The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (13 page)

IMAGE 11   “Hollywood Jabberwocky” by I.A.L. Diamond, from the June 1947 issue of
The Screen Writer
.

Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

I was a member of the Communist Party . . . and as far as I was concerned there was never, I would say, any discrepancy of any kind between what seemed to me the best interest of the Guild and what those of us in the Party felt . . . should be done in the Guild.

—Ring Lardner Jr., interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project, 1978

The real-life spectacle and legal theatrics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, filmed in the hallowed halls of Congress in October 1947, read like an A-lister’s screenplay. But the ending would prove too depressing a scenario for a Hollywood silver screen drama. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, American conservatives on the political right attacked Hollywood Reds, studios fired scores of writers (among other employees), and—perhaps most painful of all—writers betrayed other writers. Without question, this era was the most damaging in the history of the writers and their union, and the story of faithlessness and shame continues to haunt the Guild to this day.

First, Washington politicians placed Hollywood at the center of a campaign to rid American cultural institutions of any hint of communism. Then ten individuals—eight of them writers—were tried, convicted, and jailed for contempt of court. Studio moguls and Guild members crusaded against their peers as fear-mongering and anxiety over reprisal forced Hollywood’s practitioners to take sides. Thus began a long, drawn-out period of studio executives and employees naming names and destroying hundreds of their fellow employees’ careers. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund consider the period from 1947 to 1953 the most shameful time in the SWG’s history: “The Guild had been weak in the past, but the price of its weakness was never so high nor exacted so completely from its own membership.”
¹

In May 1947, key members of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or “the Committee”) boarded a plane to Los Angeles, bound for a strategy session with studio heads. Eric Johnston, then president of the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA), greeted HUAC’s new chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (Republican of New Jersey), and promised full cooperation. Johnston even went so far as to suggest to studio heads that MPAA members terminate employment for any worker “proven” to be a communist, but the executives, though willing to work with the Committee, struck down this proposal. Still, members of HUAC visited each of the studio heads, leaning on them to assist the Committee. Just before the hearings began, Ronald Reagan, then president of SAG, declared his organization’s full willingness to cooperate with HUAC.
²
He would subsequently be revealed to have been an informant for the FBI since 1943.

The Committee chair called one big-name witness after another as a phalanx of newsreel cameras captured the Hollywood pageant—produced and directed on this occasion by Washington politicians on location in opulent hotel rooms. Appearing in this drama were studio heads Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Walt Disney, actors Ronald Reagan, Robert Montgomery (the past head of SAG), Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper. Their testimony helped the Committee members narrow the focus of their attack. Assessing the inquiry in Los Angeles, Thomas flatly declared to the press: “Ninety percent of Communist infiltration in Hollywood is to be found among screenwriters.”
³
Two screenwriters, James K. McGuinness and Rupert Hughes, gladly volunteered information as so-called friendly witnesses. Notably, both men a decade earlier had served as leaders of the reactionary Screen Playwrights group. These two, along with screenwriter Howard Emmett Rogers, were members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), a right-wing organization of high-profile film industry conservatives based, like the Screen Playwrights, at MGM. Philip Dunne later argued, “In a way . . . the Committee hearings were offshoots of the battle between the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Playwrights. . . . It was being fought on a new field now. They called in the Congress of the United States on their side.”
⁴
Hughes declared that the Guild he had once helped create (meaning the social group from the 1920s) was now “lousy with Communists.” “They began to take over the Guild in 1937,” he claimed. “They’ve been powerful in Hollywood for years, both secretly and openly. They’ve attacked me and anyone else that ever opposed them.”
⁵
Anti-left vitriol, which had quieted during the war years, returned with a vengeance. The publicity HUAC achieved beginning in May assured its members that the campaign against so-called Reds in Hollywood was a powerful vehicle for spreading their anticommunist message. By June, Congress had overcome President Harry S. Truman’s veto and enacted the Taft-Hartley Act to limit the power of and monitor the activities of hundreds of labor unions within the United States, retracting much of the protection the unions had gained with the Depression-era Wagner Act. Taft-Hartley added a special clause that required affidavits of non-communist affiliations from all officers of a union before they could request an NLRB hearing or certification election.
⁶
In September, HUAC demanded that the storymakers of Hollywood come to Washington and essentially stand trial.

