The Blacklist, Part 2

 

[As I stated in the introduction to Part 1 of this post, readers of Rick On Theater will know by now that 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. The article that started three days ago and finishes below is about that conflict.

[I urge ROTters who are just coming upon “The Blacklist” to go back to Tuesday, 30 June, and read Part 1 before taking up Part 2.  Aside from the information that Mary B. Robinson imparted, I have made some annotations to her text with identifications and explanations that I won’t repeat below.]

“‘UN-AMERICAN’:

THEATRE ARTISTS vs. THE 1950s BLACKLIST”

(continued)

by Mary B. Robinson

[This is the second and final installment of “The Blacklist,” my repost of Mary B. Robinson’s “‘Un-American,’” which was first published in the SDC Journal 14.1 (Winter 2026), the membership publication of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  The article, which I pick up on Rick On Theater where Part 1 left off, is posted online, or through the SDC website.]

A BITTERNESS WITH THE COUNTRY

Actor Madeline Lee [1923-2008; film and stage actress, social activist, and later theatrical producer; married to fellow blacklistee Jack Gilford, 1949-90 (see Part 1)], one of the seven people Robbins named, described her experience of the day he testified: “Someone called and said, ’Put on your radio––Jerome Robbins is naming you.’ And our phone didn’t ring for three months after that. That’s how scared people were of being in touch with you, probably figuring the FBI had my phone tapped.”

It was a “killingly frightening” time, said actor Phoebe Brand [1907-2004], who had worked with Elia Kazan [see Part 1] and her husband Morris Carnovsky [1897-1992; stage and film actor; one of the founders of the Group Theatre] for 10 years when they were all in the Group Theatre together. Kazan identified both Brand and Carnovsky as members of the Communist Party, as did several others who named names. The Carnovskys had a 10-year-old son at the time, and Madeline Lee and her husband Jack Gilford had small children as well. These four actors––along with hundreds of other theatre artists—did not work in film, radio, or television for many years.

The blacklist was taking its toll on its victims’ personal lives as well as their professional ones––sometimes fatally. Mady Christians [1892-1951; Austrian-born German-American theater and film actress], who had created leading roles in plays such as Watch on the Rhine [1941] and I Remember Mama [1944] and starred in the film of All My Sons [1948], died of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on (her friends believed) by the stress of having been listed in Red Channels and denied work as a result. J. Edward Bromberg [see Part 1] and John Garfield [see Part 1], stalwarts of the Group Theatre who had gone on to success in Hollywood in the 1940s, both died of heart attacks after being listed by Red Channels and targeted by HUAC—Bromberg at the age of 47 and Garfield at 39. (Both had chronic heart problems that “got a lot worse with all the tensions and anxiety,” says Bromberg’s son Conrad [1931-?; playwright and actor (as Conrad Josephs)]. “I don’t say the blacklist killed my father, but it contributed.”) And Philip Loeb [1891-1955; stage, film, and television actor, director, and author], an actor and director who had flourished on Broadway for many decades, died by suicide when General Foods insisted that he be dismissed from his leading role on a long-running television show [“Jake” (1949-51) in The Goldbergs; TV (CBS, NBC; 1949-56)].

In May 1952, playwrights Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman [both Part 1]––both of whom made a considerable portion of their income in film work––were called before HUAC in the same week. Odets defended his own and others’ membership in the Communist Party of the 1930s, invoking the grim realities of the Depression and stating that they had joined “in the honest and real belief that this was some way out of the dilemma in which we found ourselves.” But he also complied when the Committee asked for the names of the other Communist members in the Group Theatre. Because he had not denounced Communism, he was not considered a “friendly” witness by HUAC––but because he had named names, he was reviled by many in the theatre community. Odets felt that he had shown the Committee “the face of a radical,” and was distressed that all anyone seemed to care about was the names. He lived uneasily with that for the rest of his life, dying a decade later at 57.

Lillian Hellman told her lawyer that she was prepared to talk freely about her own Communist past, but she would not name names. Her lawyer informed her that this was a legal impossibility: if a person opted not to take the Fifth Amendment (which allowed them to not incriminate themselves [see Part 1]), they waived their right to not name others. After much strategizing with her team of lawyers, Hellman sent a letter to HUAC several days before her hearing requesting permission to be candid about herself but silent about other people. If the Committee refused, she said, she would be forced to plead the Fifth, since “I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive.” She summed up her beliefs by declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

HUAC denied her request, saying that it was not up to her to set the terms of her hearing, so she invoked the Fifth. But in the course of her time before the Committee, she asked repeatedly to have her letter read aloud, knowing that was the way to make it public. Eventually the HUAC counsel did so while her lawyer passed out copies of it to members of the press in the back of the room. The moral outrage of the letter and the clear way it differentiated between the ethics of talking about oneself versus naming others made Hellman something of a heroine in the New York City theatre world and beyond. In her later years, she kept a book of press clippings about her HUAC testimony on a table near her front door, and wrote a memoir called Scoundrel Time [Little, Brown, 1976] detailing her experience of the blacklist and castigating those who had named names––causing Elia Kazan to remark that she “spent her last fifteen years canonizing herself.”

