McCarthyism

The author of High Noon was hounded for the communist messages in that movie. Dalton Trumbo . . .

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Widely Red

by Martin Peretz
Only at TNR Online | Post date 07.06.05

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left
By Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh
(Encounter Books, 292 pp., $25.95)

Books don't easily change bad habits. Which is why there are so many diet books: The Rosedale Diet, The Mediterranean Diet, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, The South Beach Diet, French Women Don't Get Fat, The Abs Diet, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, The Fast Track One-Day Detox Diet, and on and on ad nauseum, so to speak. There are many millions of copies of more or less easy diets out there; and still the American people eats badly and too much, especially folk who buy and, in fact, may even read these cheerily frightening guides to healthy feeding.

Bad habits in sloppy thinking and in ideas about history are even more difficult to dislodge with books. Nonetheless, the historian Ronald Radosh has made it his mission to try. Not as a general proposition, of course. But in a specific historical area. There is common in America an explanation of why an aggressive left liberalism, or socialism for that matter, petered out in the two decades after the Second World War, and the explanation is very simple. The blame is laid on what is clumsily called "McCarthyism," although the drift of what is meant by the term both predated and postdated the short, ugly, and dismal career of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. As it happens, this conventional reading also puts mainstream Democrats in the dock and the Truman administration, in particular, for building the "national security state" in opposition to the--of course, exaggerated--foreign threat of Soviet Russia and the harmless--and, no doubt about it, idealistic--domestic enlistees of the armed doctrine of communism.

To be sure, Radosh grasps that greater forces have been at play in the disintegration of the left in the United States and in the world. There are the basic facts that socialism doesn't explain intrinsic social and economic behavior and that, as a blueprint for the organization of polity and society, it has literally everywhere been a dismal failure and, in many of these places, unbelievably cruel besides. Alas, one cannot argue with much of this. Still, there remains the bitterness of the liberal and not-so-liberal left, its vindictiveness, its sense of itself as victim.

In their new book, Red Star Over Hollywood, Radosh and his historian wife Allis examine this sensibility in the film industry, focusing on the blacklist, its perpetrators and their targets. The moral high ground has usually gone to the latter, the self-styled martyrs for progress. The Radoshes examine this case in all its complications. And let's make one thing clear: They have contempt for those who banished and ostracized anyone for his or her political views. In that sense, they are true liberals: Even communists need to feed their families. What they do not countenance is the behavior of the fellow travelers, the true believers, the party apparatchiks, those who knew all too well that, by joining the Communist Party or its multitude of front groups, they had enrolled in defending ruthless dogma and more ruthless regimes.

For Radosh, this is part of an ongoing project of two decades about the distorted ethical universe inhabited by communists and their comrades. Among a half dozen volumes examining the subject, in The Rosenberg File, he (and Joyce Milton) produced the first scholarly (and readable) text to prove with newly discovered evidence the guilt of Julius Rosenberg as an atomic spy for Moscow, to demonstrate that the evidence against Ethel was not credible and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt, to examine the dishonest and counterproductive hysteria mustered by the hapless couple's supporters, to show that their innocence was deduced by their defenders from the sheer but counterintuitive fact that they were loyal to Josef Stalin. Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, a book Radosh co-edited, overturns conventional history that portrays the communist apparatus as an ally of Republican Spain rather than its ruthless manipulator. This apparatus also murdered many faithful sons and daughters of democratic Spain and from among the International Brigades--socialists and anarchists, especially. Of course, this is not exactly news. It is the message of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Which brings us to the most disgraceful blacklist of all: the systematic and, for a long-time, successful effort by "progressive" cadres in top literary circles to keep Animal Farm and 1984 from being published in America. Now, Orwell was a literary genius. His sin was that, though a man of the left, he was anti-Stalinist. That was enough to justify boycotting his writings.

The era of the blacklist and of inquests by legislative and congressional committees into thousands of people's politics left many victims, maybe two handfuls of suicides, wrecked careers, many lives destroyed in other ways. None of this has any claim to being just. And filmtown's executives turn out to be craven and cowardly. But what about the moral lives of the victims, the Hollywood victims, in particular? They have built a legend of virtue, and this virtue is contrary to the truth. Some of those who were blacklisted actually did treasonous deeds for the Soviet Union. They certainly were traitors to their friends, even to their families, to both of which they lied routinely. All of this is documented in Red Star, and documented meticulously.

There is a predictable irony in the initial origins of government investigative committees gone haywire, like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and of repressive legislation like the Smith Act, later smothered by the Supreme Court. The very idea for HUAC began with Samuel Dickstein, a hack Democratic congressman who happened to be a Communist Party agent and was paid for his chores. But, then, the committee was investigating local bully Nazis who also thought history was on their side and--most important to the Soviet Union--also making trouble for the tiny cohort of Trotskyites who had made some pathetic headway in the trade unions. When the Smith Act came up for renewal, the Communists mobilized their Democratic allies in Congress and the party faithful to assure that the statute would survive so that the Trotskyite enemy might continue to be harassed by the feds.

