by Paul Kengor
Aside from Senator Pepper, another go-to source for the Daily Worker was FDR's former vice president Henry Wallace, a dupe of such incredible proportions that this book cannot do him justice. “Has America gone crazy?” the Daily Worker quoted Wallace summing up the Hollywood hearings. “Is the Un-American Activities Committee evidence that America is travelling the road to fascism?”52
The former vice president urged his fellow Americans that they “must destroy” the House committee—at the ballot box, of course. If they did not, the evil committee “will destroy many of the foundations of democracy and Christianity.”53 Wallace, a fond admirer of the Soviet experiment, was worried about threats to democracy and Christianity—in America, that is.
Don't Play It Again, Sam
Fortunately for the anti-Communist cause, all of this reckless insanity, spoken from the mouths of certain senators, actors, and screenwriters, created a backlash. One person weary of the cacophony was Humphrey Bogart, who seemed to grow less comfortable by the day, especially once the news turned against the crew of the Red Star.
Bogart was still expressing outrage at the congressional investigation after the Committee for the First Amendment arrived in Washington. He gave a radio broadcast in which he angrily declared: “We saw the gavel of a committee chairman cutting off the words of free Americans. The sound of that gavel, Mr. Thomas, rings across America! Because every time your gavel struck, it hit the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”54
Soon thereafter, however, the press reported that one of the group's members, actor Sterling Hayden, was a Communist. Among the whistleblowers was George Dixon in his “Washington Scene” column in the Washington Times Herald. Dixon got the scoop from “the blonde and beautiful Miss Mary Benton Gore,” a “member of one of our most respected families.” A cousin of Senator Albert Gore Sr. (Tennessee Democrat), Mary Benton Gore found herself the object of Hayden's attention and affection at a “little dinner party” arranged during the actor's stay in Washington. Hayden spoke too freely to Miss Gore, who, in turn, spoke freely to George Dixon, who then spoke freely to all of Washington and beyond, detailing Hayden's interest not only in Gore's beautiful blonde hair but also in Stalin's ugly Bolshevik Russia.55
Dixon's report was embarrassingly gossipy but, it turned out, embarrassingly correct, as Hayden later conceded when summoned back to Washington for testimony. Yes, Sterling Hayden was a Communist. So much for Bogie's having “carefully screened every performer” before they left Hollywood.
Worse, Bogie and friends learned that all those anti-Communist congressmen, investigators, and lawyers did not arraign people for fun; no, they actually had some evidence. It took mere minutes to show that the suspicious screenwriters were, in fact, Communists. Congress presented registration rolls, news clips, Daily Worker articles, New Masses bylines, front-group memberships, party applications, forms, cards, checks, cash, and even numbers. Consider the evidence the House committee unveiled:
Dalton Trumbo: Communist Party registration card, code no. “Dalt T.” The committee presented a total of thirty-nine citations with Communist or Communist-front affiliations.
Albert Maltz: Communist Party registration card, no. 47196. The committee presented a total of fifty-eight citations with Communist or Communist-front affiliations.
Alvah Bessie: Communist Party registration card, no. 46836. The committee presented a total of thirty-two citations with Communist or Communist-front affiliations.
John Howard Lawson: Communist Party registration card, no. 47275. The committee found Lawson to be a one-man Communist front. Committee investigators presented the May 18, 1934, Daily Worker, which identified Lawson as one of its correspondents; a November 1946 issue of Masses & Mainstream listing Lawson as a member of its editorial board (along with Alvah Bessie and Dalton Tumbo);56 the unsettling examples of Lawson (who was Jewish) flip-flopping on Hitler in lockstep with the CPUSA-Comintern-Moscow party line; and Lawson's position as a sponsor of the American Peace Mobilization,57 the most insidious of Communist fronts, along with his Hollywood friends Albert Maltz, Budd Schulberg, Herbert Biberman,58 Dashiell Hammett, Artie Shaw, and Will Geer.59
The evidence was shocking and undeniable—and only made Lawson, Trumbo, Maltz, and Bessie angrier.
“Hitler Germany!” yelped Lawson, when presented with irrefutable evidence. “Hitler tactics!” he screeched as six Capitol policemen led him from the witness stand.60
“American concentration camp!” moaned Trumbo, as he was escorted out of the room and away from the piles of embarrassing evidence.61
Only then did Bogart and Bacall recognize that they had been used. Unbelievable as it may seem, Bacall later said that as she and Bogie and the others flew to Washington, they did not know that most of the unfriendlies called to testify were in fact members of the Communist Party. “We didn't realize until much later,” she admitted, “that we were being used to some degree by the Unfriendly Ten.”62 She conceded that they had been foolishly naïve, headstrong, emotional, and that they had hastily strolled into something “we knew nothing about.”63
Bogie was not so gentle. He was furious that he had been made to look like an idiot—a useful idiot. “You f—ers sold me out!” he yelled at Danny Kaye.64
Many members of the group felt that way. Billy Wilder spoke up first: “We oughta fold.”65 They did. The Committee for the First Amendment fell silent, withered, and died.
