by Paul Kengor
As Reagan and other friendly witnesses prepared to testify in Washington, Hollywood's Communists looked to other liberals in the movie industry for support. Bogart was still susceptible. The Communists appealed to him and other Hollywood liberals by wrapping themselves in the American flag.
A group of high-profile Tinseltown actors, writers, and producers planned a major public-relations trip to Washington to defend the First Amendment freedoms of their friends accused of being Communists, who were being summoned before the House committee as “unfriendly” witnesses. These liberals were more than game. After consulting with the unfriendlies, they changed the group's name from the confrontational Hollywood Fights Back, opting instead for the Committee for the First Amendment. This was a savvy PR move, signifying the high road to be taken: the Communists’ case would be based on the U.S. Constitution, on the unimpeachable American Founders and their venerable First Amendment—in other words, on the antithesis of the USSR that the comrades secretly saluted. The Constitution-lovers at the Daily Worker were happy to join in, aiding the campaign by headlining it as a “Bill-of-Rights Tour.”17
The liberal stars enlisted in the cause ran into the hundreds, including Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Myrna Loy, and Paulette Goddard. Roughly two dozen of them actually ventured to Washington for the hearings. The traveling troupe included big names: Danny Kaye, Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, John Garfield, Sterling Hayden, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, John Huston, Philip Dunne, Billy Wilder, and, of course, Bogie and Bacall.18 Bogart topped the list, as he would any blockbuster movie.
The two dozen huddled with directors Dunne and Huston, their leaders, to coordinate and ensure that they spoke from the same script. The group took the position that questions from the congressional investigation did not merit responses because they violated the rights of the accused to believe what they wanted, to assemble as they wanted, and to say what they wanted as guaranteed under the First Amendment.19 The liberals assumed that their accused friends were not Communists. They had convinced themselves—or allowed themselves to be convinced—that the deceivers were sitting in Washington, not Hollywood.
“Before we left Hollywood,” Bogart said later, “we carefully screened every performer so that no red or pink could infiltrate and sabotage our purpose.”20 Bogie prided himself on his ability not to be tricked. He was street-wise, just like his movie image.21 As one “First Amendment” crusader put it, Bogart “feels that he's the most politically sophisticated guy in our business.”22 The tough-talking Bogie seemed a most unlikely character to be duped.
The crew from the Committee for the First Amendment boarded a plane bearing the name Red Star (no kidding), which immediately raised suspicions among the liberals, though not enough to stop the voyage. “Coincidence or design?” Lauren Bacall puzzled to herself.23
As Bogie and Bacall led the expedition from California, a New York contingent readied to join them in Washington, including writer Arthur Miller, musicians Leonard Bernstein and Artie Shaw—proclaimer of the Soviet constitution—and producer Elia Kazan.24 (See page 218.)
Along the route, the Hollywood stars had plenty of moments to talk to reporters. Bogart, a hard-drinking hothead, prone to speak for himself without coordinating with his friends, issued a personal statement to the press, insisting that the activities of the group had “nothing to do with Communism. It's none of my business who's a Communist and who isn't.… The reason I'm flying to Washington is because I am an outraged and angry citizen who feels that my civil liberties are being taken away.”25
That line from Bogart, though honest and consistent with the American way of life, was a perfect parroting of the Communist Party line. Bogie and others had no idea how their words had, in essence, already been scripted by their closet-comrade friends. They would be unwitting mouthpieces for the Communist line, flawlessly echoing the Reds’ talking points. This was clear once the unfriendlies—the so-called Hollywood Ten—began to testify.26
“Nazi” America
Once upon a time, when the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, American Communists actively appeased Nazi Germany, placing American interests and the American ideal and democratic way of life secondary to the goals of the Soviet totalitarian state allied with fascist Nazis. They even opposed aid to democratic Britain as it was being mercilessly savaged by totalitarian-fascist Germany. And in the postwar period they did not object that the USSR was seizing Eastern Europe and rounding up Displaced Persons (DPs). Stalin's NKVD had, in fact, seized Nazi concentration camps and begun using them for Soviet purposes, with Buchenwald renamed Soviet Special Camp No. 2.27
But now, in October 1947, American Communist screenwriters—who refused to openly admit they were Communists and loyal Soviet patriots—invoked the spirit of Jefferson and Madison; their lodestar was no longer October 1917 but July 1776.
