Glenn Frankel is author of High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. He will be introducing six films written by blacklisted screenwriters on Turner Classic Movies on Nov. 20 and 21.

Hollywood has never been famous for courage under fire, but 70 years ago this month it set an all-time low. And in the process it gave us an inadvertent civics lesson in the fragility of our democratic institutions that we’d be wise to study carefully as our modern political and moral crisis continues to unfold.

In late November 1947, facing pressure from a witch-hunting congressional committee and feeling the squeeze of plummeting movie ticket sales, some 80 studio executives, producers and lawyers gathered at a conference room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and established what eventually became known as the Hollywood blacklist. After two day of wrangling, they hammered out a policy statement pledging to deny employment to anyone accused of being a communist or belonging to a group supposedly advocating the overthrow of the United States government. As a first step, they fired 10 screenwriters, producers and directors who had refused to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into alleged communist infiltration of the motion picture industry.


The Waldorf Statement, issued days later, ushered in an era of political inquisition and personal betrayal. Hundreds of people lost their jobs because they were accused by someone, often anonymously, of being communists or communist sympathizers. And not just in Hollywood: The House committee and its counterpart in the Senate investigated alleged communist influence in the arts, media, colleges and universities, trade unions, the shipping industry, the civil service, the diplomatic corps and the armed services. Some were convicted of subversion under dubious laws later found unconstitutional, and thousands lost their jobs without due process. Thousands more were denied passports. The intimate personal damage to families, friends and former business partners was unquantifiable. The purge and its morbid after-effects lingered for more than a decade.

There are striking similarities between the Red Scare and our own perilous political moment. There’s no congressional roadshow touring the country today, as in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. But both eras have been defined by the rise a paranoid, populist, neo-isolationist movement of angry, disenfranchised “Americanists” who believe their country and its culture has been secretly hijacked and undermined by usurpers who need to be exposed, shamed and rooted out. Back then, it was communists, Jews and liberals; today, it’s the media, Muslims, immigrants, transgender people and other vulnerable groups who are cast as enemies of the people. Congressional hearings were the main vehicle for the Red Scare, with TV and newspapers feeding off the anti-communist frenzy; today’s vectors of populist rage are social media, cable news shows like Fox’s primetime lineup, and right-wing websites like Breitbart, Gateway Pundit and The Daily Caller. And there are direct personal links between that era and our own—President Trump, a master of false accusation and vituperative innuendo, learned much of his political brutalism at the feet of mob lawyer Roy Cohn, who in turn learned the art of the smear from his former boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the supreme con-man of the Red Scare.

What’s been largely overlooked isn’t the historical analogy—many have made the comparison—but its deeper meaning. For the blacklist became a test of our democratic institutions, both governmental and nongovernmental, and their commitment to uphold our deepest values, most especially our civil liberties—a test that by and large they failed.



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The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s was essentially a response to the New Deal of the 1930s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a progressive coalition of liberals, social democrats, trade unionists, minorities and southern segregationists that, despite its internal contradictions, held together for more than a decade. It controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for 14 years, enacting New Deal legislation over the virulent opposition of traditional Main Street Republicans, radical conservatives and right-wing populists. The isolationist right also lost the battle to keep the U.S. out of the war against Germany and Japan. Having lost both arguments, they licked their wounds, watched and waited. And after Roosevelt died, and the war’s results were less triumphant and more complex than anticipated, they came roaring back to life. Republicans took both houses of Congress in 1946 for the first time in 16 years. And one of their most effective rallying cries was fear of the communist menace.

For many Americans, communism posed an even more alarming threat than that posed by terrorists in the modern era. Communists, after all, could be anyone—neighbors, relatives, close friends. They looked and sounded like us, yet they were agents of the Soviet Union, a ruthless foreign power whose goal was to destroy the American way of life. They were the enemy within—the “masters of deceit,” in longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s chilling phrase.

“A communist is a completely transformed, unrecognizable and dedicated man,” said a spokesman for the American Legion. “While he may retain the physical characteristics of the rest of us … his mental and psychic processes might as well be from another planet.”

If communists were witches, the best way to deal with them was with a witch hunt. And the House Committee on Un-American Activities was happy to oblige. The committee, formally established in 1938 and chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, a jowly, self-promoting former small-town New Jersey mayor, conducted a roadshow of hearings around the country, starting with so-called “friendly” witnesses and then subpoenaing hostile ones. No one under investigation was allowed to cross-examine their accusers, nor examine the incriminating documents that the FBI supplied the committee. No one was allowed to consult their own lawyers during the sessions. Defiance was not just an act of bravery but of martyrdom. If you refused to cooperate and took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, you lost your job and were blacklisted. But acquiescence alone was not sufficient. To achieve redemption, witnesses were required to go through a three-step ritual of public humiliation: acknowledge their prior left-wing activities with the deepest regret, praise the committee for its important and heroic work and demonstrate the credibility of their transformation from Red to red-blooded American by naming others as subversives. The demand for names was no longer a quest for evidence, writes author Victor Navasky, “It was a test of character. The naming of names had shifted from a means to an end.”

