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 (m. 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.”

[Scoundrel Time was the third of three memoirs by Hellman. In an interview on the Public Broadcasting Service’s The Dick Cavett Show in 1979, Mary McCarthy (1912-89; novelist, critic, and political activist) famously said of Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” McCarthy and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.]

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 (1865-1948), 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. (Webster’s autobiography Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage was published in 1972. See Part 1)]

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: 1959-74), 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. 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 blacklisted actors were John Randolph (1915-2004), Mike Kellin (1922-83). and Lou Guss (1918-2008)], 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.

[In reference to the question regarding how, if at all, the McCarthyist communist witch hunt affected the theater that came afterwards, I remind readers of the 1990 flap over the anti-obscenity clause added to NEA grant-acceptance agreements.  It was quickly declared unconstitutional because, as the federal judge stated from the bench, the clause was an “obstacle in the path of the exercise of fundamental speech rights that the Constitution will not tolerate” (UPI 9 Jan. 1991).

[Joseph Papp (1921-91; theatrical producer and director), founder and artistic director of what is now New York City’s Public Theater, labeled it a “loyalty oath” and turned down a substantial grant.  Papp had lost a job in 1958 when HUAC made him a target, so he was very sensitive to the implications.  Choreographer Bella Lewitzky (1916-2004; modern dance choreographer, dancer, and teacher), who brought the suit that led to the ruling, said, “I could not, in good moral conscience, accept the fact that a trampling on the rights of the First Amendment was good or even legal” (Los Angeles Times 15 June 1990). 

[Lewitzky compared Joe McCarthy, who “damage[ed] endless lives,” with Senator Jesse Helms (1921-2008; U.S. Senator from North Carolina: 1973-2003), who launched “destructive attacks on the NEA.”  She concluded, “All (these) incidents take down artists and art.  How many times must history repeat itself?  We must act.  Having been witness, I must act.”

[National Council on the Arts member Roy Goodman (1930-2014), a New York state senator from New York City (1969-2002) and arts patron, called the clause “a loyalty oath reminiscent of the McCarthy era” of anti-communist witch hunts (Deseret News [Salt Lake City, UT] 4 Aug. 1990).  Lloyd Richards (1919-2006; Canadian-American theater director and actor), then dean of the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) and a council member, said, “Fear has been injected into the arts community and threatened to transform the N.E.A. into a ‘National Endowment for the Agreeable’” (New York Times  4  Aug. 1990).  This was nearly 40 years after the HUAC-McCarthy era.

[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 (m. 1942-85)], Zero Mostel [1915-77], Jack Gilford [1908-90], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76], J. Edward Bromberg [1903-51], and John Garfield [1913-52] were listed, as were composers Leonard Bernstein [1918-90] and Aaron Copland [1900-90] and folk singer Pete Seeger [1919-2014]. Playwrights Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman [1905-84], and Arthur Miller were named, as well as playwright/directors Garson Kanin [1912-99; husband of Ruth Gordon  (m. 1942-85)], Marc Connelly [1890-1980], and Arthur Laurents [1917-2011], and directors Martin Ritt [1914-90], Abe Burrows [1910-85], and Joseph Losey [1909-84].

[Many of the names above and elsewhere in this installment of “The Blacklist” appear with more detail in Part 2.]

Under each person’s name there was a list of the organizations that called their loyalty to the United States into question. Anything remotely left-wing was fair game, including participation in an annual May Day parade celebrating workers [1 May is European Labor Day and was a major holiday in communist and socialist countries], or supporting members of the Hollywood Ten. Choreographer Helen Tamiris [1902-66], the director of the Federal Dance Project in the 1930s and a 1950 Tony Award winner [1950, for her choreography in Touch and Go (1949)], was accused among other things of being a sponsor of the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee. Director Margaret Webster was targeted for 14 progressive causes she supported, among them having signed a letter urging the abolition of HUAC. Underneath the name of poet and playwright Langston Hughes [1901-67; poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist] were 40 organizations, along with the accusation that his ironic poem “Goodbye Christ” was “a typical example of vicious and blasphemous propaganda Communists use against religion.” And many theatre artists were targeted for having sent telegrams of congratulations to the Moscow Art Theatre on its 50th anniversary.

