The Hollywood Blacklist. Fifty years ago this week, the House Committee on Un- American Activities began a series of clamorous hearings in Washington that sparked a campaign of anti-communist hysteria that swept through Hollywood, then the State Department, labor unions, academia and the armed forces. It was the age of loyalty oaths and McCarthyism, a chilling time in which free speech and the 1st Amendment were tossed out the window. Lives and careers were also ruined in other fields, but it was Hollywood, the incubator for America's popular culture, that became center ring for the Red Scare circus.

HUAC began its hearings on Oct. 20, 1947, with its rotund committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, perched on two telephone books and a red silk cushion so he could be seen by the swarm of newsreel and TV cameras. Two future presidents were on hand, Richard Nixon as a member of HUAC, Ronald Reagan as a friendly witness. Nineteen unfriendly witnesses were subpoenaed, mostly suspected communist writers and directors. Ten eventually testified, refusing to discuss their party affiliations or name party members. Known as the Hollywood 10, they were found in contempt of Congress, fired from their jobs and eventually sent to prison...

Fifty years after the blacklist's beginnings, the scars are still visible; wounds that should have healed are still fresh. Forgiveness is not in the air. As recently as January, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. voted against giving its life achievement award to Elia Kazan, citing his HUAC testimony, in which he informed on eight friends who had been fellow members of the Communist Party... In today's Hollywood, honors are going only to those who were blacklisted. With a 50th-Anniversary date here, the movie business is soothing its conscience with a flurry of commemorative events. Much of this activity has been spurred by the industry's sense of complicity in the blacklist. The blacklist was not government-imposed -- it was created by the Hollywood studio chiefs themselves. For anyone with a fascination for human frailty, blacklist misdeeds cover the political spectrum. The industry's communist activities were dogmatic and sanctimonious; liberals easily bullied; conservatives guilty of redbaiting and anti-Semitism.

"It was a cultural holocaust, a tragedy from which the industry has never fully recovered," says Hollywood biographer Patrick McGilligan, whose new book "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist" offers interviews with 36 blacklist survivors. "It's still a live issue because the survivors, and their children, haven't forgotten. And because it dramatically altered the climate of movie making. Even today, there are still risky political subjects that Hollywood won't take on."

It is not difficult to find unsettling parallels between Hollywood's self-imposed blacklist and industrywide self-censorship today. In response to attacks by government and religious right forces, the entertainment business has established parental-warning stickers for CDs and NC-17 labels for films -- which allow retailers to take controversial records and movies off the shelves -- and family-guidance ratings for TV programs. Historians now view the blacklist as a critical event in American postwar history, a symbolic turning point in the seismic shift from the progressive ideals of the New Deal to the anti- communist paranoia of the Cold War...

Friends turned on one another, informing on colleagues and writing partners; blacklisted writers created multiple fictitious identities; movie stars were forced to admit they'd been duped by Reds to save their careers. Yet Hollywood, having obsessively chronicled the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, has for the most part shied away from the blacklist... The Hollywood Red Scare was not an overnight phenomenon. The House Un- American Activities Committee, formed in 1934, toured the industry capital several times before the infamous 1947 hearings. HUAC's madcap investigating style made for as many punch lines as headlines. In 1938, it interrogated the 10-year-old Shirley Temple after one witness accused her of being a communist dupe!

HUAC uncovered no Red plots, but got plenty of ink. "The committee went after Hollywood early because they knew it had such high visibility," says Neal Gabler, author of "An Empire of Their Own," an influential social history of the industry's pioneering Jewish movie moguls. "Getting Hollywood was the spearhead for getting everyone else. It's where the headlines were."

When fears of communist influence resurfaced after World War II, the climate was ripe for another round of Hollywood investigations. The Republicans had wrested control of Congress in November 1946, eager to curb what they saw as the New Deal's liberal excesses. Shortly after, the Chicago Tribune ran a breathless two-week series designed, as one Tribune headline put it, to "Bare Grip of Reds on Film Industry." The stories' inflammatory tone offers a glimpse of the hysteria to come: "A hard little corps of revolutionaries who are pledged to spill the blood of American capitalists in every street have taken over the Hollywood movie writers union... carrying out a conspiracy hatched in Moscow, controlled by the Kremlin, feeding propaganda to the 95 million Americans who pay money every week to see movies."

