When “Terrorists” were called “Communists”

I ran across a fascinating interview at “Against the Grain” with Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi, authors of the book Wherever There’s a Fight. The book in general is about the ongoing fight for civil liberties in California. I am most interested in their comments about the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950’s, the Red Scare, and the so-called “Hollywood Ten.”

After World War II, the U.S. was under new rule, and like a kid in a candy store, had at its disposal all of the assets of the collapsed British and French empires. The country would soon embark on imperial adventures, the first the disrupting of the Greek Resistance movement and subverting their elections. President Truman signed into law the National Security Act, the CIA was born, the Department of War was renamed “Department of Defense” (meaning we were going on the attack) and we entered a state of permanent war.

But the whole world was not our footstool, as parts of it were dominated by the Soviet Union, and were thereby made inaccessible to American business penetration. A long protracted struggle was in store. (China was “lost” in 1948, but was not expansionist, so not as great a concern as the USSR.)

To prepare the American people for the long struggle, a massive indoctrination campaign went in to motion. We had to be injected with fear, a fear so great that it would allow our leaders to set aside the Constitution with its attendant Bill of Rights. The object of our fear was to be our former ally, Russia, without whom we would not have won the European war. Russia itself had undertaken imperial expansion after the war, mostly to protect its borders from yet another western invasion. It had renamed itself the “Soviet Union,” later the “evil empire,” our eternal enemy. (Russia had always been our enemy, we would learn.)

The propaganda campaign was intense. I lived through it as a young child. We were taught in school that communists were everywhere, met in secret cells, and were plotting to overthrow our country (much as we are taught about “terrorists” these days.) These were the days of fallout shelters, air raid drills, and “duck and cover.” (Because television was black and white, the current threat-level color code was not useful.) A whole generation was injected with a dose of fear meant to last for decades.

Joe Stalin’s crimes were finally exposed too- when he was our ally, these were ignored.

A small part of the larger fear campaign was the HUAC Red Scare hearings, the purpose of which were, in my view, the put out the word that there were communist cells around, in our neighborhoods, on campus, in government at all levels, and in the world of entertainment.

The Hollywood writers were selected for special prosecution. They were

* Alvah Bessie, screenwriter
* Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director
* Lester Cole, screenwriter
* Edward Dmytryk, director
* Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter
* John Howard Lawson, screenwriter
* Albert Maltz, screenwriter
* Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter
* Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter
* Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter

The HUAC dragged each of these men before them, the objective being to get them to “take the fifth”, which would incriminate them in the eyes of the American public. The Ten were too smart for this, and instead “took the first” and invoked their right to free speech. The committee did not take kindly to this,and eventually the Ten were accused and convicted of contempt of Congress, and went to jail. Dmytryk later turned on them to gain his freedom. The rest, in addition to jail time, were “blacklisted”,and never allowed to work again in the motion picture business.

An interesting footnote to this episode is that much of the work of these ten happened during World War II when Hollywood was a propaganda outlet for the war effort, and Russia was an ally. Their work in sympathy with our ally was also in service of our government, and was cynically used against them as part of the propaganda effort.

HUAC of course, was engaged in a much larger scare effort, and the Hollywood Ten were only minor victims. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart and Walt Disney, among others, were cowardly quislings in working for the committee and against their fellows.

But in the end, we were all victims. The “Red-baiting” did not stop after the committee’s business, but rather went on for years. The U.S. would use the Soviets as casus belli for a host of adventures costing millions of lives.

Many say that the 1950’s,with HUAC and McCarthy and all that went on, is one of the most disgraceful periods in our history, when our constitution was shredded, propaganda ran amok, and ordinary decent people thrown in jail for thought crimes.

Not hardly. It’s fairly typical.

PS: The interview I cited above was not the one I thought it was. It’s interesting, but the HUAC/Hollywood Ten was something else,and I cannot find it again.