[The Hughes poem noted above was published in The Negro Worker (November/December 1932). The publication was an international communist newspaper published from 1928 to 1937. It served as the primary media organ for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, an organization formed by the Red International of Labor Unions and the Communist Third International (Comintern).]

At the end of the pamphlet, the organizations themselves were listed and their supposed subversiveness identified. The Congress of American Women, part of an international organization that worked to improve child welfare and women’s rights, was cited as “one of the most potentially dangerous of the many active Communist fronts.” The League of Women Shoppers, a consumer advocacy group that promoted social justice and fought racial discrimination, was described as an organization “whose chief purpose was to create feminine support in labor disputes.”

The anti-labor vehemence of these guilt-by-association lists begs the question: what were unions doing to support their members during this ordeal? The answer is that the film, radio, and television unions were doing nothing––or worse. The Screen Writers Guild [formed in 1933; in 1954, became the Writers Guild of America, West and the Writers Guild of America, East] and the Directors Guild of America refused to support their members during the prosecution and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) adopted a new rule: members who pleaded the Fifth Amendment at HUAC’s hearings so as not to incriminate themselves––refusing to answer whether they were, or had ever been, in the Communist Party––were assumed to be Communists and suspended or expelled from the union. The board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) published a statement saying that members of the Communist Party “should be exposed for what they are––enemies of our country and our form of government. It is not the province of the Guild Board to decide what is the best method for carrying out this aim.”

[“Pleading the Fifth” refers to a person’s right under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution not to “be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Specifically, it means invoking the privilege against self-incrimination, allowing individuals to refuse to answer questions or provide evidence that could subject them to criminal liability.]

At first, Actors’ Equity Association followed SAG’s lead and even used some of the same “enemies of our country” language in its own published statement. But in 1951, after Variety announced that HUAC was “getting ready to switch its emphasis from Hollywood to Broadway,” some Equity members resolved to take a different stand. The membership at the October quarterly meeting in New York passed a strongly worded resolution saying that the “blacklisting of one actor in any area of the Entertainment Industry threatens the security of all actors and, indeed, jeopardizes the very existence of our Association.”

Equity’s Council was required by its By-laws to consider this resolution, and though it was hotly debated in a Council meeting two weeks later, it was eventually passed. The final resolution was considerably watered down from the membership meeting draft, but it did state that Actors’ Equity “condemns the practice of ‘blacklisting’ in all its forms,” and promised to aid members in getting a fair and impartial hearing if they faced charges. The following year, Equity succeeded in getting this language into its contracts with the Broadway League and other producers, and its members also formed an anti-blacklist committee––thereby becoming the only performing artists’ union to take a stand against the anti-democratic behavior of the federal government and the vigilante blacklisters. (SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (formerly Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers )] was not founded until 1959. See Part 2.)

Theatre was mostly exempt from the insidious Red Channels-type blacklisting that so affected film, television, and radio because its audiences didn’t care about the political affiliations of the actors, directors, and playwrights whose work they wanted to experience. At least one vigilante blacklister found this intolerable, writing an article that spewed out names while asking in frustration, “When will the theatre-going public get wise to the con game being operated in New York’s Great Red Way?”

If the theatre-going public never “got wise” to Broadway turning “Red,” a few nervous producers did. At least one director, Joseph Losey, was not hired for a job (directing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) because of his suspected Communist membership. And even Equity took a step back from its stand against blacklisting when its membership felt it necessary to vote to expel any member who’d been proven––by due process––to be a current member of the Communist Party.