So thorough had been the duping that the California state legislature, in an investigation and report a few months later, listed the Committee for the First Amendment as a Communist front, right alongside the American Peace Mobilization, HICCASP, and the Progressive Citizens of America.66 This was not, of course, because most of those on the Committee for the First Amendment had been Communists—that is not how Communist fronts worked—but because the group's non-Communist liberals were snowed by the Reds. These liberals had been “suckers,” as SAG head Ronald Reagan put it, victims of “one of the most successful operations in [the Communists’] domestic history.”67
And with the committee and its members fully exploited, the Communists hung out to dry the liberals who had lent their names to defend individuals they thought had been honest with them. The stars’ reputations had been tarnished by the closet Communists who used them. Now they endeavored to explain themselves. The celebrated lyricist Ira Gershwin, for instance, appeared before the California legislature to explain how he could be so oblivious as to host meetings for a Communist front at his home.68
Bogart, too, looked to repair the damage. He published a strong statement in which he declared, “I am not a Communist” or even “a Communist sympathizer.” “I detest Communism just as any decent American does,” wrote Bogie. “I'm about as much in favor of Communism as J. Edgar Hoover.” He pledged that his name would never again “be found on any Communist front organization as a sponsor for anything Communistic.”69 He conceded that the trip to Washington had been “ill-advised,” “foolish and impetuous.” He told Newsweek, “We went green and they beat our brains out.” Bogart also said that liberals like himself could no longer “permit ourselves to be used as dupes by Commie organizations.”70
British commentator Alistair Cooke, an astute observer of Bogart, said the actor “was aghast to discover that several of them [unfriendlies] were down-the-line Communists coolly exploiting the protection of the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.”71 The actor wanted to be viewed as a straight-shooter, speaking the truth candidly, even when it hurt. He had expected the same from his Hollywood associates. Instead, he had been duped, as had other actors, such as John Garfield (“I'm a sucker for a left hook”).
All over the world, the press took potshots at Bogie: “Was Bogart's Face Red?” ran the headline in London's News Chronicle.72 “Don't try to fox me again,” columnist George Sokolsky warned Bogart in an open letter in the New York Sun.73
Communists and even some liberals lined up to blast Bogart for daring to
say he had been duped.74 Bogie was no longer a friend. Being on the side of anti-Communism, he was a mortal enemy. As Bogart's son, Stephen, later recalled, some of Bogie's liberal friends “felt that he was copping out, just trying to protect his career.”75 And his liberal friends were kind compared to his Communist “friends.” Communist screenwriters like Lester Cole, Larry Adler, and Alvah Bessie all slammed Bogart, as did the Daily Worker. Adler said Bogie had “caved in in the most demeaning, debasing way.” Adler, Cole, and Bessie accused him of (in Bessie's words) “provok[ing] a panic that rapidly destroyed the Committee for the First Amendment itself,” since Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, and others had quickly followed Bogart's lead.76 “Bogart's about-face,” lamented the Daily Worker, was a shame, given “all the good things” he had contributed “to the fight for a finer America,” until, alas, he “decided to embrace Operation Mass Murder.”77
Yes, Humphrey Bogart, former good man; now, mass murderer of civil liberties. Like Reagan, he had suddenly morphed into a “fascist,” “capitalist scum.” As F. Scott Fitzgerald had warned, Bogart had become a target for subhuman demonization.
Of course, that is how Communists had always treated their liberal “friends.” But at least liberals learned a hard lesson this time.
Well, not all liberals. The Washington Post produced a surreal editorial rebuking not the unfriendlies for misleading their liberal friends but Bogart for his apology. “There is no reason for Mr. Bogart to apologize,” lectured the Post. “Defense of the constitutional rights of fellow citizens is an excellent reason for making a trip to Washington.” The editors conceived an exceedingly strange explanation for Bogart's apology: “One can scarcely help suspecting that what led Mr. Bogart to his interesting apologia and his gratuitous avowal that he had no use for Communism was fear of the consequences of being branded a Communist by the Thomas Committee.” A patronizing Post sniffed: “We are rather sorry for Mr. Bogart. He had nothing at all to be ashamed of until he began to be ashamed.”78
In the decades since, many liberals have adopted that same line—that Bogart caved in to fears of being labeled a Communist.79 They are wrong: Bogart's reaction, as Lauren Bacall has repeatedly noted, stemmed from the undeniable fact that he had been sold a false bill of goods by the Reds. He thought the people he was defending were not Communists—but they were. The writers and performers he defended had lied to him, with no concern for his reputation. Bear in mind, too, that Bogart was not summoned to Washington or ordered to testify. He went there voluntarily. This was not the case of “right-wing” anti-Communists striking fear into the hearts of good liberals; rather, it was an example of naïve liberals waking up to the fact that Communists had duped them.
Needless to say, the Daily Worker was thrilled to see the Washington Post’s editorial. The CPUSA house organ gleefully reported how the Post “raked Humphrey Bogart over the coals editorially.” The Daily Worker quoted the editorial at great length, dedicating seven full paragraphs to the Post’s criticisms.80 The Communists saw that they could still count on liberals, even after everything that had happened.
