The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (19 page)

The MPAA called upon all of the trade unions to help in its mission to root out subversives, essentially asking the organizations that were designed to protect employees to turn against their members. The MPAA’s November 1947 statement read: “Creative work at its best cannot be carried on in an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear. To this end, we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives.”
¹²⁸
The MPAA called for all guilds to pass a resolution stating that employees could be denied credit on a picture and compensation for their work if they were suspected of communist sympathies and had not formally cleared their names. Ultimately, the MPAA was pressuring the guilds to require loyalty oaths. Although the MPAA did not officially hold power over the guilds, this was a case of an employers’ organization compelling employees’ associations to act. In light of the citations against the Ten, it was clear that the stakes were high. In short order, the guilds acquiesced, and SWG members began vociferous, contentious debates over whether loyalty oaths should, could, or would become a fixed part of contract language.
¹²⁹

By that time, the SWG was in the throes of reorganizing from the top down. The election held in November 1947 offered two slates. The “Progressive Slate” supported Sheridan Gibney for president and included I.A.L. Diamond (writer of
Some Like It Hot, The Apartment
, and
Irma la Douce
), Arthur Kober (writer of
Me and My Gal
), Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Lester Cole, a current SWG board member and one of the Hollywood Ten. They campaigned under a platform of upholding a “unified, progressive, and militant Guild” that would support the AAA, oppose the Taft-Hartley Act, and repudiate the actions of HUAC.
¹³⁰

The alternate candidates, the self-proclaimed “All-Guild Slate,” was, as Leonard Spigelgass (
Gypsy
) described it, “a merger of innocent liberals like myself and some very right-wing people, but more non- than anti-Communist.” The All-Guild Slate promised to “restore control to the people who would use it for the purposes for which it was intended, the protection of writers’ economic interests.”
¹³¹
Rather than focus on political discussions, HUAC, or Red-baiting, the candidates argued that the key issues facing the Guild were salary raises and improvements to the minimum basic agreement. They believed that the current, more left-leaning board was using the Guild as an “organ for political propaganda” and had to be stopped.
¹³²
But
they described themselves as committed to restoration, and they promoted the idea of a Guild serving solely an economic purpose. It was a campaign intended to create an image of a sanitized Guild and to absolve the SWG of all charges or hints of communist affiliation.

The All-Guild slate won handily, and in the process the Guild redefined itself as a trade association designed to help working writers rather than a union mandated to defend all of its members, not just A-listers or Red-baiters. As described by a
TSW
editorial a year after the change in leadership, this iteration of the board was elected “primarily on the platform of restricting Guild activities to Guild affairs” and “pledged to do all in its power to drive politics out of the Guild.”
¹³³
In fact, the push was not so much to drive out politics as it was to drive out radical politics within the Guild. From a historical standpoint, scholars could argue that it was an utterly political move to sacrifice the Ten and turn a blind eye to the threats soon to come for other left-leaning liberals who remained in the Guild.

Victor Navasky argues that A-list writers had a higher stake in the economic structure of Hollywood production. Thus, those at the top were most vulnerable to the pressures of HUAC.
¹³⁴
The voices of some A-list writers swayed a few on the Guild leadership who wavered about turning away from the Ten. That is not to say that the Guild did nothing to support members who were targeted by the Committee; however, the new leadership had simply decided to focus on protecting the majority rather than risking controversy to rescue the minority.

The Guild did offer some assistance in the form of legal aid for the Ten. Thurman Arnold, an iconoclastic antitrust lawyer and friend of screenwriter Charles Brackett, was hired to represent the Guild in an
amicus curiae
brief less in support of the Ten than a call for an injunction against the blacklist, which Arnold called a conspiracy. Charging the industry with collusion against employees seemed one of few options for a legal counterattack.
¹³⁵
And while
TSW
quickly changed its tone and pulled back from its liberal stance, other small publications attempted to raise their voices on behalf of the blacklisted writers.
Hollywood Review
and
California Quarterly
provided some commentary and opinion pieces critiquing the blacklist, but these journals did not have the clout or the reach of
TSW
, let alone the audience of an industry trade paper or big-city newspaper.

The right-wing press berated the left-leaning writers mercilessly. In particular, William Wilkerson, the owner and publisher of the
Hollywood
Reporter
, seized the opportunity to declare that the film industry was in crisis: theater attendance had dropped precipitously, and foreign films were threatening the livelihood of Hollywood’s industry. According to Wilkerson, everyone—except the writers—was uniting to support the cause of preserving Hollywood. His outrage toward writers was unbridled:

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT THESE PEOPLE! IT MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! . . . Producers, directors, actors, technicians, labor—all have agreed, WITH BUT ONE DISSENTING VOTE: THE WRITER! The Molotov of our industry! . . . Either the SWG is still dominated and controlled by a Communist bloc that will gladly destroy the industry to protect the Unholy Ten and their fellow travelers since it can’t be captured for the Soviets, OR the sentiments expressed at the meeting Monday night ARE the sentiments of the Guild majority, whether that be left or right. In either case the SWG is rotten to the core.
¹³⁶

The Taft-Hartley Act also placed unions and guilds in a new and increasingly more defensive position. Members of the CFA began backtracking from their earlier statements of support for the Ten. Humphrey Bogart was pressured by his studio and publicists to write an article for
Photoplay
called “I’m No Communist.” Fellow A-list actor John Garfield also wrote a
mea culpa
to fans, “I’m a Sucker for a Left Hook,” declaring that he had been duped. And then in September 1948, the editors of
TSW
announced that the journal would henceforth be published on a “voluntary basis,” a vague term that seemed to imply that it would continue, but perhaps not for a while. The editors claimed the reason was purely financial: they could reduce the normal cost of $2,000 per issue to $419 by employing a volunteer staff and adding advertisements and paid subscriptions. But that amount still seemed exorbitant if
TSW
was not to be a “live and dynamic publication.”
¹³⁷
The editors made an appeal to readers to contribute toward the future of the journal. Looking back, it is clear that
TWS
was far too progressive for its time and that many writers could not or would not support it. The next issue of
TSW
was its last.

