Congressional theatre: dramatizing McCarthyism on stage, film, and television 9781139085977, 9780521891660, 9780521640886

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page xi)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
Part I: The Committee and the Culture
1 The Stage Is Set (page 9)
2 The Social Drama (page 35)
3 Dramatizing Directly (page 75)
Part II: Making Analogies
4 Witch Hunt (page 133)
5 Inquisition (page 162)
6 Informers (page 206)
7 Forensics (page 226)
Conclusion Further Fields (page 255)
Notes (page 265)
A Note on Archives and Library Collections (page 287)
Works Cited (page 289)
Index (page 301)

Citation preview

Congressional Theatre

Congressional Theatre is the first book to identify and examine the significant body of plays, films, and teleplays that responded to the actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the “Show Business hearings” that it held between 1947 and 1960. Brenda Mur-

phy discusses the dramatization in the works of HUAC’s effects on American life and the political, social, and moral issues that its actions raised for American citizens. Among the writers discussed are Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Maxwell Anderson, Elia Kazan, Barrie Stavis, Herman Wouk, Eric Bentley, Saul Levitt, Budd Schulberg, Carl Foreman, Abraham Polonsky, and Walter Bernstein.

Brenda Murphy is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her books include Tennessee Wiliams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration

in the Theatre (Cambridge, 1992) and American Realism and American

Drama, 1580-1940 (Cambridge, 1987). She is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights.

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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA

General Editor Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University

Advisory Board C. W. E. Bigsby, University of East Anglia Errol Hill, Dartmouth College C. Lee Jenner, Independent cntic and dramaturge Bruce A. McConachie, University of Pittsburgh Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut Laurence Senelick, Tufts University

The American theatre and its literature are attracting, after long neglect, the crucial attention of historians, theoreticians, and critics of the arts. Long a field for isolated research yet too frequently marginalized in the academy, the American theatre has always been a senstive gauge of social pressures and public issues. Investigations into its myriad shapes and manifestations are relevant to students of drama, theatre, literature, cultural experience, and political development. The primary intent of this series is to set up a forum of important and original

scholarship in and criticism of American theatre and drama in a cultural and social context. Inclusive by design, the series accommodates leading work in areas ranging from the study of drama as literature to theatre histories, theoretical explorations, production histories, and readings of more popular or paratheatrical forms. While maintaining a specific emphasis on theatre in the United States, the series welcomes work grounded broadly in cultural studies and narratives with interdisciplinary reach. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama thus provides a crossroads where historical, theoretical, literary, and biographical approaches meet and combine, promoting imaginative research in theatre and drama from a variety of new perspectives. BOOKS IN THE SERIES: 1. Samuel Hay, African American Theatre 2. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama 3. Amy Green, The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Re-Invent the Classics 4. Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution 5. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art 6. Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression 7. Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 8. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World g. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard 10. Michael A. Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor 11. Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television

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Congressional Theatre Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television

BRENDA MURPHY

CAMBRIDGE

i) UNIVERSITY PRESS |

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cB2 2Ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 2oth Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Brenda Murphy 1999 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999

Printed in the United States of America Typeface New Baskerville 10.25/13 pt. System QuarkXPress [BA]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0 521 640881 hardback

lor George

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Contents

List of Illustrations Xl Acknowledgments Xi

Introduction 1

1 The Stage Is Set Q

Part I: The Committee and the Culture

2 The Social Drama 35

3 Dramatizing Directly 75 INVESTIGATION

Big Jim McLain, Thirty Pieces of Silver, You're Next INTERROGATION

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been BLACKLIST

“Blacklist,” Fear on Trial, The Front, Guilty by Suspicion

4 Witch Hunt 132

Part II: Making Analogies

The Cruable, The First Salem Witch Trial, The Witchfinders

5 Inquisition 162 JOAN OF ARC, UNFRIENDLY WITNESS

Saint Joan, The Lark, Joan of Lorraine, Joan of Arc, The Execution of Joan of Arc GALILEO, COOPERATIVE WITNESS

Galileo, Lamp at Midnight, The Crisis of Galileo, The Recantation of Galileo Galilei

1X

Contents

6 Informers 206 7 Forensics 226 The Hook, On the Waterfront, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall

THE SELF AND OTHERS

Darkness at Noon, Montserrat, Incident at Vichy THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, The Andersonville Trial

