Customer Reviews

Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The fact that it is called the "red scare" or "McCarthyism" says a lot about how the post World War II communist problem is looked at from the modern perspective. From the earliest times I can remember gavels coming down by angry congressmen as meek witnesses calmly express their disagreement with a committee that would make them "name names." The witnesses seemed real pathetic and the committee chairmen all come off as power mad scoundrels looking for a headline. The poor Hollywood Ten went to jail or fled to Europe to write movies under fictitious names.

What none of the pictures or narration ever told me was that every member of the Hollywood Ten had been a communist at some point in his life and that half of the Hollywood ten were still communists when they went to jail for contempt of court. Since they weren't making the defense in front of Congress that they had the right to be communists, the event was portrayed as a "witch hunt." These were just misunderstood new deal liberals that wanted more socialism than the House Un-American Activities Committee.

What Mr. Billingsley shows in his excellently researched book is that they weren't just a bunch of artistic idealists, but a group of avowed Marxists being funded by and taking orders from Moscow. It's not an open question. They were given orders to get collectivist messages into Hollywood films. They were told not to portray capitalism or businessmen in a good light. Writer Budd Schulberg was criticized by the party because his book "What Makes Sammy Run?" didn't achieve any of the party's goals. Some of these guys were even writing articles for the communist Daily Worker under their own names.

Modern Hollywood liberals make the communist party members the victims of some horrible black period in American history without any thought to what Stalin was doing to his people in Russia (or would have liked to have done here). Somehow, the liquidation and forced starvation of millions is nothing compared to a few screenwriters that have to write under an alias.

Quick can you name one innocent blacklisted person whose life was ruined? I can only think of the fictional Robert DeNiro character from Guilty by Suspicion. The character had to be fictional in order prove their dramatic point. Had they made the movie about a real person who went through such things he would have had to have been an actual communist. DeNiro plays a clueless liberal that is blacklisted because he was at a few parties. There weren't any of these misunderstandings in real life.

Until I read Mr. Billingsley's book I had no idea that Hollywood was plagued by violent strikes in the 1940s whose purpose was bringing all the Hollywood trade unions under the control of communist, Herbert Sorrell. John Howard Lawson was trying to gain control of the Screenwriters Guild at the same time with the overall plan of controlling the content of Hollywood movies. Isn't it a little scary that this was being funded by a totalitarian government?

None of the facts of this period are ever discussed. It's simply boiled down to communists as idealists and anti-communists as opportunists. In order to perpetuate that myth, Hollywood has since ignored the many opportunities to present the horrors of Communist Russia the way they have presented the horrors of Nazi Germany. The recent film, The Pianist, about Jewish life in World War II Warsaw, Poland doesn't even once mention that the Nazis and Russians divvy up Poland at the beginning of the war. All you hear is that the Germans invade in 1942 and the Russians liberate in 1945. That misses the whole point of what happened to Poland in the 20th Century. But it does perpetuate the myth.

The tactic used in front of the committee hearings was to pretend that it was no one's business what their political affiliation was. That's cute, but would Hollywood have stood up for Nazis or Ku Klux Klan members under the auspices of first amendment freedom? The answer is readily available today. Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" was roundly criticized for having the "wrong kind" of independent thought. They tend to like the kind of independent thought that also coincides with their prejudices like "Fahrenheit 911." Now that's free expression worth getting behind.

Mr. Billingsley's book is so on target with what isn't discussed by Hollywood when they cry about the blacklist that it will forever be an indictment of those people who perpetuate the common myth.

We have been educated in the myth. During that reign of terror known as the McCarthy era, congressional witch-hunts of Hollywood led to blacklisting that shattered the lives of thousands of innocents.

A recent book, "Hollywood Party," is an effective antidote to the prevailing Leftist version of what happened 50 years ago. Author Kenneth Billingsley details the Communist-Hollywood connection.

Lenin himself recognized the power of cinema, saying "Communists must always consider that of all the arts the motion picture is the most important." His successor Stalin viewed film as "not only a vital agitprop device for the education and political indoctrination of the workers, but also a fluent channel through which to reach the minds and shape the desires of people everywhere."

Communist infiltration of the American motion picture industry began in the trade unions. Expanding into the ranks of actors, writers, directors and producers wasn't terribly difficult. One writer for the Communist Daily Worker claimed that the established view among party leaders was that 99 percent of movie people were "political morons." Judging by the antics of today's Hollywood personalities, that figure hasn't improved.

