Biased Hollywood Ten Tales
by Spencer Warren
Issue 94 - October 24, 2007

October 30th is the special night devoted to films credited to members of the Hollywood Ten by the Turner Classic Movies cable channel–-by my count, the fourth such program in the past five years or so. This is the sixtieth anniversary of the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee on Communist influence in the motion picture industry-–in those pre-television days 80 million Americans, more than one-half the population, attended a movie every week. The witnesses refused on First Amendment grounds to answer questions about their alleged Communist affiliations, and the hearings became something of a circus, thanks to partisan committee members and some of the witnesses (whose leftist arrogance alienated many of their anti-Communist liberal supporters in Hollywood). Eight screenwriters, one director and one producer were held in contempt of Congress and imprisoned. The hearings led to a blacklist enforced by the studios, which started with the Ten (one of whom later cooperated and went back to work) and widened during the 1950’s.

The story given over and over again on Turner, and which is beloved of left-wing Hollywood (which also is commemorating the anniversary), is that the Ten were innocent progressives deprived of their constitutional rights at the behest of right-wingers, their careers and lives destroyed. But this is only part of the truth. For years its host, Robert Osborne, and its website have repeatedly dismissed the Communist threat of the 1940’s and ‘50s. True, the blacklist was a poisonous period. Many hundreds of innocent people–-including those who had joined the Communist Party of the USA only briefly--were victimized by informers, and their careers and lives were ruined or severely damaged. Let us complete the story, however. Most of the Ten were members-–in secret--of the CPUSA, while a few had been members in the past and only briefly. For the staunch CPUSA members in particular, this meant they were part of a secret conspiracy pledged to the overthrow of our constitutional democracy by a Communist dictatorship. Further, as we now know from Communist archives in Moscow that were declassified after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 (including the archives of the CPUSA located there), as well as the declassified Venona records resulting from our breaking of Soviet codes, the CPUSA was directly funded and obedient to Joseph Stalin’s Moscow. The CPUSA was a devoted promoter of Soviet propaganda and an eager participant in Soviet espionage. (See for example the scholarly books by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill Anderson, The Secret World of American Communism, 1996, and The Soviet World of American Communism, 1998, both Yale University Press; Klehr and Haynes, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, 1999, Yale University Press; and Klehr and Haynes, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, 2003, Encounter Books.)

Thus, the story should be presented in shades of gray, not the simplistic, dogmatic black and white--or, shall we say, lurid color--seen on Turner. As disciples of Stalin’s party line, American communists obediently endorsed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, which precipitated the Second World War with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1st (in which Soviet Russia joined weeks later). This led eventually to the Holocaust that was centered in Poland. These people also supported the Soviet invasion of neutral Finland in 1940, defended Stalin’s purge show trials of the late 1930s, and dismissed revelations about his growing Gulag concentration camps that imprisoned millions. Further parroting the party line, they joined with isolationists and German-American Bund fifth columnists in loudly protesting President Roosevelt’s crucial assistance to Churchill’s Britain, including Lend-Lease, when it held the torch for Western civilization, fighting Hitler alone after the fall of France, in 1940-41. American communists thus were aligned with Hitler at Stalin’s order, until the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941, when they leaped through the hoop and took a diametrically opposite position.

In short, the Hollywood Ten, especially Stalinist CPUSA members like John Howard Lawson (their Stalinist leader) and Dalton Trumbo, who are such a cause celebre for Turner and left-wing Hollywood, did not have clean hands. (Trumbo joined the party during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact.) And the blacklist, in Tom Wolfe’s words, has become a “poignant myth.” Appearing before HUAC, these people ostentatiously invoked their First Amendment rights under the Constitution they were pledged in secret to destroy.

Ronald Reagan came into direct conflict with Lawson in July 1946 at a meeting of a liberal/leftist cultural group on whose executive committee he served, the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). Following allegations by the anti-communist liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. that this was a communist front group, Reagan and other liberal members sponsored a resolution denouncing communism, just as the group earlier had denounced fascism. It stated: “We affirm our belief in free enterprise and the democratic system and repudiate Communism as desirable for the United States.” When Reagan spoke at a committee meeting in favor of the resolution, future Hollywood Ten member and Turner hero Dalton Trumbo attacked the resolution as wicked (Reagan had been denounced at an earlier meeting as “capitalist scum” and an “enemy of the proletariat”). And Turner hero Lawson waved a menacing finger at Reagan, shouting, “This organization will never adopt a statement which endorses free enterprise and repudiates Communism! . . . a two-party system is in no way necessary or even desirable in a democracy!” Reagan then proposed a vote by all the members in secret ballot. Lawson replied that “the membership [wasn’t] sophisticated enough to make this decision.” (Quoted in Ronald and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (Encounter Books 2006), pages 115- 116). Peter Schweizer writes in Reagan’s War (Random House, 2002) that Reagan’s experiences at this time led to his long-range plan to destroy communism.

