Ryskind Destroys Romantic Notions of a ‘Noble’ Blacklisted Ten

• Allan Ryskind, Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Regnery, 2015, 506 pages, $29.99.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, came to Hollywood in 1947 and persecuted 10 of the most important figures in the American movie industry.

That’s the official story contemporary readers may have heard, endlessly repeated in books, articles, and documentaries with “Inquisition” and “McCarthyism” in the title. Trouble is, as the late espionage expert Herbert Romerstein noted, the official story is wrong on all points. Senators are not part of House committees, and McCarthy did not become alarmist about Communism until 1950, three years after the first HCUA hearings on Hollywood. And the famous “Hollywood Ten” were far from the most important figures in the movie industry. As Billy Wilder quipped, only a few of them were even talented. The rest were just unfriendly, as Hollywood Traitors author Allan Ryskind, editor-at-large for Human Events, knows full well.

Ryskind grew up in Hollywood, son of screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the only openly anti-communist group in town a time when the Communist Party practically ran the place. Allan Ryskind knows more about this than many readers will want to learn, but Hollywood Traitors is strong on its central theme. The blacklisted screenwriters were not, as often portrayed, misguided liberals and noble patriots, persecuted by evil right-wingers. They were all Communist Party members and servile Stalinists who did what they were told. When Stalin struck his alliance with Adolf Hitler in 1939, all American Communists went along with the party line, and the Hollywood troops served with great zeal.

A primary example is Dalton Trumbo, wealthy screenwriter of “Kitty Foyle,” “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Exodus,” and other films. He wrote The Remarkable Andrew, a novel, during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin and Hitler were allies. The book urges the United States not to aid Hitler’s victims, particularly Great Britain. Ryskind has probed the Trumbo papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society and found an unproduced script called “An American Story,” which supports the Stalinist North Korean regime of Kim Il Sung. In Trumbo’s vision, the conflict was North Korea’s war of independence.

This came at a time when many in Hollywood had left the Communist Party. Another figure who stayed in was John Howard Lawson, one of the Ten, and the party’s straw boss in the talent guilds. Ryskind was brave enough to tackle Lawson’s “Theory and Technique of Playwriting.” The idea here is that Marxists were better writers and art had to be a weapon in class struggle, otherwise it was just so much bourgeois decadence.

Writers who thought otherwise faced an inquisition at the hands of Communist Party enforcers. As Ryskind shows, that was the fate of Albert Maltz, screenwriter for “This Gun for Hire,” “Pride of the Marines,” “Two Mules for Sister Sara,” and other films, and possibly the most talented of the Hollywood Ten. Stalinst Party bosses forced Maltz to write a humiliating retraction of an article in which he had praised Trotskyist writer James Farrell, and to the end of his days Maltz defended his retraction. You can’t make up this stuff, but don’t look for it in the movies.

Alvah Bessie, screenwriter for “Northern Pursuit” and “Objective Burma!,” was probably the least talented of the Hollywood Ten. His claim to fame was fighting in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a Stalinist militia organized by the Communist Party. Ryskind provides background on this 1930s conflict, but for further reading see Between the Bullet and the Lie, by Cecil Eby, and Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell.

Ryskind’s vast cast of characters jostles with luminaries such as Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, but the author does not neglect the lower echelons. He is quite familiar with Hollywood players such as Abe Polonsky, Paul Jarrico, Jules Dassin, Norma Barzman, Waldo Salt, and others. For the most part, they remained loyal to the Communist cause, long after others had bailed. Readers might ask themselves: If these people were so wrong on something so basic, why listen to them on anything else?

Readers will welcome the material on Elia Kazan, one of the most talented directors of all time, whose “On the Waterfront” told of his struggle with the Communist Party and Stalinism. As Marlon Brando put it in the film, he was glad what he done to them. So was Roy Brewer, the Hollywood union boss who teamed with Ronald Reagan to drive the Communist Party out of town. The book includes a photo section and a helpful filmography, but Communist influence in movie content, as Ryskind shows, was “relatively small stuff.” Even so, the Stalinist legacy remains to this day. The American movie industry still hails the Hollywood Ten as heroes and pays homage to loathsome regimes such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Hollywood Traitors also provides valuable background on the broader role of the left in American history. The author charts organizations such as the League of American Writers and the American Peace Mobilization, and introduces important Cold War figures such as Jacques Duclos.

Ryskind has been around long enough to recall that left-wing Florida U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper became known as “Red” Pepper, and that Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho served as running mate to Henry Wallace on the pro-Soviet Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Students of the Cold War and Hollywood politics will prize it the most, but everybody can learn something from Hollywood Traitors.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry.