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Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left

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The McCarthy era is generally portrayed as one of the darkest times in American history, and those who faced blacklisting in Hollywood have been lauded as heroes. Through ground-breaking new research and the reliance on original source materials, the Radoshes have compiled a thorough re-examination of the enchantment by some in the film industry with the Communist Party, and their betrayal by that very same party.

The Radoshes describe the infatuation of "the Hollywood Party" from its roots in the 1930s, when several visited the Soviet Union. They demonstrate that, far from being innocent, the "Hollywood Ten" were committed Communists, who used and abused free-speech supporters (like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) for their own ends. The Communist Party, in turn, cynically used the "Ten" for its own ends -- trotting them out to speak at unrelated left-wing events for years, which prevented the Ten from individually rehabilitating their images and obtaining work. The authors also describe the way the CP line was inserted in several films, most notoriously, "Mission to Moscow." This film, designed to turn the views of a skeptical American public toward the USSR during World War II, whitewashes Stalin's purge trials of the 1930s, where many truly innocent were tortured into confessing and executed. Perhaps most interesting is the difficult path faced by those who broke with the Party and either "named names" or walked a fine line to avoid naming names. For many, being seen as an informer was worse than preventing and exposing genuine Communist infiltration.

If I have any criticisms of the book, it is that the Radoshes did not take their exploration of the film colony's long romance with the left through the Vietnam War years and today. While the blacklist years were seminal, many in Hollywood contine to lean left even after the fall of the USSR, and take almost reflexively anti-Bush positions today. We are left to wonder what the leftist fathers passed on to their sons. Perhaps the authors will address this issue in a subsequent book. In the meantime, "Red Star Over Hollywood" is well worth reading.

REDS WERE NOT PART OF THE RED, WHITE & BLUE - a review by Bob Cohen of "Red Star Over Hollywood" by Ronald & Allis Radosh


Ronald & Allis Radosh's new book: "Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left" is a brilliant, myth-busting and yet compassionate exploration of the era and the errors of the blacklist in Hollywood.

For ideologues there is only black and white. They allow no paradoxes, complications,and irony that are the ingredients in real life. For the Radoshes these same ingredients make their book read like a political thriller even though we know the outcome.

As Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote many years later the informers, the informed, and the uninformed were all victims. His disgust with the Communists as time went on is one of the many important revelations compiled in this book. Most moving is the painful questioning by two sons of blacklisted writers (Lawson & Lardner - also part of the Hollywood Ten) of their fathers - what led them, in Jeff Lawson's words, "to believe so strongly in such false concepts."


One of the Radoshes conclusions will surely shock both the extreme left and the extreme right: "But ultimately HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) and the [Communist] Party served each other's purposes." The Party served up real "witches" to rationalize HUAC's witch-hunt proceeding, and HUAC made martyrs of the Reds who were up until then in great trouble with Hollywood liberals because of their fanatic support for Stalin and the Soviet Union, i.e. their turning on the U.S. when Stalin signed a peace pact with Hitler in 1939.

"Red Star Over Hollywood" is necessary reading for folks from all shades of political opinion. When I mentioned this book to a friend who had voted for George W. Bush in the last election, and explained to him what it was about, he responded by asking: what's all the fuss about - the Communists were just another political party, like the Democrats and the Republicans! This book shows that the cultural commissars of the American Communist Party had a covert agenda and that they callously used well-intentioned writers, actors and directors to press that agenda - the propaganda that Stalin was our spotless ally and that anyone who opposed his dictatorship as well as Hitler's was, indeed, a fascist.

The writers also deal with today's romanticization of the "victims" of the blacklist through film, TV documentaries and even the Academy of Motion Pictures apologia exhibit. The irony of the iconization of John Garfield (in a TV documentary written by his daughter) as loyal to the Left, when he, in fact, told HUAC that "the Communist Party was not a legitimate political party such as the Democratic or Republican party," is almost surreal.

Perhaps the biggest irony we see in "Red Star" is that the socialist "paradise" that so many of both the knowing and unknowing Reds yearned for, would have not tolerated their idiosyncracies and would have put them in the Gulag, if they were lucky, or tortured and shot them as they eventually did to Otto Katz who posed as a pure anti-fascist at Hollywood parties in the 30's.

The other side of the pro-Soviet coin that these Hollywood elite played with, was an anti-American outlook. Even when some, such as Trumbo, eventually made their way out of the black and white world of Communist ideology, they weren't able to completely drop the view of the U.S. as the "imperialist, racist" monster they had so long tried to hold at bay.

