Going Back Over the Hollywood Blacklist

Re “A Rewrite for Hollywood’s Blacklist Saga,” Commentary, April 25: I am trying to figure out what Ronald and Allis Radosh are trying to say.

On the one hand, they say the Hollywood Ten were die-hard communists and therefore not the heroic figures they have been made out to be. On the other hand, they say the Hollywood Ten were of minimal importance and limited popularity, and have been mythologized.

Could it be that their actual importance was in trying to take advantage of the freedoms that the Constitution guarantees -- even unpopular causes like theirs or muddle-headed ones like the Radoshes’?

Michael Green

Las Vegas

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Finally, an article that nails the Hollywood communists for what they were -- slavish Stalinists who excused Soviet tyranny and murder -- and not the idealistic, noble martyrs of left-wing mythology. But then, inexplicably, Ronald and Allis Radosh retreat from their position by writing “it was wrong to deprive artists of their livelihood because of their political beliefs.” What was wrong with it?

Would the Radoshes condemn anyone for refusing to hire intellectuals who subscribed to Nazi, neo-Nazi, racist, anti-Semitic or Islamic fundamentalist movements and philosophies? In any significant way, were, or are, communists any less unsavory and less potentially dangerous to our freedoms?

Al Ramrus

Pacific Palisades

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The Radoshes promised “a cleareyed look” at the blacklist era, but they completely missed the point. The House Un-American Activities Committee asked us to believe that marginally organized artists actually posed a threat to the stability of the most powerful nation in history, simply by having opinions and expressing ideas.

The Radoshes’ rhetoric obscures the fact that HUAC’s actions were indefensibly wrong, whether or not they were taken with patriotic intent. HUAC persecuted and punished those whose views the committee found unacceptable, not because this was right to do so, but simply because it could.

Everything that’s great about our wonderful, terrible, imperfect nation flows from the 1st Amendment. Opinions, ideas, beliefs -- and the freedom to have and express them -- are protected by the eloquent simplicity of those 45 words.

Closing with a “maxim” they wrongly attribute to John Ford, the Radoshes still can’t get close; the actual quote is, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and it’s a line from Ford’s 1962 film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” written by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, from Dorothy M. Johnson’s story.

Michael Sloane

Screenwriter, “The Majestic”

Glendale

“The Majestic” is a 2001 movie set during the blacklist era.