More than that, they denounced the congressmen who dared to question their loyalties as nothing less than goose-stepping stormtroopers seeking to establish a Nazi regime in the United States. Yes, a Nazi regime.This was a consistent Communist Party line, up and down the ranks. Again and again America's Communists and Communist sympathizers lashed out at these alleged homegrown “Nazis” and “fascists.”
The Daily Worker, of course, was central to this coordinated campaign of outrageous name-calling. An excellent case in point is the October 29, 1947, issue, which led with an article by Washington editor Rob F. Hall. The piece trumpeted the combative words of unfriendlies John Howard Lawson, who testified on October 27, and Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and Alvah Bessie, who testified (in that order) on October 28.28 Unbeknownst to their liberal friends, all four of these men were dedicated Communists; Hall and his colleagues at the Daily Worker knew the truth, surely, but made no mention of it in their paper.
Commissar Lawson was characteristically vicious. He informed Congress that it was behaving like “Hitler's Germany.” “You are using the old technique, which was used in Hitler's Germany,” explained Lawson, “in order to create a scare here.” The House committee was, said the dedicated Stalinist, “trying to introduce fascism in this country.”29
For his part, Dalton Trumbo did nothing to conceal his contempt for the congressmen, especially Chairman Thomas, who gaveled the writer repeatedly. “You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire,” Trumbo lectured. “For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there is the smell of smoke in this very room.” As if that were not direct enough, Trumbo screamed as he left the hearing room: “This is the beginning of an American concentration camp!”30
The screenwriter said this at the very time that the Soviets were taking over Buchenwald from the Nazis.
Albert Maltz followed next. Though he was not as visibly angry, his words were incendiary. He accused Congressmen Thomas and John Rankin, the latter the racist New Deal Democrat from Mississippi, of a bipartisan effort to “carry out activities in America like those carried out in Germany by Goebbels and Himmler.”31 Meanwhile, in the USSR that Maltz advocated, Stalin boasted about his own vicious secret-police head (and serial rapist and mass murderer), Lavrenti Beria, whom Stalin dubbed “our Himmler.”32 This was not hyperbole on Uncle Joe's part. Sadly, Maltz (who was Jewish) and the others seemed incapable of making distinctions between true tyrants and murderers, on one hand, and elected representatives conducting a public inquiry, on the other.
Maltz also declared that the congressmen were full of “hatred of the very idea of democratic brotherhood”—though he said nothing about the antidemocratic USSR that he admired. The American politicians were carrying out “an evil and vicious procedure,” a form of “official tyranny,” according to this supporter of evil, vicious, and official Soviet tyranny.33
Maltz was followed by fellow screenwriter Alvah Bessie. Maltz and Bessie knew each other well; both were alumni of Columbia University and fellow contributors to New Masses, which had been edited by former KGB agent and Communist spy Whittaker Ch
ambers. Bessie was so dedicated to international Communism that in the 1930s he volunteered for the International Brigades to fight alongside the Communists in the Spanish Civil War.34 Bessie was literally willing to give his life for Communism.
These, too, were rather crucial details apparently not shared with Bogie and Bacall and friends.