One last delicious irony. The Hollywood Reds posed as defenders of free speech. John Howard Lawson, one of the most vociferous Stalinists in the group, was honest, at least, in saying (albeit in a private meeting with the Hollywood Ten's lawyers): "'The answer is that you do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists.' As he explained, they were to favor free speech for Communists 'because what they say is true,' whereas what fascists say 'is a lie.'" Not exactly the words of a poster-boy for the ACLU.

This book is well written, concise, and very fair in it's portrayal of what Lillian Hellman called a "scoundrel time" (except that she herself was one of the scoundrels) and sheds a bright light on what is now become received wisdom about the blacklist. In doing so it does more to honor the blacklistees, including those, whom like Elia Kazan remained blacklisted by the Left for the rest of his life, and the blacklisters, then most of the dishonest films, books and TV shows who, once again, exemplify the tunnel vision of the ideologues.

Remember the Hollywood blacklist? The Hollywood Ten? I'll bet you know a lot about these events even if you weren't alive in the 1950s. That's because Tinseltown has a vested interest in keeping the memory of this era alive. It was the era of the Red Scare, of Senator Joseph McCarthy waving his infamous list of communist subversives during a speech in West Virginia. It was the time of congressional investigations, a time when invoking the Fifth Amendment might keep you safe from a contempt charge but would make you look guilty as sin in the public eye. For a select few the McCarthy era was a time of great fear, and no one feared this witch-hunt against communism more than Hollywood. Why? Because, despite the mountains of claims to the contrary that have emerged over the years, the movie industry oozed communists. There were so many Reds in Hollywood that they should have renamed the town Little Moscow. Yet even today, you won't hear about this truth in the media. You will, however, get the skinny on what really went on if you pick up a copy of Ronald Radosh's "Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left."

Talk about exploding myths! Radosh's book, which he co-wrote with his wife Allis, cuts through the layers of denial and presents us with an ugly picture of the real Hollywood of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Vladimir Lenin, the little pipsqueak who brought the nightmare of Marxism to the Soviet Union back in the early part of the twentieth century, had a soft spot for film and theater. He believed that the best way to spread communism around the globe was through movies and plays. This is exactly what the Kremlin crowd set out to accomplish in the following decades. They managed to gain converts to their cause--men who later became movers and shakers like Budd Schulberg, Joseph Losey, and Maurice Rapf--by allowing them to work closely with the Soviet film industry. Once these people came back to the United States, they spread their plague to others with the help of party apparatchiks Willi Munzenberg, V.J. Jerome, and John Howard Lawson. In no time at all, writes Radosh, a branch of the communist party flourished in Hollywood. So many big names signed on that newcomers to the industry, in an attempt to make contacts and find work, had to become communists or fellow travelers themselves.

The Hollywood branch of the communist party worked to increase their membership and influence in several ways. One of the most successful methods involved the tried and true "United Frontism" and "Popular Front" techniques, or the forming of organizations that on the surface embraced popular progressive causes to lure in unsuspecting liberals while maintaining strong communist control behind the scenes. Radosh reveals that the concerns many people had about the rise of National Socialist Germany in the 1930s helped increase membership, although the party's propensity to change direction, oftentimes overnight according to directives issued from the Kremlin, tended to alienate many members. Also off putting was the heavy-handed discipline that could fall on an unsuspecting member at any time. Albert Maltz, for example, discovered the inflexibility of the party when he wrote an article deemed "revisionist" by the upper hierarchy. His very public refutation of his article left little doubt about the strong-arm tactics used behind the scenes. Despite the ugliness the Hollywood Reds occasionally displayed, they were somewhat successful in spreading their propaganda through films like "Mission to Moscow," "The Spanish Earth," and "The North Star." Congressional investigations threw some of these dupes in the slammer, and silenced a few more, but many never repudiated their warped views.

I enjoyed Radosh's book, the first one of his I've had the chance to read. The author and his spouse obviously know what they're talking about and, since Ronald Radosh himself was a communist for many years, he understands how these groups think and act. "Red Star Over Hollywood" occasionally suffers from dry prose and a bewildering number of groups and individuals, but the authors always manage to bring the book back up to speed by throwing in some great anecdotes. For instance, the part where we learn about Ronald Reagan (at the time a liberal) and his buddy William Holden crashing a communist get together in an attempt to inject some common sense into the proceedings is great fun to read about. Reagan got up and started talking only to find himself under verbal attack for some forty minutes. God bless him! The account of Albert Maltz's forced rehabilitation is absolutely chilling, a sobering tale that hints at the violent tendencies inherent in communism. Arguably the best part of the book, however, involves the long, strange trip writer Dalton Trumbo took from the time of his blacklisting to his repudiation of the communist party later in life. So many intriguing stories pop up in the book that the actual creation of the blacklist takes a backseat.

