by Owen J. Hurd
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HAPPY DAYS NO MORE
The celebrations after the end of World War II didn’t last long. The good feelings stoked by the conquest of fascism were doused by a new ideological threat, communism. The spiraling strength of the Soviet Union—especially worrisome in the atomic age—the Korean War, and the perceived spread of communist sentiment at home, combined to make for a complicated era in American history.
In this chapter, you’ll read about what happened after the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings attempted to expose subversive elements in the motion picture industry and learn about the curious retirement years of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur.
Hollywood Ending
In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee conducted hearings intended to ferret out communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. The committee subpoenaed forty-one individuals. The first ones to take the stand were so-called friendly witnesses like Adolphe Menjou, Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, and Ayn Rand who cooperated with the committee, motivated either by patriotism, fear, or a combination of the two.
Some named names of suspected “commies,” others railed against organizations they considered communist fronts, and all took the opportunity to profess their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and enthusiastically supported any efforts to purge Hollywood of “reds.”
Many of the remaining unfriendly witnesses—current or lapsed Communist Party members as well as sympathizers and civil libertarians—indicated that they would not cooperate with the committee. Eleven were called to the stand. One by one, they were sworn in, and one by one they were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Several defendants attempted to launch into diatribes of their own, questioning the legitimacy of the proceedings, but boisterous committee chairman, New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, was having none of it. He cut them off, denying them their free speech rights, issuing grandstanding browbeatings in the process. The only foreigner among the eleven, Bertolt Brecht, fled the country. The remaining ten were charged with being in contempt of Congress.
The Hollywood Ten, as they came to be called, was made up of screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, and Albert Maltz along with writer-director Herbert Biberman, writer-producer Adrian Scott, and director Edward Dmytryk. All were accomplished professionals with credits to their names, though some worked primarily on B movies. Among the writers, the best known were probably Oscar-nominated Trumbo (Kitty Foyle) and Lardner, who had won an Academy Award in 1942 for Woman of the Year, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. With twenty-six movies to his credit, Dmytryk was nominated by the academy for best director for the 1947 film Crossfire.
Sentenced to jail terms of up to one year, the defendants appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to take up their cases. Soon, they were all incarcerated in various federal penitentiaries, serving terms between six months and one year. Lardner and Cole were sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, which by this time was the new home of former HUAC committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas, who managed to get himself convicted of fraud in 1949 for a ghost payroll kickback scheme. Fittingly, Thomas had refused to testify in his own trial, exercising a right denied to the Hollywood Ten.
While in prison, one of the Hollywood Ten had a change of heart. Edward Dmytryk realized that being associated with communism would make it impossible to work in the motion picture industry again. To avoid the blacklist, he requested a second hearing before HUAC, a hearing in which he promised to cooperate fully. Taking the stand during HUAC’s second round of hearings Dmytryk ratted out his former comrades. He provided names of other communists and even claimed that members of the Hollywood Ten—Lawson, Maltz, and Scott—encouraged him to weave Marxist messages into his films. The use of this kind of subtle propaganda was what the committee had hoped to find.
In return for his testimony, Dmytryk was taken off the blacklist, and his career flourished. In 1954 he directed The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Van Johnson, and José Ferrer. In the film, a principled but naive U.S. naval officer, Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Johnson) conducts a mutiny aboard a World War II minesweeper, based on the questionable assumption that it was the best decision for the crew and the service. Goaded by a self-serving junior officer, Lieutenant Tom Keefer (MacMurray), into believing that the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Philip Queeg (Bogart) is mentally unhinged, Maryk takes control of the ship during a storm, relieving Queeg of his duties. Maryk is court-martialed but he avoids punishment thanks to his canny defense attorney, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald who despite taking the case is disgusted by the whole matter. Played by Ferrer, Greenwald is especially disdainful of Keefer, whom he insults in the film’s climactic scene:
I wanna drink a toast to you, Mr. Keefer. From the beginning you hated the Navy. And then you thought up this whole idea and you managed to keep your skirts nice and starched and clean, even in the court martial. Steve Maryk will always be remembered as a mutineer. But you, you’ll publish your novel, you’ll make a million bucks, you’ll marry a big movie star, and for the rest of your life you’ll live with your conscience, if you have any. Here’s to the real author of the Caine mutiny. Here’s to you, Mr. Keefer.
Greenwald then throws his drink in Keefer’s face, before delivering this memorable line: “If you wanna do anything about it, I’ll be outside. I’m a lot drunker than you are, so it’ll be a fair fight.”
Pretty heady stuff coming from the mouth of a guy who three years earlier had squealed on fellow members of the Hollywood community in an effort to save his own bacon. Ferrer’s innocent association with actor Paul Robeson landed him on a list of Hollywood subversives. Like Dmytryk, Ferrer did what he had to do to preserve his career.
