Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been….?
A.R. Thompson explores the febrile atmosphere of McCarthyism and its effects on Hollywood.
Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been….?
In 1982, during a Q&A at La Cinémathèque française, Orson Welles was asked by a young cineaste a question which mentioned the film and theatre director Elia Kazan.
Mademoiselle, you have chosen the wrong metteur en scene, because Elia Kazan is a traitor… He is a man who sold to McCarthy all his companions at a time when he could continue to work in New York at high salary. And having sold all of his people to McCarthy, he then made a film called On the Waterfront which was a celebration of the informer. And therefore, no question which uses him as an example can be answered by me.
Welles here is referring to the ‘Hollywood Blacklist’ and the overall atmosphere of persecution and red-baiting in Los Angeles from the late 40s to the later 50s. It is a jewel in the crown of Hollywood’s tainted history, glinting luridly alongside sex scandals, blackmail, political corruption and murder. If you’ve ever read the novels of James Ellroy, you will know the moral landscape I mean. It was part of the ‘Second Red Scare’ or the ‘McCarthy Era’, after Joseph McCarthy, a Republican Senator for Wisconsin. As it happens, the term McCarthyism is now considered outdated, giving the man less credit for the tactics of repression and persecution to which his name has long been attached; his part in this period is now seen in the broader context of a culture made possible by Harry Truman’s 1947 executive order 9835, know as the ‘Loyalty Order’, intended to root out political subversives (both on the Left and Right) within the US government, and the sinister and unconstitutional wiretappings and internal espionage of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
Hoover himself rose to prominence during the First Red Scare, following the 1917 revolution in Russia. The US government became convinced that the same ideals that swayed Russia from Tsarist serfdom to radical Marxism could lead to revolution in their own country. In 1919, Hoover became head of the General Intelligence Division, or Radical Division, using indexing methods he learned as an eighteen-year-old messenger for the Library of Congress. He later said of his early apprenticeship: "This job trained me in the value of collating material. It gave me an excellent foundation for my work in the FBI where it has been necessary to collate information and evidence." One of his first assignments was the ‘Palmer Raids’ which led to the arrest of 6000– and deportation of nearly 600 – socialists, communists and anarchists. The First Red Scare lasted roughly from 1919 to 1923, after which the FBI turned its attention to bootleggers and gangsters profiting violently from Prohibition. The media at the time, including Hollywood, made popular figures of both the outlaw criminals and the slick, highly trained G-Men of Hoover’s Bureau.
However, the 1930s also saw an increase in sympathy for left-leaning politics, far greater than that of the First Red Scare. The Great Depression, incidentally not caused by the Great Crash of 1929, but by ongoing deflation after WWI and the 1930 drying-up of credit in the country’s many de-centralised banks, had made apparent the underlying fragilities of capitalism. To the millions of people left destitute by large-scale unemployment, left-wing politics seemed an attractive alternative to the current system. In the meantime, Hollywood’s power was growing. The glamour of golden-age Hollywood became a welcome escape for the struggling masses. This increased popularity and the industrial scale on which films were being produced meant studio heads were required to draft in talent, especially writing and directing talent, from the world of theatre.
The 1930s was something of a high tide for the American stage; with increased federal funding as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, a whole generation of actors and directors rose to prominence on the New York stage, who would later head west and flourish in Hollywood. Elia Kazan and Orson Welles were two such examples. Welles began directing and acting for the Federal Theatre Project at the age of twenty-one, creating his own company, the Mercury Theatre. Meanwhile, Elia Kazan, also in his early twenties, was working with the Group Theatre alongside figures such as John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb and Clifford Odets, names that will recur later in this story. The New York theatre in this period grew in stature not only on account of the youth and confidence of its practitioners, but as a result of radical creative influences from Europe and Russia. Notably, the Group Theatre began promoting the Stanislav method of acting, which would later lead to the Actors’ Studio and the use of ‘method acting’, whereby performers, to attain more naturalistic performances, are encouraged to stay in character and draw from their own experience. Conversely, Orson Welles’ 1937 production of Julius Caesar and an all-black production of Macbeth in 1936 utilised set design from German Expressionism, with dramatic lighting and heightened set design.
All this was taking place as fascism was on the rise in Germany, Spain and Italy. Added to this, the increasing totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union, made for an uneasy geopolitical situation for social democracies in North America and Western Europe. Many intellectuals of the time, either too naïve or too stubborn to accept the emerging horrors of the Soviet experiment, were joining the Communist Party as the only viable means of resisting fascism in Europe, as well as confronting the inequality and growing right-wing rhetoric at home. The Group Theatre in particular shifted further to the left, to the point where figures like Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, eventually abandoned the Communist Party and the Group Theatre, on account of the former’s influence on the other. Kazan later stated:
I was instructed by the Communist unit to demand that the group be run "democratically." This was a characteristic Communist tactic; they were not interested in democracy; they wanted control. They had no chance of controlling the directors, but they thought that if authority went to the actors, they would have a chance to dominate through the usual tricks of behind-the-scenes caucuses, block voting, and confusion of issues. This was the specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had enough regimentation, enough of being told what to think and say and do, enough of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. The last straw came when I was invited to go through a typical Communist scene of crawling and apologizing and admitting the error of my ways. I had had a taste of police-state living and I did not like it.
These words were given as part of Kazan’s 1952 testimony to the House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC). During the 1940s, the American Communist Party dwindled in significance, along with other left-wing, pro-union, pro-labour groups. WWII effectively ended the Great Depression, stimulating industry and providing jobs for millions of unemployed Americans. As industry flourished, the bottom fell out of the market, ideologically speaking, for the left; capitalism didn’t seem so bad after all.