CAPITULATION

HUAC’s new focus on Broadway was preceded by several years of FBI investigations of well-known theatre artists who also worked in film. In 1950, choreographer Jerome Robbins [1918-98], whose celebrated work on Broadway and with the New York City Ballet was beginning to lead to film offers, was informed by television host Ed Sullivan [1901-74] that his suspected Communist membership in the 1940s made it necessary to rescind an invitation to appear on his show. Sullivan told Robbins that his past affiliations could harm his career and urged him to “confess” to local FBI agents; he may also have suggested that he would divulge his homosexuality if he didn’t comply.

[HUAC and McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations linked the “Lavender Scare” to the “Red Scare” by labeling LGBTQ people potential security risks due to vulnerability to blackmail.

[Sullivan actively supported Cold War anticommunism by enforcing the entertainment industry's blacklist. Despite his own statement the he “never asked a performer his religion, his race or his politics” (“My Story,” Colliers Magazine 14 Sept. 1952), in the early 1950s, he routinely consulted the editors of Counterattack to vet his guests and ensure they were “cleared” of any leftist or pro-communist affiliations before appearing on his show.

[To get back on television or stay on the air, many blacklisted stars had to rely on conservative figures like Sullivan to help clear their names. For instance, Sullivan published a statement by jazz singer Lena Horne (1917-2010) in his New York Daily News column in 1951, where she condemned communist agitation to help make herself eligible for television work again.

[Despite his early compliance, Sullivan occasionally used his power to protect controversial figures. Later in the decade and into the 1960s, Sullivan sometimes pushed back against political pressure, famously defying CBS and FBI warnings in 1967 to allow blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show (1948-71).]

Robbins met twice with the FBI in New York, confirming his brief Communist membership and agreeing to appear before HUAC if called. He even said he would be willing to identify others who were in the Party with him but he expressed reservations about “smearing people whose activities I had no knowledge of for the past three to six years.” He then left on a European tour with the New York City Ballet, and when Sullivan published a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “Tip to Red Probers: Subpena [sic] Jerome Robbins,” he stayed overseas for some months afterwards on the advice of his lawyer. His letters from that time even suggest that he considered becoming an ex-patriate to avoid having to testify before HUAC.

In early 1952, stage and film director Elia Kazan [1909-2003] was called before the Committee in a private session. He too was candid about his own brief membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s when he was an actor with the Group Theatre, but he was not required to name names. But his contract with Twentieth Century Fox was up for renewal, and he was told by one of its producers that unless he identified other former Communist Party members to the Committee he would never work as a film director again. Kazan began to experience chest pains, hand tremors, and sleepless nights as he agonized over what to do, eventually turning his agitation against the Communist Party, which he had left in 1936 over his refusal to try to persuade the Group Theatre to produce plays with overt Communist propaganda. He felt he had been humiliated at a Party meeting and had remained bitter ever since.

“I was against them all,” he wrote many decades later. “I began to measure the weight and worth of what I was giving up, my career in films, which I was surrendering for a cause I didn’t believe in.” (Of course, the “cause” he’d be giving up his film career for would not have been Communism, but the ability of his friends and colleagues to make a living.) Kazan directed all the blame for his situation at the Communist Party and none at HUAC, apparently rationalizing (as many did at the time) that if a democratic government behaved in an anti-democratic way, it was within its rights to do so. But others deplored HUAC’s “contempt for basic human rights,” in the words of Arthur Miller, and laid the blame for the blacklist squarely at the feet of the federal government.

[The quotation (and those below) from the director is from Elia Kazan: A Life (Knopf, 1988), his autobiography.]

Kazan returned to HUAC in April 1952 and gave the Committee eight names. (For good measure, he went on to talk about all the plays and films he’d directed, describing how––as he said of one musical––they were “non-political but full of American tradition and spirit.”) He then tried to hold off the inevitable recriminations from the theatre community by taking out an explanatory ad in the New York Times [“A STATEMENT by Elia Kazan,” 12 April 1952: 7]––a defense that was poorly received and seen as self-serving. His secretary at the Actors Studio quit in protest, people he knew crossed the street to avoid him, and he received many letters, some of them anonymous, condemning what he had done. One such letter concluded, “I cannot sign my name because you hold an economic whip over those of us who are only actors.”

