[I’ve been holding on to
this article since it came out last winter.
I knew I wanted to post it because it’s such a volatile subject, and this
is extraordinary coverage of it. It’s
also an apt topic to contemplate in these times particularly because it’s about the
very thing that made this country break away from Great Britain almost 250
years ago.
[I’m talking about
the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought—the freedoms enumerated in the
First Amendment. As readers of Rick On Theater will know by now, I consider myself
pretty nearly a First Amendment absolutist.
But 75 years ago, during the Second Red Scare, this country’s government
and some of its citizens took it upon themselves to punish people for what they
thought.
[If that wasn’t bad enough,
often those who made it their business to root our people who had ideas
different from their own did so with no real evidence—where have we heard that
recently?—and when there wasn’t proof, then innuendo and lies were thrown
about.
[I’m talking, of course,
about the Hollywood blacklist. People’s
lives were destroyed. Some people, including
innocent people, died. All because one
group of people decided that anyone who doesn’t think, act, or believe they way
they do must be rooted out. To hell with the First Amendment! We don’t need that—it just gets in the way of
real America.
[So, let’s take a look
again at what happened back in the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Let’s see how close we are now to repeating
one of the darkest periods in our history.
And for full disclosure, I’ll admit that I was around during all this—but the
blacklist began about six months before I was born and reached its peak when I
was between 6 and 10. (I’m old, but I’m
not that old!)]
“‘UN-AMERICAN’:
THEATRE ARTISTS
vs. THE 1950s BLACKLIST”
by Mary B. Robinson
[This article was published in the SDC Journal 14.1 (Winter 2026), the membership
publication of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. It’s posted online,
or through the SDC website.]
Long before the
phrase “witch-hunting” became a president’s attempt to tarnish investigations
into his own acts, it was the title of a chapter of director Margaret Webster’s autobiography Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage [A. A. Knopf, 1972].
Webster [1905-72; American-British theater actress, producer, and director] was
a victim of the 1950s blacklist, the systematic destruction of people’s
livelihoods brought on by the federal government’s pursuit of alleged
Communists in the United States. It caused irreparable harm to the professional
and personal lives of many Americans, including a number of directors and
choreographers, as well as other theatre artists.
Twenty years
later, Webster wrote that what happened in the 1950s “now seems so utterly
incredible,” but she was convinced that “we need to be reminded that,
incredible or no, it could happen again.” She foresaw that cruel and dangerous
government overreach could again be tolerated by much of the public “under the
same pressures of insecurity, ambition, hatred, and above all––fear; always,
and on both sides, fear.”
More than 50
years after she wrote those words of warning, it feels important in our own
time to re-examine these past events from the perspective of our theatrical
predecessors: directors, choreographers, and other theatre artists of the
mid-twentieth century. What did they do when they were confronted with state
sanctioned persecution? What compromises of their own values were some of them
willing to make, while others refused to comply––and why? And how can this
dangerous era in our nation’s history illuminate what we might do in our own
time––one that has echoes of the 1950s but is unquestionably much worse?
AFRAID OF THINKING PEOPLE
The public’s
fear of Communists that certain politicians exploited in the late 1940s and
early 1950s was fueled by the existential terrors of the atomic bomb and the
Soviet Union’s acquisition of it. The Communist Party USA, which had been the
hope of many progressives during the unemployment and deprivation of the Great
Depression [1929-39], had, for much of the country, acquired a much more
sinister cast because of the arms race. The Soviet Union was now our Cold War
enemy with the capacity to wipe us out, rather than the World War II ally it
had been a decade earlier. And in much the same way that certain fears of the
public are exploited today, ambitious politicians manipulated people’s fear of
Communists for their own self-interest. Congressman Richard Nixon’s career took
off with his dogged pursuit of supposed Soviet spies in the late 1940s, while
Senator Joseph McCarthy grabbed the limelight in 1950 when he claimed there
were hundreds of Communists working in the State Department.
[The nuclear arms race (1949-91) was the Cold War competition
for supremacy in nuclear weaponry between the United States and the Soviet
Union.