In their actions here, Lawson and Trumbo, two of the Ten who later wrapped themselves in our Bill of Rights, were vociferously fighting against a statement critical of the system ruling Stalinist Russia, one of the three bloodiest tyrannies in human history, along with Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China. In fact, they worked as Stalin’s allies and foot soldiers. Trumbo alone was once the subject of a Turner tribute; needless to say, Osborne never breathed a word of his Communist activities like this, nor of his joining the party when it was loyally backing Stalin’s pact with Hitler.

The Ten’s Communist brethren meanwhile were attempting to take over Hollywood craft unions, including the Screen Actors Guild. During a violent strike they fomented at Reagan’s studio, Warner Brothers, studio employees avoided the picket lines by entering in shuttle buses. Reagan was the only one who, rejecting the warnings of security personnel, sat upright inside his bus rather than hiding under a seat. When Reagan, with Gene Kelly, Katharine Hepburn and others in the guild tried to mediate an end to the strike (the last thing the Communist union wanted), Reagan received a telephone call in which an unidentified voice “threatened to see to it that he never made films again,” as recounted in Schweizer’s book (page 11). Schweizer continues: “If he continued to oppose the . . . strike, the caller, said, ‘a squad’ would disfigure his face with acid.” Reagan received many other threats, and felt compelled to hire guards to watch his children; he obtained a gun permit and slept with a revolver at his bedside. His wife, Jane Wyman, “would awaken and find him sitting up in bed at two in the morning, holding the gun because he had heard an unusual sound.” Reagan’s stand against the Communist union earned him verbal abuse from a subsequently blacklisted actress, Karen Morley, whom Osborne loves to portray only as a victim. Later, repentant former Communist actor Sterling Hayden described Reagan as “a one-man battalion” who stopped the Communist union’s attempted takeover. (Schweizer, pages 12-13.)

Reagan’s leadership led to his election in 1947 as president of the Screen Actors Guild, succeeding the staunch anti-Communist Robert Montgomery, who also had an outstanding combat record as a Navy officer. When Reagan proposed a resolution forbidding any Communist Party member from serving as a union officer on the ground they had a secret agenda and allegiance only to the party, Morley and another actress later blacklisted, whom Osborne also portrays only as a victim, Anne Revere, strongly opposed the measure. It passed 1307 to 157. Morley and Revere, secretly, were CPUSA members.

Reagan opposed the blacklist and later worked to help actors avoid its wrath (which led to his introduction to a young newcomer named Nancy Davis). He told the HUAC Committee that much as he detested Communist philosophy, “I detest more . . . their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest. . . .”

No one hearing Osborne’s comments on Turner would have a clue about these crucial events in the history in Hollywood in the later 1940’s, and Ronald Reagan’s leadership role. True, Turner is supposed to be a classic movie channel, but it is Osborne and Turner officials who have repeatedly injected politics and their left-wing misrepresentation of history. If they wanted to deal with this complex, controversial subject fairly, they could have invited as a guest Ronald Radosh, author, with Allis Radosh, of Red Star Over Hollywood. Turner often hosts authors of new books about film history and promotes them on its website (like one on homosexuals and the movies, the subject of a month-long series last June which insulted Christians by describing the moral constraints against homosexual conduct as “60 years of Hollywood homophobia”).

In light of all these facts, how can one explain why Turner’s website entry for its October 30th program of five films http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=178704

makes no mention whatever of the Ten’s secret CPUSA membership? Why does it refer only to their “suspected communist leanings.” Why is there no mention of the true meaning of CPUSA membership, as revealed in the scholarly work of Haynes, Klehr and other historians? Why did Osborne, in the three earlier series, paint them only as innocent victims of a “witch hunt”? Why, during a night devoted to this subject during a series Turner presented several years ago on films of the 1940’s, did Osborne fail completely to state the secret CPUSA membership of the Ten? Why, on other occasions, did he leave their party membership to his comments after midnight, rather than during the prime-time film showings?