Out of a concern for diminishing funds and lost time, the Ten agreed that only two among them, Lawson and Trumbo, would stand trial in the US District Court in Washington, DC. Whatever verdict was decided in those trials would be accepted by the other eight in their cases. The trials began in April 1949, and the judge soon found Lawson and Trumbo guilty of contempt
of Congress for refusing to answer the questions posed by the Committee. The remaining eight defendants went before a judge and a jury and were convicted as well. Each hearing took less than an hour. After an appellate ruling in 1949 in the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, Lawson and Trumbo began serving one-year sentences in a federal prison in Kentucky in early June 1950. The eight began serving their same year-long sentences soon after.
¹³⁸
In a strange twist, J. Parnell Thomas, the HUAC chairman, joined Lardner and Cole in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he served nearly nine months of an eighteen-month sentence for conspiring to defraud the US Treasury by padding his staff payroll.

Around this time, the executive board of the SWG passed a resolution to support a loyalty oath. Some members of the board wanted every Guild member to sign a statement of non-communist affiliation, but others pushed back. Carl Foreman, who wrote
High Noon
and
Bridge on the River Kwai
, remembered that “the fights were so bitter, and I stood out against that loyalty oath. And Spigelgass, who had been my commander when I was in his regiment during the war, begged me, crying, not to vote against the loyalty oath. ‘It’ll ruin you,’ he said to me; ‘you’re throwing your career away.’
”
¹³⁹
Ultimately, all of the members of the board signed the oath, which stated:

BE IT RESOLVED that we, members of the Board of the Screen Writers Guild, affirm our anti-Communist position and voluntarily have signed the following oath:

“I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY NOR AFFILIATED WITH SUCH PARTY, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE IN, AND I AM NOT A MEMBER OF, NOR DO I SUPPORT ANY ORGANIZATION THAT BELIEVES OR TEACHES THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT BY FORCE.”

AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that, deep in the conviction that the Guild is nonpolitical and a professional organization, we will resist any motion or efforts to impose on the Guild’s general membership any loyalty oaths not required by law.
¹⁴⁰

The odd language of this statement reveals the conflicted opinions of the board members. Though they describe the Guild as a “nonpolitical” organization, the statement is political. They signed it voluntarily, and yet there is a clear sense that they were concerned about outside persuasion or force
that might impose a loyalty oath on SWG members. This resolution became part of the Guild’s constitution in 1951 and remained in effect until 1973. Thus, by agreeing to the MPAA’s loyalty requests, the Guild effectively aided in the institution and enforcement of the blacklist.

During the court challenge to HUAC, there was a reprieve in Committee hearings for others in Hollywood who had been labeled radicals or subversives. The studios turned their attention to the new realities of vertical deregulation under the Supreme Court’s Paramount Consent Decree, which called for the divestment of theater chains from studios’ holdings. Then, in 1951, with the Ten still imprisoned, HUAC initiated a second wave of hearings in Hollywood and later subpoenaed Hollywood writers to testify before the Committee in Washington. This time, more than a hundred Hollywood professionals (writers, actors, and directors, among others) were called. The Red-baiting began anew and with even greater fervor. At the SWG, the All-Guild board members were inclined to duck and ignore loudmouthed members on the right and the left.

In fact, both election slates had endorsed Sheridan Gibney for president, believing him to be nonpartisan and a figure who might unite the organization. However, Gibney detested the subpoenaed writers. Nearly thirty years
later, he was still incensed: “The Guild almost was destroyed by the Communist-minded members. . . . [T]hey had done the Guild a tremendous disservice by bringing about this situation where the Guild and the Communist Party were identified in the form of dual membership and there was never any attempt on the part of these people to preserve or protect the Guild as an organization for representing writers with a nonpolitical base.”
¹⁴¹
Gibney and others felt that some of the Guild’s left-leaning members had misused their organization as an instrument for political causes. To Gibney, this selfish activity seemed like a betrayal of the organization he had been elected to lead.

IMAGE 14   Carl Foreman at HUAC hearings, c. 1951.
High Noon
was in the midst of production when Foreman was called to testify.

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

The blacklist proper consisted of individuals whom the government deemed to be under suspicion, disfavor, or attack, and who the studios, in turn, unofficially dictated should not be allowed to work in Hollywood. A HUAC subpoena alone could mean the end of studio employment. Paul Jarrico knew that he had been blacklisted the morning he arrived at RKO and studio security stopped him from passing through the studio gates. The previous day Jarrico had received a subpoena at his home, delivered by a US marshal who happened to be accompanied by a throng of news reporters.
¹⁴²
His writing partner and friend Richard Collins, who wrote
Song of Russia
and had been a member of the Communist Party, had named Jarrico among twenty-six individuals he alleged were communists.