They could count on liberals for many decades to follow. The torch would be passed to future generations of liberals—journalists at the Washington Post and the New York Times, professors in college classrooms—to call “HUAC” names, defend the likes of Lawson and Trumbo, and argue that anti-Communist “witch-hunters” had run roughshod over innocent liberals.
As for liberals like Bogart, like Garfield, like Wilder, like Reagan, they had learned their lesson.
Enemies at Home?
One of the Hollywood Ten called to testify before Congress in October 1947 was the director Edward Dmytryk. At the time he was an unfriendly witness, but he, too, would experience an awakening. The reflections he ended up sharing with Congress four years later shed light on the issue at the crux of the debate over domestic Communism, particularly when it became clear that the United States and the Soviet Union were adversaries. The question was whether American Communists, given their pledged loyalties to the USSR, would fight for the Soviet Union against America if the two countries ever went to war.
When Dmytryk testified in 1947, he had sincerely believed that Stalin's Russia and CPUSA wanted peace. But by the time he sat before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in April 1951, his view had changed. “I had never heard, before 1947, anybody say they would refuse to fight for this country in a war against Soviet Russia,” Dmytryk told the committee.81 In the intervening years, however, many developments—including a hot war on the Korean Peninsula and high-profile espionage cases like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss—had revealed to him that American Communists’ “love of the party” and the USSR took precedence over any love he thought they had for America. He felt that the Communist Party encouraged this treachery as a natural result of its allegiance to the Soviet Union.
Dmytryk should not have been surprised. The party, of course, pledged itself to the Soviet Motherland, and had from the very beginning—since that founding meeting in Chicago in September 1919. As far back as 1944 CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder had frankly admitted his loyalty to the Soviet Union over the United States in testimony before Congress.82 When Congress looked deeper into the matter, both Democrats and Republicans were mortified by the affirming testimonies they received from some American Communists.83
It was a hard lesson that many in Hollywood, including Edward Dmytryk, learned late. And it was an issue that the new Democratic president in Washington would have to confront in a new war—the Cold War.
12
TRASHING TRUMAN:
WORLD COMMUNISM AND THE COLD WAR
When Ronald Reagan testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, he and the entire world had been assured of the closing of the Comintern. Moscow had shut down the Comintern in 1943 in order to improve wartime relations with the United States—allegedly, anyway.1
In truth, the organization was not really abolished, as scholars such as Harvard's Mark Kramer have shown.2 Herb Romerstein, who has spent decades examining the ongoing life of the Comintern after 1943, notes that the Comintern “continued to exist in various forms” after its supposed shuttering. As a young Communist, Romerstein learned this firsthand, and he confirmed it in his career as a government investigator and, today, as an archival researcher.
The Soviets continued the Comintern's critical functions. Certain entities like the Comintern radio school never ceased operations. Every country's Communist Party, Romerstein adds, continued to have a representative in Moscow who reported to what was a Comintern-like central structure, and did so both during and after World War II.3 Romerstein cites the American representative, Maria Reiss,4 who corresponded with the Comintern well after the war, writing memos to an organization that supposedly did not exist. (In the 1960s, Reiss would pledge her allegiance to Mao's China after the Sino-Soviet split.)5 Many other such cases could be cited.
More importantly, the Comintern had merely morphed into a new entity: the International Department, which ran under the auspices of the all-powerful Soviet Central Committee. The International Department would last until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, all along retaining the Comintern's primary function of maintaining relations with Communist parties all over the world and funding those parties wherever and whenever possible, including by providing military aid to Soviet clients in the Third World.6
In short, Moscow had not abandoned the objective for which the Comintern was created in the first place: to spread Communism around the globe. That goal was fundamental to Marxism-Leninism and would not change.
Thus, as Romerstein notes, CPUSA remained “under total Soviet control … from 1919, when it was formed, to 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.”7 The party's top officials were in constant contact with the head of the International Department once the Comintern was disbanded (in name).8
Stalin's War
It was Joseph Stalin who announced the closing of the Comintern, b
ut he remained committed to the Soviet mission of spreading Communism worldwide. In fact, he had far greater success in the task than Lenin ever did.9
Greedily eyeing post–World War II Eastern Europe, Stalin said: “Whoever occupies the territory also imposes on it his own social system as far as his military can reach.”10 Years later his right-hand man, Molotov, said that his duty had been clear: “I saw my task as minister of foreign affairs as being how to expand the boundaries of our Fatherland. And it seems to me that we and Stalin did not cope badly with this task.”11
Not badly at all: they got all of Eastern Europe.
Yet Stalin's gaze extended beyond Eastern Europe, a fact not appreciated even today. A recently declassified Soviet document reveals a secret speech that Stalin gave to the Plenum of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party on August 19, 1939, only four days before signing the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The speech explains Stalin's motivation for trusting Hitler in such a pact, a seemingly inexplicable trust.
Stalin began his remarks by declaring, “The dictatorship of a Communist Party may be envisaged only as a result of a great war.” He argued that a major war would be good for the USSR because it would help spread global Communism—or, in his words, “world Revolution.” If and when a conflict started, he said, it would be “indispensable to prolong the war as long as possible.” Stalin asserted: