Hollywood’s fellow travelers

IN 1946, Time magazine observed that many movie stars, “horrified at the thought of being considered bloated capitalists, favor leftish causes.” There was a message here that too many celebrities -- a dozen or so were named -- had moved beyond the political mainstream and that a price would have to be paid. The following year, a House committee began an investigation of communism in the film industry, the effects of which linger in Hollywood to this day. Old scores were settled, former friends became lifetime enemies and those who defied the committee were packed off to jail. A blacklist quickly circulated, denying work to hundreds of “Reds” and their sympathizers, loosely defined.

How does Hollywood choose to remember this dark episode in its history? Very selectively, to be sure. A host of movies have appeared -- “The Way We Were,” “The Front,” “Guilt by Suspicion,” “Fellow Traveler,” “The Majestic” -- with the same basic script: Cold War America was a nation in the grip of hysteria. Cynical, Red-hunting politicians had singled out Hollywood to generate maximum publicity for themselves. The people they targeted were most often harmless dreamers with some vague past connection to the political left. Although a handful did buckle under the pressure of the blacklist, most stayed true to their ideals by refusing to answer the committee’s questions or by lecturing their inquisitors about the true meaning of Americanism. These were the heroes, and this version of events has been bolstered by a flood of memoirs and histories, the most influential being Lillian Hellman’s “Scoundrel Time” and Victor S. Navasky’s “Naming Names.”

But not all scholars agree with this scenario: Over the years, some have laid part of the blame at the feet of Communists in the movie industry; their work, however, when not debunked as a smear against the innocent, has largely been ignored.

This may be about to change. In 1983, Ronald Radosh co-wrote “The Rosenberg File,” an account of the 1950s atomic-spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, based largely on FBI reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book’s main conclusion -- that Julius Rosenberg ran a key espionage ring for Stalinist Russia -- enraged large parts of the American left. (That Radosh turned out to be correct made it that much worse.) More recently, he and others have emphasized the slavish devotion of American Communists to Moscow in the years just before and during World War II -- a devotion that turned dozens of party members into Soviet spies.

Radosh, then, has been trolling these waters for years. His views are largely anathema in the history profession, where left-wing legends die hard. His latest effort, “Red Star Over Hollywood,” co-written with his wife, Allis, is a first-rate, if occasionally overheated, account of moviemaking’s long-term love affair with the left. Anchored mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, the book deals with the likes of James Cagney, Elia Kazan and the Hollywood Ten -- not with the politics of outspoken contemporary figures such as Tim Robbins, Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore.

The misery of the Great Depression triggered a left-wing tilt among artists, writers and performers. Then came World War II, with the United States and the Soviet Union joined in opposing Nazi Germany. Against this backdrop, the American Communist Party portrayed itself as an independent organization devoted to world peace and economic justice. It thrived as never before.

Penetrating Hollywood, the Radoshes note, was a major Communist goal. Lenin himself had described the motion picture as the ideal outlet for political propaganda, and movies were now the leading form of popular culture in the United States. Those who worked in the stratified, dictatorial world of the Hollywood studios were seen as ideal recruits for the movement -- powerless folk keenly aware of the lopsided distribution of wealth. What the American Communist Party offered was a sense of shared values, a whiff of equality in a wildly unequal town. “I found myself collecting Party dues from Dalton Trumbo and other famous writers,” a fellow member noted. “Dalton was making five thousand dollars a week but we were comrades.... I was welcome at the ‘red table’ at MGM where all the left-wingers ate.”

For a time, American Communists attracted the support of some of Hollywood’s best, including screenwriters Albert Maltz, Maurice Rapf, Hellman, Budd Schulberg and Ring Lardner Jr. -- all products of elite Eastern colleges. Rapf’s father, Harry, was a prominent MGM producer; Schulberg’s father, B.P., headed production at Paramount Studios. “With a tennis court adjoining our house and with the Pacific for a swimming pool ... ours was not exactly a proletarian or Marxist background,” the younger Schulberg recalled.

A number of actors and directors joined the party in this era or attached themselves to well-known Communist fronts. Cagney, who grew up in poverty, explained his motivation this way: “What the hell did I know about the ebb and flow of political movements.... It all seemed so sensible: take from the overrich, give to the poor. Distribute the wealth.... At the time, left seemed right.”

There was more to this, however, than the generosity of gullible celebrities. Indeed, the Radoshes demolish the portrait of Hollywood as a place where Reds were akin to fuzzy idealists. During World War II, they note, Communists exerted strong influence over the Screen Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and the back-lot production unions. Led by screenwriter John Howard Lawson, its cultural enforcer, the party rode herd on its legions, deciding, for example, that Budd Schulberg’s classic novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” was an affront to the working class or that an essay by Maltz recommending greater artistic freedom for Communist writers was an offense against Stalin himself. A defiant Schulberg decided to quit the party; a penitent Maltz issued one of the most obsequious public retractions on record.

World War II marked the height of Communist influence in Hollywood. Taking full advantage of the Soviet Union’s new role as the United States’ ally, Communist screenwriters churned out scripts portraying Stalin’s Russia as a socialist version of Camelot. The Radoshes show that all of this was done with the tacit approval of the studio moguls, although the Communists were remarkably good at tweaking the lines to produce what one screenwriter called “a total reversal of reality.” There was nothing “un-American” about these movies at the time. The Communist line was that the best means of supporting the Allied war effort was to defend the Soviet Union.

The payback came in 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, taking full advantage of early Cold War tensions, began its circus-like probe of communism in Hollywood. The Radoshes portray HUAC as a pack of bigots and retrogrades looking to smear the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and to earn publicity for themselves. What makes “Red Star Over Hollywood” stand out from most other accounts, however, is its contention that those who refused to testify before HUAC -- the so-called Hollywood Ten, which included Maltz, Lardner, Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk and several other distinguished figures -- sealed their own fate and helped bring on the blacklist. The book argues that they did this by shamelessly portraying themselves as wounded patriots and champions of free speech when others considered them hard-line Stalinists who were following every twist and turn of the ever-changing communist line.

In addition, the Radoshes are sympathetic to a number of those who did testify before the committee -- Kazan and Schulberg, in particular -- seeing them not as stool pigeons or desperate careerists but as artists who had come to despise the Communist Party and saw no reason to protect it. They are the heroes of this book, men who sought the middle ground in a political climate gone awry. That they couldn’t find it -- that they wound up condemning extremists of the left in a forum ruled by extremists of the right -- remains one of the great tragedies of that time.

History has made its judgment about HUAC and the blacklist -- that both were odious. And “Red Star” prompts a final question: Will the movie colony ever be ready to make a similar judgment about the Stalinist sympathies that have tainted its past? *