In the spring of 1953, Margaret Webster [see Part 1] was “plunged into fear” when she received a telegram from Senator Joseph McCarthy [see Part 1, especially annotations] ordering her to appear at a private hearing of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a longstanding committee that McCarthy had begun using to investigate alleged Communists. Webster had had very little work since 1950, when she had first been listed in Red Channels, and for a time she had been denied renewal of her passport, though she had successfully appealed that decision. “Your friends began to divide into two groups,” she later wrote, “those who grasped your hand warmly and seemed a little over solicitous, and those who were polite but a trifle evasive and had that ‘no-smoke-without fire’ look in their eyes.” While preparing to sublet her apartment, she was advised to go through her books and get rid of Ten Days That Shook the World, [Boni & Liveright, 1919] John Reed’s firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, and others like it; and “my letters to my mother from Russia in 1935 had best, my friends told me, be burned,” she wrote. “Yes, really.”

[In 1935, Webster traveled to Russia to attend the Moscow Theatre Festival. Because of the prominent role of her mother, British actress Dame May Whitty, in the founding of the British Actors’ Equity Association, Webster served as an official actor-delegate for the London Theatre Council during this trip. She corresponded with her mother in the U.K. during the festival.]

Though Webster did not plead the Fifth at her hearing, believing that “if the law empowered congressional committees to ask you these questions, it also told you to answer them,” she hoped to be able to avoid talking about others––such as longtime Soviet admirer Paul Robeson [1898-1976; bass-baritone concert artist, actor, collegiate and professional football player, and activist], whom Webster had directed in Othello in 1943. In fact, McCarthy’s real target was the recently established Fulbright Program and Webster had been called as a witness because she had served as a juror for the applications of theatre artists. The hearing itself was anti-climactic but the months leading up to it had taken their toll. A week later, she left for an extended stay in Europe on a ship called the USS Constitution [sic]. “I have never, ever, been so relieved as I was to see the last of the Statue of Liberty,” she wrote 20 years later. Though she directed plays and operas sporadically in the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s, her professional and personal life kept her mostly in the UK from then on, and her feelings of love and pride for the United States were forever changed because of the actions of its federal government.

[Robeson was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; leader of the Soviet Union: 1924-53) because of the racism he and other African Americans experienced in the U.S., but which he asserted he didn’t see in the USSR. The Soviet Union was also actively opposed to European colonialism in Africa, a cause which Robeson avidly espoused (though not necessarily for the same reasons).

[Beginning with his first trip in 1934, Robeson visited the Soviet Union frequently to perform, speak, and escape the oppressive racism of Jim Crow America. He may have joined the CPUSA shortly after the war, but there’s no confirmation of this.

[The Fulbright Program, founded in 1946, is a United States cultural exchange program with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of the United States and other countries through the mutual exchange of people, knowledge, and skills. The program has been considered one of the most prestigious scholarships in the United States.

[McCarthy targeted the Fulbright Program because he claimed its educational exchange scholars and administrators were promoting communism and criticizing American values. He alleged that the program funded “America-haters” and left-leaning academics who sympathized with communist ideologies. McCarthy almost certainly didn’t believe the allegations, however; he was using fabricated claims for personal intimidation and media attention.

[Furthernore, Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-95; U.S. Senator from Arkansas: 1945-74; Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: 1959-75), founder of the program, was one of the few politicians willing to stand up to McCarthy publicly. Attacking Fulbright’s namesake program was a calculated effort to humiliate a political rival and intimidate other lawmakers.]

In June of 1956, Arthur Miller [see also Part 1] was finally called in to testify before HUAC––something he had been expecting for six years since he was first listed in Red Channels. During that time, he had written The Crucible, a play whose lukewarm reception he attributed to its audience’s discomfort with its witch hunting subject matter, and he too had been refused renewal of his passport. The night before his hearing, a representative of the Committee’s chairman reached out to Miller’s lawyer suggesting that the hearing could be cancelled if Miller’s fiancée Marilyn Monroe [1926-62; m. Miller 1956, div. 1961] agreed to be photographed shaking hands with the chairman. Miller refused.

