THE BLACKLIST

The House Committee on Un-American Activities not only failed to uncover any red plots in Hollywood, it didn’t find any red plots anywhere, ever, in its sad, sorry, sick 30-odd-year existence (“Hollywood’s Blackest Hour,” by Patrick Goldstein, Oct. 19).

Add to that the fact that not one single person was ever convicted of anything (i.e., treason) as a result of the HUAC hearings/investigations, and you get a pretty depressing picture of what a few neo-Nazi pigs supported by their fellow travelers can do to a country.

In my opinion, those who named names are but a step away from being the folks who watched in silence as their neighbors were being put in freight cars. And a few steps away from being the ones who slammed the freight car doors shut.

LOU COHAN

Cypress

*

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that everyone who did inform was loathsome, foul, venal and cowardly. Having done so, can we at last turn a critical eye on men like Abraham Polonsky, who to this day want to skate quickly past their boundless devotion to the cause of Soviet communism?

We now know that the Communist Party of America was directly under the thumb of Moscow, a charge that men like Polonsky scoffed at for so many years. We now know that Stalin managed to kill more than 30 million of his own people during the collectivization and purges, a charge that men like Polonsky assured us was outright Red-baiting fiction. We now know that anti-Semitism in the USSR was pandemic, a charge that men like Polonsky could not imagine in their illusory dream of a utopian state.

And the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact of 1939 spoke loudly and clearly to all except those who shut down their minds about the true nature of Stalinism.

DAVID MURRAY

Los Angeles

*

I was surprised to see no mention of “The Way We Were” in Goldstein’s excellent exploration of the Hollywood blacklist and its sad ramifications. It was, I believe, the first mainstream film to address--albeit superficially--the paranoia and injustice of the era and offered many baby boomers their first, dramatic exposure to the blacklist phenomenon.

CHRISTOPHER NICKENS

Los Angeles

*

The worst that Goldstein can say about the Communist Party is that its members were “ill-mannered ideologues” and that they were “dogmatic and sanctimonious.”

The Communist Party was an agency of a hostile foreign power--the Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers said that when he was a member of the CP he considered himself to be a soldier in defense of the Soviet Union. CP leader William Z. Foster wrote a book with the catchy title “Toward Soviet America.”

Members of the CP are not on the other side of the fence politically, they are on the other side of the trench. Yet all who oppose the CP are roundly criticized, and we inevitably read the word “hysteria” applied repeatedly to any historical concern about domestic communism.

I am waiting for the day these ex-Reds apologize to America for supporting Joe Stalin.

THOMAS W. GRAHAM

Placentia

*

Goldstein suggests that the current practice of placing parental-warning labels on CDs, movies and TV fare is the moral equivalent of the Hollywood blacklist, which destroyed friendships, careers and even lives.

Clearly, he should not be trusted anywhere near sharp tools, moving parts or moral judgments.

BURT PRELUTSKY

North Hills

*

Goldstein’s article was a brilliant and ironic reminder of how fear of the “different,” from rap music to ABC’s “Nothing Sacred,” can turn rational people into moral dictators. A book that foreshadows TV’s “parental warnings” and other such labels is “Only Victims” by actor Robert Vaughn, an outstanding examination of the era.

JULIE T. BYERS

Temple City

*

It’s revolting to see the “blacklisted” communist writers portrayed as idealistic victims. These pathetic apologists for Stalin deserved much worse than they received. They were propagandizing for a Soviet regime that was enslaving and murdering millions of people and, for a time, engaging in a pact with Adolf Hitler.

Victims? Hardly. Idealists? Only if one’s ideal is human sacrifice and mass slaughter.

MICHAEL S. BERLINER

Executive Director

The Ayn Rand Institute

Marina del Rey

*

Hollywood may have “shied away from the blacklist,” but the media certainly haven’t. We have seen countless articles, biographies and documentaries on the Hollywood 10. Yet this coverage is focused on movie people. For some odd reason, every other aspect of the McCarthy era is ignored. The media seem to believe that McCarthy only picked on people who lived between Beverly Hills and Malibu.

That dark period in America even had some genuine heroes, folks who had the courage to stand up to McCarthy and bring him down. Of course, that job wasn’t done by Hollywood movie stars, it was accomplished by a few smart lawyers working with the U.S. Army. I wonder if that story will ever be covered.

TIM TRUBY

Los Angeles

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Congratulations on your coverage of the blacklist’s anniversary last Sunday. One extremely important thing missing from your list of scheduled events that day was a performance of “Three Songs,” the brilliant new musical now at the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena.

It was sponsored by the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, which has one of the finest collections of materials on the Hollywood blacklist in the country at 60th Street and Vermont Avenue. The library also arranged the supplementary program featuring such famous victims of the blacklist as Ring Lardner, Marsha Hunt and Paul Jarrico.

RUTH HARMER-CAREW

Los Angeles

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Contrary to the anti-anti-communist historical revisionism that infects Goldstein’s article and most Hollywood writing about the Cold War and the blacklist, we know, and learn more daily, about the extent of communists’ efforts at all kinds of different subversions.

The Cold Warriors had every right to take seriously the communists’ own public proclamations: that the Soviet Union would use any and all resources, including good-hearted dupes, to reach its goal of expanded military might and political and military victory over the United States.

Elia Kazan, to his great credit, saw what Gale Anne Hurd is too dense to see: Soviet communism was evil and those who served it, even unwittingly and with “good intentions,” served evil. For that Kazan deserves praise and honor.

In a nutshell, communists here served Stalin, and it is totally disingenuous to claim that they did not know what Stalin was doing. If the witch hunters were implicitly anti-Semitic by referring to the natal names of various Hollywood personalities, that was nothing compared to Stalin’s plans. Besides systematically killing the leading figures of Yiddish culture in the USSR, he was planning to launch his own “final solution to the Jewish Question.”

DENNIS GURA

Santa Monica

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I wonder how many of your readers know that at one time Larry Adler was considered by many to be the greatest harmonica player in the world, until the blacklist drove him out of the country to England, where he still resides.

It’s sad that such an incredible and legendary talent is virtually unknown by anyone born after World War II. So even today it seems the blacklist continues to claim its victims.

STEVE BARR

Culver City

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I am quite disgusted with the continued martyrization of the blacklist “victims” of the 1950s. At that time, this nation was locked in a life-and-death struggle with the most evil force in human history, communism. Those in Hollywood who embraced that loathsome ideology were nothing less than enemies of America, and it was good and right that they be shunned. The true heroes of the time were those on HUAC and those who informed.

The liberal Hollywood establishment and the liberal media can conspire all they want to rewrite the history of the time, but the above truth will always remain the truth.

KEMP A. RICHARDSON

Canyon Country

*

Your coverage of the 1947 HUAC hearings and the subsequent blacklist of a number of filmmakers was well-written and largely free of bias, though Elia Kazan got no credit for his confession of his communist membership and no sympathy for the reverse blacklist he’s endured from the Hollywood left in the last few years, largely by people unborn in the ‘40s.

Of course there were communists in the film industry, most of them recruited as kids in the ‘30s, when Marxism still had a human face. Not one of them picked up a rifle and went off to Spain, nor damaged the country, though of course many Americans did: Oppenheimer, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, who were punished appropriately.

The film industry, as you made clear, avoided any film endorsing Stalin (save only “Mission to Moscow,” which wasn’t much of a movie).

Maybe Billy Wilder summed it up best, speaking of the “Unfriendly 10”: “You have to remember that only two of them were talented. The rest were just unfriendly.”

CHARLTON HESTON

Beverly Hills