During the 1930s Communist opposition to the Nazi threat attracted substantial support from film stars and other influential folks from Hollywood. They ignored the obvious similarities between these two faces of Leftism - the mass murders and torture, the secret police, the suppression of the most basic rights, the intimidation, the focus on government rather than the individual, the total ignoring of man's spiritual side - and contributed their fame, money and time to Communist front organizations.

Red influence in Hollywood was pervasive. One former Communist screenwriter noted that there were a number of "awful writers" who managed to get jobs only because they belonged to the party.

For many Hollywood luminaries, anyone who opposed Hitler was their friend. Being a Communist was considered the same as being a Republican or Democrat or Prohibitionist or Vegetarian. It was simply a matter of which party you felt best represented your interests.

The problem with that theory is that Communism was never just another political party; it was the only one directed from a foreign country. It was the only one that would have shredded the Constitution and immersed the U.S. into the subhuman slavery of totalitarian terror. It was the only one that considered Stalin, who made Hitler look like a piker when it came to slaughter, a god.

Of course, not everyone joined the party or one of its many fronts purely for philosophical reasons. One actor told a potential recruit that "you will make out more with the dames" if he'd sign up. So he did.

Throughout the 30s many in Hollywood, encouraged by comrades, agitated for America to assume an active role in crushing Nazism. Rallies, ad campaigns and fundraisers were held. America had a moral obligation to get involved.

All of that changed immediately in 1939 when Hitler and Stalin joined in a pact. Now, the party line was that the U.S. had no business in interfering with the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. President Roosevelt was denounced as a warmonger.

Even some of the dimmest bulbs started figuring it out when the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League transitioned into the Hollywood League for Democratic Action overnight. All they were saying, is give peace a chance.

Less than two years later, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, it was back to Plan A. Lurching back and forth didn't present any difficulty for the true believer. The party always knew what was best and no independent judgement was needed.

Penetration of the film industry was sometimes subtle. One Red screenwriter and instructor counseled his students to get just five minutes worth of party propaganda in each film. Try to get the message across in dialogue from one of the major stars. This would make it less likely to be edited out of the movie.

Sometimes the penetration wasn't subtle. Producer Hal Wallis, learning of an intended anti-Communist film, said not to even bother. The party would toss stink bombs into any theater attempting to show it. Rumors were started about actors who opposed the party. They'd be portrayed as pro-Nazi, knowing that Jewish producers would not be inclined to hire them.

Controversy surrounded the honoring of director Elia Kazan at this year's Academy Awards. Kazan had done the unthinkable. He'd actually named names.

His wife, Molly, has written about what many in Hollywood still characterize as witch-hunts: "Those witches did not exist. Communists do. Here, and everywhere in the world. It's a false parallel. The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none in the trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts, none sending money from Hollywood to Twelfth Street. No one who was in the Party and left uses that phrase. They know better."

Readers of "Hollywood Party" will know better, too.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley has done an excellent job of telling the story of the Hollywood blacklist from a conservative perspective which has been missing from most books on the fifties. He accurately depicted the subversive activities of the communist party and their influence on unions and screenplay content.

I used his text as a reference for my own chapter on the blacklist in my new book, "The Moviegoing Experience 1968-2001".
I researched this topic extensively and discovered it's even more complicated than Billingsley suggests.

It probably was fairly safe to hire "Reds" in the thirties since the nature of the studio system kept them in line. There's no question some were talented writers, directors and actors.
The staunch Catholocism of Joseph Breen who ran the Production Code combined with the conservative worldviews of most of the moguls like Meyer, Disney, Warner and Zukor along with conservative exhibitors kept movies within a mainstream context.
To get a movie written, produced, released and exhibited meant you had to go through channels which meant that most Marxist references would've been removed along the way so as not to alienate viewers. There's no question that writers like Dalton Trumbo would've liked to turn cinema into a propoganda medium but those in power made that difficult.

It was the changes in the post-war era that made these same individuals a threat during a major industry upheaval.
The 1948 consent decree which forced the majors to sell off their theater chains combined with an increase in independent production and television competition caused the entire studio
system to unravel. It was at this point that the Hollywood communists made their move and tried to dominate the industry and/or stir up labor problems with a never ending series of strikes often accompanied by violence and indimidation. The same screenwriters or actors who were kept in line a few years earlier began to undermine the production and distribution system. Billingsley didn't really examine these events in relation to the CPUSA as fully as he should have in my opinion.