He did not plead the Fifth at his hearing, at which one congressman accused him of having gotten a good review for The Crucible in the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker and with “criticizing” Elia Kazan’s appearance before HUAC––not by anything Miller had said but because he had chosen to work with other directors on his last two plays. When he was asked who was present at a meeting of Communist writers he’d attended in the late 1940s, Miller refused to answer, saying “the life of a writer . . . is pretty tough. I wouldn’t make it tougher for anybody. I ask you not to ask me that question. I will tell you anything about myself.”

He was warned that his “moral scruples” were not a legal reason to stay silent about others and that he was placing himself in contempt of Congress. Pressed about two specific people, he repeated, “I have given you my answer.” Eventually he was dismissed and cited for contempt, receiving a 30-day suspended sentence and a $500 fine [$6,200 today]––and experiencing “a bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before,” as he wrote in Timebends, “a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom.”

But though many of the blacklist’s victims experienced fear, bitterness, and grief over what their country had become, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson did not––he hadn’t believed in the United States as a beacon of freedom in the first place. Robeson was a huge star both nationally and internationally in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as a very vocal admirer of the Soviet Union, where he had first been received with open arms in 1934 after experiencing racist threats while traveling through Hitler’s Berlin.

Though he was never a member of the Communist Party, a speech that Robeson made in Paris after the Second World War, in which he suggested that African Americans should refuse to fight in a potential war against Russia, caused the government to revoke his passport in 1949. When baseball legend Jackie Robinson, folksinger Joshua Daniel White, and other Black celebrities were called before HUAC in the early 1950s, they were not asked to name names––instead, they were required to denounce Paul Robeson and his remarks about Black people owing no allegiance to the U.S.

When he himself was called before the Committee in the spring of 1956, Robeson took the Fifth and then used the opportunity to attack HUAC forcefully and directly in a way rarely seen since the Hollywood Ten. With nothing to lose and no belief in the Committee’s right to question him, he turned his anger fully on the men in front of him.

“I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. And they are not,” he declared. “They are not in Mississippi. And they are not in Montgomery, Alabama. And they are not in Washington. “And that is why I am here today. You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers.”

Asked about his trips to the Soviet Union, he told the Committee that “in Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being.” When asked why he didn’t just stay there, he answered, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it, just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

The Committee tried to put further questions to him, but he laughed them off, saying, “This is really ridiculous,” and “Oh, please.” Eventually the chairman was forced to adjourn the hearing, at which point Robeson declared, “You are the non-patriots, you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

When the chairman repeated that the meeting was adjourned, Robeson shot back, “You should adjourn this forever, that is what I would say.”

By the time Paul Robeson spoke those words in 1956, the process of “adjourning” the Communist hunters’ work had already begun. A number of performing artists determined to fight back sued the newsletter Counterattack, which discontinued Red Channels in the mid-1950s and paid damages for years afterwards. (Its publishers stated, “We never said the ‘facts’ in Red Channels were correct or incorrect. We’ve just reported the public record.”) Joseph McCarthy’s larger-than-life personality and bullying tactics, which kept the radio and television public riveted for several years, began to make him increasingly unpopular. He was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died in 1957. And HUAC kept up its investigations in a desultory way in the late 1950s and beyond but with much less publicity and success, finally disbanding in 1975.

But while HUAC and “McCarthyism” are gone, some of the seeds they planted have gone on to new life. McCarthy’s chief counsel, the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn [1927-86] (known to many as a character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America [1991 two-part play; 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and many more honors); see my report (11 December 2010)]) was a mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to the young businessman Donald Trump [b. 1946; politician, media personality, and businessman; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029], to whom Cohn imparted his belief that when in trouble, the best course of action was to “deny everything and fight.”

AFTERMATH

The lives of the theatre artists who faced the blacklist in the 1950s were profoundly altered as a consequence of their ordeal. Paul Robeson may have gotten the last word in his stand against HUAC, but his years in the wilderness had taken their toll. After his passport was restored in 1958, he resumed his performing career but went through periods of deep depression and made several suicide attempts. He was institutionalized and given electroshock therapy––a common treatment at the time—and was nearly catatonic in the last years of his life. He died in 1976 at the age of 78. A friend of his said some years later that “the conspiracy of the government to make him a non-person was very successful.”

Some blacklisted theatre artists left the United States and became lifelong expatriates. Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956; German theater practitioner, playwright, and poet], who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape Hitler’s Germany, fled to Switzerland the day after his 1947 HUAC hearing and then to Communist East Berlin in 1949. Joseph Losey [see Part 1], who had directed a number of productions for the Federal Theatre Project as well as the U.S. premiere of Brecht’s Galileo [written 1938; premiere, 1943], moved to Europe in 1952 and became a noted film director there. Sam Wanamaker [1919-93; American actor and director], who’d been performing in England when he found out he’d been blacklisted, simply stayed there—acting, directing, and eventually becoming the leading force behind the creation of the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London.