Notes 205 Works Cited 289 Screen Credits 299 Index 201

Conclusion Further Fields 255 High Noon, Panic in the Streets

A Note on Archives and Library Collections 237

Primary and Secondary Sources 239

Government Documents 298 Television and Radio Credits 200

X

List of Illustrations

1. Senator John Rankin, Publicity Photo 19 2. Newspaper Cartoons on the Hollywood Hearings | 21 3. Report of the Tenney Commission on John Gassner 41 4. A Scene from Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been 97

5. An Anti-Communist “Mimeo Press” Bulletin 109 6. Trish Anti-Communist Handbill Attacking Arthur Miller 137

7. Ingrid Bergman as Mary Gray in Joan of Lorraine 175

8. Charles Laughton in Galileo 191 g. Peter Capell in Lamp at Midnight 195

of After the Fall 221

10. Jo Mielziner’s Design for the Traveling Production

11. The Model for the Set of Incident at Vichy 232, 12. Joseph Wiseman and Hal Holbrook in Incident at Vichy 235

x1

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Acknowledgments

pe thanks are due to my husband, George Monteiro, for his invaluable criticism, advice, and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. I have also profited by the sagacious editorial advice of Don B. Wilmeth and Anne Sanow.

I am greatly indebted to the gifted researchers who assisted me in the work on this project, all three of whom went far beyond the call of duty: Michael Menard, Susan Abbotson, and Heather Masciandaro. For

providing the funds that made their help possible, and for the funds that allowed me to travel to the libraries and museums whose collections were indispensible to my study, I am indebted to the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. For the sabbatical leave that gave me the time to write this book, I am equally indebted to the University of Connecticut.

The research collections and staffs of a number of libraries have been indispensible to this project: the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Museum of Television and Radio, New York; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Lilly Library, Indiana University; the John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Library, Brown University; the Library

of Congress; and, above all, the libraries of my home institution, the University of Connecticut, particularly the Homer Babbidge Library and its Inter-Library Loan Division, and Special Collections at the Thomas R. Dodd Research Center. I am particularly grateful to the many librarians and curators who have made me the beneficiary of their experience and expertise in the course of this project. My friend and colleague Regina Barreca provided me with some invaluable documents. Helen Coxe Cheney kindly made available to me the text of Louis O. Coxe’s The Witchfinders.

For permission to reprint photographs from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, I am grateful to the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. X11

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Introduction

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. Henry James, Preface to The Aspern Papers History was dangerous in those days. History is always dangerous. Abraham Polonsky, Interview, The Box

[ 1976, as Scoundrel Time, her memoir of the 1950s, was about to appear, Lillian Hellman was questioned about Senator Joseph McCarthy in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. She responded that “McCarthyism came from powerful places. .. . McCarthy is a very inaccurate name for a shameless period. McCarthy only summed up

the angers and fears of a great many people.”! In fact, Senator McCarthy was only the most visible embodiment of the worst excesses of Congressional investigating committees, excesses that were associ-

ated in the public’s mind during the early fifties with the term “McCarthyism.” I have found that many well- informed Americans are

surprised to hear that Joseph McCarthy never served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the Congressional body that is most closely associated with “McCarthyism.” McCarthy’s own bases of operation, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security and the Senate Committee on Government Operations, are not exactly

household words, perhaps because they were essentially one-man shows, better known as “McCarthy Committees” than as anything else. HUAG, on the other hand, is well-known as Congress’s anti-Communist

investigating arm, and, although it had several chairmen who were almost as desirous of press coverage as Senator McCarthy — Martin Dies, John Rankin, and J. Parnell Thomas, for example — no single individual ever usurped the Committee’s image in the public mind. It was HUAG, which conducted the Hollywood Ten hearings and the sub1

Introduction sequent Show Business investigations, that captured the public’s attention, rather than any individual congressman. The Hollywood Ten hearings of October 1947 were HUAC’s major

media event. The Committee managed to stay in the limelight for a decade, however, by means of its much more extensive Show Business hearings of 1951 and 1952 and its perennial “Investigations into Com-

munist Activities in the Los Angeles Area” and “Investigations into Communist Activities in the New York Area.” This was in spite of the short-lived but determined headline-grabbing of its rival in the Senate, during the period between McCarthy's speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, on 19 February 1950, when he claimed to have the names of 205