The hearings blatantly violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. Congress is supposed to make laws, not judge the innocence or guilt of those accused of violating them. But from the start, the committee functioned as judge, jury, prosecutor and executioner. Which is why President Harry Truman, despite his administration’s own program of Red-hunting among federal employees, declared in September 1948 that “the committee is more un-American than the activities it is investigating.”

Like any compelling public show trial, the committee needed an audience, and it found one in Hollywood. It held its first public hearings into the film industry in October 1947. The result had been contempt of Congress citations for the 10 screenwriters, directors and producers, known as the Hollywood Ten, who had refused to cooperate. All had been members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s and early 40s, and most still were. At first, they had a lot of support from the film community—Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and a planeload of movie-star liberals flew from Hollywood to Washington to protest outside the committee room. Even Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, questioned the committee’s bully-boy methods.

By 1951, when the committee returned for a sequel, the atmosphere was very different. The Ten had each been convicted and sentenced to up to a year in prison, and their convictions had been upheld by the Supreme Court. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their alleged coconspirators had been arrested for stealing atomic secrets and Moscow and Washington had embarked on a nuclear arms race that lasted 40 years. By September 1951 more than 83,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed or wounded fighting against Communists in North Korea.

The truth is the Communist Party had never been very large or influential in Hollywood. It was down to perhaps 100 active members by 1951, and most of its members were political dissidents, not spies or traitors. No matter. The studios followed through on their pledge to purge anyone who refused to cooperate with Congress (or with the studios’ own internal “clearance” process).

The press played a critical role in helping the committee conduct its undue process. Partisan cheerleaders like Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, and right-wing gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons had welcomed the committee to Hollywood with a series of red-baiting columns. But the mainstream press was also a key ally. The committee scripted its hearings for maximum news coverage. Its staff steered testimony to produce newsworthy headlines each morning in time for the afternoon press, then ginned up yet another set of alleged revelations later in the day for the next morning’s papers.

The press generally reported on the hearings without embellishment or sensationalism—but also without skepticism. The allegations of so-called “friendly witnesses” were reported without question or rebuttal. Like criminal trials, congressional hearings are considered privileged forums—journalists can publish or broadcast anything said during these hearings whether true or not, without fear of being sued for libel. Most of those who were named as communists were not contacted by reporters and given the opportunity to respond to the accusations against them. “The press does not merely mirror or report the hearing; it is an indispensable part of it—like a loudspeaker on a high-fidelity sound system,” wrote committee critic Frank J. Donner.

Alan Barth, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, was one of the few mainstream journalists to object to this perversion of the press’s role of government watchdog. “The tradition of objectivity … has operated in this context to make the press an instrument of those seeking to inflict punishment by publicity,” he wrote. “Allegations that would otherwise be ignored … as groundless and libelous are blown up on front pages and given a significance out of all relation to their intrinsic merit after they have been made before a committee of Congress.” Sound familiar?

Those few journalists who wrote critically of the Red Scare eventually faced their own day of reckoning. Elizabeth Poe Kerby, who wrote an expose of the blacklist for Frontier, a small, liberal monthly magazine, and later became a researcher of a detailed study by the Fund for the Republic, a bipartisan research group funded by the Ford Foundation, was accused before the committee of being a communist sympathizer herself and the study was smeared as a red front. Mississippi Senator James Eastland’s internal security subcommittee held closed-door hearings on “Communist Party Influence in the Press,” sending 30 of its 38 subpoenas to current or former staff members at the New York Times, whose editorials had criticized both the blacklist and racist Jim Crow practices in the South. The Times issued a ringing editorial defending its right to challenge government policies, but it also pledged to fire anyone who was found to be a Communist Party member, and three employees who took the Fifth Amendment before the subcommittee were fired or forced to resign.

One by one our democratic institutions failed us. The committee far exceeded the constitutional limits of its powers; the executive branch was supine (it wasn’t until 1954 that President Dwight Eisenhower helped quietly engineer the successful effort to censure McCarthy); and the courts took a decade or more to rein in the abuses. Both political parties aided and abetted the inquisition. So did many liberals who felt trapped between a bullying committee and its dogmatic communist targets and wound up enabling the blacklist. Hollywood’s powerful Jewish community, which should have been in the front-line of defending civil liberties as a core value, by and large failed to stand up. (The man who presided over the meeting that drafted the Waldorf Statement was Mendel Silberberg, an entertainment industry lawyer who was the unofficial leader of Hollywood’s liberal Jewish community.) And journalists for the most part also failed to hold a critical spotlight to the process of repression.

The real question the 70th anniversary of the birth of the blacklist poses isn’t about Donald Trump—we already know what he is. No, it’s about us and our democratic institutions. Who exactly will stand up for civil liberties and due process? Congress, whose two houses are in the hands of the party that Trump rules? The Supreme Court, with its renewed 5 to 4 conservative majority? The hollowed-out political parties? The establishment press, which appears much more willing to hold accountable those in power than its blacklist era predecessors but wields far less influence in the age of social media?

The blacklist demonstrated just how fragile these institutions can be when under a ruthless assault. Most of them failed us then; will they do so now?