break it anymore," Ceplair notes. The Screen Writers Guild was anything but an activist union now. In fact, writers from the patrician era who'd left the guild in its activist days to join the reactionary MPA had come back. Some even made it onto the guild board.

Furthermore, while making certain concessions in the annual collective bargaining negotiations throughout the blacklist years, the studios actively used the blacklist to control the Screen Writers Guild's most important concern -- screen credit. A movie writer's career depends heavily on credits, as much then as it does today, and when the guild first organized, gaining control over credits was one of its biggest victories. The blacklist, however, enabled producers to impose an eviscerating clause in the studio-guild contract that returned control to them.

"We tried for years to get that clause removed," says Michael Franklin, executive director of the Screen Writers Guild from 1958 to 1978. "We didn't succeed until the early '60s," when the blacklist was beginning to fade.

Also, because of the Taft-Hartley Act, a slightly less evil cousin of the blacklist, the studios were able to hire non-Screen Actors Guild talent -- which was cheaper and easier to fire. Screen Actors Guild internal records show that as late as 1954 the guild was fighting to close this loophole that the studios routinely exploited.

The studios had certainly started out furious at the MPA for having brought HUAC back. By 1950, however, with the studios very much enjoying the upper hand with the guilds and unions, the fury had cooled into a loving warmth. That year the Sept. 17 edition of the New York Times quoted producer Walter Wanger as saying, "I recognize that time and history have proven the correctness of the judgment of the MPA and its foresight."

It's long been said in the producers' defense that they were not the ones who brought HUAC into Hollywood and that the stage employees union, not the studios, delivered the death blows to the liberal Conference of Studio Unions. But there's a consistent pattern of others doing the actual dirty work that ultimately benefited the studio heads and that they never protested. Indeed, in the case of destroying the Conference of Studio Unions, they worked directly with the stage employees.

It's also long been said, and repeated increasingly since the end of the Cold War, that there certainly were Communists and Communist subversion and espionage in America at the time (Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, et al.). And that hatred and fear of communism (on the march in Korea, exploding atomic weapons in Siberia) were real. Anti-communist sentiment, in short, was in its own way honest.

Perhaps, but not in Hollywood. In the above meeting between studio heads and members of the three talent guilds following the Waldorf Statement, director George Stevens made a wry and telling observation -- that "the people to be sacrificed ... are among the [unions]; there has been no talk of sacrificing heads of motion picture companies ... if they were found to be communists." The minutes of the meeting record no response from the producers.

Moreover, communism in America and communism in Hollywood weren't the same thing. Hollywood's branch, for example, was almost incompetent. As early as 1954, studies showed that most Communist interest in movies was focused on attempts -- unsuccessful, for the most part -- to keep anti-Communist propaganda out of films, not to put pro-Communist propaganda in. As for the threat elsewhere in the country, it's recently been disclosed that the FBI, which worked with HUAC, scored a huge gain when a top Soviet spy defected in 1945 and divulged all major Red networks across the United States. Hollywood was not among them.

As for the reality of hating and fearing communism, Hitler's hatred and fear of Jews was real, too. The Klan's is still real. Still, the sincerity of anti-Communist sentiment might carry more weight if it didn't, in Hollywood's case, have as its antecedent and subtext a longstanding hatred and fear of unionism and liberalism, for which "anti-communism" provided respectable, patriotic cover.

Marsha Hunt, a popular young actress in the '30s and '40s, had never been a Communist or a sympathizer. She was, however, a committed and outspoken liberal. At a 1947 Screen Actors Guild board meeting she contradicted president Robert Montgomery, a founding member who liked the old patrician system, on a matter concerning the viability of officially excluding Communists from all the guilds. "I was listened to, but the board moved on to other business," Hunt recalls. "No one said anything, no one commented, I was totally erased."

Shortly thereafter, her career ended.
salon.com | Jan. 11, 2000

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