Why is Ronald Reagan’s courageous stand against these communists never mentioned on Turner? Fair-minded, responsible people who respected their audience-–i.e. liberals in the true meaning of the word--would explain all points of view on a controversial subject, not resort to extremely one-sided, tendentious presentations. Responsible, liberal-minded people also would first inform themselves on a weighty subject rather than mouth off left-wing myths just to make themselves feel good. As always with the far left, whether the Hollywood Ten or people like Osborne and the writers on the Turner website, the end justifies the means.

Osborne and Turner’s transgressions are not limited to the Hollywood Ten. For years, Osborne has gone out of his way in often making gratuitous comments that communism was never a threat to our country. In a series on movies of the 1950’s, he dismissed concern about communism as “paranoia.” A few months ago, he said it again during comments for the showing of We Were Strangers (1949). How hurtful such comments must be to those watching Turner who lost loved ones in the Korean War, in which 33,746 U.S. servicemen were killed and more than 100,000 were wounded or missing--a war that likely would not have been launched by the communists but for Stalin’s successful testing of an atomic bomb in 1949. (See We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, by the dean of Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, 1997, Oxford University Press.) Thanks to the Venona decrypts and other disclosures, there is no question we lost our monopoly of the atomic bomb secret only four years after Hiroshima as a result of communist espionage (which began while we were allies of Soviet Russia); this resulted in the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, and their execution in 1953.

Osborne returned to his theme during a special series Turner did on Dalton Trumbo. The film that got Trumbo most in hot water, along with director Edward Dmytryk, was Tender Comrade (1943). On the surface this is a sweet if mediocre story of four women working in a war production plant, who rent a house together when their husbands are off at war. Several times they say “share and share alike” and speak of running the household like a “democracy” in “meetings.” In one scene, the housekeeper receives in the mail a medal awarded to her soldier husband. One of the other women (Kim Hunter, later blacklisted), wants to hang the medal on the wall in the living or dining room, for all to see; she exclaims that the housekeeper shouldn’t “keep this all to herself.” “It’s part ours,” she enthuses. “Share and share alike. Isn’t that right?” To which the housekeeper assents, “Democracy.” No normal group of Americans would speak that way, especially in 1943. But it is the way communists speak. Nor is this the American meaning of democracy, which is a political ideal of the people electing their government and protection of individual liberty, not a social/economic idea as presented here and in the work of Marx and Lenin. Dismissing any criticism, Osborne selectively quoted the lines and castigated the star, Ginger Rogers, for refusing to speak the lines, which then were assigned to Kim Hunter.

Tender Comrade (being shown in the October 30th program) is only one of quite a few forties films shown on Turner that include communist propaganda, although even the possibility of interpreting them this way is of course never mentioned on Turner. The boxing drama Body and Soul (1947), written by the later blacklisted Abraham Polonsky, analogizes the corrupt fight-promoter to our free enterprise system: “It’s business,” he repeatedly intones, justifying his fixing of matches and exploitation of the boxer hero (John Garfield). Polonsky does much the same thing in a film he wrote and directed about the numbers racket in New York, Force of Evil (1947). In Pride of the Marines (1945), based on the true story of blinded Guadalcanal hero Al Schmid ( Garfield), future Hollywood Ten member Albert Maltz wrote some belligerent lines about how the oppressed were going to make some big changes after the war. (There is nothing wrong with social commentary like this; what is dubious is its insertion by secret Communists to promote their agenda of overthrowing our constitutional democracy.)

Turner also has shown three of the films whose wartime pro-Soviet propaganda, along with revelations of Soviet espionage and the closing of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, contributed to postwar disillusionment and the anger against communist influence in Hollywood. These films--Mission to Moscow (1943), Song of Russia (1944) and Days of Glory (1944)--were made at the behest of our government to promote public support for our Russian ally, which was shouldering the brunt of the war effort against the Nazi Wehrmacht before the Allied D-Day landings. Mission to Moscow, based on the memoirs of U.S. ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies, a pro-Stalin apologist, is the most egregious of the three, whitewashing Stalin’s late thirties purge trials and more. Yet in its series on 1940s films several years ago, Turner typically focused on the Hollywood Ten and completely ignored these films. It has never done a series on these films, to my knowledge.