The myth of the valorous victims is one of those lies that is unaffected by facts. It is, in many ways, a glitzy product of Hollywood in its mawkish moods. Guilty by Suspicion (with Robert De Niro and directed by Irwin Winkler), The Way We Were (with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, directed by Sidney Pollack), and The Front (with Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, directed by former blacklistee Martin Ritt) retell the clichéd story of straightforward idealism betrayed by fabrication and fear. But the tale is much more complicated than that, and it is much more complicated and textured than the semi-official legend, Naming Names, by Victor Navasky, the long-time former editor of The Nation, who has made a career of absolving the American left of any culpability for its embrace of Stalinism.

This is, as the Radoshes show, the burden of the argument. Imagine that there were now to be in the elites and among the aspiring elites millions of people who burnished the wisdom and political fortitude of, say, Charles Lindbergh and Ezra Pound. As it happens, these two individuals were truly great men in their ways, Lindbergh as an aviator and Pound as a poet. But they suffered the reasonable public ignominy of being sympathetic to fascism, Pound to the point of treason. Lindbergh did his penance as a combat flyer in the Pacific during World War II, but he was a hero no more. Yes, there is now an adoring Lindbergh website but that is the full of it. And, here and there, some crank clings not to the Cantos but to the curdled confusions of a crazed writer. Pound was truly punished for his war-time fascist heresies on the radio: From 1945 to 1958, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane, now inhabited by John Hinckley Jr. Nothing to compare to the lighting of candles for those who were on the blacklist.

The blacklisted were mostly, though not all, hack writers and directors. But producing mediocre work is no crime. In Hollywood, it was usually richly rewarded. So what did they do wrong? They were enthusiasts for Stalin, certainly a moral offense equal to being an enthusiast for Hitler and Mussolini. This fidelity to Stalinism ran deep, and in behalf of Stalinism the comrades deceived, conspired, plotted. The Radoshes tell us who in Hollywood had had enough and saved their own souls, if not always their jobs. And they also tell us who in filmland perverted and fabricated on behalf of the communist design. It is hard to reconstruct a world in which so many intelligent people lived the ethical life of cosmic cheats.

Here is what Stalinists (no, a Leninist was no better) lied about: the police state, the show trials, the deliberate famines, the repression of the peasantry, the massive ethnic transfers, the executions, the great terror, the Gulag, the systematic and murderous anti-Semitism, the squelching of free thought, the Trotsky plot against the revolution (no, a Trotskyite was no better, either), the perversion of the judiciary, the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to them there were no "widows of the revolution," in David Remnick's affecting phrase. And, if circumstance happened to catch them in flagrante, they would lapse into that hoariest of justifications, "historical necessity." These are the atrocities which the blacklisted denied or defended or asserted were forced on the Kremlin by the West, the flabbiest of excuses. These men and women lived by a tissue of fabrication, and they passed that tissue--like a genotype--on to their children. Instead of being an apologist for Stalin, Richard Dreyfuss shilled for Arafat.

This is not just a book about the Hollywood Ten. In any case, there are differences among these ten. It is about a whole leftish culture in the film colony. Still, the playwright Lillian Hellman, though not really a Hollywood figure but a Broadway personage, was, as Red Star shows, the paradigm of the confirmed film industry Stalinist, its grand exemplar. Although she was the screenwriter for The North Star, a shabby hit of a pro-Soviet movie, she never suffered for her sins. She lived a life among the rich and powerful. She "wintered" in the Caribbean with the Alsops and the Bundys. She "summered" in her grand house on Martha's Vineyard. Still, she was always ready to defend Soviet Russia. This made her an intellectual swindler, a moral contortionist. In my presence, she even seemed to justify the execution of an ex-lover, Otto Katz, the model for the hero in her play Watch on the Rhine, who was caught up in the 1952 Czech political trials against "Titoists" and "Zionists." One section of Hellman's utterly false autobiographical work Pentimento was made into a film called Julia, starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia. Maybe, dear reader, you will recall Julia, the fascinating American heroine of the pre-war anti-fascist resistance in Vienna. Julia was an intimate friend of Hellman's, at least according to the book and the movie. But, as soon as Pentimento appeared, rumblings erupted in New York that were only intensified by the first showings of Julia on screen. Julia's was a life stolen from someone else, someone who had never known Hellman.

It turned out that Julia's story was Muriel Gardiner's, an eminent psychiatrist and heiress to the Swift meat fortune who was married to an Austrian exile Socialist intellectual, Joseph Buttinger, no communist sympathizer, he or she, no friend of Hellman, to be sure. (In fact, Buttinger was chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam during the Vietnamese war and a contributor to Dissent magazine.) Hellman had poached on the wrong folks' lives. Hellman's intimates were embarrassed for her and by her; they began to press her for an explanation: Who really was Julia? A lawsuit by Gardiner was in the offing, and a Gardiner memoir, Code Name Mary (Yale University Press). As Joan Mellen tells it in her engrossing double biography Hellman and Hammett (Harper Collins), Hellman confided to her lawyer Ephraim London (and then to many others) that Julia was my wife's mother, deceased now more than 60 years. This flimsy improvisation persuaded no one, and Hellman died soon thereafter with her most desperate lie.

So what has all this to do with the fate of the American left or American liberalism? Any movement that does not own up to its past hobbles its future. These flanks are still enchanted with the suicidal heroism of the self-deluded Hollywood communists. This twisted syndrome did not stop with apologetics and excuses for Stalinism. It continues with the tortured explanations and barely disguised extenuations for the Muslim terror war against democratic and civil society. The Radoshes have written a wise, honest, and perceptive book.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.