[Richard Nixon (1913-94), a staunch anti-communist, was
the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 until his
resignation in 1974. He was Representative from California from 1947 to 1950,
then Senator from 1950 to 1953. Nixon served as Vice President of the United
States under Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) from 1953 to 1961, and then was the Republican
nominee for president in 1960, losing to Democrat John F. Kennedy (1917-63;
35th President of the United States: 1961-63).
[Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-57) was Republican U.S.
Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957 (his death). He was Chairman of the
Senate Committee on Government Operations (1953-55) and Chairman of the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (1953-54). The latter was the Senate’s
counterpart to the House’s Committee on Un-American Activities. McCarthy
exploited the “Red Scare” (1947-59), giving rise to the term “McCarthyism” to
describe his tactics and rhetoric.]
But in truth,
certain members of the federal government who hated Roosevelt’s New Deal (with
its “socialist” programs like Social Security) had always seen Communism as a
threat––or at least as a tool that could be used to stir the American public’s
anxieties and further their own ambitions. The House Committee on Un-American
Activities, or HUAC, was first proposed in 1934 to investigate the
dissemination of Nazi propaganda in the U.S., but it wasn’t until Communism was
added as another “un-American” element whose proponents should be investigated
that HUAC came into being in 1938. Even at the time, it was recognized that the
term was vague and subjective: as one liberal congressman put it, “un-American
is simply something that somebody else does not agree to.” Other organizations
such as the Ku Klux Klan were suggested as additional targets for HUAC’s
investigations, but that idea was dismissed by a Southern congressman who
stated that the Klan was a thoroughly American institution.
[Franklin D. Roosevelt (known as “FDR”; 1882-1945; 32nd
President of the United States: 1933-1945) initiated unprecedented federal
legislation during his first 100 days as president to implement the New Deal, a
1933-38 series of federal programs, public work projects, and financial
regulations in response to the Depression, focusing on relief, recovery, and
reform.
[Among these programs was the Works Progress
Administration (WPA; 1935-43), which supervised the construction of bridges,
libraries, parks, and other facilities, while also investing in the arts. The
arts programs were the Federal Writers' Project (FWP; 1935-43), the Historical
Records Survey (HRS; 1935-43), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP; 1935-39), the
Federal Music Project (FMP; 1935-43), and the Federal Art Project (FAP; 1935-43).
[The congressman who made the statement in the paragraph above regarding un-Americanism was Maury Maverick, Sr. (1895-1954; United States Representative for Texas: 1935-39). A liberal Democrat, he made the remark during the 1937 congressional floor debate on the creation of HUAC.
[In response to Representative Samuel Dickstein (1885-1954; U.S. Representative from New York City: 1923-45), who introduced a resolution for a new committee to investigate “un-American activities,” Maverick made his comment. (Ironically, in 1999, the authors of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era [Random House, 1999] learned from Soviet files that Dickstein was a paid agent of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB.)
[The "Southern congressman" who’s supposed to have defended the KKK in that debate was likely Martin Dies (pronounced to rhyme with “skies”; 1900-72; U.S. Representative of Texas: 1931-45; 1953-59); see below.]
HUAC’s first
chairman [1938-44], Congressman Martin Dies, was a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-labor politician who decided that
his committee’s first target would be the Federal Theatre Project, which had
been created by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in 1935 to put
theatremakers back to work during the Depression. Directed by Vassar theatre
professor Hallie Flanagan [1890-1969; American theatrical producer and
director, playwright, and author], the Federal Theatre Project employed between
8,000 and 12,000 people at any given time and went far beyond its mandate of
combating unemployment. It created the first network of regional theatres
across the country, attracted an audience of 30 million people (two-thirds of
whom had never seen a play before), and charged no admission for most of its
productions.
The work of the
Federal Theatre Project spoke to those audiences with immediacy and urgency
about matters that affected their own lives. It commissioned new plays such as It
Can’t Happen Here [adapted in 1936 into a play by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
and John C. Moffitt (1901-69)], a cautionary tale about the rise of American
Fascism adapted from the [1935] Sinclair Lewis novel; staged classics in ways
that highlighted their relevance to contemporary issues; and created a
brand-new theatrical form in the Living Newspaper, an early kind of docudrama
that explored current events. It bucked the norms of segregation in the South
when it integrated both casts and audiences, and it created many Black theatre
units in large and small cities around the country.