Communists in the State Department, and his censure by the Senate on 2 December 1954. The impact of the Committee’s investigations, and the industry blacklist that proceeded from them, on the movie industry and Hollywood community has been well-documented by historians, although the extensiveness of this effect is still being realized, as each year brings more documents to light, and more memoirs and biographies record their effects on individual lives.°

Never a direct target of the Committee in the way that the mass media were, the Broadway theatre never resorted to official blacklisting. Nevertheless, the show business investigations had a tremendous effect

on American drama and theatre between 1947 and 1960. In the thirties and forties, actors, directors, and writers were accustomed to moving freely between Broadway and Hollywood, sometimes working on several different films and plays in the same year. During the HUAC hearings, an artist who was blacklisted in Hollywood could often find work in New York, particularly in the nascent Off-Broadway theatre, but being branded a Red generally had a negative effect at the box office. Not surprisingly, the New York theatre retreated from dramatizing overt political and social questions between 1945 and 1960, creating instead what Arthur Miller has called “an era of gauze” in the intensely personal and psychological plays of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Carson McCullers, Robert Anderson, and others. In this most pervasively and oppressively ideological of times, the American theatre has seemed to

critics and historians to have ignored the fundamental political issues that were dividing the country.* The one exception has been assumed to be Miller himself, who, as a target of the Committee, showed courage in adapting Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1950 and in writing his own

Crucible in 1953, two treatments of political demagoguery and the manipulation of mass hysteria against a scapegoat. 2

Introduction

This view ignores the persistent subtext beneath the apparent selfabsorption of the theatre of the fifties, however — a subtext in which political, social, and moral issues were engaged and debated with intensity and passion.”® Miller was not the only American playwright who found the use of historical analogy useful in attacking McCarthyism. Playwrights like Lillian Hellman, Bertolt Brecht (temporarily exiled to Santa Monica, California), Barrie Stavis, and Saul Levitt developed an aesthetic strategy that was firmly grounded on the representation of recognizable historical events — events that drew an immediate emotional response from the spectator. In their plays, the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch hunt become powerful historical analogies for HUAC. In the context of the Inquisition, the coercion of Galileo

into recanting his belief that the earth moves around the sun was analogized with the situation of the friendly witness who repudiated his leftist beliefs and his leftist friends in order to appear cooperative with the Committee. The most sympathetic of Christian scapegoats, Joan of Arc, was a natural historical analogy for witnesses like Miller and Hellman, who were viewed as having been pilloried by the Committee for following the dictates of their consciences and refusing to bring harm to others by naming names. The representational field in these plays was by no means limited to

the distant past. Saul Levitt evoked the American Civil War in The Andersonville Tral and Arthur Miller the recent war against the Nazis in Incident at Vichy. Herman Wouk argued in favor of the state and against the dictates of the individual conscience in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Miller engaged in an analogical debate over the morality

of naming names with Elia Kazan and Budd Shulberg through the medium of the tightly knit community of Brooklyn longshoremen in Schulberg and Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Film and television writers followed a similar strategy, particularly when films were adapted from plays, although the political impli-

cations were often considerably weakened during the studio production process. Occasionally, however, the discussion of the issues was allowed to go out directly to a mass audience right before the vigilant eyes of self-appointed censors, under the cover of historical drama.

This was the case with Abraham Polonsky, Walter Bernstein, and Arnold Manoff, the three blacklisted writers who wrote the You Are There series for CBS television, with the help of producer Charles Russell and a number of “fronts,” about Galileo, Joan of Arc, Socrates, the Salem witch trials and the Boston Tea Party. Common to many of these 3

Introduction plays is a fundamentally forensic structure. All of them involve cultural institutions of interrogation, and many use the trial as a structural prin-

ciple for the play’s action. Reflected at the center of these theatrical representations, in other words, was HUAC’s major weapon, the committee hearing, which was in reality a trial without a defense, a Jury, or even, in many cases, evidence against the accused.