Befitting his willingness to fight, Bessie was pugnacious before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At one point he referred to chief investigator Robert E. Stripling as “Mr. Quisling.” This implied that Stripling was guilty of privately serving an enemy government, and thus a traitor and a cretin—an ironic form of disparagement coming from Bessie. Over and over, Bessie warned that the committee was pushing America toward “fascism” and “foster[ing] the sort of intimidation and terror that is the inevitable precursor of a fascist regime.”35
A decade later, Bessie would seek vengeance with a play he titled simply The Un-Americans, a morality play released the year Joe McCarthy died.36
The Nazi parallels were not only absurd but deeply offensive, given the very recent experience of the Holocaust. American Jews, in particular, should have been outraged by the comparison. Analogies between Congressman Thomas and Hitler, between Stripling and Goebbels, and between “HUAC” and the Third Reich were obscene; they trivialized the unprecedented, unspeakable evil inflicted by Hitler and his racist-fascist henchmen.
And yet the Communists’ outrageous accusations worked. They allowed the closet comrades to deflect attention from the justifiable question of where their true loyalties lay—and for whom, and what, they were really working. Congress was conducting a legitimate inquiry, given the history, record, and professed beliefs of CPUSA, the Comintern, and their sworn members. Congressional investigators were well aware of that background. They also had documentation to back it up—everything from lengthy Comintern edicts to tiny CPUSA membership cards; detailed testimony from numerous former party members, such as Ben Gitlow and J. B. Mathews; and a cache of militant speeches from Soviet leaders beginning with Lenin. And, of course, there were the tens of millions of Soviets slaughtered at the hands of the current leader of the USSR.
The Communist tactic of deflection worked in large part because a host of duped liberals joined the chorus. As ridiculous as it was to call the Communists’ accusers Nazis or fascists,37 the CPUSA approach worked masterfully with liberals in Hollywood, especially when the unfriendlies were called to testify in Washington. The success of the campaign was stunning, given that many of these liberals had always recognized the evils of Hitlerism—unlike their comrade friends, whose position on the Nazis depended on what Stalin was saying at the moment. These liberals knew what Nazis were really like, and still they engaged in the smears.
Hollywood's liberals were a huge help to the Communists. The American public in the 1940s was not cynical toward Hollywood as it is today. In the 1940s, Hollywood's Golden Age, the actors and actresses were truly stars. The Communists knew that these were precisely the right cohorts to enlist.
Not every star could be fooled into repeating the Marxist agitprop about incipient “fascism” or a coming American “Nazi state.” John Wayne, for example, would insist that America needed a “delousing” of Communists and their sympathizers.38 But plenty of other celebrities did join the cause. To be fair, Hollywood's progressives generally stuck to the “First Amendment” script—but not all of them. Some celebrities took the bait, repeating the obscenities about fascism or Nazism, or some other infamous form of historical repression. And as they did, the secretly and illegally Soviet-funded Daily Worker, mouthpiece of the secretly and illegally Soviet-funded CPUSA, ran their words in banner headlines.
“I ask you when they put words in concentration camps, how long will it be before they put men there, too?” said Judy Garland in defense of the accused Communist screenwriters. The Daily Worker eagerly published her assessment—more than once.39 “Dorothy” looked somewhere over the rainbow and saw nothing but barbed wire and gas chambers—an American Auschwitz, courtesy of Congress's anti-Communists.
“This is nothing new,” lamented actor Frank Gervasi, quoted in a Daily Worker piece titled “Hollywood Fights Back.” “We saw it before in Rome [under Mussolini] and Berlin [under Hitler].”40
Actor Larry Parks went for another analogy: he likened Congress's investigation to the “Spanish Inquisition.” Sure enough, the Daily Worker ran with the quote, just as it ran with a similar quote from the first press release by the Committee for the First Amendment, which denounced this “political inquisition.”41 Similarly, the Communist newspaper quoted liberal actor John Garfield as being “sore, damn sore” at Congress's so-called heavy hand against the First Amendment. Garfield said he loved “this country and … want to see it set free”—as if America had returned to the days of slavery.42 Judy Garland agreed with Garfield. She announced that Congress was “kicking the living daylights out of the Bill of Rights.” Once again she got her name in the Daily Worker.43
Lillian Hellman provided great copy for the Daily Worker with her regular recitations of the party line. Speaking of the hearings, she snarled, “This past week has been sickening and degrading.” The congressmen were “yes-men” and “Judasgoats,” who would lead films, radio, press, publishers, trade unions, scientists, and churches “to the slaughter.” And all of it was unnecessary, said the pro-Stalin writer, since “there's never been a communist idea in films.”44
By this point, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been likened to Hitler's Gestapo, to Spain's inquisitors, to Salem's “witch” drowners, to slaveowners, and to Judas, who handed over Jesus Christ for crucifixion. Hollywood's liberals and Reds alike were making Congress pay the price for daring to consider whether there were Communists in Hollywood seeking to secretly manipulate the film industry under orders from true henchmen like Stalin and Beria in Moscow.