Elia Kazan resumed his successful career in both theatre and film but was disturbed by his own actions for the rest of his life. He speculated in his 1988 memoir that as the child of Greek immigrants, he might have been consumed by the need to prove his own patriotism. “What I’d done was correct but was it right?” he wrote. “No one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged. I did not. Here I am thirty-five years later, worrying over it.”

Kazan’s testimony cost him his working and personal relationship with Arthur Miller, whose early plays All My Sons [1947] and Death of a Salesman [1949] he had directed: Miller collaborated with other directors on his 1950s plays The Crucible [1953; staged by Jed Harris (1900-79)] and A View from the Bridge [1955; directed by Martin Ritt], both of which explore the human costs of informing on others. But Miller never explicitly condemned Kazan, and he always kept his anger directed at the perpetrators––HUAC and the vigilante blacklisters––rather than at their victims. Decades later, in his memoir, Miller lamented the futility of Kazan’s capitulation to HUAC. “Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself?” he asked. “What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?”

[Quotations from Arthur Miller are from Timebends.]

Writing from Israel in the spring of 1952, Jerome Robbins asked in a letter, “What is the news––& what have been the repercussions of Kazan’s statement?” When he himself was finally called before HUAC in May 1953, he talked about his reasons for joining the Communist Party––because of its stance against “minority prejudice” and anti-Semitism [Robbins, born Jerome Rabinowitz, was Jewish]––and why he left it several years later over its treatment of artists as “puppets” expected to insert Communist propaganda into their work. Then, with very little prompting, he went on to name seven of his colleagues from that time as having been members of the Party as well.

His demeanor when testifying “was so compliant that his appearance had about it the aura of social blackmail” (according to Naming Names [Viking Press, 1980], Victor Navasky’s [1932-2023; journalist, editor, and author] definitive account of the blacklist era), leading to speculation in the theatre and dance community that he might have cooperated so fully with HUAC for fear of being outed. At the hearing, when Representative Clyde Doyle [1887-1963; United States Representative from California: 1945-47 and 1949-63] asked him to explain his motives, observing that “some other people, who claim to be artists or authors or musicians, would put you down as a stool pigeon,” this exchange ensued:

Robbins: I’ve examined myself. I think I made a great mistake in entering the Communist Party, and I feel I am doing the right thing as an American.

Doyle: Well, so do I . . . You are in a wonderful place, through your art, your music, your talent . . . to perhaps be very vigorous and positive in promoting Americanism in contrast to Communism. Let me suggest that you use that great talent which God has blessed you with to put into ballet in some way, to put into music in some way, that interpretation.

Robbins: Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for its [sic] American quality particularly.

Doyle: I realize that but let me urge you to even put more of that in it, where you can appropriately.

Jerome Robbins’s career continued unabated in theatre and he began to work in film as well. But like Kazan, he found that many of his colleagues and friends were outraged by his compliance with HUAC’s request for names. Even his family was appalled: his father told his sister that rather than become an informer, Robbins should have given up his prospects in film, television, and even theatre. “He could always open a dancing school,” he said.

Robbins was haunted by what he had done for the rest of his life. Years later, in his notes for an autobiographical play, he wrote that he had capitulated to HUAC not so much because he was afraid of his sexual identity becoming known, but because of his lifelong insecurity about being the son of Jewish immigrants. He had always experienced “terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments, would be taken away.” In front of HUAC, he believed, “I panicked and crumbled and returned to that primitive state of terror––the façade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.”

[Robbins’s statement above is apparently from journal entries he made in the early 1990s for a play called The Poppa Piece that was to be an autobiographical play with dialogue that explored not only his anguish over the HUAC interview, but his family history as well. The Poppa Piece was never completed and its only “performances” were private experimental workshop sessions.]