I have one recommendation and one warning to those readers about to attempt the book. In the case of the former, if you're not very familiar with this time period, read a background history of the Red Scare first. Doing so will assist you in learning the context for what happens here and help you learn the basics about a few of the groups and personalities associated with the blacklist. In the case of the latter, the topic is so huge that Radosh doesn't have the space to cover many of the important Reds. There is almost nothing here about Lillian Hellman or Dashiell Hammett, for example, and both of those individuals had a lot to do with the influence of communism in film and books. Nevertheless, this book is well worth your time. Read it and remember it the next time Hollywood releases yet another "we were innocent" propaganda piece.

Ron and Allis Radosh have performed a public service by reversing John Ford's maxim (which they quote in their book) and printing the facts, not regurgitating the legend, about one of the most mythologized episodes in recent American history. Their book places the era of the Hollywood 10 and the blacklist within the context of radical political activity in the movie industry from the 1930s to the present day, and deftly punctures the mantle of innocence and virtue that the Hollywood Left has cloaked itself in ever since. By exploring how Hollywood's Communist activists made themselves easy prey for congressional investigators by their fidelity to every twist and turn in the Communist Party line and by embracing a culture of secrecy and concealment that undermined any genuine coalition with non-Communist liberals, the Radoshes have presented a sharply drawn, but unpolemical, account of the more complicated reality. Drawing on an abundance of fascinating new source material, the authors have shed new light on such topics as the origins of Communism in Hollywood, the tragedy of John Garfield, and the evolution of Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's retrospective thinking about the blacklist and its victims (the last would certainly make for a better play than Trumbo's son's "Trumbo for (Useful) Idiots" cartoon version!). This extremely well-written book makes an indispensable contribution to the ongoing debate about a perenially controversial subject.

While George Clooney was simultaneously thumping his chest and patting his back for how he and his "community" are proudly out of touch with mainstream America, I was engaged in the rather more edifying exercise of reading this great new book by Ronald and Allis Radosh. For readers with an interest in the context of the culture-clash between the "Hollywood elite" and the poor benighted people who buy movie tickets and DVDs, this book is an excellent resource.

I say the "context" of the clash because this is a look at history, and a serious research work too. This is not a book that details the fashionable Leftist obsessions of Clooney, Streisand, Penn, and the rest, and therefore may be less satisfying to some readers than other recent books that address current names and controversies more directly. Instead, "Red Star Over Hollywood" digs deep into something far more serious and sinister ("sinister" comes from the Latin word for "left," by the way): the film colony's infiltration by agents of the Comintern, dedicated partisans of Stalin, and other actors, directors, writers, and executives eager to use the power of film to promote socialism in the United States.

As Clooney's speech -- and even more so, his movie -- make clear, modern Hollywood's sense of itself is built to a large degree on the legend of its heroic stand against "McCarthyism" and the blacklist (that's what makes Clooney's self-congratulation so laughable -- does anyone in Hollywood *defend* McCarthy?). But the Radoshes demonstrate not only that there really were communists in positions of influence (in other words, the witch-hunt turned up real witches), but that there was also a strong and active anti-communist Left in Hollywood. Even more than the relatively small number of conservatives in Hollywood, it was this anti-communist Left that was in the most direct conflict with the Stalinists, their apologists, and their dupes, particularly before and during World War II.

All of this is important information, but it's when they turn to their discussion of HUAC and the blacklist in the postwar period that the authors most directly confront Hollywood's defining myth. Far from the usual pop-psychology analysis of the deranged and sweaty McCarthy (and why do so few people seem to notice that *Senator* Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with the *House* Committee on Un-American Activities?) the authors have gone in-depth in committee records, and also into the backgrounds of the people from Hollywood who came before the committee. It's certainly easier to issue blanket denunciations of McCarthy and his ilk than to sift through pages and pages of dusty documents. Ronald and Allis Radosh are to be commended for doing the latter.

It's because this book is so heavily researched -- so filled with names, dates, and places -- that I note again that it may not be to everyone's taste. It is, I repeat, a work of history. It notably lacks the rhetorical sledgehammer blows of, say, an Ann Coulter book, and so doesn't have the fist-pumping, take-that-you-commie excitement value some readers derive from more polemical works. But those books seem to disappear as soon as they fall off the bestseller lists. This, on the other hand, is a book that deserves to be around for a long, long time.