In this book, I have examined the dramatic representations of the Un-American Activities Committee. I have done so in the context of the Committee’s own self-created drama, drawing on the anthropological model developed by Victor Turner to analyze the “social drama” of the HUAC hearings, in which American society tried through the redressive procedure of formal Congressional proceedings to heal itself of a deep ideological breach between Left and Right that had been widening since the first World War. I have also found the theory of scapegoating by comparatist René Girard illuminating in my examination of HUAC’s social and cultural effects, and in developing my own model for the five-part ritual framework of the Hearings themselves. It is not theory but practice that is in the foreground of this book, however. Always keeping in mind the limitations of my own cultural perspective, I have tried to bring to light the significant body of dramatic works that quite consciously dramatized the effects of the Committee on American life and debated the political, social, and moral issues that its actions raised for American citizens. If there is a larger contention in this book, it is that plays, screenplays and teleplays are written by individuals, and realized on stage or film in collaboration with other artists and craftsmen, in the inescapable con-

text of events, both public and personal, that occur in those individuals’ lifetimes. For cultural and literary critics and historians to ignore the unique personal histories of authors, and the impact of their experiences, both public and private, on the work they produce, is to offer at best a partial and limited analysis of that work. While a study with the fairly broad scope of this one cannot pretend to do the job thoroughly for any single writer, it can suggest some ways in which a single phenomenon in the United States’s recent past, the Show Business investi-

4,

gations of HUAG, affected the complex weave of relationships — public and private, personal and political, aesthetic and ideological — that char-

acterize the participation in the cultural moment of the years between 1947 and 1960 by writers who felt its effects keenly and personally. As I show in the third chapter, there have been several direct dramatizations of individual experiences with the Committee in various per-

Introduction formance media, of varying quality and sophistication. The great majority of writers, however, have made use of the aesthetic strategy of his-

torical analogy. Employed most straightforwardly, the strategy is to construct a dramatization of a historical event so as to highlight its sim-

ilarity to the events of the present, but to leave it to the spectator to make the connection. The writer thus compels the spectator or reader to participate in the process, taking on some of the responsibility for seeing the resemblance between contemporary events and the event in the past, and the implications of that resemblance. For these writers,

the practical value of the use of analogy lies in this collaborative process. In a political climate in which, under the Smith Act, one could be prosecuted for conspiring to advocate subversive ideas, the ability to deny authorial responsibility for the political implications of a play

and to secure the audience’s complicity in developing them was an important consideration. Despite the deliberate aesthetic camouflage, any serious critic who was even minimally aware of the Committee’s activities noticed the analogies that were being made in these works, and the courageous ones did not hesitate to discuss their agreement or disagreement with their political implications. These writers were working in a culture that was attuned to their dramatic idiom and responsive to its contemporary subtext. This book is intended to make the subtext available again, to allow for a reconsideration of this passionate and compelling commentary on one of the nation’s most divisive cultural crises.

5

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PART ONE

THE COMMITTEE AND THE CULTURE

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] The Stage Is Set

Critical comment on the performance of the Dies committee indicates that most reviewers would not recommend further government subsidies of $25,000 to stage such a dull and witless circus, a show certainly too poor in entertainment value (though it is summer) to justify the expense of production. Champion Labor Monthly, September 1938

[The Hollywood Ten hearing] has been launched with that ineffable touch of showmanship which the naive Easterner associates with a Hollywood premiere, lacking only in orchids, evening dress and searchlights crisscrossing the evening sky. Cabell Phillips, New York Times, 26 October 1947

n a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of

| ee on 13 September 1948, President Harry Truman warned that crucial scientific work might “be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification.” This atmosphere, he said, “is un-American, the most un-American thing we have to contend with today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country in which scientists are expected to change their theories to match changes in the police state’s propaganda line.”' Even for the blunt-speaking Truman, these were strong words, and their meaning was emphasized by the story that appeared next to the report of his speech on page one of the New York Times. a report on the pursuit of one Arthur Adams by the House Committee on Un- American Activities (HUAQ), which quoted chairman J. Parnell Thomas as saying that the Committee had “a great amount of testimony” on Adams, and that he hoped that Adams “could be found, be brought to Washington, and be questioned.”* Regardless of the guilt or innocence of Mr. Adams, his fate was sealed. He had been named by HUAG, and he faced the recriminations of a populace, a large por9