I have a copy of "Red Channels" and it would've been useful if the author actually made a list of the 324 people who were blacklisted (out of an industry total of 17,500 personnel) and indicated why they were fired. How many were Party members, how many were part of Communist fronts and how many were innocent dupes. There was a difference between these groups and the level of danger they posed to their employers. Whereas all Stalinists were bad people, not all Leftists were Stalinists nor were they necessarily bad people although their ideology turned out to be wrong.

In any event, I think the author has added a new perspective on the subject which will assist others in further analysis of the period.

Richard W. Haines
Author "Technicolor Movies" and "The Moviegoing Experience 1968-2001"

Unless you've been living in a cave, you have surely heard some of the Sturm and Drang that attended the awarding of Elia Kazan with an honorary Oscar for career achievement. The hysteria that this produced was a result of his decision to testify truthfully before the House Un-American Activities Committee four decades ago. One would think that folks could be a little less passionate about the events of a half century ago, but, largely because the period is so poorly understood and the subject of so much disinformation, the wounds from the Blacklist period are still open and fresh and like stigmata, mystically appear on even those who were not born then--Ed Harris, Nick Nolte, Steven Spielberg, etc.

What was it that Elia Kazan, and others, did that is so abhorrent to Left-Wing Hollywood? Simply put, he willingly testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, about the practices and membership of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA), which he had left by then. "Naming names" was his great sin. You see, many members of CPUSA were pleading the 5th Amendment rather than admit that they were Communists and rather than testify about fellow members. It was their action that the Left elevated to the moral high ground. It became somehow virtuous to remain a part of the criminal conspiracy to overthrow our Constitutional Democracy and to protect your traitorous cohorts. On the other hand, those, like Kazan, who sought to expose the conspiracy, were labeled as finks, rats, snitches & traitors.

You have to admire the beauty of what was accomplished here. We would not see it's like again until the demonization of Linda Tripp and Ken Starr. Only criminal conspiracies require the ethos that informing is evil. There's no other segment of society where it's considered evil to tell the truth about wrongdoing. But American's have a soft spot in their hearts for outlaws anyway, witness Butch & Sundance and the Godfather movies. So if you cloak your illicit enterprise in some noble trappings you can get most folks to buy into the anti-informing dogma. Since most of the Intelligentsia was anti-anti-communist, there was fertile ground for them to plant the idea that Communists & Fellow Travelers were well intentioned liberals, their opponents were close minded Neanderthals and anyone who would inform on the good Left to the evil Right, was a traitor.

Indulge me now in a brief thought experiment. Let's just change one thing about our whole scenario & see how much different we think reactions would be now. Let's say that there was a sizable percentage of folks in Hollywood in the 30's who were committed Nazis. They truly believed in their socialist principles and acted out of the best intentions. They sought to sneak party dogma into their films, raised money for the party, tithed part of their salaries, participated in marches and petition drives & what not. Then suddenly, the Hitler/Stalin pact is announced, and many of them realize that they've been duped. The ideology they were so devoted too, turns out to be capable of compromising with their sworn enemies. But others are unfazed. They stay in the party and remain devoted. They turn on a dime and go from advocating isolation to demanding American entry into the war. Then word starts to slip out that millions of people are being murdered by the State for their beliefs. Murder on a scale previously unimaginable for mankind. Many more leave the Party, their consciences finally singed. But others stay on, still devoted to the Cause and the downfall of the U.S.. Finally, after W.W.II ends, the government begins to realize that this enormous conspiracy has been going on in it's midst. Slowly and none too sure-footedly, the investigations begin. An intrepid few risk the ire of their friends, coworkers and the bulk of the Intellectual class and when they are called to testify, they admit to their own participation in the conspiracy and warn that others remain involved. They are vilified within their own milieu and when the scare dies down and those they sought to expose are accepted back into the industry, their own careers are destroyed. But forty years later, one of their number is to be honored by the Academy.

Now here's where our thought experiment pays off. Our Elia Kazan doppleganger exposed a Nazi plot to subvert the US government. Those he informed on stayed in the Party despite the Holocaust & continued to support the Nazi regime. They refused to cooperate with government investigations and covered up for friends and for the Party.

Can we still see hip Hollywood walking out of the ceremony or sitting on their hands? No, we can't imagine that can we? Suddenly, we imagine a heroes welcome for this brave soul. Hell, they'd be fighting for the movie rights to his story.

And yet, at the Academy Awards we saw Hollywood's smart set side with the Gulag and the Show Trials and the Destruction of the Kulaks and the Iron Curtain as they spurned one little man who followed the dictates of conscience and tried to warn his beloved adopted country about the serpent at its bosom. Even an industry with as much to be ashamed of as the Movie business, must have felt a special twinge of self loathing in the dark recesses of its miserable heart after this display.

