One of the first acts of the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1946 (for the first time in twenty years) was to convert a temporary Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been investigating fascist sympathizers during the war, into a permanent one concentrating on the political left. The focus of the committee’s first big “investigation” was the movie industry.
The notion of Hollywood as a fount of subversion may be difficult for some younger readers to comprehend. It was the heyday of the studio system, and my fellow witnesses and I worked for large commercial enterprises whose leaders were utterly dedicated to the free-enterprise system. Mostly Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe, they were self-made men, as the saying goes, and were inclined to wax sentimental about America as a land of opportunity. Their highest loyalty, second only to the flag, was entertainment.
In 1947, the studios gave us Life With Father, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer. My own contribution to that year’s fare—a job not especially of my choosing—was the co-authorship of Forever Amber, a costume epic about a peasant girl who slept her way up and around in seventeenth-century England. The great social problem that my collaborator Philip Dunne and I tackled on that one was making an audience care whether Linda Darnell ended up with her true love, Cornel Wilde. (It was a challenge we failed to overcome. “You know what’s wrong with this movie?” Phil said after an early screening. “It’s the story of a resistible force up against a movable object.”)
Our congressional inquisitors had much to say about a handful of sympathetic Hollywood treatments of life in Soviet Russia. But these were true curiosities made at the behest of the Roosevelt Administration in wartime when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allies. Louis B. Mayer could honestly describe M.G.M.’s contribution to the genre, Song of Russia, as “little more than a pleasant musical romance.”
As screenwriters, which most of us were, our influence was limited; our political beliefs were, in any case, no less “American” than those of our inquisitors. Indeed, some of the views expressed by members of the committee in that period would seem obnoxious to most Americans today, as they did to us then. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi was given to racist and anti-Semitic rants like the one, delivered shortly after the hearing, in which he ticked off some of the names on a petition of support for us. His operatives had ascertained that June Havoc had been born June Hovick; that Danny Kaye’s “real name” was David Daniel Kaminsky; that Eddie Cantor had once been Edward Isskowitz; and that Edward G. Robinson had gone by Emmanuel Goldenberger, among other revelations that Rankin described as “too numerous to mention.”
Thomas and Nixon represented a more civilized form of witchhunter, and the committee was now trying to distance itself from Rankin’s harangues. Even so, the committee members and staff, like many of the studio executives, seemed to view the role that some of us had played in organizing the Screen Writers Guild and other motion picture unions as almost un-American in itself. We were also quizzed about our support in the thirties for the democratically elected government of Spain against the military revolt led by General Francisco Franco. “Premature anti-fascists” we had been labelled by, among others, F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. times, as in the interrogation of Bertolt Brecht on the same day I testified, even anti-government activity in Nazi Germany seemed to be worthy of exposure.
Most of us, in fact, belonged or had belonged to the Communist Party of the United States, but the meaning of that affiliation is very hard for people to grasp today, with all that has become clear about Communism as it unfolded in the Soviet Union, China, and other weak and impoverished nations over the course of the twentieth century. Neither I nor any of my friends in the party wanted the U.S. remodeled along Soviet lines. We deplored the absence of free elections, the cult of personality that surrounded Stalin, and the general atmosphere of regimentation. All these defects, though, we attributed to the lack of a democratic tradition in that country before the transition to socialism. In America, we believed, the conversion to a rational economic system would be accomplished peacefully at the polls. We also expected that under Marxist socialism, Russia would become more, rather than less, democratic, and the failure of that to happen was beginning to stir doubts among some of us even as we faced the committee.
In the scheme of revolutionary activities, ours had been, on the whole, rather temperate. Besides some educational sessions in Marxism, we had spent most of our party time organizing and strengthening the guilds and unions in the picture business. During the war, we had encouraged our colleagues and employers to do what they could to help bring about the defeat of Germany and Japan. What we did not do was act as spies for the Soviet Union, The Soviet government certainly had spies in America, just as the American government had spies in the Soviet Union. That’s one of the things governments do: spy on each other. But about the dumbest thing a Soviet spy could have done—and the surest way to draw the attention of the F.B.I.—would have been to join the Communist Party of the United States.
In recalling that odd moment in American political history, however, I would be derelict if I did not also acknowledge that, defining subversion as they did, the committee’s choice of Hollywood and its communist and left-liberal activists as a target was, on a certain rudimentary level, well-considered. Many of us had entered our professions with hopes, which we still harbored in varying degrees, that the great new medium of motion pictures would be a force for change, not in the crude way that such a thing might have been conceived in the Soviet world, but in the sense of allowing us to portray some of the not so beautiful realities of modern life and to gently illuminate areas of possible improvement.
As subject matter, both the Depression and the war had brought out some of the best in Hollywood, and the movies had seemed to be coming down from the clouds, at least until Congress began looking our way. Fox, my employer, had in recent memory produced The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. During an earlier stint at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I had co-written the first of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn films, Woman of the Year, in which Michael Kanin and I had tried to strike a modest blow equality between the sexes. A subsequent script of mine, Tomorrow the World, had been a chance to show, through the story of a Nazi youth raised by American relatives, that racism and brutality, far from being the inherent traits of Germans or the Japanese, had to be learned and might therefore be unlearned.
Along with some of my Hollywood peers, I had hoped to see the studio system eventually yield to looser arrangements allowing even greater creative liberty. In 1945, I had been part of an effort to launch an independent production company focusing on documentaries and features about the kinds of social questions that the studios avoided. Even before the hearings, however, we had been forced to lower our sights as the studio bosses and their financial overlords in New York began to turn away from the “topical films” that, in any case, had never been more than a small part of their output. Still, to quote from a written statement that I carried onto the witness stand vainly hoping to be permitted to read it aloud, Hollywood was a “citadel of freedom” compared to Washington under the sway of the Committee on Un-American Activities.
“It seems to me you are trying to discredit the Screen Writers Guild through me,” I replied to Thomas, “and the motion picture industry through the Screen Writers Guild, and our whole practice of free expression.” I was about to add something about my understanding of the First Amendment when he interrupted again.
“Never mind your understanding,” he fumed. “There is a question: Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
“I could answer exactly the way you want, Mr. Chairman,” I replied.