One story claimed that Hollywood was "ruled" by three first families of film producers, including the three surviving Warner brothers and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, "all of them born in Russia." Another charged that the Screen Writers Guild was conrolled by communists and named nine top allegedly Red leaders. The series had instant effect -- Jack Warner clipped every installment, while many of the unfriendly witnesses HUAC subpeonaed were writers named in the stories.

Hollywood was already a town in turmoil. Box office (receipts) were down from wartime highs. In 1945, the studios had been racked by labor unrest. That October, police broke up a picket line on the Warner Bros. lot with tear gas, hoses and nightsticks. By 1947, the guilds had split into warring right- and left-wing camps. Even the trade papers were divided. The Hollywood Reporter warmly endorsed HUAC's mission, while Variety attacked the committee as "under-the-belt punchers," dismissing the first day of hearings with the headline: "Red Quiz Barnum Show."

"There was an acute polarization between the left and right in Hollywood," recalls Paul Jarrico, an 82-year-old blacklisted writer who was spared being subpeonaed in 1947 because he was one of the few communist writers with a war record. "The right-wingers were taking out these crazy ads in the trades, warning that Hollywood was being menaced by communism."

David Raksin remembers seeing a paramilitary motorcycle gang roar around town, led by beefy character actor Victor McLaglen. "They trained out in Los Feliz, wore black uniforms and acted like they were an army," he recalls. "There were lots of right-wing loonies around." The industry had lots of prominent communists too who made no secret of their politics. When Harry Cohn first met Walter Bernstein, then working for director Robert Rossen, the Columbia Pictures chief said, "Who's that, Rossen, one of your Commie writers from New York?" "Your politics were out in the open," Bernstein explains. "If you could make a buck for Harry Cohn, being a communist or a Republican didn't mean anything to him."

Sensing a new publicity opportunity, HUAC returned to Hollywood in May 1947, privately questioning industry conservatives, including actor Robert Taylor and Ginger Rogers' mother. Jack Warner, hoping to establish his anti-Red credentials, rattled off a list of writers he suspected as communists. In September, the committee issued 43 subpeonaes. Twenty-four went to friendly witnesses like Taylor, Warner, Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper; the rest to suspected communists, including many of the influential writers and directors of the era.

Launched on October 20th, the hearings were high theatre, making headlines coast to coast. "Communists Plot to Run Movies, Producer Says," blared the Minneapolis Star. The Des Moines Register proclaimed: "Hollywood Crawling With Reds." Ayn Rand testified that "Song of Russia," a wartime propaganda film co-written by Jarrico, was a Marxist whitewash, saying, "there were never such well-dressed, happy people in Russia." Walt Disney claimed that communists had financed a 1937 strike against his studio.

Jack Warner provided comic relief. Embarrassed that he'd named so many subversives in his earlier testimony, he said, "I was rather emotional, being in a very emotional business." Asked why he hadn't fired the Reds he'd fingered earlier, he blustered: "I've never seen a communist and I wouldn't know one if I saw one." Soon he was delivering a fervent soliloquy about his studio's commitment to good citizenship, saying of one patriotic picture: "Every American should see it, not only every American but every foreigner who thinks he wants to be an American." When Warner came up for air, Rep. Richard Nixon dryly replied: "I think I can see why you're so successful in selling your pictures to the American public."

On October 27 a planeload of Hollywood liberals, known as the Committee for the First Amendment, arrived in Washington. Formed by writer-directors Philip Dunne, John Huston and William Wyler to protest the hearings, the group included such stars as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly. One of their first fund- raisers was at Ira Gershwin's house... All did not go well. Accustomed to softball movie- magazine interviews, the stars were unprepared for a barrage of hostile queries from cold- eyed political reporters...