[Living Newspapers were
nonfiction performances in revue format—realistic, current, relevant—and the
topics were always recent. The Living Newspapers frequently dramatized social
issues of the day such as unemployment and
the housing shortage, and often implicitly or explicitly urged social action,
so controversy over their politics contributed to the disbanding of the FTP in
1939.
[The FTP is the subject of my post
“The
Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)” (30 October 2024), and there’s some discussion of Living Newspapers in “America’s
War on Theater” by Daniel Blank in “America's
Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024).]
There is no
doubt that some of the thousands of theatremakers who worked for the Federal
Theatre Project were members of the Communist Party. (So were several members
of the Group Theatre, the other notable American theatre experiment in the
1930s, including playwright Clifford Odets [1906-63; playwright, screenwriter,
and actor], the success of whose plays Waiting for Lefty [debut: 6 January
1935; Broadway: 26 March 1935, Group Theatre], Awake and Sing! [premiere:
19 February 1935, Group Theatre], and Golden Boy [premiere: 4 November 1937,
Group Theatre] gradually propelled him and a number of Group Theatre actors
toward the more lucrative film industry.) But the Communist Party was not
illegal in the U.S. in the 1930s, and it was for many the only political party
that was squarely on the right side of many important issues, including racial
justice.
[The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was declared illegal by
the Communist Control Act of 1954 which criminalized membership in the CPUSA. The
act has never been used for mass arrests, however, and portions were later
dismantled or found unconstitutional by courts, but it remains a federal law on
the books. Because of the First Amendment, the Department of Justice never
fully enforced it, and no one has ever successfully been prosecuted under it.
[Ironically, the Nazi Party has never been made illegal
in the United States. American Nazi groups have, however, faced intense
government surveillance and public backlash. (The American Nazi Party [ANP] was
founded in 1959. It was renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party [NSWPP]
in 1967, but it still exists.)]
Hallie Flanagan
was not charged with being a member of the Communist Party herself, but with
letting Communists infiltrate the Federal Theatre Project and producing radical
plays. Called before HUAC in December 1938, she caught her accusers off guard
with her opening statement that the Federal Theatre was in the business of
“combating un-American inactivity”––i.e., unemployment among theatre
professionals––and her use of the term “Marlowesque,” which elicited this
memorable exchange:
Congressman
[Joe] Starnes [1895-1962; U.S. Representative from Alabama: 1935-45]: You are quoting
from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?
Flanagan:
I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe [1564-93; English playwright, poet, and
translator].
Starnes:
Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all
that we want to do.
When Flanagan
clarified that she was speaking about an Elizabethan playwright, an embarrassed
Starnes stated that all drama, going back to the Greeks, was about social
conflict and therefore inherently Communist. “Mr. Euripides was guilty of
teaching class consciousness,” he declared.
But though
Hallie Flanagan may have had the upper hand during her congressional hearing,
the mere charge of Communist infiltration was enough to turn public opinion
against the Federal Theatre Project, and Congress voted to stop its funding and
end its existence in June 1939.
In an op-ed for
the New York Times after its demise, Flanagan wrote that her
congressional adversaries “were afraid of the Federal Theatre because it was
educating the people to know more about government and politics and such vital
issues of the day as housing, power, agriculture and labor. . . [.] They are
afraid, and rightly so, of thinking people” [“Congress
Takes The Stage,” Sec. 9 (Drama, Screen, Music, Dance, Art, Radio), 20 August
1939] And a further reason HUAC wanted to get rid of the Federal Theatre, she
maintained, was because “it gave Negro actors as well as white actors a chance
[for employment].”
After four
years of astounding productivity, the Federal Theatre Project was dead, never
to be revived––and at least 8,000 theatremakers were immediately put out of
work. But Flanagan believed that its brief existence had made the creation of
some kind of national theatre inevitable. “Not even an act of Congress can kill
an idea,” she stated.