Part One: The Committee and the Culture

tion of which believed he was a Communist conspirator simply because he was called before the Committee and questioned about his affiliations without benefit of trial, judge, jury, or the right to cross-examine

his accusers or present his side of the case. If he was a teacher, an employee of the government or the film industry, a member of an AF of L union, or an employee of a business that followed the directives of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce or the American Legion, he would

almost certainly lose his job. He might also be harassed by his neighbors, his children attacked at school, his family hounded out of the neighborhood. Such was the atmosphere Truman was talking about, the atmosphere surrounding the House Committee on Un-American Activities at its most powerful, in the years from 1947 to 1956. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established on a temporary basis in 1938 “for the purpose of conducting an investigation

of (1) the extent, character, and object of un-American propaganda activities in the United States, (2) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American propaganda that is instigated from for-

eign countries or of domestic origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by the constitution, and (3) all other questions in relations thereto that would aid Congress in any necessary remedial legislation.”’ The temporary Committee was chaired by Martin Dies (D-Texas) from its inception until its end in 1944. In the context of the rising global political tension that was soon to erupt in World War II, the establishment of the Committee was one of a number of measures taken to ensure the national security by guarding against subversion of the government from within the United States. In June 1940, the Congress passed by a vote of 382 to 4 an expanded version of the Alien Registration (Smith) Act, which called for the registration and fingerprinting of all aliens over the age of fourteen and the deportation of the criminals and subversives among them. In a provision that was to be fundamental to the activities of the Committee, the bill also made it a crime to conspire “to organize or help to organize any society, group, or assem-

bly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States by force or violence;

or to be or become a member of, or affiliate with, any such society,

group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof.”* Although a number of efforts to have the Communist Party of the United States declared illegal failed, it was argued that, since Commtunism advocated the overthrow of government, by violent revolution if necessary, to accomplish the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” any mem10

The Stage Is Set

ber of the Communist Party by definition advocated “the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence.” Twelve leaders of the Communist Party were tried and convicted under the Smith Act, and the convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1951. In 1945, through a smart parliamentary maneuver, Representative John Rankin (D-Mississippi) engineered the establishment of a permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities, but was in turn maneuvered out of the Committee chairmanship. John S. Wood (D-

Georgia) chaired the Committee from 1945 until 1952, with a brief but influential interruption, when it was chaired by one of its most avid members, J. Parnell Thomas (R-New Jersey). With another brief interruption when it was chaired by Harold Velde (R-Ilinois), the Committee was presided over by Francis E. Walter (D-Pennsylvania) from 1955

to 1963. In 1947, President Truman had headed off attacks on his administration by demanding a loyalty oath for federal employees. In April 1951, the president stiffened the test of loyalty for employees of the U.S. government. Under the first executive order, an employee could be fired if “reasonable grounds existed for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the government of the United States.” In 1951, all that was required for dismissal was “reasonable doubt as to the loyalty of the person involved.” In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower

authorized dismissal of any federal employee who cited the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying at a congressional hearing. The force behind this increasing pressure to affirm one’s loyalty was an intensification of the environment that Truman had warned about in 1948. The McCarran Internal Security Act, passed over President Truman’s veto in September 1950, read in part: “Whenever there shall be in existence [an Internal Security Emergency], the President, acting through the Attorney General, is hereby authorized to apprehend and by order detain, pursuant to the provisions of this title, each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of sabotage.”° The McCarran Act required the registration of all Communists and Communist organizations with a new Subversive Activities Control Board and provided for “internal security emergencies” and the detention of suspected subversives. James V. Bennett,

director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, announced in September 1952 that $775,000 had already been expended for the activation and rehabilitation of six “relocation camps,” the facilities where Japanese Americans had been interned during World War II, which were Capa11

Part One: The Committee and the Culture

ble, he estimated, of holding more than sixty thousand Communists.’ In 1954, Congress passed the Communist Control Act, which virtually outlawed the Communist Party and denied certain civil rights to Communists and “Communist-front” organizations. In taking these extraordinary measures, the government was reacting to a number of events inside and outside the United States that contributed to the country’s ever-increasing anxiety about what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover referred to as the “enemy within.” In 1950 and 1951, Americans witnessed the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury

related to charges of espionage, Senator Joseph McCarthy's (unsupported) charge that 205 State Department workers were members of the Communist Party; the upholding by the Supreme Court of the conviction of U.S. Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act; the arrest

of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs in England; the sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for conspiracy to steal atomic secrets; the fall of China to the Communists; the outbreak of the Korean War; and the first successful atomic explosion by the Soviet Union. A good indication of the country’s mood is the activity of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which released a series of pamphlets suggesting ways to deal with what it perceived as the menace to the American way of life posed

