City of Nets (61 page)

Like the new Senator McCarthy's subsequent announcement that he had a list of 205 card-carrying Communists in the State Department, Thomas's talk of “hundreds” of prominent Hollywood Communists was pure fantasy. They didn't exist. The total of Communist Party members in the movie business was never large. After years of interrogations, supported by all the evidence accumulated by the FBI and the movie studios, the House committee issued a list in 1952 of everyone in Hollywood who had ever been identified as (not proved to be) a past or present Communist, and the grand total came to 324 employees or wives of employees of the movie industry. This in a work force of more than thirty thousand.
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And even if the term “important” be extended to encompass second-rate directors and mediocre screenwriters, scarcely two or three dozen Communists could be said to have any importance whatsoever. Near the start of the congressional hearings, in fact, when the studio heads held a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club to discuss the Communist problem, Louis B. Mayer named the young son of a well-known producer as a ringleader of Hollywood radicals. Sam Goldwyn responded with commendable
sang-froid.
“If that snot-nosed baby is the Red boss in Hollywood, then, gentlemen, we've got nothing to fear,” Goldwyn said. “Let's go home.”

What, then, was the House committee trying to accomplish? The least plausible answer, which nonetheless deserves a moment's consideration, is that the congressmen were genuinely concerned about the possibility of Communist domination of a major medium of information. Recent revelations of Soviet spying were in the air, and the committee was struggling with its first actual piece of legislation, a bill drafted by Rankin to punish by ten years in jail any attempt “in any course of instruction or teaching in any public or private school, college or university to advocate or to express or convey the impression of sympathy with or approval of, Communism or Communist ideology.” This was a bit strong even for the Un-American Activities Committee. A majority of the committee members could not bring themselves to recommend Rankin's measure to the full House, but they went on considering various proposals to outlaw communism.

The second least plausible explanation, which both the Hollywood producers and the dissenting radicals professed to believe, was that the House committee sought to dominate the movie industry, to tell the producers what movies to make. Jack Warner was reasonably typical, once the HUAC hearings got under way, in decrying government interference in Hollywood. “We can't fight dictatorships by borrowing dictatorial methods,” he said, in a prepared statement that sounded like someone else's handiwork. “Nor can we defend freedom by curtailing liberties, but we can attack with a free press and a free screen.” John Howard Lawson, the Communist screenwriter who was to play the role of chief demon at these same hearings, sounded equally pious in testifying about the need for a “free screen.” “J. Parnell Thomas and the Un-American interests he serves . . . are afraid of the American people,” Lawson declared in a statement that Thomas refused to let him read. “They don't want to muzzle me. They want to muzzle public opinion. They want to muzzle the great Voice of democracy. . . .”

The real explanation of the committee's objectives is probably the obvious one: partisan politics. Just as President Truman was more or less continuing Roosevelt's New Deal, so Thomas was continuing to play the harassing role originally performed by Dies. Like Dies, Thomas represented the small-town worrier who couldn't figure things out but suspected that many of his daily problems were the fault of dark forces in distant places, international cartels, giant labor unions, foreign radicals. Dies and Thomas and the committee all represented, in other words, the constituency of the bewildered and the resentful, all those people whom Nathanael West had described as “tired of oranges, even of avocado pears . . . [the] cheated and betrayed.”

