Unrepentant

Today it’s reduced to labels: McCarthyism, fellow traveller, witch hunt, blacklist; and to soundbites: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Have you no sense of decency, sir? For a half-century, it has played in reruns: allegorical episodes of The Twilight Zone; the black comedy of The Front, featuring Woody Allen and written by the blacklist survivor Walter Bernstein; Philip Roth’s novel I Married A Communist. Most recently, the play Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, performed to critical acclaim off-Broadway.

The huac hearings into Communist activity in Hollywood were never just the investigation they claimed to be. They were, according to Navasky, “degradation ceremonies.” And in these ceremonies, Kazan looked too willing to play his part.

His testimony was a grandiose thing, a self-serving, wholly immodest analysis of his work. He called his 1945 movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “a typically American story [that] could happen only here and a glorification of America not in material terms but in spiritual ones.” He claimed Panic in the Streets was “built around the subject of an incipient plague [in which] the hero is a doctor in the United States Health Service.” He portrayed himself as a patriot and took swipes at those who refused to testify.

Schulberg’s testimony was far more modest. He said he had written a few scripts, but none that he was “very proud to talk about.” The bulk of his testimony was about the Party’s attempts to influence what he wrote. I told them I had decided to write a book. The feeling of the group was, “That is fine. Writing is very important, books are very important, provided that they are useful weapons. He described how these pressure plays struck a nerve. It was very similar to what the writers in the Soviet Union were being told: that anything that helped the five-year plan, that made the workers happier in their role, was a good book. He described his crisis of conscience about Communism, one that issued from the writers’ congress he attended in Moscow. Every man who appeared on the platform . . . by 1938 had either been shot or silenced, and after that none of these writers, who were trying to follow their individual line, were able to function any more.

While Kazan obligingly painted a picture of the Red Menace that was useful for the Committee, Schulberg’s testimony was more problematic, and his picture of those in the Party’s rank and file vastly more complex. He suggested that a “large percentage” of the membership wasn’t involved in or even aware of the Communist Party’s espionage work. He said that most who joined were “idealistic,” “innocents” who had hoped that Communism would bring about “peace on earth and good will to men”; they were fodder for the “conspirators” and “manipulators.” He testified that his quitting the party was typical, that turnover in membership was “constant.” He pleaded for compassion. He made a case for the suspension of the blacklist: [Since] many of the people were in no way really subversive, they got into something that they really didn’t understand. Industries should not be encouraged to crack down on them.

Not everyone appreciates the distinctions between Kazan’s and Schulberg’s testimonies, however. “Both Kazan and Schulberg had tremendous guilt feelings that they continuously rationalized in order to live with themselves,” says Judy Chaikin, director of an Emmy-nominated documentary about the blacklist. “[Schulberg’s] testimony was a vain attempt to cleanse himself before the Committee and save his career.”

Schulberg’s explanation of his decision to testify does raise questions:

Point: He says he wasn’t subpoenaed by huac but rather volunteered to testify – but omits the fact that he notified the Committee of his willingness to testify two days after he had been named during the testimony of screenwriter Richard Collins.

Point: He says he named only those “who had already been named” – but, as Navasky points out, one of them, a writer called Tillie Lerner, had not been previously named. In fact, Schulberg was the only witness ever to name Lerner; a mitigating factor here is that Lerner was a novelist who worked outside the Hollywood blacklist.

Point: He says that the naming of names was moot because government moles in the party had already secured membership rolls – but this glosses over the fact that some individuals weren’t blacklisted until they were named in a public session of huac.