The most appalling-–and typically gratuitous-- comment by Osborne was when, several years ago, he introduced the 1949 film, The Red Danube. This is a striking drama about the forced repatriation by Britain and the U.S. back to Stalin’s Gulag (and to firing squads), after the end of the war, of more than two million Soviet citizens-–many women and children--who had wound up behind German lines in the chaos of the war. Many committed suicide rather than go back, as recounted in Count Nikolai Tostoy’s Victims of Yalta (Hodder & Stoughton, 1977) and Nicholas Bethell’s The Last Secret (Basic Books, 1974). The film, based on the novel, Vespers in Vienna by Bruce Marshall, dramatizes the story through the plight of a Russian ballerina (Janet Leigh) who takes refuge in a church but, when she is about to be handed back to the Russians, kills herself-–the conflict is presented as one of communism against Christianity.

In his introduction, Osborne dismissed the plot, heaving his shoulders with a wisecrack that the film was about “those bad old Commies.” Thus, he sent down the Orwellian memory hole the suffering of more than two million souls. Osborne, a movie trivia writer for the Hollywood Reporter, should perhaps not be expected to know about this history, but he would not have made himself guilty of this holocaust denial but for his evidently uncontrollable urge to dismiss communism at every opportunity. When I wrote a four-page letter to Turner’s then general manager, Tom Karsch, citing the scholarly sources and complaining generally about Osborne’s anti-anti-communist obsession, I received a non-response of a few sentences from a director, stating merely that Osborne had “lived through” the blacklist. So much for Turner’s respect for evidence, facts, history.

In the final example noted here, Osborne betrayed his dislike of this country. Earlier this year Turner showed Objective Burma! (1945), a compelling low-key drama about U.S. commandos on a special mission behind Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma (a British war theater-–but that’s another issue). The film allusively dramatizes the enemy’s torture and murder of one of our men and one character refers to them as “monkeys.” The somber mood of the film is attributable to the terrible casualties we had been suffering in the jungles of the Pacific islands, fighting against a savage enemy whose widespread atrocities, like the Bataan Death March, were already known. When the film ended, Osborne complained about the film’s “rah rah propaganda.” In addition to his practice of patronizing and insulting the films his own channel wants viewers to watch, Osborne here was invoking the widespread left-wing attitude of moral equivalence-–leftists are offended by any suggestion this country may be morally superior in any way, even compared to our World War II enemy.

In light of the Japanese Rape of Manila in January 1945, their Rape of Nanking in 1937-38, their use of bubonic plague and anthrax weapons against Chinese civilians (about 10 million of whom they killed in the war), and all their other atrocities which killed millions, Osborne once again was treading near the moral equivalent of holocaust denial. Further, how would such a comment be felt, if they were watching, by, say, the relatives of Private Ralph Ignatowski, whose body was found on Iwo Jima, his ears cut off and his penis shoved inside his mouth? Ken Burns’s just shown PBS documentary, The War, goes into Japanese atrocities in detail. (See also an examination of this issue in my review essay on Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima at http://acuf.org/issues/issue78/070216med.asp.) Ironically, Objective Burma! is being shown on October 30 th because two of the Ten, Lester Cole and Alvah Bessie, worked on the script and story. So Osborne even patronized two of his heroes.

Sadly, Turner and Osborne demonstrate, in their instrumental view of truth in the name of their “Cause” (however vaguely defined) just how much they have in common with their Hollywood Ten heroes. This is a very important issue because, as Orwell writes in 1984, he who has the past has the future. It is amazing that Time Warner, the owner of Turner Classic Movies, permits such politicization, which must be costing the channel viewership.

May I urge readers to watch the presentation the evening of October 30th, beginning at 8 p.m., to see for themselves. And if Osborne’s comments are true to form, they may wish to consider complaining to Jeffrey L. Bewkes, President of Time Warner, One Time Warner Center, New York, N.Y. 10019. 212-484-8000. If Turner has reformed and gives a fair presentation, no one will be more pleased than I.

Spencer Warren is www.ConservativeBattleline.com ’s film critic. In October 2000 he co-hosted on air with Robert Osborne his own series of conservative movies, which was complemented by a series of left-wing movies.