[Though Brecht was a dedicated Marxist who supported communist causes, he was never a card-carrying member of the communist party, either before World War II, when it was the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands [KPD]), or after the division of Germany and he lived in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), when it was the the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]).

[Brecht chose to remain an independent sympathizer rather than a enlisted party member. He maintained an artistic and political autonomy that often frustrated party officials, both in East Berlin and in Moscow.]

Some who had been blacklisted in film and television went on to do their best theatre work. Uta Hagen [see Part 1] gave the performance of a lifetime when she created the role of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962, and she also became a revered acting teacher at the HB Studio []in Greenwich Village, New York] and author of the seminal book Respect for Acting [Macmillan, 1973]. “McCarthy kept me pure,” she said about the fact that she was forced by the blacklist to stay in theatre instead of doing films when her career began to take off in the early 1950s. Morris Carnovsky became a celebrated actor in the plays of Shakespeare in his later years, and called the blacklist a “Shakespearean experience” because “it took in all the extremes of human character.” Zero Mostel [see Part 1] won Tony Awards for his performances in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [premiere: 1962; Best Actor in a Musical: 1963] and Fiddler on the Roof [premiere: 1964; Best Actor in a Musical: 1965]. He also appeared in the 1976 film The Front as an actor who dies by suicide because he is denied the means of earning his living––a character based on Mostel’s good friend Philip Loeb. The Front’s director Martin Ritt [see Part 1], its screenwriter Walter Bernstein [1919-2021; screenwriter and film producer], and several other actors in it had also all been blacklisted.

[Hagen won the 1951 Tony for Best Actress in a Play for Country Girl and the Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1999. Mostel also won the 1961 Tony for Best Actor in a Play for Rhinoceros.]

The rift in the theatre community that had been created by the naming of names was never completely healed. Although people on both sides of the divide still worked together, there was lingering guilt on one side and resentment on the other. In 1963, Jerome Robbins [see also Part 1] hired three formerly blacklisted actors for his Broadway production of Brecht’s Mother Courage [1963; the three John Randolph (1915-2004), Mike Kellin (1922-83). and Lou Guss (1918-2008) blacklisted actors were ], and cast Conrad Bromberg, the son of J. Edward Bromberg, as Courage’s son Eilif. “Every so often we’d go off in a corner and ask each other, ‘Why do you think we’re here?’” Bromberg says about himself and his fellow actors. They concluded, “Because Jerry felt bad.”

Zero Mostel took to greeting anyone who had named names as “Looselips”––but he also worked on both his hit musicals with Jerome Robbins, who was brought in when Forum was in trouble out of town and who directed and choreographed Fiddler. When Mostel was asked whether he would agree to work with Robbins on Forum, he answered, “We on the left don’t blacklist.” His friend Jack Gilford almost quit the production in protest of Robbins being hired, but his wife Madeline Lee Gilford [1923-2008] (one of Robbins’s victims) persuaded him to move on from what they’d all suffered and stay with the show. “You’re not going to blacklist yourself,” she told him.

Besides damaging the lives of so many theatre artists, did the blacklist change American theatre itself in any way? In 1972, around 100 theatre artists who had been HUAC witnesses––some who had refused to comply and some who had named names––were asked this question in a survey. One playwright spoke for many when he stated his belief that the blacklist ushered in a “general sense of fear” in the theatre: “fear to attack the status quo, fear to assert revolutionary solutions to social ills”––even, he went on to say, fear “to assert that social ills were a proper subject for dramatic treatment.” There were exceptions, and another respondent pointed out that several plays such as The Crucible were written in response to the blacklist. But Arthur Miller was a known and celebrated playwright by then; overall, many believed that a certain self-censorship in the theatre had started in the 1950s and lasted for some time afterward. “What happened to most of us,” wrote director Harold Clurman [1901-80; theater director and drama critic], “was that we came to desire nothing more than to be inconspicuous citizens, with no other thought than to ‘get on.’”

There was another long-term––though indirect––result of the blacklist: the creation of SDC. Director Shepard Traube [1907-83], who worked on Broadway in the 1930s and then went to Los Angeles to direct and produce films in the ’40s, saw the writing on the wall and moved his family back to New York in 1948 to resume working in the more hospitable world of theatre. He was listed in the 1951 edition of Red Channels and called before HUAC in the spring of ’52; he pleaded the Fifth and refused to name names. His daughter Victoria, who was a child at the time, says that she never heard him speak about any of this except for when the Traubes’ nanny expressed her opinion that McCarthy was “a great man.” Traube fired her and explained why to his small daughters.