Bogart’s integrity didn’t fare much better in the blacklisting episode. He and a crew of Hollywood’s elite actors, including Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, and Groucho Marx, had flown into Washington, DC, making a showy display of their solidarity with the Hollywood Ten, but once they found themselves in the middle of the maelstrom they backtracked quickly. Bogart went as far as to formally disassociate himself with the Hollywood Ten in an article he wrote for Photoplay magazine, titled “I’m No Communist,” saying “the ten men cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee were not defended by us. We were there solely in the interest of free speech, freedom of the screen, and protection of the Bill of Rights.” Presumably, those rights took a backseat when their reputations and pocketbooks were at stake.
After the Klieg lights dimmed, the friendly witnesses went on with their lives, reputations and careers intact, though some suffered loss of face after being branded as informers. It was a different story for those who refused to testify. Once they served their sentences (many got time off for good behavior), the nine members of the Hollywood Ten who stuck to their guns found themselves blacklisted and unable to work openly in Hollywood. Some of the screenwriters were assigned to low-budget projects, written under pseudonyms or submitted by fronts. Trumbo, Lardner, and Maltz moved to Mexico for a time but each returned to the United States eventually. Lardner wrote uncredited scripts for the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The blacklist was finally lifted in 1960 when producer-director Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write a credited screenplay for his production of Exodus. Shortly thereafter Kirk Douglas made the announcement that Trumbo had also written the screenplay for Spartacus. It turned out that Trumbo had written numerous other uncredited screenplays during the blacklist era, including two Academy Award–winning screenplays: Roman Holiday (1953), which was credited to a front, Ian McLellan Hunter, and The Brave One (1957), which Trumbo wrote under the pseudonym Robert Rich. With the blacklist lifted, Lardner wrote his first credited script, The Cincinnati Kid (1965), followed by the screenplay for M*A*S*H (1970),
for which he won the Academy Award for Best Writing.
One of the Hollywood Ten writers whose career was permanently stalled by the blacklist was Alvah Bessie. He resorted to menial jobs over the years, working at one point as a stagehand. In an article for the New York Times Magazine (March 25, 1973), Victor Navasky tells the story of Bessie’s awkward reunion with turncoat Edward Dmytryk:
Alvah Bessie, as militant as any member of the 10, was put to the test when, after some post-prison hard times, he finally landed a job as P.R. director of San Francisco’s film festival—only to discover that he had been recommended for the job by Ed Dmytryk, the one member of the 10 who had defected and named names…. One day Dmytryk walked in the door, put out his hand and said, “Hello, Alvah.” Bessie’s jaw dropped, he stared and, speechless, left the room.
There were tiffs between other members of the Hollywood Ten, too. Trumbo caused a stir when he won the Writers Guild’s Laurel Award in 1970. At his acceptance speech, he spoke of the blacklist era, saying, “it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.” This was too much for Albert Maltz, who complained that Trumbo’s position “makes a mockery of the struggle” for freedom of thought and expression. To dramatize his position, Maltz made a comparison with the Nazi era. “If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.”
Informed of this position by Navasky, Trumbo replied, “Fuck Albert Maltz!” For the most part, Trumbo resolved to live and let live, rather than to hold onto the bitterness created by that dark chapter in Hollywood’s history. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to forgive Elia Kazan, the director who freely named names in committee hearings. “Kazan is one of those for whom I feel contempt, because he carried down men much less capable of defending themselves than he.” With his immense professional stature, Trumbo suggested, Kazan could have continued to get work on some level. But those he named suffered greatly.
Trumbo’s feud with Maltz continued until Trumbo died of cancer in 1976.
One by one, the Hollywood Ten passed on, the last one being Ring Lardner, who died in 2000 at the age of eighty-five.
LOOSE ENDS
On October 23, 1947, actor and Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan took the stand at the HUAC hearings. Although he was a friendly witness, he claimed that he did not know of any communists in Hollywood. His personal opinion was that it was unnecessary and even undesirable to outlaw the Communist Party. Although he despised their ideas, Reagan said, “I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.” On another occasion, he proclaimed that the SAG “will not be a party to a blacklist.” It turns out, though, that Reagan was saying one thing and doing quite another. Communists and those who refused to cooperate with HUAC were subsequently denied membership to SAG. And in 1985, it was revealed that Reagan had been naming names all along, just not openly in front of the committee. He had been secretly funneling names of suspected communists to the FBI.
Not Fade Away
As the war against communism raged in Hollywood and Washington, the hero of World War II’s Pacific theater of war, General Douglas MacArthur, was prosecuting the Cold War in Korea. The only problem was that MacArthur and his boss, President Harry Truman, were not seeing eye to eye. Things finally came to a head when MacArthur made public comments that contradicted the administration and jeopardized a pending peace initiative. Truman consequently relieved the popular general of his command on April 10, 1951. From that day on, there was never any love lost between the two headstrong leaders. But as they butted heads—through the media, comments and letters to friends, and finally dueling memoirs—their lives took divergent paths.
A week later, MacArthur was addressing Congress, concluding his farewell speech with the oft-quoted line, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” Though the phrase provided a vivid rhetorical flourish, it was an inaccurate description of what was to come, for MacArthur did neither—at least not right away.
