The Romance of American Communism

In 1955 Murray Kempton published “Part of Our Time,” a study of the 1930s radical left. In it, he contrasted the human “ruins” of that movement--those who embraced Stalinism, ultimately rendering themselves historically irrelevant and politically impotent--with its “monuments”: those who escaped entanglement with Soviet-controlled ideology and, as a result, contributed to the incomplete victories that have made the United States what it is today: a modern liberal democracy with still a long road to travel.

Even now, almost half a century and millions of politically charged words later, Kempton’s book remains one of the few worthwhile studies of the old American left: graceful, ironic, touched equally with affection and rueful contempt. It contains, among other felicities, the best short summary of Hollywood’s communists, those men and women whose lives and careers would be derailed (some of them only temporarily) by the Hollywood hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the studio blacklist they engendered. In his chapter on the Hollywood Reds, he stated a position that has, until now, been inarguable: That the communist left--mostly screenwriters--did not appreciably or subversively affect the content of American films during the popular front decade (from the mid-’30s to the mid-’40s).

It is the central perversity of “Radical Hollywood,” an earnest, highly selective and very bad history of the old left’s show biz branch, to challenge this notion. No less than HUAC, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner see, albeit happily, Reds under all the beds who were far more influential than they or we ever imagined. One can only guess at the glee with which this book would have been greeted by HUAC’s investigators had it been published, say, in 1950.

They could have learned, to their consternation, that some Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy westerns were written by radicals and carried subversive messages about the rapaciousness of the big ranchers and mining interests of the West. They would also have discovered that even Abbott and Costello pictures were not immune to odd bits of slipped-in social consciousness.

I think we can accept that cheerfully enough, especially if we remember that land- and water-rights westerns--whether they were written by radicals or not--have ever found convenient villains in the owners of significant prairie real estate and if we concede that comedies, whether low (such as Abbott and Costello’s) or high (such as “The Awful Truth”), have always depended on rich ninnies to serve as the butts of their jokes; it does not require a communist to appreciate their usefulness in that regard. Unsurprisingly, few romantic comedies, nearly all of which featured the rich and fatuous getting either wisdom or comeuppance, were written by leftist hard-liners. Sophisticated humor, it would seem, never comes easily to dour ideologues.

Buhle and Wagner almost ignore comedy of this kind--even, unaccountably, the divine “Bringing Up Baby,” which was written by one of their heroes, the non-communist leftist Dudley Nichols--though the genre carried some of the sharpest social criticism of the era. But that’s typical of their ideologically blinkered approach to every genre from film noir to musical. Let their treatment of the social issues movies of the ‘30s typify their method. If a still-great gangster picture such as “The Public Enemy” was co-written by the communist John Bright, it is fulsomely treated. If, though, that most savage of feminist films, “Baby Face,” was created by non-communists, it doesn’t rate a mention. The same goes for “Black Legion,” the best--maybe the only--film about nativist racism ever made. Or for “Employees’ Entrance” or “Skyscraper Souls” (female exploitation in the workplace) or “Heroes for Sale” (a powerful portrayal of a war hero’s degradation).

Even “Scarface,” surely as potent a gangster drama as “The Public Enemy,” goes unnoticed because it, too, lacks leftist creative credentials, as does “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang,” easily the most gripping of the era’s many prison dramas. Frank Capra’s most socially conscientious movies (“Forbidden,” “American Madness,” “The Miracle Woman,” even his greatest success, “It Happened One Night,” and that most riveting of his failures, “Meet John Doe”) rate scarcely a mention. It is only when his screenwriter is the communist Sidney Buchman that the authors pause to parse, ineptly, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

What’s going on here? It would be easy to dismiss Buhle and Wagner as slob historians, given the huge number of howling errors they commit--misstated plot summaries, misattributed credits, vulgarly stated political history--but they’re not really historians at all; they’re mythologists, overstating the importance of the communists and their allies in film history and underplaying the significance of those less formally committed to ideology.

It works like this: They sweep into their account every Hollywood figure who, briefly or lengthily, was (to borrow some of their favorite phrases) “a friend of the left,” or “left-leaning” or an “anti-fascist favorite.” (People like the great cameraman Gregg Toland are lumbered by such catch phrases, though it is impossible to imagine how the way he lighted a set might have been conditioned by his political views.) Concurrently, they are determined to dismiss those who did not embrace, in Vivian Gornick’s phrase, “the romance of American Communism.”

The authors are beholden to the fantasy, much favored by the Old Left and uncritically accepted by their New Left apologists, that in Depression-era America, the only way to effect meaningful social change was to embrace communism. This means they have to impute mass status and influence to the party, both in and out of the movies. But this is nonsense. To begin with, almost every socially ameliorative or transformative action in New Deal America arose out of the yearning hearts of liberal Democrats, not from the harder souls of revolutionists. In this period, Communists never polled more than about 100,000 votes in a national election and, more to our present point, in Hollywood they had at most about 200 members (not all of them simultaneously enrolled). It is possible that at the height of Popular Front influence they could count on 1,000 “left-leaning” supporters in the industry, but they, obviously, had varying degrees of passion for the cause. The Purge Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Soviet invasion of Finland did take their tolls.

This doesn’t matter to Buhle and Wagner. Everyone who ever gave five bucks to help buy an ambulance for the Spanish Loyalists is a creative hero to them; everyone else is a nonperson. This does occasion their book’s only grace notes: a surprising lack of rancor about defected communists who later “named names” to the House committee. It is more important to the authors to count future apostates among the true believers than it is to chastise them for subsequent betrayals.

But it is their exclusionary passion, rather than their inclusionary one, that renders their book useless. It stems from their New Left premise that, absent the guidance of a revolutionary cadre that could use the mass media as a bullhorn, American society could not get itself roiling and boiling with the fervor it exhibited, and its films reflected, in the 1930s. They seriously believe that film in the Popular Front period was the primary “means of communication between social movements and ordinary Americans,” that “the most crucial as well as most expansive experiments were realized via this relation,” that, indeed, Popular Front movies constituted “an alternative to anti-populist modernism.”

But American movies have always been a prime example of socially careless capitalism. Frenziedly, irrationally, they will or will not use ideology in pursuit of popular favor. The lugubrious theorizing of communism’s corrupt intellectuals (Buhle and Wagner devote a particularly dismal chapter to it) is of no consequence to those who control the means of production. The very idea that communist luminaries like John Howard Lawson or Albert Maltz would have been capable of writing “expansive experiments” is ludicrous. They achieved their apotheosis in World War II, writing emotionally empty tributes to its “little guy” heroes and were engaged in finding new forms of hackery when HUAC silenced them.

Film noir was a place the communists tried to go but naturally the authors misstate the genre’s history in their maddening way. The movies that really influenced film history were made by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, who drew their energy not from ideological cant but from the variously delightful and menacing forms American nuttiness takes. The communist left produced almost nothing but gasbags, now thoroughly deflated. In a way, “Radical Hollywood” is their perfect tribute; a huge lie built on hundreds of smaller ones, a wet travesty of scholarly and critical standards.