And then there was the matter of publicity, not as an adjunct to politics but as the essence of it. To say that J. Parnell Thomas was a publicity seeker, which he was, misses the point that publicity is the blood of politics. There are no issues, really, except on rare occasions of war or disaster, only images and competing images. Even before television made this obvious, J. Parnell Thomas sensed that his essentially purposeless investigations of communism might bring him great rewards (what made Tom Dewey a presidential candidate, after all, if not his highly publicized investigations of New York gangsters?). One of Thomas's committee members, young Dick Nixon, saw similar possibilities but had the shrewdness and the patience to bide his time until he encountered the great drama that would make him famous, the clash between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
The Un-American Activities Committee had long been tempted by Hollywood, and by the publicity that accompanied every suggestion of an investigation of the movies, but Dies's probing tentacles had been rather harshly beaten back in 1941. And the committee had many other fields to explore. (When Congressman Dickstein had been asked back in the 1930's exactly whom his proposed Un-American Activities Committee would be authorized to investigate, he had prophetically answered: “Everybody!”) So the committee began the year 1947 by inquiring into the United Auto Workers' role in the continuing strike at Allis-Chalmers, and the United Electrical Workers' role in a strike in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers' role in a strike at the Reynolds Tobacco Company plant in Winston-Salem. Labor unions, as Hollywood would learn, were a matter of continuing interest to the Un-American Activities Committee.

In its more or less random explorations, the committee had inevitably been struck by the activities of Louis Budenz, a former managing editor of the
Daily Worker,
who had somehow found God and now sought only to condemn and expiate his former sins. He began making radio speeches to denounce the Evil One, an all-powerful agent who he claimed was traveling throughout the United States as the secret representative of the Kremlin. “This man never shows his face,” Budenz said. “Communist leaders never see him, but they follow his orders or suggestions implicitly.” The Un-American Activities Committee was thrilled. It summoned Budenz to come and tell all he knew about the worldwide Communist conspiracy, and Rankin welcomed him with a burst of his customary rhetoric. “Are you familiar,” he demanded, “with the rape of innocent women, the murder of innocent men, the plunder of the peasants and the robbery of the helpless people . . . by the Communist regime?”

Budenz eventually identified the Kremlin master agent, the man who never showed his face, as Gerhart Eisler, an obscure German operative who may quite possibly have been all that Budenz said he was. The committee had no difficulty in demonstrating that Eisler had repeatedly lied to U.S. immigration authorities, used several false names (Edwards, Brown, Berger, Liptzin), and traveled on a forged passport. This and more was detailed in the testimony of Eisler's older sister, Elfriede, who now called herself Ruth Fischer and was writing a denunciation of German communism for the Harvard University Press. She described her brother, whom she had not spoken to for many years, as a Soviet police agent, a murderer, and a “terrorist.” She was not a great deal kinder to her other brother, Hanns, the Hollywood composer, whom she described as “a Communist in a philosophical sense.”

Gerhart Eisler was already in the custody of the Immigration Service, which wanted to deport him. Brought from Ellis Island to Capitol Hill by two Immigration Service agents, he proved to be a waspishly intractable witness. When the committee's chief investigator, Robert Stripling, asked him to take the stand, he said, “I am not going to take the stand.”

“Mr. Eisler, will you raise your right hand?” said Stripling.

“No,” said Eisler.

“Mr. Eisler . . .” said Chairman Thomas, “you want to remember that you are a guest of this nation.”

“I am not treated as a guest . . .” said Eisler. “I am a political prisoner.”

The committee duly cited Eisler for contempt (the resolution to do so represented Congressman Nixon's maiden speech) and moved on to Hanns Eisler, who also offered rich possibilities for the committee's interrogators. When Eisler was trying to get a visa to the United States in 1940, his application was supported by such influential admirers as Dorothy Thompson, Malcolm Cowley, Clifford Odets, and—of all people the committee would like to embarrass—Eleanor Roosevelt. Unlike his truculent brother, Hanns Eisler parried the committee's questions with remarkably sassy wit. When Stripling described him as “the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical field,” Eisler said, “I would be flattered.”

“Mr. Eisler . . .” Stripling persisted, “haven't you on a number of occasions said, in effect, that music is one of the most powerful weapons for the bringing about of the revolution?”

“Sure,” said Eisler. “Napoleon the First said—”

“Never mind Napoleon,” Thomas interrupted. “You tell us what you said.”