Like many other directors and producers, Traube went out of his way to hire blacklisted actors. In 1955, he began to work on a project he’d first conceived of 15 years earlier: creating a union for stage directors and choreographers. Among the early supporters of this idea who brought their knowledge and experience to SDC’s 1959 founding were Margaret Webster, Helen Tamiris [see Part 1], and others whose professional lives had been damaged by the blacklist. Some who had named names were also central to this effort: Elia Kazan (in whom Traube had confided his wish to start a directors’ union many years earlier) provided important support, and Jerome Robbins served on SDC’s first interim Board. Out of a broken community, Traube and his colleagues created a new one that nearly 70 years later gives us a collective strength and voice to face the overwhelming challenges of our own time, as theatre artists and American citizens.

“In its clumsy way,” said one respondent in answer to the question about whether the blacklist had changed the theatre itself, the federal government’s persecution of “un-American” theatre artists had served a useful purpose: it “brought home to American theatre people that ‘It Can Happen Here.’”

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.

[There are clear echoes in “‘Un-American’” of the stage version of Good Night, and Good Luck, which I watched on CNN about a year ago.  Edward R. Murrow’s battle of words with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (who gets a mention from Robinson) was a big part of the Second Red Scare, the basis for the blacklist.  His “investigations” on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations were parallels to the HUAC probes into the Hollywood figures—and the tactics were identical.

[I’ve been working on a report on that broadcast, but it’s been hard going and I’m not finished yet, unhappily.  When I am, I’ll be sure to put links in that post to this one, and come back and insert links from “The Blacklist” to the play report.

[Mary B. Robinson is a 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.]

The Blacklist, Part 1

 

[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, 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, 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.)

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.]

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.]

'Operation Mincemeat'

 

[The musical Operation Mincemeat premièred at the New Diorama Theatre (near Regent’s Park in London) on 14 May 2019 and ran until 15 June. The cast featured writers Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Zoë Roberts (book, music, and lyrics) with Jak Malone and Rory Furey-King. 

[It then played on The Little stage at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 4 to 11 January 2020. A run on The Large stage began on 23 July 2021, where it was originally due to run until 7 August, however due to popular demand it was extended to 18 September. The musical ran for a final time at Southwark Playhouse from 14 January to 19 February 2022.

[Operation Mincemeat's final Off-West End run opened at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, from 28 April to 23 July 2022.

[The musical transferred to London’s West End, opening on 9 May 2023 at the Fortune Theatre. Originally scheduled to close after 9 July 2023, the production has been extended multiple times after receiving favorable reviews. It’s still running; after winning several awards for the Off-West End stagings, Operation Mincemeat, dubbed the best received show in the West End, won the 2024 Best New Musical Laurence Olivier Award (London’s counterpart of a Tony).

[The musical transferred to Broadway in 2025 for an originally slated 16-week limited run. Previews began on 15 February at the Golden Theatre and the show officially opened on 20 March to generally positive reviews. The original London cast reprised their roles on Broadway, and days after its first preview, the show announced an extended run due to popular demand, subsequently extended multiple times, and is still running. It was nominated for the 2025 Best Musical Tony Award, but didn’t win.

[There have been two feature-length movies based on the same material as the musical. The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film directed by Ronald Neame, based on the book of the same title (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954) by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Operation Mincemeat is a 2021 war drama film directed by John Madden based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book (Bloomsbury) of the same name.

[Among the 80-odd characters portrayed by the five-actor cast, is, as David Gordon of TheaterMania describes him, “one of the most surprisingly real figures from this espionage mission: Ian Fleming, an eccentric intelligence officer in a black tux who’s writing a novel about a British secret agent with a penchant for martinis shaken, not stirred,” played by one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts.  (Says Gordon: she “kills it.”)] 

“HIS SPY SCHEMES CAME TO LIFE”
by Thomas Maier

[This article, which is more about Ian Fleming, his James Bond novels, and his real-life spy colleagues than it is about the London and Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat, ran in the New York Times of 24 August 2025 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was posted as “How Ian Fleming and His Spy Scheme Inspired a Broadway Show” on the Times website on the same date.]

Even before 007, Ian Fleming concocted creative plots that aided wartime victories.

The James Bond spy novels dreamed up by Ian Fleming [British; 1908-64] were rooted in his World War II experiences as a British intelligence officer. In one instance, Fleming had an idea that was so wild it’s still hard to believe it actually worked. To misdirect the Nazis, he suggested outfitting a corpse with fake military plans and strategically placing it off the coast of Spain.