Oh yeah, the book. Well, it isn't terribly well written, sorta repeats itself in some places, and in its earnest desire to expose Communist hypocrisy, it ends up seeming a little over the top in some places, too polemical. But it does present an overwhelming picture of how extensive and malicious the Communist infiltration of Hollywood was in the 30's and 40's. That alone makes it worthwhile.

GRADE: C

We all think we know it, because we've seen the newsreels, we've heard the interviews with the "Unfriendly 10" and read the ghastly legacy of what we assumed was the only "blacklist" that kept Hollywood craftsmen and women out of important films during the 20th century. But with a careful layout of the truth as it shows up in American Communist and Moscow newspapers, citing of interviews of actors who felt that they were "duped" by the Communists to paint HUAC and the US government in general as evil and disregarding craftsmens' rights Lloyd Billingsley creates a credible argument that we do not know the whole story. Perhaps most troublingly, Billingsley systematically cites evidence of American Communists in Hollywood marching strictly to a tune from Moscow, not their own masses: galvinizing the Anti-Fascist (eg Anti-Nazi) effort whole heartedly....until the day Stalin signed the anti-agression pact with Hitler. Suddenly, Pete Seger was singing peace-at-any-cost songs instead of string-the-fuehrer-up songs; Lillian Hellman was silenced when she had been so vocal about our duty to protect what she was heard to call "the motherland". Then, when Hitler invaded Hellman's precious "Motherland", Hollywood elite's communists' tune changed again, as evidenced by The Daily Worker and New Masses....a Communist paper popular in Hollywood. Could there be better evidence that CPUSA was the marionette in Stalin's paws?
And what a prize for him! Being able to use Hollywood as his vessel for agit-prop must have made Goebbels a little jealous, talented as Lenni Riehfenstahl was. Aside from the fact that socialist rhetoric often runs amok in 30's and 40's films --- capitalists bad, poor people good----Billingsley lists at least 3 unapologetically pro-Soviet films made during the war, ostensibly to boost understanding of our ally, but laced with untruth.
The book is not just a review of the early years of the House Un-American Committee ( another myth dispelled: this was pre-McCarthy, who came onto the committee long after the Hollywood 10 were dispersed for refusing to simply admit they were in the Communist Party....which of course, was not a crime.) It is a survey, through earlier interviews, articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses, and material available for a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union that verified the ties between the Soviet and American parties and the US party's dependence on "Moscow gold", which of course made it hard for them to disobey "Moscow's demands". Explanations are given for seemingly popular leaders stepping down suddenly; for Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Santy lying about the Ukranien famine (he was being blackmailed); for people recanting when they wrote articles stating perhaps we shouldn't worry about making sure so much Marxist dialectic gets into our films (other Hollywood elites would lock them in a house and basically "debrief" them until they came to the "right" conclusion....or,until they simply stormed out and said "this is b.s.").

It is also about learning of "ambassadors" like Paul Robeson, who betrayed Jewish friends when for the hundredth time he travelled to the USSR and when told they were to be murdered, came back here & assured us that Russia was purely pro-Semitic. (His friends were murdered soon after; Robeson, in an anguished memoir, recanted his mistake years later).

In brief, this is a book that gives us a sight of very normal people in fancy clothes; union leaders, communist bosses, congressional committee members, actors and actresses, with heroism and weaknesses on all sides. Billingsley's seemingly "revisionist" telling is well cited in thourough end notes that I've enjoyed following up on in the texts mentioned, especially those drawing from the briefly-opened KGB archives.

This book lifts the veil on a murky historical episode with an incredible level of detail. For the first time the full background and context of the "Hollywood Ten" controversy is laid out in an even-handed way. The stunning list of stars and celebrities who fell for the Communist lure should prompt reflections on why creative and artistic people are attracted to certain forms of ideology in such large numbers. With the immediate drama and conflict of the Cold War era already receding in popular memory, this book is a valuable contribution to the record of a time that will seem increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible to future generations.

I cannot give enough praise for this book. For those like me who were born after the 1950's, and have no personal recollection of the "McCarthy Era", it is too easy to blindly follow the standard Hollywood version of what actually happened; lunatic McCarthyites attacking innocent people for no particular reason. But while it is true that McCarthy's tactics ruined lives and did more harm than good to the American way of life, this is too often used to overshadow the other side of the picture; that Communists were indeed battling for control of the motion picture industry in the 30's and 40's.