Despite MacArthur’s assertions that he had “no political aspirations whatsoever,” anyone who attended his public speaking engagements might have had to wonder. After being honored with one of the largest and most enthusiastic ticker-tape parades in New York’s history, MacArthur toured the United States, excoriating the Truman administration’s war effort and domestic policies.
Covering one such speech, Time magazine described a defiant MacArthur, delivering “hard-hitting” attacks on Truman, “full of oratorical thunder.” MacArthur “raked the Administration up one side and down the other,” accusing it “of appeasing Soviet Russia and thus inviting World War III.” Shifting to domestic issues, MacArthur groused about “high taxes, the drift to socialism, the debased dollar, the rise of bureaucracy, the decline of morals, and the way that corruption has ‘shaken the people’s trust in…those administering the civil power.’”
“If MacArthur isn’t a candidate for President,” quipped Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, “there’s not a steer in Texas.”
But MacArthur’s political instincts were often misguided. In November 1951 he delivered a vitriolic partisan speech at a Seattle centennial celebration. An audience that was presumably eager to laud the retired soldier for his brilliant military career was less inclined to tolerate a tone-deaf rant against the Truman administration.
Even after Truman decided against running for reelection, MacArthur continued to aim most of his barbs at the increasingly unpopular president, instead of focusing on fellow candidates for the Republican nomination. MacArthur’s best opportunity to seize the nomination came at the Republican convention in Chicago, but MacArthur turned in one of his most pathetic rhetorical performances in an uncharacteristically lifeless speech. He still may have salvaged an opportunity to become vice president, but he picked the wrong horse, as Senator Robert Taft lost the nomination to Dwight Eisenhower.
His political career over as quickly as it began, MacArthur went into hibernation. Bunkered in his high-rise luxury apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Tower in Manhattan, MacArthur turned inward, receiving few guests and making no appearances for months. The only passions he indulged were televised football games and boxing matches.
Meanwhile, Truman and his wife, Bess, returned to Independence, where they would live out their remaining years. For a guy who made some of the most momentous decisions in the history of the United States and the world, Harry Truman spent his retirement years in a curiously homespun and humble way. The folksy former leader of the free world strived to live much like the average Tom, Dick, or Harry—to the extent that an ex-president can. His grandest objective was to raise funds for and build the Truman Library. Other than that he hoped to keep a low profile.
“It’s almost impossible to do as other people do”—that is, lead a simple, inconspicuous existence—Truman observed, “after you’ve been under those bright lights.” But Harry and Bess gave it their best shot. The effort was made easier, in part, by Truman’s shaky finances. When he left the White House, Truman had no significant means of income. Today’s former presidents receive a substantial pension, as well as an ample expense account to cover administrative costs associated with their duties as former presidents. Not so in Truman’s day.
Other presidents had amassed large personal fortunes before their political careers, but Truman, a former farmer and haberdasher, had little in the way of savings, and the only pension he had was the $112 he received each month from his World War I service in the U.S. Army. This amounted to about a third of an average workingman’s income.
And of course Truman had expenses that the average workingman did not. The former president received thousands of letters per month. The cost of responding to his mail came t
o about $10,000 a year.
Truman had offers, but he was determined not to take on any jobs or entangle himself in any business dealings that would commercialize or otherwise demean the office of the presidency. Even opposed to accepting speaking fees, Truman eventually took a page from the playbook of Ulysses S. Grant, accepting a contract to write his memoirs. For this the president received an advance of $600,000—a huge sum of money for that era. But it wasn’t as good as it seemed. Those who like to rail about today’s high taxes should be glad they aren’t paying the same tax rate Truman did: 67 percent. Between taxes and expenses incurred to hire researchers and other assistants, Truman estimated that he netted a mere $37,000 from the project.
Still, the influx of cash enabled the Trumans to take a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. Their next vacation would be a far more modest affair—that quintessentially American expedition: the family road trip. Unencumbered—not to mention unprotected—by the Secret Service, Harry and Bess hit the road, kicking off a two-thousand-mile road trip from Independence, Missouri, to Washington, DC, and back, with stops at Philadelphia and New York City along the way. Back then, there were no laws requiring protection for former presidents. That would change after November 22, 1963.
They departed Independence with no fanfare whatsoever and hoped to remain incognito throughout the trip, staying in no-frills motels and eating at roadside diners. Each stop in a small town followed a loose script. The Trumans would pull off the highway to refuel or for a quick meal. The gas station attendant or waitress would recognize the former president and first lady and before they knew it they’d be swarmed by well-wishers, gawkers, reporters, and autograph seekers. Harry and Bess managed to go unnoticed in one or two cities, but on most occasions their every move was monitored and often chronicled in the local newspaper. One headline, from the Decatur Review, in Illinois, noted: “Truman 10% Tipper.” The cost-conscious Truman was not above griping about an overpriced breakfast in Wheeling, West Virginia—55¢ “for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast.” The following day he was pleased to see that a generous lunch of roast chicken with five sides and coffee could still be had for just 70¢.