ARTIST-HATING BRUTALITY
HUAC’s crusade
against Communism was briefly suspended during the World War II alliance
between the Soviet Union and the United States, but it picked up again with a
vengeance when the Cold War [1947-91] began. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover [1895-1972; first
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: 1935-72] appeared before the
Committee in early 1947 and declared that the Communist Party in the U.S. “is
far better organized than were the Nazis in occupied countries prior to their
capitulation. They are seeking to weaken America just as they did in the era of
obstruction when they were aligned with Nazis. Their goal is the overthrow of
our government.”
[The political alignments above are a little skewed, which wouldn’t have been unusual at the time. The CPUSA was never aligned with the Nazis, though it supported U.S neutrality in the “imperialist conflict”—until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The “era of obstruction,” a frequent turn of phrase for Hoover, was the period of the non-aggression treaty between the Third Reich and the USSR, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939.
[The agreement was shattered when Germany launched a surprise invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa (1941). (Though CPUSA disagreed with Molotov-Ribbentrop, CPUSA organized labor strikes in American defense plants to obstruct mobilization.)]
“With the
tiniest Communist Party in the world,” playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005;
playwright and essayist] countered in his memoir Timebends [Grove Press,
1987], “the United States was behaving as though on the verge of bloody
revolution.” And once again, HUAC went after the performing arts with the full
force of what Miller termed its “artist-hating brutality.”
In October
1947, more than 40 people in the film industry received subpoenas to appear
before HUAC. Eight writers and two directors refused to testify when they
showed up at their hearings; instead, they used their committee appearances to
publicly denounce HUAC, with some comparing its methods to those used in Nazi
Germany. The “Hollywood Ten” were each fined $1,000 [worth $15,000 in 2026] for
contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. Three years later, when
they had exhausted all possible legal appeals after the Supreme Court refused
to hear their case, they began to serve their time.
[The Hollywood Ten, ten left-wing screenwriters and
directors cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions
before HUAC, were Alvah Bessie (1904-85; novelist, screenwriter, and journalist),
Herbert Biberman (1900-71; screenwriter and film director), Lester Cole (1904-85;
screenwriter), Edward Dmytryk (1908-99; Canadian-born American film director
and editor), Ring Lardner, Jr. (1915- 2000; screenwriter and novelist), John
Howard Lawson (1894-1977; playwright, screenwriter, arts critic, and cultural
historian), Albert Maltz (1908-85; playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter),
Samuel Ornitz (1890-1957; screenwriter and novelist), Adrian Scott (1911-72;
screenwriter and film producer), and Dalton Trumbo (190576; screenwriter).]
While in
prison, director Edward Dmytryk changed his mind and agreed to cooperate with
HUAC, not only admitting to having been a member of the Communist Party
himself, but also identifying a number of people he knew as Communists (or
former ones) and thereby becoming one of the first people to rescue himself by
naming others. Dmytryk was released from prison and resumed his work in the
film industry; the other nine people in the Hollywood Ten served the remainder
of their terms and were blacklisted once they regained their freedom. “Naming
names” became a purity test that the federal government set for people as the
only way to get off the blacklist. HUAC didn’t need the names––they already had
them––but to prove their loyalty to the U.S., people were made to practice a
“ritual speech intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs,”
wrote Arthur Miller, who went on to dramatize this process in The Crucible [1953],
his play about the 1692 Salem witch trials.
Meanwhile,
another, more insidious form of blacklisting had begun. In 1947, President [Harry
S.] Truman [1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53] instituted
the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, in which membership and donor lists of
organizations with supposed ties to Fascism, Communism, totalitarianism, or
“subversive views” were obtained and checked for the names of people in the
federal government as well as those applying for jobs in it. At first, these
lists were for internal use only, but Truman later allowed them to be released
to the public. The implication that the government had branded these American citizens
disloyal to their country because they supported “subversive” organizations
such as the Negro Cultural Committee and the American Protection of the Foreign
Born was soon taken up and exploited by vigilante blacklisters.