by Communism. The 1946 pamphlet “suggested the institution of a strict federal loyalty program and an investigation of Communist influ-

ence in the cultural media, notably the motion picture industry’; the 1947 pamphlet called for the Department of Justice to publish, biannually, “a certified list of Communist-controlled front organizations and labor unions” and demanded an “anti-Communist” modification of the Wagner Act; the 1948 pamphlet demanded “federal legislation barring Communists from positions in teaching, social work, book reviewing,

and libraries.” The 1952 “master plan” virtually disregarded the Constitution in calling for “an untrammeled investigation and prosecution of Communists, the complete exclusion of Reds and fellow travelers from all agencies and professions affecting public opinion, from all educational or literary positions, from jobs of high visibility, prestige, and salary, particularly those in the entertainment field, and from any plant or factory large enough to have a trade union local.” The country’s anxiety about Communism reached a peak during the short career of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) as the

chief anti-Communist spokesperson. This career ran its course between his charges against the State Department in 1950 and his defeat in the “Army-McCarthy Hearings” and censure by the Senate 12

The Stage Is Set

for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the senate, and to impair its dignity” in 1954. The intense focus on Communism during the McCarthy years, however, was thoroughly prepared for by the steadily building intensity of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had focussed the country’s attention on Communists and “Communist sympathizers” as early as 1938. By 1950, the Committee had firmly established two rituals. The first was a ritual of absolution for its “friendly” witnesses, which included accusation, exposure, repentance — proven by informing on others — and absolution. The second was a ritual of degradation for its “unfriendly” witnesses, consisting of accusation after accusation, followed by the continuous tak-

ing of the Fifth Amendment; despite the Supreme Court’s warning that no guilt could be inferred from a witness’s seeking the Fifth’s protection — “I decline to answer because the answer may tend to incriminate me” — it carried an insinuation of guilt. As Representative Richard M. Nixon (R-California) spelled it out for a witness, “It is pretty clear, I

think, that you are not using the defense of the Fifth Amendment because you are innocent.”

The Federal Theatre Project, 1938 Under the chairmanship of Martin Dies, the Special Committee was largely a tool for attacking the New Deal, and one of its first targets in 1938 was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which was seen as the most vulnerable of the Works Progress Administration’s projects. J. Parnell Thomas launched his attack on 27 July 1938 in the New York Times, declaring that HUAC would make a sweeping investigation of the FTP

and the Writers Project based on “testimony given before him at... informal and confidential hearings . . . being held by individual members of the committee.” Declaring that the FTP was a “hot bed of Communists” and “infested with radicals from top to bottom,” Thomas told the reporter that “practically every play presented under the auspices of the project either centered on a plot sympathetic to the cause of communism or serves as a vehicle for the propagation of New Deal theories.” He also charged that Project Director Hallie Flanagan “wrote and produced a Communist play called ‘Hear Their Voices’ while on a trip to Soviet Russia.”'” Flanagan’s unequivocal denial of the charges had no effect on Thomas. Stepping up the rhetoric, he charged on 10 August that the FTP, “a government agency, supported by public funds, 13

Part One: The Committee and the Culture

has become part and parcel of the Communist party, spreading its radical theories through its stage productions. .. . practically every single play presented under the auspices of the Theatre Project is sheer pro-

paganda for communism or the New Deal.”" As historian Walter Goodman has noted, among the WPA projects, Federal Theatre was always considered something special, a somehow frivolous enterprise when so many were out of work and hungry. Moreover, the notion of singling out for subsidy several thousand writers and actors strained the generous impulses of many Congressmen. Even if Federal Theatre had been operated in a condition of absolute ideological purity, it could not have held out against the anti-New Deal forces who were regrouping in 1938 and dreamed of destroying the WPA altogether; if they could not have hung Federal

Theatre on a charge of radicalism, they would have done it on a charge of using dirty words.’*