Author’s Note: Sources consulted in the writing of this article include biographies and memoirs of the theatre artists discussed, plus three indispensable books: Naming Names by Victor Navasky, a comprehensive narrative published in 1980; Broadway and the Blacklist by K. Kevyne Baar, which details the actions of Actors’ Equity and other unions; and The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro, a 2024 book about HUAC’s targeting of the Federal Theatre Project.

[Because of its length, I’ve had to break this article into two parts.  Part two of “The Blacklist” will be posted on Friday, 3 July.  Please come back to ROT for the conclusion of this report.

[Mary B. Robinson is a stage director, teacher, and writer who has directed more than 70 productions in New York City and around the country, taught directing at NYU and Brooklyn College, and written the books To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater and Directing Plays, Directing People: A Collaborative Art.  She served for 15 years on the Executive Board of SDC.]

More On Theatrical Intimacy

[On 26 May, I posted an article on Rick On Theater entitled “A growing theater trend: The art of staging love” by Matthew J. Palm of the Orlando Sentinel.  When I first saw the article, it was the first I heard of theatrical intimacy designers, the name of the position Palm used in his article.  I did a little poking about the ‘Net and discovered that it was, indeed, “a growing trend.”  Some months later, I got an e-mail from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  SDC was getting on board with this new concern, growing out of the #MeToo movement. 

[Then a few weeks later, I got my copy of SAG-AFTRA, the member magazine for the film and television union.  In it was also an article on the same subject.  (SDC uses the title “intimacy choreographer” for the job Palm had written about, and SAG-AFTRA calls it “intimacy coordinator,” but the responsibility is the same.)

[I’m posting both the SDC e-mail, which arrived in my inbox on 23 July, and the un-credited SAG-AFTRA article, from the summer issue that arrived earlier this month, because I think this is an important move on the part of the professional entertainment industry—and I applaud the unions for getting out in front of the need and engaging their memberships in the issue.]

“Stage Directors And Choreographers Society & Intimacy Choreography”

[SDC, formerly known as Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers or SSDC (until 2009), was established in 1959, representing theatrical directors and choreographers, working on Broadway and on National tours, Off-Broadway, and in various resident, regional, stock, and dinner theatres throughout the United States.]

July 23, 2019

Dear Members and Associate Members,

As theatre artists and organizations encounter a changing discourse around staging sexual content and intimate moments, initiatives that provide awareness of the issues and positively shift our language and practices are essential in creating a safer and more empowered industry. We believe it is a part of SDC’s job to educate our Members on why the field of intimacy choreography has emerged and provide resources for building higher sensitivity and awareness around what is needed to ensure a context of consent in all rehearsal rooms. SDC recognizes that every project will need different resources and every director builds a rehearsal room in their own way.

Our approach, which will roll out over the next few months, is one of in-depth education that provides many paths and possibilities to staging intimacy versus mandating or endorsing a singular policy. That is not our place. But we do want to give directors and choreographers the tools for successfully grappling with intimacy onstage in our current ‘me too’ world and in doing so begin to set some best practices and standards. We deeply respect each individual Member’s unique approach to their craft, and we sincerely appreciate the emergence of intimacy choreography and support all artists to work purposefully and intentionally when it comes to issues of consent and sexual safety onstage, whether that be with an intimacy choreographer or not. 

To provide a wealth of information and resources to our Members, we will be creating an online and offline library where directors encountering sexual content or looking for guidance around intimacy staging may go. If you stage your own intimacy, SDC will offer you access to helpful language to assist you in creating the context for artists to speak up and actively set boundaries. If you want to learn more directly about the work of intimacy professionals, we will have information about what the field is, how it can help you, and where you can learn more. SDC will continue to provide our Members with resources for getting to know the community of intimacy choreographers and how to begin a collaborative dialogue with them.  And finally, we will develop resources to help Members navigate and negotiate the addition of an intimacy choreographer onto the collaborative team, whether requested by you, your employer, or an actor.  Everyone needs access to all the tools, even if they use them differently

Intimacy Choreography, A Vital & Emerging Field

In 2006, the field of intimacy choreography emerged primarily out of academic institutions as a training tool and research field for stage artists. This scholarly work then evolved into organizations outside the higher education field, which offer tools, education, consulting, and comprehensive resources for staging theatrical intimacy. The two primary organizations who offer training and who choreograph intimacy are Intimacy Directors International (IDI) and Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE). In collaboration with specific intimacy choreography organizations, Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) trains their choreographers in staging sexual violence. Many of these seasoned and trusted fight directors are now crossing over into intimacy choreography.