I have always been curious about the influence of Communism in Hollywood. This book by the Radoshes was perfect for someone like me who was willing to read and learn something about it. It was far from being a right wing diatribe as two previous reviewers who panned the book stated. It seemed to be a straight forward analysis of the situation. I came away from it feeling that despite the diligent efforts of the Communists to use the movies to propagate their views they were far from successful. The studio heads, whether for economic or patriotic reasons, insured that the obvious propaganda was kept out of their movie productions. Like C Coffman who wrote the prior review, I wanted to know more about the thinking of the people who were so enamored of the Soviet Union. It was difficult for me to comprehend how the Hollywood writers continued to support the Soviet Union in the face of clear evidence that Soviet movie writers were being executed in the Soviet Union. Nor could I fully understand how these Hollywood writers, men (mostly) of immense talent, cowered before their Communist censors. Finally, the Radoshes put the "Hollywood Ten" and the blacklist years in perspective. They state there were wrongs on both sides and show how the claims of the victims of the blacklisting that they suffered immensely from the Congressional investigations were highly exaggerated. I came away with the feeling that the ability of those blacklisted to eventually gain work and to use their media to publicize their plight so as to portray themselves as heroes was only possible because they lost. It would never have been possible for them to show movies about the evil of the blacklisting days had their dreams for a Communist take over of the USA come true since like their fellow professionals in the Soviet Union they would have probably been executed. Who said you can't win for losing!

The back lash continues against the media strangle-hold on revisionist history.

How many times have you watched a documentary or a movie that exhonerates those poor persecuted innocents, dubbed the Hollywood Ten, as sitting targets seated before an array of mean and ruthless right-wing zealots - the HUAC committee of the late 1940's and early 50's? Over and over and over it seems, doesn't it? Well now we have a detailed and painstakingly written rejoinder, "Red Star Over Hollywood", which tells the real tale; that these were mostly hard core members of the communist party USA, who took their marching orders directly from the Kremlin. They were Stalin's men and, not to put to fine a point on it, useful idiots in his quest to foment a world-wide communist revolution.

Ron Radosh, a communist from childhood, smelled the coffee after he wrote a book trying to prove the innocence of the Rosenberg's only to find that .... they were guilty! After he said so he was unceremoniously drummed out of the "leftist corp" and made to wear a political scarlet letter by his former comrades....some friends they.

Radosh is a PhD in History and a diligent, detailed researcher of the facts i.e. he's interested in the truth and in that sense wherever the facts lead him he will go. Unfortunately, one doesn't find this trait to be prevalent among political ideaologues be they historians, archeologists, political scientists, reporters, book publishers or video media types. As an aside, I found it interesting to compare this book with Neil gabler's, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jew's Invented Hollywood." The nexus for me is the juxtaposition of the capacity for those who would be relentlessly capitalistic to simultaneously have the ability to be in favor of a world-wide communistic revolution? Is it a fear of chistianity as an ally of capitalism? I don't know, but I for one would encourage Radosh to address the subject. And, he's the man to do it (another book to read as a companion peace would be "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson, the author of "Modern Times.")

It's important to recognize that not all of those in Hollywood, whose lives were ruined by HUAC, were hard-core communists. Some were just idealistic liberals trying to make a differnce against perceived and real injustices. To the readers benefit, Radosh teases out these nuances rather well, and anyone interested in this period of history will read this book with great interest.

Setting the record straight is important, but the Hollywood left still clings to a thin tissue when it characterizes this story as a "fable of innocence destroyed by malice." It's their shakey attempt at moral authority, the kind that underpins a Sean Penn in his critique of Bush's Iraq policy, while he ignores the evils of Sadaam Hussein.

This book challenges the template of the Hollywood left: that these were brave dissenters standing up for the right to espouse unpopular beliefs against right-wing bullies leading a witch hunt against "un-American activities;" that they were victimized political innocents who were skewered by despicable sellouts who named names to save their careers. Read it, it's good.

It's no secret that many of Hollywood's and the entertainment businesss's current "stars" are socialist afficienados (or worse), but where did this denationalized elitism come from? "Red Star Over Hollywood" does a spectacular job at laying out the groundwork and background of the Hollywood political left, Communists and fellow travelers from the 1930's to 1950's. With about 37 pages of reference material (diaries, speeches, Congressional testimony, biographies, autobiographies, news articles, interviews, etc.), the authors leave no doubt about how these folks cooperated with the Soviet Union in its attempts to "take over" Hollywood as a tool in their effort to create a Soviet America. The names of the actors, screen writers, producers etc who were card carrying Communists, fellow travelers, quislings, leftists, and varieties of socialists who made up the Hollywood scene in those days will floor you. You'll have to read the book to find out who they were. And there were many heroes as well, who finally stood up and took on these cultural saboteurs. You'll never watch movies on the Turner Classic Movies channel the same way again. After you read the book, look closely at the writing and producing credits on these old films.