Because truth can be stranger than fiction, that scheme is now the subject of the rollicking Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” The show, a hit in England before arriving in New York last spring, gets big laughs from this absurd tale of deception. In a rousing number, “God That’s Brilliant,” the conspiring spies sing rapturously as they plot to kill Hitler. (Fleming paints a picture of a martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing assassin who “kills the guards, snogs the girl and says something cool.”)

[Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the Austrian-born German politician who became dictator of Germany in the Nazi era, from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party, elected Chancellor (Kanzler; prime minister) of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. (Reich, as in Third Reich among other uses, in German means ‘empire,’ ‘kingdom,’ 'realm,' or ‘nation.’)

[Historians have identified at least 42 assassination plots on Hitler, starting before he held office. (There are probably more as some cases may be undocumented.) One was the famous 20 July plot, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944; regarded as one of the ablest tank commanders of the war; known as the Desert Fox) was at least a supporter if not an active participant.

[This is the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler’s government and replace it, and the weapon was a briefcase bomb that exploded at a conference of high-ranking members of that government at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia. The bomb went off, killing 4 and injuring 20, but only wounding the Führer slightly.

[Only one planned assassination attempt was hatched in the U.K.: Operation Foxley. This was a top-secret Allied plan by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in mid-1944 to kill Hitler at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The SOE considered various scenarios, including sniper attacks, poisoning the water supply on the Führer‘s private train, or a direct commando raid. The operation was meticulously planned but ultimately never executed, as intelligence revealed Hitler had relocated to Berlin and rarely visited the Berghof again after late 1944.

[Ian Fleming did not consult on any assassination plot against Hitler. As far as anyone has revealed.]

Though the show presents him as a sort of bumbling genius, the Fleming character helps to establish the complex story as a spy caper. He “is so respected and revered and made a huge contribution to British culture,” said one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts [b. 1985], who also plays Fleming and other characters. “It seemed like a huge opportunity to have a little bit of fun and poke a little fun at him.”

But the musical provides only a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a spy.

In reality, Fleming was a clever and sophisticated British intelligence officer, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic and gained a wealth of insider knowledge that he later transformed into colorful, action-packed fiction with his Bond novels. “Never say ‘no’ to adventures — always say ‘yes,’” he explained. “Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

The Operation Mincemeat ruse originated in 1939 — shortly after Britain declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany [3 September 1939] — with a lengthy memo by Fleming’s boss, Adm. John Godfrey [1888-1970], the director of naval intelligence. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,” concluded the historian Ben Macintyre [b. 1963], who has written about the wartime caper and Fleming’s fictional character, the suave MI6 agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, who was portrayed in a string of popular films by a series of actors.

[MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) is the British Secret Intelligence Service, roughly equivalent to the CIA in the United States. (The Military Intelligence designation is a hold-over from its origin during World War I when espionage and intelligence were the province of the war ministry.) It handles foreign intelligence, covert operations, and international espionage outside the United Kingdom. and answers to the Foreign Secretary.

[It shouldn’t be confused with its sister agency, MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), the Security Service, which handles domestic intelligence and security, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-espionage within the U.K. It answers to the Home Secretary and is the approximate counterpart to our FBI—except that MI5 has no law-enforcement responsibility and no power to make arrests.

[The third leg of the British intelligence structure is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters. It serves as the UK's signals intelligence, cybersecurity, and cryptanalysis agency, the direct equivalent of the NSA in the U.S.]

Though the schemes appeared to be implausible, the memo advised, “the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem.” No. 28 envisioned that “a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”

Fleming’s idea was later put into action by the British naval intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley [1917-82] and Ewen Montagu [1901-85]. (Both are leading characters in the musical, and properly given credit for their heroics. In 1953, Montagu published a book about it called “The Man Who Never Was.”) According to Macintyre, Fleming was “at least tangentially involved” in launching the plan, though these other spies carried it out.

Found on the corpse were documents identifying him as Capt. (Acting Major) William Martin [“b. 1907” (fictional)] — he was actually a vagrant named Glyndwr Michael [1907-43] who had died after ingesting rat poison — and paperwork that in time convinced Nazi forces that a 1943 Allied invasion of Italy through Sicily would instead take place at Sardinia. The deception helped make the Allies’ eventual victory in Italy easier and less bloody than expected.