At the core of intimacy choreography is the use of a more formalized vocabulary and practice for staging intimacy or scenes of a sexual nature. The protocols of intimacy choreography give performers a common vocabulary that allows them to communicate with each other about the work they are doing and to define boundaries. There is a practice, a codified set of guidelines, that makes the process less intimidating and gives artists more agency in their own work.

Intimacy choreographers are experts in conversations of power and consent in any space where sexual content is being rehearsed. They aim to create cultures where artists are empowered to tell the clearest story possible without violating their own personal boundaries. And they ensure that throughout a run, the actors are continuing to have an open dialogue about the sexual staging, renewing consent and opening conversations to address the live and ever-changing nature of the theatre.

Techniques used by intimacy choreographers include: teaching languages of initial consent and renewal of consent, contact improvisation, checking in and out (making a ritual of intimacy, so actors have a mental separation of the work from their daily lives), and initiating channels for actors to communicate openly through the process about their experience. All of these tools give artists more agency to only agree to situations they feel physically and emotionally safe engaging in while continuing to respect the creative team and their process of telling a specific and compelling story.

With increased public awareness and discourse on sexual harassment and consent, many theatres, universities, and leaders in our field have felt a need to respond directly. Our field is addressing a critical need to improve the working conditions of our industry, and SDC is taking action as well.

Where We Stand

SDC believes that each director should have the freedom to tell the story they want to tell in the way they want to tell it. And we recognize a growing need in our industry to dismantle abusive power structures and respond to a tremendous outpouring of concern about how, on and off stage, we engage appropriately with one another. We look forward to leading the discourse around intimacy direction and providing vital resources for directors to uphold ethical practices and accomplish their best work.

With more resources to stage intimacy, we hope to give directors concrete tools to set-up systems in the rehearsal room and beyond. When actors are unified by a director around a specific language of consent, they are less likely to take actions that will put their fellow actors at risk. This shared awareness and work will ensure that stage intimacy continues to be consensual, even when directors have left the run.

“Uncomfortable” is not “unsafe.” SDC’s goal is to provide resources for safety. We understand that art can and often must be emotionally and physically challenging. We encourage our directors to make their most daring and rigorous work. And we believe that exciting and influential art can and should be done in spaces where consent and boundaries are firmly understood. With our comprehensive resources, our repository of points of view and research, we aim to give every director the support they need to build more awareness around issues of intimacy and create their own culture of open dialogue and consent.

While our comprehensive library is coming soon, CLICK HERE [SDC Member Portal] for immediate information about intimacy choreography and to share with us your experiences and needs on this topic. We look forward to being in dialogue with you, our Members and leaders of the theatre community, about this vital and ongoing issue.

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, President

John Rando, Executive Vice President

Michael John Garcès, First Vice President

Michael Wilson, Treasurer

Evan Yionoulis, Secretary

Seret Scott, Second Vice President

Leigh Silverman, Third Vice President

*  *  *  *

“Safety, Dignity & Integrity:

SAG-AFTRA to Standardize Guidelines for Intimacy Coordinators”

[This article appeared in SAG-AFTRA 8.2 (Summer 2019),  published quarterly by SAG-AFTRA, Los Angeles, Califormia.  The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, known as SAG-AFTRA, is the union that represents film and television actors, journalists, radio personalities, recording artists, singers, voice actors, and other media professionals worldwide.  The organization was formed in 2012 following the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG – created in 1933) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (created in 1937 as the American Federation of Radio Artists [AFRA], becoming AFTRA in 1952 after merger with the Television Authority).]