In 1950, the
weekly right-wing newsletter Counterattack published a pamphlet entitled
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television,
accusing 151 people in the entertainment industry of having ties to “Communist
front” organizations. This 50-cent [worth $6.95 today] pamphlet was bought by
thousands of people who wrote letters saying they would boycott the products of
the radio and television shows’ sponsors if the actors, directors,
choreographers, writers, and composers listed in Red Channels were
hired.
[Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts on Communism
was a weekly, right-wing, anti-communist newsletter published from 1947 to
1955. The publication played a central role in naming and blacklisting alleged
communists and “fellow travelers” during the height of the post-WWII Red Scare. (A fellow traveler is a person who supports or sympathizes with a political party, especially the Communist Party, but is not an enrolled member. The term was used disparagingly in the 1950s to describe people accused of being communists.)
[The newsletter was established in May 1947 by three
former FBI agents who under a private, for-profit consultancy firm named
American Business Consultants (ABC). Its stated goal was to combat communism
and expose individuals, labor unions, and organizations suspected of subversive
affiliation with the CPUSA. Counterattack went into decline after a
series of lawsuits by people who were named in the publication.
[Red Channels, a pamphlet-style report published
in June 1950, was the newsletter’s most famous and historically significant
byproduct. This document listed 151 actors, writers, musicians, and broadcast
journalists. The publication of Red Channels institutionalized the
Hollywood blacklist, effectively freezing or destroying the entertainment
careers of iconic entertainment and media figures.]
Included in
this first edition of the pamphlet were many prominent theatre artists who also
relied on income earned in radio and the new medium of television. Actors Uta
Hagen [1919-2004], José Ferrer [1912-92], Ruth Gordon [1896-1985; wife of Garson Kanin (m. 1942-85)], Zero Mostel
[1915-77], Jack Gilford [1908-90], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76], J. Edward Bromberg [1903-51],
and John Garfield [1913-52] were listed, as were composers Leonard Bernstein [1918-90]
and Aaron Copland [1900-90] and folk singer Pete Seeger [1919-2014].
Playwrights Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman [1905-84], and Arthur Miller were
named, as well as playwright/directors Garson Kanin [1912-99; husband of Ruth Gordon (m. 1942-85)], Marc Connelly [1890-1980],
and Arthur Laurents [1917-2011], and directors Martin Ritt [1914-90], Abe
Burrows [1910-85], and Joseph Losey [1909-84].
[Many of the names above and elsewhere in this installment of “The Blacklist” appear with more detail in Part 2.]
Under each
person’s name there was a list of the organizations that called their loyalty
to the United States into question. Anything remotely left-wing was fair game,
including participation in an annual May Day parade celebrating workers [1 May
is European Labor Day and was a major holiday in communist and socialist countries],
or supporting members of the Hollywood Ten. Choreographer Helen Tamiris [1902-66],
the director of the Federal Dance Project in the 1930s and a 1950 Tony Award
winner [1950, for her choreography in Touch and Go (1949)], was
accused among other things of being a sponsor of the End Jim Crow in Baseball
Committee. Director Margaret Webster was targeted for 14 progressive causes she
supported, among them having signed a letter urging the abolition of HUAC.
Underneath the name of poet and playwright Langston Hughes [1901-67; poet,
social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist] were 40 organizations,
along with the accusation that his ironic poem “Goodbye Christ” was “a typical
example of vicious and blasphemous propaganda Communists use against religion.”
And many theatre artists were targeted for having sent telegrams of
congratulations to the Moscow Art Theatre on its 50th anniversary.
[The Hughes poem noted above was published in The
Negro Worker (November/December 1932). The publication was an international
communist newspaper published from 1928 to 1937. It served as the primary media
organ for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, an
organization formed by the Red International of Labor Unions and the Communist
Third International (Comintern).]
At the end of
the pamphlet, the organizations themselves were listed and their supposed
subversiveness identified. The Congress of American Women, part of an
international organization that worked to improve child welfare and women’s
rights, was cited as “one of the most potentially dangerous of the many active
Communist fronts.” The League of Women Shoppers, a consumer advocacy group that
promoted social justice and fought racial discrimination, was described as an
organization “whose chief purpose was to create feminine support in labor
disputes.”
