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.
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Yeats
Carefully researched (and socialists will hate it).
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 6, 2019