No amount of truth injected into the debate seemed to make any difference. When Congressman Thomas suggested that Communist propaganda had been inserted into certain Hollywood films “during the past eight years,” the Daily Worker dubbed Thomas's mere suggestion a “smear”—as if films like Mission to Moscow had never happened. Hollywood heroes stepped forward to back the Daily Worker’s disavowals. When Chairman Thomas asked Danny Kaye—who had done mocking imitations of Thomas during his trip to Washington aboard the Red Star—whether he had ever seen a Hollywood movie that seemed to include pro-Soviet propaganda, the dancing comedian replied flatly, “No, sir. I haven't.”45 Standing with Kaye was Paul V. McNutt, a special counsel for the movie industry, who sent a letter to Thomas protesting the congressman's insinuation.46
Seconding Kaye was Gene Kelly, who in an interview with the media said: “As Mr. Kaye has remarked, it's pretty hard to find any propaganda in pictures.… You can't make a picture for entertainment that the American public will accept and inject any propaganda in it. So I think so far, we're pretty safe.”47
While McNutt, Kaye, and Kelly challenged the notion that Communist propaganda could make it into a movie, John Howard Lawson was preparing to testify as an unfriendly before the House committee. It was Commissar Lawson, recall, who had ordered Communist writers that it was their “duty” to get “Communist doctrine” and “the party line in every script that you write.” For now, however, Commissar Lawson was talking to Kaye and friends about one thing only: his awe of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
A Sprinkling of “Red” Pepper
This kind of rhetoric did not come strictly from actors. The Daily Worker also thrilled in the words of certain Democratic senators, such as Elbert Thomas of Utah, Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, and Claude “Red” Pepper of Florida, who advised the unfriendlies not to answer questions from their congressional colleagues. Senator Thomas dubbed the committee's methods “unholy.” Senator Taylor vowed “to battle this Un-American Committee.”48 Taylor said the committee members were “fascist-minded,” in “parallel wit
h those of pre-war leaders in Germany, Italy, and Japan.” The Daily Worker gratefully ran these senatorial assessments on page one of its October 22, 1947, issue; it included them in other editions as well, under eye-catching headlines like “Liberals Question Committee's Legality.”49
The Daily Worker was especially pleased with Senator Pepper's words, which it turned into a gigantic, front-page, above-the-fold headline that screamed, “SEN. PEPPER URGES FILM STARS DEFY HOUSE PROBE: Says Committee Helps Fascism.” (See page 224.) The senator from Florida had long been accused of thinking like a Soviet official. Here, he did not disappoint the Bolshevik faithful: he told reporters that the “HUAC” investigation could be “the Stalingrad in the attack on civil liberties in this country.” The imagery was clear: the senator was likening the so-called First Amendment fighters to the Soviet soldiers who turned back the Nazi assault at Stalingrad in late 1942 and shifted the momentum in the war. In this analogy, the members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities were the Nazis. The editors at the Daily Worker liked the analogy so much that they flagged it with a subhead, “STALINGRAD FOR FREEDOM.”50
Senator Pepper was doing yeoman's work in helping CPUSA rally the masses. He was extremely active, joining forces with the Progressive Citizens of America, which called for the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.51