The anti-labor
vehemence of these guilt-by-association lists begs the question: what were
unions doing to support their members during this ordeal? The answer is that
the film, radio, and television unions were doing nothing––or worse. The Screen
Writers Guild [formed in 1933; in 1954, became the Writers Guild of America,
West and the Writers Guild of America, East] and the Directors Guild of America
refused to support their members during the prosecution and imprisonment of the
Hollywood Ten. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
adopted a new rule: members who pleaded the Fifth Amendment at HUAC’s hearings
so as not to incriminate themselves––refusing to answer whether they were, or
had ever been, in the Communist Party––were assumed to be Communists and
suspended or expelled from the union. The board of the Screen Actors Guild
(SAG) published a statement saying that members of the Communist Party “should
be exposed for what they are––enemies of our country and our form of
government. It is not the province of the Guild Board to decide what is the
best method for carrying out this aim.”
[“Pleading the Fifth” refers to a person’s right under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution not to “be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Specifically, it means invoking the privilege against self-incrimination, allowing individuals to refuse to answer questions or provide evidence that could subject them to criminal liability.]
At first,
Actors’ Equity Association followed SAG’s lead and even used some of the same
“enemies of our country” language in its own published statement. But in 1951,
after Variety announced that HUAC was “getting ready to switch its
emphasis from Hollywood to Broadway,” some Equity members resolved to take a
different stand. The membership at the October quarterly meeting in New York
passed a strongly worded resolution saying that the “blacklisting of one actor
in any area of the Entertainment Industry threatens the security of all actors
and, indeed, jeopardizes the very existence of our Association.”
Equity’s
Council was required by its By-laws to consider this resolution, and though it
was hotly debated in a Council meeting two weeks later, it was eventually
passed. The final resolution was considerably watered down from the membership
meeting draft, but it did state that Actors’ Equity “condemns the practice of
‘blacklisting’ in all its forms,” and promised to aid members in getting a fair
and impartial hearing if they faced charges. The following year, Equity
succeeded in getting this language into its contracts with the Broadway League
and other producers, and its members also formed an anti-blacklist
committee––thereby becoming the only performing artists’ union to take a stand
against the anti-democratic behavior of the federal government and the
vigilante blacklisters. (SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (formerly
Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers )] was not founded until 1959. See Part 2.)
Theatre was
mostly exempt from the insidious Red Channels-type blacklisting that so
affected film, television, and radio because its audiences didn’t care about
the political affiliations of the actors, directors, and playwrights whose work
they wanted to experience. At least one vigilante blacklister found this
intolerable, writing an article that spewed out names while asking in
frustration, “When will the theatre-going public get wise to the con game being
operated in New York’s Great Red Way?”
If the
theatre-going public never “got wise” to Broadway turning “Red,” a few nervous
producers did. At least one director, Joseph Losey, was not hired for a job
(directing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) because of his suspected
Communist membership. And even Equity took a step back from its stand against
blacklisting when its membership felt it necessary to vote to expel any member
who’d been proven––by due process––to be a current member of the Communist
Party.
CAPITULATION
HUAC’s new
focus on Broadway was preceded by several years of FBI investigations of
well-known theatre artists who also worked in film. In 1950, choreographer
Jerome Robbins [1918-98], whose celebrated work on Broadway and with the New
York City Ballet was beginning to lead to film offers, was informed by
television host Ed Sullivan [1901-74] that his suspected Communist membership
in the 1940s made it necessary to rescind an invitation to appear on his show.
Sullivan told Robbins that his past affiliations could harm his career and
urged him to “confess” to local FBI agents; he may also have suggested that he
would divulge his homosexuality if he didn’t comply.
[HUAC and McCarthy’s Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations linked the “Lavender Scare” to the “Red Scare” by
labeling LGBTQ people potential security risks due to vulnerability to blackmail.
[Sullivan actively supported Cold War anticommunism by enforcing the entertainment industry's blacklist. Despite his own statement the he “never asked a performer his religion, his race or his politics” (“My Story,” Colliers Magazine 14 Sept. 1952), in the early 1950s, he routinely consulted the editors of Counterattack to vet his guests and ensure they were “cleared” of any leftist or pro-communist affiliations before appearing on his show.