SAG-AFTRA has announced that it will collaborate with Alicia Rodis, the associate director and cofounder of Intimacy Directors International (IDI), the intimacy coordinators with IDI and other trained providers to standardize, codify and implement guidelines for on-set intimacy coordinators.

The guidelines will establish new, relevant policies for nudity and simulated sex and other hyper-exposed work; define the duties and standards for intimacy coordinators on productions; and specify acceptable training, vetting and qualifications of intimacy coordinators. Intimacy coordinators provide coaching for actors performing intimate scenes and ensure that proper protocols are followed while they are at their most vulnerable.

“Our goal is to normalize and promote the use of intimacy coordinators within our industry,” said SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris, adding, “Intimacy coordinators provide an important safety net for our members doing hyper-exposed work. At a time when the industry still needs to make great changes, our initiative will ensure the safety and security of SAG-AFTRA members while they work, and it respects the boundaries of actors.”

Added National Executive Director David White, “These specifically implemented guidelines will allow productions to run more efficiently while the specialized support empowers both cast and crew. We look forward to working with our industry partners and allies to ensure these guidelines work for our members and others on set. Many productions are already using intimacy coordinators, so it is imperative to codify and standardize the work to best benefit SAG-AFTRA members and the industry as a whole.”

SAG-AFTRA’s efforts are not just limited to on-set work. The union is committed to defending the rights and dignity of its members on the job, while pursuing work and in the public sphere. It has elevated the conversation on sexual harassment and abuse through its public policy advocacy efforts, including several pieces of legislation and by hosting a groundbreaking panel discussion on image-based sexual abuse, such as “deepfake” non-consensual sex scenes.

The union continues to pursue its goal to change the culture of harassment and abuse in the industry once and for all. Over the past year and a half in particular, SAG-AFTRA has made great strides toward this vision, starting with the rollout last February of the Four Pillars of Change framework for confronting harassment and advancing equity. This comprehensive initiative strengthens protections for members and holds productions to high standards of conduct through new rules and guidelines, enhanced education and resources, and public policy advocacy.

Introduced early last year, Code of Conduct Guideline No. 1 calls for an end to professional meetings and auditions in high-risk locations such as hotels and private residences, and encourages members to bring a support peer to auditions and meetings where safety may be a concern. SAG-AFTRA has since codified Code of Conduct Guideline No. 1 into the Netflix, Commercials and Network Television Code contracts, along with provisions that provide explicit personal harassment protections.

In collaboration with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation and The Actors Fund, SAG-AFTRA has expanded existing intervention tools and survivor support services. At SAG-AFTRA, more than 100 first- and rapid-responder staff have been trained across the organization, including specialized assessment and intervention training for field representatives. Additional experts have been brought on for intake and case management of complaints, and the union’s long-running 24/7 safety hotline has evolved to include a specialized trauma hotline for members who are experiencing, or who have experienced, sexual harassment or assault.

In addition, SAG-AFTRA is leading a proactive legislative agenda at the federal and state levels that expands and strengthens sexual harassment laws, mandates training for nonsupervisory staff, aims to dismantle the legal barriers to reporting misconduct, extends protections to workers outside of a traditional employment relationship, prohibits the use of nondisclosure agreements in employment agreements, and targets image-based sexual abuse and on-set coercion.

In California, for example, SAG-AFTRA supported the passage of Senate Bill 1300, which prohibits an employer from requiring an individual to sign away their rights under the state anti-discrimination and anti-harassment law in exchange for a raise or as a condition of employment. The law also prohibits employers from requiring an employee to sign any documents that deny an employee’s right to disclose information about unlawful acts in the workplace, including sexual harassment. Senate Bill 224 expanded sexual harassment protections to explicitly prohibit sexual harassment in certain business relationships that exist outside of the employer-employee legal structure, and Senate Bill 820 prohibited secrecy provisions in settlement agreements following sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination.

