Kazan Still at Eye of Storm

Obviously some of your Counterpunch letter writers lack knowledge and understanding of the blacklist and its antecedents (“An Honorary Oscar for Kazan: Debate Hits a Bundle of Nerves,” Feb. 1). Most of those who were victims of the blacklist had been active in the communist movement of the ‘30s, during the Great Depression. The “evil ideology” they espoused included such causes as civil rights, labor and union rights, and other worthy goals now widely accepted, even by political conservatives.

Hollywood figures called before HUAC in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, whether actual card-carrying Communists or not, were largely idealists who simply refused to accept the legality of the witch hunt and refused to “name names.” As Victor Navasky so clearly describes in his book “Naming Names,” everyone became a victim--those like Elia Kazan who named names in order to save their own skins, and those like Will Geer who refused to name names and as a result were blacklisted from the film industry for 10 years or more.

Whether Kazan should now receive an Oscar or not is less important to me than the number of inflammatory and ignorant responses that some of your published letters have expressed. Are we still victims of the McCarthy mentality of guilt by association and innuendo?

SALLY O. NORTON

Laguna Hills

Anyone who thinks the HUAC hearings in the ‘40s were designed to root out subversion in the motion picture business probably also believes that the Republican-sponsored impeachment trial was about “morality.”

HUAC’s campaign against Hollywood Commies was about as substantive as McCarthy’s notorious list of communists in the State Department. It was congressional show business, and to pretend that the committee, or men like Elia Kazan, were standing up heroically in the face of a hideous threat to our way of life is ludicrous.

JOE NACHISON

Santa Monica

I have been married to Elia Kazan for almost 17 years, but I had never heard of Allen Garfield until he sent us a copy of his piece (“Despite Talent, Kazan Doesn’t Deserve Honorary Oscar,” Jan. 25)--by express mail, no less.

FRANCES KAZAN

New York