Under Prime Minister Winston Churchill [1874-1965; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55], an advocate of espionage, sabotage and “ungentlemanly warfare,” Fleming was sent to Manhattan to join the spies working to persuade the United States to join the war. For several months before the Americans entered the war, in December 1941, the British Security Coordination (B.S.C. [part of MI6]), based on the 36th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, used propaganda, political influence and media manipulation to secretly combat isolationists and the Nazi threat inside America.

Soon, the United States created its first spy agency — the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. [1942-45]), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency [formed 1947] — with the help of Fleming, who impressed officials with his advice about espionage and his willingness to take chances. “The British are many things, but cowards they are not,” Ernest Cuneo [1905-88], a top O.S.S. official [1942-45], said after working with Fleming.

Ghastly but ingenious, Fleming’s Mincemeat plan — itself inspired by a detective book on his shelf involving a corpse with forged papers [Basil Thomson (1861-1939; British colonial administrator, prison governor, and novelist), The Milliner’s Hat Mystery (Eldon Press [London], 1937)] — wasn’t his only creative idea. “Fleming could always laugh when some stratagem misfired — he had plenty more to choose from,” observed John Pearson [1930-2021; English novelist and biographer], whose Fleming biography [The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape [London], 1966)] appeared two years after Fleming’s death, in 1964 at the age of 56.

One of Pearson’s favorite stories was how Fleming and William Stephenson [1897-1989; Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman, and spymaster; codename: Intrepid], overseer of Churchill’s spies in Manhattan, broke into the Japanese consul general’s office, located below the B.S.C. headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Stephenson, Fleming and two other spies entered the closed offices at 3 a.m. Fleming acted as a lookout. They picked a safe’s locks and “borrowed” the Japanese code book and other confidential documents. They ran upstairs to their own offices to microfilm the important material.

Then they returned the papers, leaving them in the same order they were found. “To Stephenson, it was a straightforward operation,” Pearson recounted in Life magazine, “to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.”

[Japan’s Consul General in New York City from 1939 to 1942 was Morito Morishima (1896-1975; traditional Japanese name order: Morishima Morito). The office that Stephenson, Fleming, and the British agents broke into was Morishima’s. The exact date of the raid is hard to verify because, for one reason, it’s possible it never actually happened.

[The story of the safe-cracking raid was popularized after the war by William Stephenson’s biographers. According to Stephenson, the raid was real, Fleming was the lookout, and the stolen codes successfully helped the Allies track Japanese and German maritime movements.

[Many of Ian Fleming’s official biographers and modern intelligence historians argue that the Rockefeller Center break-in may have been a “tall tale” or a piece of post-war bravado. They note that while Fleming certainly met with Stephenson in June 1941, there’s no mention of a physical break-in in British Naval Intelligence logs.

[Fun Fact: Whether the New York incursion was actual or not, the idea of cracking open Morishima’s safe ultimately inspired Fleming to pen Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond novel. In the book, Bond remembers his first kill and recounts that it happened in the Japanese Consulate in Rockefeller Center, New York. (See below.) Lest we forget, the “double-oh” in Bond’s code number is a “license to kill,” given to the agents of the “British Secret Service” who are authorized to use lethal force.]

Fleming told Godfrey, his former boss, about the successful break-in, hoping the story would reach the appreciative ears of Churchill, whose approval mattered to Fleming on a personal level. Churchill had been friendly with Fleming’s father, Valentine [1882-1917], a fellow Conservative in Parliament, who was killed by German shellfire in World War I when Fleming was only 9.

Years later, Fleming turned this spy scheme in Manhattan into fiction. In his first novel, “Casino Royale,” he introduced the assassin James Bond, who tracks down a Japanese cipher expert who was cracking British coded messages inside Rockefeller Center. Stationed in another building and equipped with a Remington rifle that had telescopic sights and silencer, Bond takes aim and shoots the Japanese agent. “It was a pretty sound job,” Bond summarized. “Nice and clean too.”

After the war, Fleming had felt at a loss, craving the intrigue and intensity of his spy work. “We almost suffered emotional ‘bends’ the day the war ended — tension went out like a power line turned off,” recalled Cuneo, who later ran a small newspaper syndicate with Fleming. “Aside from its horrors, you missed the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.”

[In March 1951, Cuneo and a small group of investors purchased the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In addition, Cuneo and the Bell Syndicate-North American Newspaper Alliance group acquired the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in September 1952. Cuneo acquired full control over NANA in the mid-1950s and served as president until 1963 when he sold it, though he remained with NANA as a columnist and military analyst from 1963 to 1980.

[Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence, including Fleming and Ivar Bryce (1906-85), and because some writers in the Cuneo era had alleged links to the CIA, critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage. Cuneo, a staunch anti-communist, was involved with the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization formed in 1963.]