[To get back on television or stay on the air, many blacklisted stars had to rely on conservative figures like Sullivan to help clear their names. For instance, Sullivan published a statement by jazz singer Lena Horne (1917-2010) in his New York Daily News column in 1951, where she condemned communist agitation to help make herself eligible for television work again.
[Despite his early compliance, Sullivan occasionally used his power to protect controversial figures. Later in the decade and into the 1960s, Sullivan sometimes pushed back against political pressure, famously defying CBS and FBI warnings in 1967 to allow blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show (1948-71).]
Robbins met
twice with the FBI in New York, confirming his brief Communist membership and
agreeing to appear before HUAC if called. He even said he would be willing to
identify others who were in the Party with him but he expressed reservations
about “smearing people whose activities I had no knowledge of for the past
three to six years.” He then left on a European tour with the New York City
Ballet, and when Sullivan published a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer
entitled “Tip to Red Probers: Subpena [sic] Jerome Robbins,” he stayed overseas
for some months afterwards on the advice of his lawyer. His letters from that
time even suggest that he considered becoming an ex-patriate to avoid having to
testify before HUAC.
In early 1952,
stage and film director Elia Kazan [1909-2003] was called before the Committee
in a private session. He too was candid about his own brief membership in the
Communist Party in the 1930s when he was an actor with the Group Theatre, but
he was not required to name names. But his contract with Twentieth Century Fox
was up for renewal, and he was told by one of its producers that unless he
identified other former Communist Party members to the Committee he would never
work as a film director again. Kazan began to experience chest pains, hand
tremors, and sleepless nights as he agonized over what to do, eventually
turning his agitation against the Communist Party, which he had left in 1936
over his refusal to try to persuade the Group Theatre to produce plays with
overt Communist propaganda. He felt he had been humiliated at a Party meeting
and had remained bitter ever since.
“I was against
them all,” he wrote many decades later. “I began to measure the weight and
worth of what I was giving up, my career in films, which I was surrendering for
a cause I didn’t believe in.” (Of course, the “cause” he’d be giving up his
film career for would not have been Communism, but the ability of his friends
and colleagues to make a living.) Kazan directed all the blame for his
situation at the Communist Party and none at HUAC, apparently rationalizing (as
many did at the time) that if a democratic government behaved in an
anti-democratic way, it was within its rights to do so. But others deplored
HUAC’s “contempt for basic human rights,” in the words of Arthur Miller, and
laid the blame for the blacklist squarely at the feet of the federal government.
[The quotation (and those below) from the director is
from Elia Kazan: A Life (Knopf, 1988), his autobiography.]
Kazan returned
to HUAC in April 1952 and gave the Committee eight names. (For good measure, he
went on to talk about all the plays and films he’d directed, describing how––as
he said of one musical––they were “non-political but full of American tradition
and spirit.”) He then tried to hold off the inevitable recriminations from the
theatre community by taking out an explanatory ad in the New York Times [“A
STATEMENT by Elia Kazan,” 12 April 1952: 7]––a defense that was poorly
received and seen as self-serving. His secretary at the Actors Studio quit in
protest, people he knew crossed the street to avoid him, and he received many
letters, some of them anonymous, condemning what he had done. One such letter
concluded, “I cannot sign my name because you hold an economic whip over those
of us who are only actors.”
Elia Kazan
resumed his successful career in both theatre and film but was disturbed by his
own actions for the rest of his life. He speculated in his 1988 memoir that as
the child of Greek immigrants, he might have been consumed by the need to prove
his own patriotism. “What I’d done was correct but was it right?” he wrote. “No
one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged. I did
not. Here I am thirty-five years later, worrying over it.”
Kazan’s
testimony cost him his working and personal relationship with Arthur Miller,
whose early plays All My Sons [1947] and Death of a Salesman [1949]
he had directed: Miller collaborated with other directors on his 1950s plays The
Crucible [1953; staged by Jed Harris (1900-79)] and A View from the
Bridge [1955; directed by Martin Ritt], both of which explore the human
costs of informing on others. But Miller never explicitly condemned Kazan, and
he always kept his anger directed at the perpetrators––HUAC and the vigilante
blacklisters––rather than at their victims. Decades later, in his memoir,
Miller lamented the futility of Kazan’s capitulation to HUAC. “Who or what was
now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate
himself?” he asked. “What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?”