The return home was less than triumphant... "We were so naive it was ridiculous," Bacall later recalled. "When the press started to ask us questions, they had a field day." The hearings ended abruptly on October 30th, with the committee quizzing only 10 of the original 19 people it had subpeonaed. Politics gave way to pandemonium. The unfriendly witnesses refused to answer any questions, even ones about their Writers Guild membership, citing the 1st Amendment. Their attempts at impassioned oratory were silenced by Thomas, the committee's gavel-pounding chairman. The most vocal members of the 10, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, were physically dragged away from the witness stand. Ring Lardner, Jr. supplied the only writerly wit. Asked the famous question -- "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" -- he replied, "I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning."

To save face, Thomas said the hearings had been halted to prevent communists from staging a massive Washington rally. It seems more likely that he wanted to avoid more bad reviews. Variety brought down the curtain with the headline: "Commie Carnival Closes: An Egg Is Laid." But if HUAC ended up with egg on its face, so did the Hollywood 10, whose blustery speechifying cast them as ill-mannered ideologues. "It was a sorry performance," complained John Huston, a one-time supporter. "They lost a chance to defend a most important principle."

On November 5th, the American Legion threatened to boycott films made with the involvement of (communist) party members. On November 17th, the Screen Actors Guild voted to make its officers take a non-communist pledge. 20th Century Fox chief Darryl Zanuck had assured his writers that he wouldn't fire them unless ordered to by his board of directors. On November 21st, the board met and gave the order.

On November 25th, the House voted overwhelmingly to cite the Hollywood 10 for contempt of Congress. Anti-communism gave way to thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Saying his committee was there to protect the "Christian people of America," HUAC member John Rankin read a list of Hollywood 10 supporters, saying "Another one was Danny Kaye, we found out his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky... One calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg. Another one here calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg." (Douglas' wife, California congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, was one of only 17 House members to vote against the contempt citations).

News of the citations came as 50 industry leaders met behind closed doors at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. All the legendary moguls were there: Louis B. Mayer, Loews' Nicholas Schenck, Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, RKO's Dore Schary, Paramount's Barney Balaban, 20th Century Fox's Joe Schenck. Also on hand, significantly, was the Motion Picture Assn. of America's new special counsel, former Secretary of State James Byrnes, who assured the studio brass that the government wouldn't stand in their way if they fired the 10...

Despite the misgivings of Goldwyn and Schary, the group unanimously adopted a resolution, known as the Waldorf Statement, which deplored the actions of the 10 and said that the studios would no longer knowingly employ any communists. It was the official beginning of the blacklist. Within days, all studio-employed members of the Hollywood 10 were fired. Everyone ran for cover. Jack Warner telegrammed his distribution chief, eager to know how Danny Kaye and John Garfield's theatre bookings were holding up... The 10 took their case to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear their appeal. In 1950, they went to prison, to serve one-year sentences. Two of the writers, Lardner and Lester Cole, were sent to Danbury Prison, where they were joined by HUAC Chairman Thomas, serving time on a payroll padding charge...

Eventually hundreds of film and TV writers, directors and actors suffered the same fate, forced to leave the country or work under false names. Except for some film noir and low-budget thrillers, many penned by blacklisted writers, 1950's-era Hollywood movies were noticeably bland and inoffensive. "The spirit went out of the system," says Jarrico, who was blacklisted for 17 years and moved to Europe. "It was the difference between films like 'Casablanca' in the '40s versus 'Pillow Talk' in the '50s. There was a pall of fear over Hollywood; people were scared to make movies that said something." Some film historians believe that legacy remains today... For blacklist survivors, the most difficult decision often involves whom to forgive and what to forget...

SOURCE: These excerpts were derived from the CALENDAR Magazine of the Sunday, 19 October, 1997 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition. The author, Patrick Goldstein, is a regular contributor to Calendar. This article is reprinted here because it is in the national interest of the American people.