HUAC issued forty-five subpoenas, this time not to “friendly” witnesses, but instead to Hollywood practitioners who were suspected of having communist affiliations or sympathies.
⁷
Witnesses were not briefed on what they were alleged to have done wrong or what evidence was to be presented against them, as required in a typical courtroom trial. A good number of the witnesses were young and just starting out in Hollywood. Ring Lardner Jr., thirty-two at the time, recalled that his bright pink subpoena arrived just a week after he had signed a $2,000-a-week deal with Fox Studios and purchased a home on the beach in Santa Monica.
⁸
Of those called, nineteen publically denounced the Committee’s agenda; the
Hollywood Reporter
referred to them as the “Unfriendly Nineteen.”

Ceplair and Englund explain that four dozen other names could have been added to the list if it had been based solely on long-term dedication to the Communist Party, to the guilds, or to other Communist-controlled or -influenced organizations. But several characteristics of the Nineteen were particularly relevant to HUAC’s agenda: all of them lived in Los Angeles and were employed in the film industry; all were actively involved in pro-Soviet activities; and sixteen were or had been screenwriters.
⁹
Only one was a veteran of World War II, all of them were men, and ten of them were Jewish. The Committee’s first eleven targets were John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo (writer of
Kitty Foyle
and
Tender Comrade
), Albert Maltz (writer of
Pride of the Marines
), Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, writer and director Herbert Biberman (who had written
The Master Race
), director Edward Dmytryk, producer and writer Adrian Scott (who had written
Mr. Lucky
), Ring Lardner Jr., Lester Cole, and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had adapted
Hangmen Also Die!
(Brecht denied he had ever been in the party and then fled the country only hours after his congressional testimony.) Waldo Salt, who later wrote
Midnight Cowboy, Serpico
, and
Coming Home
, was to be next in line.

In October 1947, HUAC reconvened in Washington to hear again from “friendly” witnesses Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney, and several others. Their testimony served as confirmation of a premise the Committee already believed to be true: that there were “communist infiltrators” in Hollywood who were systematically taking over the unions. As the proceedings began, Chairman Thomas declared: “It is only to be expected that Communists would strive desperately to gain entry to the motion picture industry simply because the industry offers such a tremendous weapon for education and propaganda.”
¹⁰
Reagan testified about his experiences in SAG, and Disney told stories of his battles with the Screen Cartoonists Guild. The Committee then called the men now known as the “Hollywood Ten,” one by one. Chairman Thomas sat balanced atop two phone books and a cushion, lording over the witnesses, an oversized gavel at the ready. John Howard Lawson was the first to come to the table. Though Lawson tried to make a speech, Parnell interrupted him with two questions: “Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” and “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” The juxtaposition of the questions was designed to imply that membership in the SWG was just as sinister as membership in the Communist Party.

Although no Committee member offered a chance to do so, each man attempted to speak, only to be immediately silenced by Parnell’s gavel. From their extensive reading of the records, Ceplair and Englund report that “the words ‘pounding gavel’ stud the transcripts of the hearings and indicate the frequency and relish with which a contumacious witness’ words were drowned out.”
¹¹
Only Albert Maltz was able to read his statement in full. When asked about his membership in the SWG, Maltz replied, “Next are you going to ask me what religious group I belong to?”—thereby tying the treatment of the Hollywood Left to the persecution of Jews.
¹²
Trumbo brought copies of his screenplays and challenged the Committee to locate subversive material in their pages. But not one of the Ten was allowed to introduce evidence or ask questions of the Committee members.