[Quotations from Arthur Miller are from Timebends.]
Writing from
Israel in the spring of 1952, Jerome Robbins asked in a letter, “What is the
news––& what have been the repercussions of Kazan’s statement?” When he
himself was finally called before HUAC in May 1953, he talked about his reasons
for joining the Communist Party––because of its stance against “minority
prejudice” and anti-Semitism [Robbins, born Jerome Rabinowitz, was Jewish]––and
why he left it several years later over its treatment of artists as “puppets”
expected to insert Communist propaganda into their work. Then, with very little
prompting, he went on to name seven of his colleagues from that time as having
been members of the Party as well.
His demeanor
when testifying “was so compliant that his appearance had about it the aura of
social blackmail” (according to Naming Names [Viking Press, 1980],
Victor Navasky’s [1932-2023; journalist, editor, and author] definitive account
of the blacklist era), leading to speculation in the theatre and dance
community that he might have cooperated so fully with HUAC for fear of being
outed. At the hearing, when Representative Clyde Doyle [1887-1963; United
States Representative from California: 1945-47 and 1949-63] asked him to
explain his motives, observing that “some other people, who claim to be artists
or authors or musicians, would put you down as a stool pigeon,” this exchange
ensued:
Robbins:
I’ve examined myself. I think I made a great mistake in entering the Communist
Party, and I feel I am doing the right thing as an American.
Doyle:
Well, so do I . . . You are in a wonderful place, through your art, your music,
your talent . . . to perhaps be very vigorous and positive in promoting
Americanism in contrast to Communism. Let me suggest that you use that great
talent which God has blessed you with to put into ballet in some way, to put
into music in some way, that interpretation.
Robbins:
Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for its [sic] American quality
particularly.
Doyle:
I realize that but let me urge you to even put more of that in it, where you
can appropriately.
Jerome
Robbins’s career continued unabated in theatre and he began to work in film as
well. But like Kazan, he found that many of his colleagues and friends were
outraged by his compliance with HUAC’s request for names. Even his family was
appalled: his father told his sister that rather than become an informer,
Robbins should have given up his prospects in film, television, and even
theatre. “He could always open a dancing school,” he said.
Robbins was
haunted by what he had done for the rest of his life. Years later, in his notes
for an autobiographical play, he wrote that he had capitulated to HUAC not so
much because he was afraid of his sexual identity becoming known, but because
of his lifelong insecurity about being the son of Jewish immigrants. He had
always experienced “terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work,
veneer of accomplishments, would be taken away.” In front of HUAC, he believed,
“I panicked and crumbled and returned to that primitive state of terror––the
façade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would see
Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.”
[Robbins’s statement above is apparently from journal
entries he made in the early 1990s for a play called The Poppa Piece that
was to be an autobiographical play with dialogue that explored not only his anguish
over the HUAC interview, but his family history as well. The Poppa Piece
was never completed and its only “performances” were private experimental
workshop sessions.]
Author’s
Note: Sources consulted in the writing of this article include biographies and
memoirs of the theatre artists discussed, plus three indispensable books: Naming
Names by Victor Navasky, a comprehensive narrative published in 1980; Broadway
and the Blacklist by K. Kevyne Baar, which details the actions of Actors’
Equity and other unions; and The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy,
and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro, a 2024 book about HUAC’s
targeting of the Federal Theatre Project.
[Because of its length, I’ve had to break this article
into two parts. Part two of “The
Blacklist” will be posted on Friday, 3 July.
Please come back to ROT for
the conclusion of this report.
[Mary B. Robinson is a stage director, teacher, and writer
who has directed more than 70 productions in New York City and around the
country, taught directing at NYU and Brooklyn College, and written the books To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the
Transformation of American Theater and Directing Plays, Directing
People: A Collaborative Art. She
served for 15 years on the Executive Board of SDC.]