During the public testimony of Hallie Flanagan on 6 December 1938, the Committee offered no evidence for any of the charges made by Thomas beyond the testimony of the witnesses they had interviewed in their secret hearings. While Flanagan tried continually

to return the Committee members to the charges that had been made and the brief she had prepared to refute them, the questioning ranged all over the lot as the congressmen tried to find something in her background that would establish her as a Red. A great deal of questioning centered on an article that Flanagan had written about workers’ theatre for Theatre Arts Monthly. One of the bestknown moments in the Committee’s history occurred as Representative Joseph Starnes (D-Alabama) questioned Flanagan about this article. Noting that she had referred to “a certain Marlowesque madness” among the workers’ theatre participants, Starnes asked, “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?”'’ In her account of the hearing, Flanagan remembered that “the room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh. Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so pre-judged us that even the classics were ‘communistic.’ I said, ‘I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.’”'* The questioning continued: Mr. Starnes: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do. 14

The Stage Is Set

Mrs. Flanagan: Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare. Mr. Starnes: Put that in the record because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely Communistic, and we want to help you. Mrs. Flanagan: ‘Thank you. That statement will go in the record. Mr. Starnes: Of course, we had what some people call Communists back in the days of the Greek theater. Mrs. Flanagan: Quite true. Mr. Starnes: And I believe Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn’t he? Mrs. Flanagan: I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists. Mr. Starnes: So we cannot say when it began.’”

Hallie Flanagan’s brief was never entered in the record of the hearing.

The Federal Theatre Project, a target of the House Appropriations Committee as well as HUAC, was abolished in the wake of the hearings, despite approval by the Senate Appropriations Committee, with

the appropriations bill reading specifically that “none of the funds made available by this joint resolution shall be available: (a) After June 30, 1939, for the operation of any Theatre Project.”’® The theatre and

entertainment community had placed its support solidly behind the FTP. As Flanagan noted, the variety of organizations and individuals coming out publicly for the continuance of Federal Theatre included every theatrical union,

representing a combined membership of thousands; the Screen Actors’ Guild, the Screen Directors’ Guild, the Screen Writers’ Guild, speaking for the vast Hollywood industry; entire companies of plays

on Broadway, dramatic critics from coast to coast; distinguished actors, producers, directors, designers from New York and Hollywood; college and community theatres from the North, East, South, and West; the Federation of Arts Unions representing painters, sculptors, musicians, and artists of every field.'”

In a typically theatrical show of support, Talullah Bankhead and a sup-

porting cast had flown to Washington to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee. The three major talent guilds in Hollywood had sponsored a national radio broadcast and mass demonstration. All of this good will and lobbying activitv was to no avail, a perhaps

ominous sign of the temper of the times. 15

Part One: The Committee and the Culture

The Hollywood Investigations HUAC was established on a permanent basis in January of 1945, just

five months before Germany surrendered to the Allies and eight months before Japan succumbed to atomic attack. Although Martin Dies had conducted a series of “subcommittee” hearings in which he personally “cleared” actors such as James Cagney, Fredric March, and Humphrey Bogart, who were accused by informants of Communist ties

in 1940, the Committee did not turn its full attention to Hollywood until shortly after the war ended. In cooperation with motion-picture studio owners, HUAC held hearings that were aimed ostensibly at root-

ing out Communist infiltrators in the motion-picture industry. The Committee first targeted mainly writers, the well-known leftists of the Screen Writers Guild, in the 1947 hearings whose putative purpose was searching for Communist propaganda in Hollywood films. In 1951, when members of the Committee had discovered the power of publicity that attended their Show Business investigations, a second and far more comprehensive set of hearings was aimed at Hollywood figures who sent money into “Communist coffers” by contributing to various leftist causes.

Anti-Communist sentiment had been building in Hollywood since the early thirties, when a number of left-wing writers such as John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, and Herbert Biberman had come from the East and become active in making the Screen Writers Guild the most left-wing of Hollywood unions. Variety reported in 1933 that Communism is getting a toehold in the picture industry ... [among] a crowd of pinks listed on studio payrolls as writers, authors, scenarists and adapters. And though most of the new red movie recruits are getting anywhere from $500 to $1,500 a week their program calls for a fantastic sovietizing of the lots. Meeting place of the pinks is Venice.