By January 1952, Fleming had turned most of his attention to writing spy novels. He modeled Bond on various real-life figures — notably Stephenson for his bold moves, inventive killing gadgets and coolheaded fearlessness. This fictional secret agent would have a boss called “M” — modeled after his own Royal Navy superior Admiral Godfrey. And Fleming dedicated his “Thunderball” novel [1961] to his American spy pal Cuneo.

The author amused himself by slightly changing the names and identities of his spy friends: Cuneo, for example, became Ernie Cureo, a taxi driver and secret C.I.A. informant, in “Diamonds Are Forever” [1956]. And the American spy Felix Leiter [C.I.A. agent], a recurring character who appears in “Live and Let Die” [1954] and “Goldfinger” [1958], gets his first name “Felix” from the actual middle name of Fleming’s childhood friend, the British spy Ivar Bryce.

[Personal Comment: I didn’t read the Bond novels until the 1960s, when I was a teenager. At the same time, my family moved to Europe when my father joined USIA and was assigned to Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1” [9 March 2013] and “Part 2” [12 March 2013]) and I went to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

[As I was attending school in a French-speaking town, I read a couple of things in French just to see if I could. One was the translation of Thunderball—Opération Tonnerre (‘Operation thunder’) in French, published in 1962. (At this same time, I also remember watching the French-dubbed version of From Russia with Love, the 1963 Bond film. In French, it’s called Bons Baisers de Russie, which is a common idiom frequently written or printed on vacation post cards that means “Greetings from Russia,” “Best wishes from Russia,” or, as the movie has it, “With love from Russia.”  The phrase literally means “Good kisses from Russia.”)]

One of Fleming’s most enthusiastic readers was President John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63]. They met at a Washington dinner party the Kennedys were hosting in the spring of 1960, months before the election [8 November]. Kennedy was already a fan of the 007 novels. After dinner, he asked Fleming how he might handle Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba.

[Castro (1926-2016), the Cuban revolutionary, was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.  He overthrew right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-73; President of Cuba: 1940-44 and 1952-59) on 1 January 1959 and assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.

[Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.]

“Ridicule, chiefly,” Fleming replied wryly. He then outlined several Bond-like spy techniques that could “deflate” Castro’s reputation. Kennedy seemed amused by Fleming’s far-fetched suggestions. One called for American scientists shooting off a rocket intended to form a fiery cross in the sky, which might be interpreted as a heavenly sign that Castro should be replaced.

Apprised of Kennedy’s dinner conversation, the C.I.A. director Allen Dulles [1893-1969; lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI – 1953-61)] later directed scientists in the agency to see if Bond’s fictional gadgets and high-tech killing devices could be adopted.

Fleming’s novels — already moderately successful — soared in popularity with a public endorsement by the new president. In March 1961, Life magazine listed Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” [1957] as one of Kennedy’s favorite books. The Kennedys later hosted a private screening of the Bond movie “Dr. No” [novel: 1958; film: 1962; first Bond film] at the White House.

[Kennedy watched Dr. No at the White House on 28 November 1962; the movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 29 May 1963, though it had premièred in the U.K. on 5 October 1962. (Almost a year later, on 23 October 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House Family Theater to watch From Russia With Love, making it one of the very last movies the president ever saw. The Kennedys flew to Dallas on 21 November, arriving just after 11 p.m. He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on the 23rd and declared dead a half hour later.)]

Around that time, Dulles received a copy of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” from the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, with the inscription, “Here is a book you should have, Mr. Director.”

[Operation Mincemeat had at least one unexpected consequence.  In 1951, journalist, writer, and editor of books about theater Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), who was fascinated by the Mincemeat deception, pitched an idea at a cocktail party to master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) about a civilian traveling and accidentally being mistaken for a fake intelligence agent, getting saddled with a dangerous identity.

[Hitchcock bought Guernsey’s treatment and, along with screenwriter and film producer Ernest Lehman (1915-2005), used that premise of a non-existent agent to create the 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest—one of my all-time favorite flicks.  

[In the film, Cary Grant’s (1904-86) character, ordinary advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (his initials, seen on his cufflinks on the train with Eva Marie Saint [b. 1924], are “ROT,” my nickname for this blog) is mistaken for George Kaplan—a government agent who doesn’t actually exist. (Thornhill appears to have answered a page for Kaplan in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.)

[Just as in Mincemeat, British intelligence used a fabricated marine officer to misguide the Germans, the American agents in North by Northwest intentionally perpetuate the illusion of Kaplan to protect a real double agent (Saint’s character) and trap enemy operatives.

[Thomas Maier is the author of The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (Hanover Square Press [Toronto], 2025).]