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.]