There they gather at least once a week to plan for the millennium when studios will be writer-controlled and producers will be hired hands. Most of the leaders of the literary-communist movement are easterners who have hit Hollywood during the past two years.’®

After two particularly bitter strikes during the thirties, there was no love lost between the Hollywood producers and the unions, particularly the Screen Writers Guild. HUAC had had its eye on Hollywood since its earliest days under Martin Dies. In August 1938, Dies released a report from Committee investigator Edward F. Sullivan stating that Commu16

The Stage Is Set

nism was rampant in the movie industry. In Julv 1940, Dies, at home in Beaumont, Texas, took private testimony from former Communist Party member, and probable paid police-informer, John L. Leech.'” Leech gave Dies the names of forty-two movie people and repeated them to a Los Angeles County grand jury a few weeks later, when a

number of the names were leaked to the press. The result was that “newspaper headlines all over the country emblazoned their front pages with the news that Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fredric March, Franchot Tone, Lionel Stander, and over a dozen other stars had been named as Communists. Dies, alone in ‘executive session,’ promised clearance to all those who would ‘cooperate.’ Within two weeks of the ‘leak’ all but one of the named, actress Jean Muir, had appeared and all except Stander had been ‘cleared’ by the HUAC chairman.”*° Stander was promptly fired by Republic Studios. The next foray into Hollywood occurred in 1945, when John Rankin announced in a press conference that “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this Government has its headquarters in Hollywood,” which he called “the greatest hotbed of subversive

activities in the United States.” “We’re on the trail of the tarantula now,” said Rankin, “and we’re going to follow through.”*! A more tem-

perate “committee spokesman” put the investigation in proportion, noting that the investigation involved “propaganda both clever and childish, in movies.” While nothing immediate came of this attack, it is a good indicator of the ardent fervor with which the Committee conducted its assault on Hollywood. The most even-handed of the histori-

ans of HUAC, Walter Goodman, has suggested some simple motivations for this vehemence. “Io Rankin, Hollywood was Semitic territory. To Thomas, it was New Deal territory. To the entire Committee, it was a veritable sun around which the press worshipfully rotated. And it was also a place where real live Communists could readily be found.”** We have already seen Thomas’s dislike of the New Deal in his comments on the FTP. Rankin regularly gave clear evidence of his dislike of Jews and foreigners, on the floor of the House, as when he com-

mented on a petition from the Committee for the First Amendment that opposed HUAC: “I want to read you some of these names. One of the names is June Havoc. We found .. . that her real name is June Hov-

ick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out his real name David Daniel Kamirsky. . .. Another one is Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Edward Iskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robin-

son. His real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg. There is another here 17

Part One: The Committee and the Culture

who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hessel-

berg.”*? But it was the double promise of Communists who were celebrities that really drew the Committee to Hollywood, and they hit pay dirt with the hearings that investigated the so-called “Hollywood Ten” — actually nineteen — in 1947.

In their study /nquisition in Hollywood, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund estimate that approximately 300 “movie people” — artists, technicians, backlot and front-office workers — joined the Communist Party during the decade from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the first wave of HUAC subpoenas (1936-47).** Although HUAC had had its eye on Hollywood, and particularly on the Screen Writers Guild, since the early days of the Dies Committee, the focus was intensified in

May of 1947, when a subcommittee consisting of Thomas, John McDowell (R-Pennsylvania), and two investigators conducted a week of hearings in Los Angeles, during which they listened to fourteen actors, writers, and producers. After being “amazed at the revelations made by the witnesses and their frankness in naming names, places, dates, Com-

munist card numbers, etc.,” Thomas concluded that “go per cent of Communist infiltration was in the screen writing field” and that many of the “names” were “prominent persons, including prominent script writers.”*> Two weeks later, the subcommittee issued an indictment

based on what the witnesses had told them. It charged that the National Labor Relations Board was abetting the effort of Communist organizers to take control of the industry; that scores of highly paid screenwriters were injecting propaganda into movies; that White House pressure had resulted in the production of “some of the most flagrant Communist propaganda films”; that subtle techniques were used for glorifying the Communist Party, while the Communists prevented the production of films which glorified loyal American citizens; and that

the heads of the studios had done nothing to prevent all of this.*° Exposure was essential; public hearings were promised. As Walter Goodman has noted, “not one of the . . . charges would ever be substantiated, but the publicity which these coming attractions received bespoke high success for the feature event.”’ This was the first stage of the Committee’s grandstand production, the hearings of 20-30 October 1947, which produced the “Hollywood Ten” and became the Thomas Committee’s greatest source of notoriety. After investigators had spent the summer in Los Angeles collecting “several volumes of testimony from people in all branches of the industry,”?> on 21 September 1947 the Committee issued forty-three 18

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