Parnell’s treatment of the Ten was so contemptuous that some mainstream newspapers, even ones that had toed a patriotic line thus far, briefly expressed some sympathy. An editorial in the
Washington Post
charged that
Thomas “may pretend that his supercolossal Hollywood investigation is aimed not at interference but merely exposure. Its effect, nevertheless, is to intimidate and coerce the industry into an even more rigid acceptance of Mr. Thomas’ concepts of Americanism.”
¹³
The
New York Times
was equally repelled by Thomas’s behavior: “The Thomas committee and others may do well to remember that respect for individual rights and constitutional processes of law is one of the marks which distinguish a democracy from a totalitarian state; and that one of the best ways to fight communism is to show such respect at all times and places—even on Capitol Hill.”
¹⁴
As Ceplair notes, the radical difference in the treatment of the unfriendly witnesses in comparison to the earlier treatment of the friendly witnesses by a purportedly neutral legislative body amounted to a blatant violation of due process.
¹⁵

A month later, on November 24, Eric Johnston, as head of the MPAA, chaired a private meeting at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. He included all eight major studio heads as well as the independents and a few of the studios’ East Coast financiers. The next day, in Washington, the House of Representatives cited the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress for refusing to say on record whether they were members of the Communist Party. The Ten, who had already been suspended without pay by the studios, were now ordered by the government to serve jail time.

Later that day in New York, the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers released a statement from their closed-door meeting. The studios called the behavior of the Ten deplorable and promised not to rehire any of them until the Committee cleared them of culpability or wrongdoing. The document, known thereafter as the Waldorf Declaration, read in part: “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group [that] advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods. In pursuing this policy, we are not going to be swayed by hysteria or intimidation from any source. . . . [We] will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives, to protect the innocent; and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened.”
¹⁶

A third event that November demonstrated that even Guild members had changed their attitudes about what it meant to be a member: the SWG elected a new “All Guild” slate of candidates to its board. This new, all-but-leftist board was more concerned with saving the Guild’s reputation than protecting the
rights of individual members. For example, hardboiled novelist and Guild member James M. Cain, who had scripted
Stand Up and Fight
, wrote to the executive board to demand that the Guild not spend money helping the Ten. If they were communists, which he believed they were, then “they are a job for the Communist Party”; if they were not, the writers should simply say so, and they would need no legal support. But “in neither event,” Cain wrote, “as this now stands, is Guild action necessary, or desirable.”
¹⁷

The underlying question in much of this drama was whether the SWG was, at its core, a political organization. Should the Guild as a whole express a political agenda, and if so, what should that agenda be? Had it formerly been run by a leftist leadership that was furthering a series of unknown political schemes? Of course, the debate about the meaning and purpose of the Guild had begun at its very inception. World War II put a hold on many of these disputes, but in the final year of the war through the aftermath of the Waldorf Declaration, the debate became heated and heightened to a level never seen before in the industry. SWG members were vigorously disputing the purpose and political power of their Guild—both within the industry and beyond. Much of this rancor spilled out on the pages of
The Screen Writer
.

During these critical years, from the end of World War II to the HUAC hearings, the board of directors of the SWG undertook an extraordinary creative, intellectual, and political endeavor: the publication of its own professional journal. The first issue of
The Screen Writer
(
TSW
) appeared in June 1945 and the last in October 1948. This short-lived monthly publication presented a diversity of pieces by screenwriters across genres, across media (radio, television, theater), and even across oceans.
The Screen Writer
also offered space for directors, cinematographers, animators, and critics to expound on their ideas regarding narrative and story. In the journal’s editorials, articles, and letters to the editor, a range of members debated key issues, which at their core questioned the overarching purpose and mission of the Guild. Here, writers wrote for one another. But quickly, an audience of Hollywood insiders—as well as creative writers (novelists, critics, journalists, playwrights, and composers)—began to take notice and sometimes to contributed their thoughts. The journal’s articles, commentary, and creative writing were celebrated by some in the industry and loathed by others.