“It depends on the circumstances,” I told him. “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”
With that sentiment, I had exhausted Thomas’s patience. “Leave the witness chair,” he commanded.
When I again protested my desire to testify, he pounded his gavel in exasperation. “Leave the witness chair!”
“I think I am leaving by force,” I said.
“Sergeant, take the witness away!” he ordered. And the sergeant did so.
It was my first and, I had every reason to assume, my last encounter with Congressman Thomas. Three years later, however, we confronted each other as fellow inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, where I had been sentenced to one year for the misdemeanor of not answering his questions satisfactorily.
The blue prison fatigues hung loosely on the weary, perspiring man I met crossing the prison quadrangle. In the same costume, I felt that I looked comparatively dapper after eight hours of mild stenographic labor in the Office of Classification and Parole. Thomas’s job as custodian of the chicken yard, while not exactly strenuous, had kept him in the August sun all day. He had lost a good deal of weight, and his face, smooth and scarlet at our last encounter, was now deeply lined and sallow, making him look ten years older. I recognized him, however, and he recognized me. We did not speak. How could either of us pick up where we left off? Since my conviction for Contempt of Congress, along with nine other Hollywood writers and directors, I had lost an appeal, and the Supreme Court had declined to review the constitutional issues in our case.
During the same period, Thomas had been brought to trial for putting nonexistent workers on the government payroll and appropriating their salaries for himself. Offering no defense and throwing himself on the mercy of the court, he had received a mild sentence, later reduced by parole to an actual term of about nine months—three months less than my own stint. When his case was due to be heard by the parole board, Thomas, I learned later, was worried that I might find some way to use my official capacity to sabotage his application. Actually, the case was taken out of my hands by a civilian clerk. Like the rest of my colleagues in the Hollywood Ten, I was denied parole. But I was the only one to receive, in addition to the statutory sixty days off for good behavior, an extra fifteen days for “meritorious good behavior.” This was a reward for the improvements I had made in the grammar and style of the prison material I typed.
Though far from happy about my situation, it seemed more fluid than that of the sorry figure before me in the prison yard. Even if the torch of super-Americanism Thomas had brandished so fiercely during his two years of glory had not already been snatched from him by Senator Joseph McCarthy, there was no political future for a man whose downfall had been so pitilessly publicized and so prosaically self-aggrandizing.
My own future was at least unclear. I had taken the position that, while public servants are answerable to the people, private citizens cannot be summoned in the absence of even an allegation of an illegal act to account to the government for their beliefs and associations—matters that have traditionally been an American’s own business. It was a First Amendment argument that commanded a good deal of support, some of it quite respectable. In fact, we had based our stand on the seemingly unequivocal language of a 1943 Supreme Court decision: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Many people are surprised that the ten of us ended up not only blacklisted but imprisoned for refusing to discuss our political beliefs and associations. None of the hundreds later blacklisted in movies and television underwent the additional burden of being jailbirds. Ironically, in 1947, the Communist Party had not yet been deemed a criminal enterprise, and we were hardly eager to be the first to portray it in that light, as a plea based on the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment might have implied.
By 1951, when the next hearings commenced, the leaders of the American Communist Party had been convicted under the Smith Act and were serving their sentences. (The statute in question made it a crime to advocate the forcible overthrow of the government. The party bosses were deemed to have done so not on the basis of anything they had said themselves, but on the indirect evidence of sentiments expressed by Marx and Lenin as founding fathers of the movement.) So the Fifth Amendment had become a safe recourse—a way to avoid prison, at any rate—and once we had lost in the courts, there was no more point in citing the First. What witnesses couldn’t avoid was the blacklist—unless they were willing to name names. I am not saying that we would have pled self-incrimination if we had been certain of our success. What seemed most important and urgent to us at that time was to put the committee out of business, and only a court victory on the freedom-of-speech issue seemed likely to accomplish that. After the resolution of our case, there was no reason for anyone else to take a position that had become so clearly self-defeating.
Subpoenaed by the Committee in 1952, Lillian Hellman composed a brilliant statement of her reasons for refusing to testify about others. “I am not willing, now or in the future . . . to hurt innocent people . . . in order to save myself. . . . I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Those were the words of a gifted writer, and they had an excellent propaganda effect against informing. But Lillian was also an instinctive dramatist, and she couldn’t resist the opportunity to make her situation more suspenseful in her book Scoundrel Time. There she led readers to believe she had put herself in grave personal danger by insisting on the right to testify only about herself and not name other people. Some of the best legal minds in Washington, she wrote, felt that she was sending herself straight to jail by taking that position. In fact, she had made it clear in her letter to the Committee that if it failed to grant her the privilege she was requesting, she would simply invoke the Fifth Amendment on all questions. And by then, it had been established in case after case that there was no legal penalty for that. Just unemployment.
Within weeks of the first set of hearings, the heads of the movie studios met in New York and announced that none of us would work for any of them again until we had cleared ourselves with the Committee. Back in Hollywood, people went out of their way for us—a few to express their support, the majority to avoid our company. The talent guilds we had helped organize declined to support us, and soon passed new rules that made the blacklist easier to enforce. As it continued and expanded, some of us managed to work undercover at greatly reduced compensation; others had to find new occupations entirely; a few lost their lives in despair.
Nowhere else in the world, except possibly in the Kremlin, had there been a group of Communists with a higher standard of living or greater community acceptance than the writers who belonged to the party in Hollywood. One of the unwritten rules of membership, however, had been a polite understanding with our employers that we wouldn’t advertise it. Now my colleagues and I—soon to be known as “The Hollywood Ten”—were a hot story, and the studio bosses could no longer engage in what today might be called a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Making my discomfort worse was my inability to simply refuse to answer the committee’s questions and assert that my membership, in either the Communist Party or the Screen Writers Guild, was none of their business. But our lawyers, in an exercise of logic that seemed persuasive at the time, had insisted that such a stance could leave us vulnerable in court at a later date. We were instead supposed to maintain that we were making an attempt, in our own way, to answer the questions we felt the committee had no right to ask.
In recent decades, feelings in Hollywood, among other domains of American culture, have turned sharply in our favor. As the sole survivor of the Ten, I have been in a position lately to receive many expressions of respect and admiration from actors, actresses, and other denizens of the New Hollywood who sometimes have only a sketchy idea of what really happened to us. Since I enjoy a little adulation as much as the next man, I don’t always make a point of filling in the gaps in their knowledge or correcting the points of confusion.