In "Hollywood Party", Billingsly provides exhaustive documentation and reference to show the Communist takeover of the labor unions, the distortions by the Communist Party propaganda machine in Los Angeles, the hypocrisy of the wealthy who preached Communism while shamelessy living in the lap of luxury (something which persists to this day), and in some cases the mere naiveté of well-meaning liberals who were used by the Communist organizers, and who later faced disillusionment after Kruschev's revelations about Stalin's reign of terror and murder.

My advice to anybody of my generation; if you think you've got this topic all figured out, be sure to read this book. It will balance out your understanding with the rest of the picture. This isent "red-hunting" propanda, conjecture and hearsay. it's all documented.

Some are critical of Billingsly's book because it seems that he ignores or glosses over the McCarthyism of the 50's. But please remember, this book illustrates the Communist issues in the 30's and 40's something rarely done by Hollywood, whereas Hollywood has already hacked the McCarthyite 50's to death. It's been done.

An excellent account of what was happening in Hollywood in the '30's, 40's and 50's. Witch Hunt indeed! The truth is many of the big names were in fact Communists or Communist sympathizers who were trying to spread their version of the "truth" in whatever way possible. Those who were guilty hollered the loudest. While one does not have to completely accept the arguments put forth in this book, this side of the story is long overdue. For too long, Communists in the film industry have been portrayed as martyrs. If these individuals had been Nazi's, how long do you think it would have taken to blacklist them? Sadly, as shown in the book, these individuals did support the Nazi's when their masters in Moscow told them too.

I was too young to understand this issue and bought this book after watching the movie, "The Way We Were" and seeing some of the stars "disrespect" Kazan at the 99 Oscars. Therefore I felt it was time to understand the blacklist. As most readers, I was surprised by the "conservative view" truth. I consider myself liberal but I can't see how anyone could support the belief that communism equals freedom of speech after reading this review.

What will you learn? The beginning of Ronald Reagons's activism, exactly how influential the communist party was in Hollywood unions, and the blind support given by so many celebrities to this brutal regime.

This is not a fun read, but a in-depth analysis of an important issue to the development of our country. Frankly, I don't recognize this country that would embrace communism as some Americans did in the 30s to 50s. For this reason, the book provided a valuable intellectual journey in my discovery of American history and would recommend it to others.

This even-handed book is a useful corrective to the guff we've always heard about the Hollywood loyalty investigations and their supposed terrorization of completely innocent victims. By noting how Party members followed every twist and turn of the Party line, including the self-contradicting ones, Billingsley shows that this picture of a disgraceful era is largely a false one. Those who cried the loudest about violations of the Bill of Rights were precisely those who defended a doctrine that was established to eliminate individual rights. As his book makes clear, the screenwriters whose lives were supposedly "ruined" managed to keep writing and raking in the big bucks anyway. While there were many innocent dupes whose reputations suffered because of their gullibility--and no one can be blamed for being gullible--there were also plenty of malicious, deceitful Party hacks who deserved worse than what they got. (If Nazism had penetrated Hollywood to the same extent, it's a safe bet that no crocodile tears would have been shed for Nazi sympathizers who were fired by the studios; and there can be little doubt that they would have been, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights.)

Billingsley could have improved his book, however, by adding an important missing element: an explanation of WHY the Party found it so easy to recruit dupes among the wealthy Hollywood elite, and so hard to recruit them among the working classes. The answer is obvious: people with cushy jobs and lots of money tend to feel guilty about this glaring contrast between their own comforts and those of the less fortunate. Supporting a movement that claims to speak for the poor can be a very effective way to assuage this guilt. In fact, there's a book on the Amazon.com site, entitled GUILT, BLAME, AND POLITICS, that explores this very issue quite thoroughly.

The paperback edition of Billingsley's book mentions the disgraceful treatment Hollywood, as a whole, has given to director Elia Kazan, simply because he named names and told the truth about how a despicable, lying ideology--with the blood of millions on its hands--had penetrated Hollywood, from where its propaganda could deceive millions. For years, because of this and this alone, Hollywood refused to give his work the recognition it deserved. And these are the same people who insist that the dupes of the 1940s, who aided and abetted a murderous ideology, be forgiven! If they were indeed unwitting dupes, they should have been forgiven, but for telling the truth about the unrepentant Party goons, Kazan should have received a medal a long time ago. Yes, there were disgraceful things going on in those days--but the most disgraceful of all was the way the Party hacks supported Stalin and then succeeded in making their lies look like an innocent form of "dissent" that should be immune to criticism.