However, when the war ended, America needed a new enemy. As Norman Mailer put it: ‘Americans function best, we’re team players to an extraordinary extent…if you’re a team player, you have to have an opponent. There’s nothing more onerous than practising on a team that plays no games. So, the big game became the Cold War.’
Communism was that great new opponent. Having been a decisive ally in the fight against the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and its increasingly totalitarian regime was now seen as a threat to the capitalistic West and its ideology was once again a risk to the America’s idealistic and, thanks to the GI Bill, increasingly educated youth. The sudden existence of weapons that could destroy the entire planet, began a war of face between two great superpowers. The world, still shaken from the trauma of WWII was about to enter an age of atomic paranoia, where fear could be manufactured and profited from just like any of the other ascendent post-war industries. The irony was that the US government was stoking fear of communism when it was least posing a threat. Communism’s heyday in America was the 1930s, when the FBI was more concerned with Al Capone than Karl Marx.
The 1940s also saw Orson Welles’ short rise and fall in Hollywood. By the end of the decade Welles was an exile, struggling to fund independent productions in Europe, having been given ‘the greatest contract of all time’ by RKO for 1941’s Citizen Kane, still listed by critics as one of the finest American films of ever made. Kazan’s star seemed only to rise higher and higher from the late 40s through to the early 50s. In theatre, Kazan was responsible for introducing the world to Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and a young Marlon Brando, giving the latter what Peter O’Toole called the best lead role in twentieth-century theatre, Stanley Kowalski in Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. In film, Kazan brought Brando’s genius to a wider international public, as well as making legends of James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
By 1950, HUAC already had the names it needed. The entire infrastructure of snooping and rooting out alleged subversives was of reasonable sophistication that the subsequent hearings were, in the administrative sense, unnecessary: in other words, a show trial. The fact that these names were already known and that it was known that these names were known worked in HUAC’s favour. The absurd nature of the demands, contemptuously viewed though they were by many in Hollywood, meant those under threat of being blacklisted were more likely do so, seeing as no one would be informing on anyone not already known to the committee. The idea was to humiliate those ‘liberal decadents’ in Hollywood, a continuation from the left-leaning talent draft of the 30s, whose voice was getting too loud for some people in government’s liking. Like all repression it was not the punishment itself that was effective, but the threats surrounding that punishment.
None of this seemed to put Kazan off. On his first hearing in January 1952, he admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party, but named no names. He returned in April, at his own insistence, fully condemning his former associates, including Group-Theatre playwright Clifford Odets. This was followed by a full-page justification in the New York Times, written by Kazan himself, not only defending his actions, but compelling other Hollywood liberals to do the same. ‘Communists,’ he writes, ‘get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries. I am talking about free speech, the rights of property, rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.’ One could argue that Kazan did the wrong thing for the right reasons. There was no question that Communist nations were guilty of all he accused them. Whether that clears one’s conscience over him is down to the individual. The worst results of the blacklist were for those who refused to name names, rather than those named. The actor John Garfield’s career was effectively ended by his refusing to testify. His death, aged 39, is thought by many to be caused by the stress of his ordeal. The ‘Hollywood Ten’, writers and directors who also refused, became the spokesmen for constitutional rights. Some fared better than others. The best-known name, subject of a 2017 biopic starring Bryan Cranston, was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who spent eleven months in prison in 1950. He and the other ten were officially disallowed from working in Hollywood unless they openly condemned communism. Instead, many of the blacklisted writers worked under pseudonyms or utilised ‘fronts’, Writers’ Guild members who took the credit for the work. Many ended up writing for skid-row B-movie studios, having previously worked on prestige pictures. During this period, Trumbo contributed to the terrific cult film noir Gun Crazy (1950), with Millard Kaufman acting as front, and went on to win two Academy Awards for Best Screenplay for Roman Holiday (1953), Ian McLellan Hunter acting as front, and The Brave One (1956) under the pseudonym Robert Rich. These are arguably Trumbo’s greatest achievements as a screenwriter and one wonders if he would still be as well known today without the persecution he faced. Regardless, the effect the blacklist had on the lives and careers of those who upheld their right not to testify cannot be understated. There is a temptation to dismiss the events as a fall from grace for people of great privilege, Hollywood decadents–– one look at the YouTube comments for any of the documentaries on the subject show attitudes are less uniform now than they might have once been.
Part of the sense of betrayal by those who did testify was the notion that a united front against HUAC by figures as powerful as Elia Kazan would have embarrassed the committee sufficiently to kill the witch hunt in its shell. Kazan and his defenders argue his actions represent the individual artist’s responsibility to his art and his art alone, that for Kazan to have refused to testify would have been to deny himself to continue producing great work. Like other notorious Hollywood figures–– Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick–– the decision to detach the art from the artist is only made difficult when discussing works of genius. This is true of Elia Kazan. His films are masterpieces, his impact on American theatre indelible. He created great art. So too did Dalton Trumbo, John Garfield, Judy Holliday, Lee J. Cobb (who would later cave in and name 20 names), Ruth Gordon and Bertolt Brecht among others.
In 1999, at the 71st Academy Awards, Kazan was given that year’s Honorary Award, recognition of his lifetime’s achievements in filmmaking. The award was met with protests on the streets outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and during the ceremony his standing ovation, a number of famous figures, including Nick Nolte and Ed Harris are seen on camera refusing to stand, while Warren Beatty, Martin Scorsese and others are seen cheering all the louder.
Returning to Orson Welles in 1982, is the subtle and nuanced conclusion to his righteous outburst, words that perfectly express how we must consider figures like Kazan with or without a clear conscience. “I have to add that he is a very good director.”