In New York, the union supported the successful passage of several bills over a twoyear period. Senate Bill 6577 adjusted the statute of limitations for second- and third-degree rape from 5 years to 20 and 10 years, respectively; enhanced damages to include punitive damages and attorney fees in employment discrimination cases; and lowered the “severe and pervasive” standard in sexual harassment cases that denies many victims recourse. Senate Bill 4345 made it a second-degree felony to coerce someone to appear nude in a film. New York state and city have both broadened the statute of limitations for filing sexual harassment claims from one year to three years and have expanded sexual harassment training requirements to nonsupervisors, an essential tool to address the harassment that can occur among co-workers or co-stars.

Together, these victories take on the culture of silence that protects abusers and reflect an evolving understanding of workplace harassment and abuse. Yet, despite measurable progress, there is more work to be done.

When it comes to sexually explicit material, performers should control the use of their images. Unfortunately, sophisticated, free digital technology enables creators to depict an individual as engaging in virtually any activity without their consent or participation, including nude performances and realistic sex acts. While this technology is often used to make deepfake porn, mainstream filmmakers have also used it to create digitized performances of actors without their consent. This technology is just one example of the challenges the union faces in protecting performers from image-based sexual abuse.

In May, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, joined SAG-AFTRA for a panel discussion on how deepfake technology can be weaponized to harass and defame individuals, spread misinformation and undermine national security. Moderated by NBC4 anchor Colleen Williams with an introduction by Carteris, the panel featured White, digital forensics expert Hany Farid, law professor Mary Anne Franks, and SAG-AFTRA members and activists Alyssa Milano and Heidi Johanningmeier.

To address the growing threat to members, SAG-AFTRA sponsored California Senate Bill 564, introduced by state Sen. Connie Leyva, which would ban the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual digitally created sex scenes and nude performances, including deepfakes. The first of its kind, this legislation would give individuals reasonable time to decide before consenting to a digitized intimate scene and the right to sue creators where no consent was obtained at all. SB 564 passed with unanimous support, only to unfortunately be shelved in the Senate Appropriations Committee a few weeks later. SAG-AFTRA continues to pursue avenues in Sacramento that would ensure these protections for members.

SAG-AFTRA also supports H.R. 2896, known as the SHIELD Act, a federal bipartisan bill that would prohibit the intentional disclosure of intimate images that the subject intended to be private, often referred to as “revenge porn.” Performers, especially women, are frequent targets of this misconduct and are at risk of having their cell phones hacked or sensitive behind-the-scenes footage leaked. The bill was introduced in May by Reps. Jackie Speier and John Katko, with support from Sen. Kamala Harris. At a press conference that day, SAG-AFTRA member and activist Amber Heard, a survivor of such a nonconsensual disclosure, spoke about the public humiliation she experienced, and White voiced the need for legal remedies.

As the work unfolds, SAG-AFTRA will continue to work with industry stakeholders, subject-matter experts, lawmakers and members to secure the right to work safely and with respect, dignity and integrity.

_______

REPORT: If you believe you have experienced workplace harassment or unlawful discrimination, call your union at (855) SAG-AFTRA / (855) 724-2387 and press 1.

FOR AFTER-HOURS EMERGENCIES: (844) SAFER SET / (844) 723-3773 IF YOU ARE IN IMMEDIATE DANGER, DIAL 911 TO CONTACT LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.

These numbers are always available on the back of your membership card, the Help Center on the sagaftra.org website and on your member app.

SUPPORT: For workplace harassment support services, including counseling and referrals, call the number below for the office nearest you. This service is provided in partnership with SAG-AFTRA, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation and The Actors Fund.

The Actors Fund, Los Angeles (323) 933-9244, ext. 455 • intakela@actorsfund.org

The Actors Fund, New York City (212) 221-7300, ext. 119 • intakeny@actorsfund.org

The Actors Fund, Chicago (312) 372-0989 • shaught@actorsfund.org