The authors draw some connections between the Hollywood leftists of that era and the current crop of leftists in the "entertainment industry" today. But that comes at the end of the book and is a very brief section.

This is a must read book for anyone who is even slightly interested in the Hollywood of the 30's-50's and who here's the sophist leftist pontifications of the Tim Robbins, Barbra Streisands, Bill Mahrs and others. One thing that will strike you is how well educated, thoughful, well read and articulate both the left and the right were in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. There was intelligent discourse on all sides. They make today's left and right apologists seem like 3d graders reciting "Dick and Jane" from memory. That insight was worth the price of the book.

Gary

I used to wonder why Hollywood ignored the crimes of Soviet Communism, which easily rival the crimes of National Socialism, something they've shown us over and over and over again (certainly understandable). Not one major film has been made showing us the summary executions during Lenin's "Red Terror," the deaths of millions during forced collectivization, the torture and mass murder during Stalin's purges of the late 30's, the cold-blooded massacre of thousands of Polish citizens at Katyn, or the horrors of the gulag. But Hollywood has been plenty busy pumping out films on "McCarthyism" and the ghastly "blacklist." They're listed in this book: Guilty by Suspicion, The Front, The Way We Were, The Majestic, Marathon Man, The House on Carroll Street, Fellow Traveler, One of Hollywood Ten. This is all propaganda of course. The way they tell it you'd think it was one of the darkest and most tragic eras in human history. McCarthy and his ilk were no saints, and there were certainly excesses, but I don't believe anyone was murdered by McCarthy and HUAC. By contrast tens of millions were murdered in Soviet Russia. Apparently that's no big deal to the fools in Tinseltown who are constantly wringing their hands over "McCarthyism," the blacklist and the persecuted Hollywood ten. These crybabies wouldn't have lasted ONE DAY in the Kolyma forced-labor camps!

The Radoshes show us that Hollywood back in the 30's and 40's was filled with Soviet-sympathizing Communists who put out propaganda films whitewashing Stalin's mass murders such as The North Star, Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow. While the first two simply glossed over the Stalinist holocaust in Ukraine, the latter film actually GLORIFIED Stalin's secret police and mass purges. Can you believe this? Hollywood actually justified Stalin's killing machine! Think about that the next time some Hollywood leftist whines about the "horrors" of "McCarthyism."

While no one in Hollywood would dare praise Stalin now, quite a few do embrace other blood-soaked Communist despots. For example, Shirley MacLaine made a pilgrimage to Red China, then reeling in the aftermath of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, and declared that Mao Tse-tung was a hero of all time. Someone should let Shirley know that her "hero" is the biggest mass murderer in history (see "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday). And countless Hollywood "useful idiots" such as Robert Redford, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone and many, MANY others swoon over that thug Fidel Castro, who has more blood on his hands (15,000 killed) than the hated Augusto Pinochet (3,000 killed). Pinochet's crimes have been the subject of several Hollywood flicks - i.e. Missing, Of Love and Shadows, etc. None have been made on the mass murders of Castro and Mao. To add insult to injury Castroite Robert REDford was executive producer of "The Motorcycle Diaries," a saintly portrayal of Castro's chief executioner Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his early days. He later went on to murder hundreds of "counter-revolutionaries" at La Cabana prison, something that's highly unlikely to be portrayed in the next pro-Che film starring Benicio del Toro.

The negative reviews are beyond pathetic. McCarthy this... McCarthy that... blah, blah, blah... Of course they can't refute one thing in the book. They prefer myth, not facts. Hollywood was filled with Stalin-worshipping Reds (now Castro-worshipping Pinkos), the Rosenberg's were guilty as charged and Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Truth hurts - deal with it!

Also recommended:

Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto E. Fontova
Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr
The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel

The Hollywood Blacklist is a story which has long been perpetuated by the film industry into popular culture, but RED STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD: THE FILM COLONY'S LONG ROMANCE WITH THE LEFT takes a different approach then most, documenting the large number of movie stars who did join the Communist Party and as a result had an impact on filmmaking trends. Material from the papers of Dalton Trumbo and other Hollywood insiders examine the concurrent growth of Communism through the 1930s and war years and the growing numbers of film greats who joined, experienced inner party disagreements, and influenced the industry as a whole. It's the first book to examine the discussion groups and members who helped define and promote Hollywood radicalism and makes for an important analysis filling many gaps.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch