THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST

As one who is in the middle of writing a play about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, I couldn’t help but see omissions in Michaelson’s article.

She made the entire HUAC investigations seem a horrifying aberration of American history, without noting the witch hunts in the 1830s, the 1860s after the Civil War and most viciously under President’s Harding’s administration in the 1920s. It seems witch-hunting occurs in this country with despicable regularity.

The connection Michaelson makes between the Old Left and Hollywood’s new liberal left seems pitifully tenuous at best--if only because neither was born of the same experiences and attitudes.

The Old Left’s politics were definitely more intellectual, while their modern counterparts seem more spiritual and activist in nature.

To my knowledge, Trumbo never rode aboard a Soviet-made helicopter. Note also that the Hollywood Ten were mostly writers, not actors and actresses.

THOMAS G. LAGOS

Hollywood