“I consider myself, in this matter, a pupil of Napoleon,” the completely unfazed Eisler retorted. “I think in music I can enlighten and help people in distress in their fight for their rights. In Germany we didn't do so well. . . . The truth is, songs cannot destroy Fascism, but they are necessary. . . . It's a matter of musical taste whether you like them. . . . If you don't like them, I am sorry; you can listen to ‘Open the Door, Richard.' ”

In questioning Eisler about his various compositions, Stripling repeatedly asked him about his collaborations with Brecht. Had he written the music for
Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken),
Brecht's radical play of 1930; for
Kühle Wampe,
the Berlin film of 1932; for
Hangmen Also Die
? Eisler cheerfully acknowledged them all (though he seemed to think he was protecting his friend by avoiding any mention of Brecht's name). But he would not admit to being a Communist. “I would be a swindler if I called myself a Communist,” he said. “I have no right. The Communist underground workers in every country have proven that they are heroes. I am not a hero. I am a composer.”

 

J. Parnell Thomas began his investigation of Hollywood in May of 1947 with a series of interrogations in his suite at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. These meetings were supposedly closed, private, but after each afternoon's session, Thomas and Stripling told reporters about the wonders they were discovering. Their indirect targets, as usual, were the New Deal and the labor unions. Thomas declared that “the government” had “wielded the iron fist in order to get the companies to put on certain Communist propaganda,” and that the main vehicle for this propaganda, the Screen Writers Guild, was “lousy with Communists.” As evidence for these charges, Thomas reported that Robert Taylor had testified that government officials had delayed his entry into the navy in 1943 until he had finished filming M-G-M's
Song of Russia,
which Thomas described as “Communist propaganda that favored its ideologies, its institutions and its way of life over the same things in America.” The committee's most implausible witness, Ginger Rogers's mother, Lela Rogers, told the investigators that her daughter had bravely refused to speak a typical piece of Communist propaganda, “Share and share alike—that's democracy,” which had appeared in Dalton Trumbo's script for
Tender Comrade.

There were fourteen of what Thomas called “friendly witnesses,” and on the basis of their testimony, he announced his conclusions. White House pressure had forced the studios to produce “flagrant Communist propaganda films”; Washington intrigues had helped Communist union leaders to threaten the studios, and Communist writers were subtly infusing Moscow's propaganda into the movies. After this verdict, the trial could begin. All these un-American maneuvers needed to be publicly exposed and publicly condemned and he, J. Parnell Thomas, proposed to do so. The pink subpoenas that circulated through Hollywood that September were proof that he was very much in earnest.

Herbert Biberman, a rather pompous producer and director whose most recent films included
Abilene Town
and
New Orleans,
was one of the first to see the obvious pattern in the subpoenas and to do something about it. He got on the telephone and invited a group of the prospective witnesses to assemble at eight o'clock that same evening in the home of the director Lewis Milestone to discuss with some lawyers how they should defend themselves. The nineteen witnesses were mostly writers: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Waldo Salt. And Brecht. There were also a few who had graduated from writing into directing and producing: Edward Dmytryk, Irving Pichel, Adrian Scott, Robert Rossen. And one actor, Larry Parks. Most of them were or had recently been members of the Communist Party (as the authorities well knew, since the CP's Los Angeles secretary was an FBI informer). Perhaps by coincidence, only one of the nineteen had done military service during the recent war. Perhaps by coincidence, at least ten were Jews; perhaps by coincidence, but more likely not.
The Hollywood Reporter
was apparently the first to call them “the unfriendly witnesses,” but they took pride in the term and applied it freely to themselves. It was left to the malicious Billy Wilder to say, “Only two of them have talent. The rest are just unfriendly.”

Biberman had invited to the meeting four prominent defense lawyers, notably Robert Kenny, who, despite the handicap of a withered arm, had succeeded Earl Warren as state attorney general (and fully supported Warren's activities in the incarceration of the Japanese). Almost equally well known was Bartley Crum, a corporation lawyer and a Republican. The other two were militant leftists, Ben Margolis and Charles Katz, charter members of the National Lawyers Guild.