Letters

HUAC

How It's Used

“As fascism advanced in Europe, there were many in Hollywood going over to 'the side of the angels', some of them travelling alongside, a few actually inside the Communist party. Davis was a long way from joining the party, but she was a 'premature anti-fascist', selling war bonds for Roosevelt. When the war did finally arrive, she and John Garfield set up the Hollywood Canteen, a club for soldiers waiting to go to fight. Cary Grant donated a piano and Duke Ellington played it; Crosby and Sinatra sang; Dietrich, Lamarr, Gable and Crawford played hostess. A uniform got you in the door and fed for free; black and white mingled on the dancefloor (when there was trouble Davis said, 'we played the "Star-Spangled Banner" and that would stop it'); the rich and famous washed dishes and scrubbed the floors.

“It was just the kind of utopian activity that provoked the right into associating antifascism with communism. The club closed in 1945, and within two years the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities was sitting in Hollywood. Garfield was called as a witness and refused to name names, but repented in writing. Davis didn't join the campaign against the HUAC (led by Bogart, who later recanted, signing away his dignity in a hotel room). But, a decade later, she made Storm Centre, the first film to depict what was happening under McCarthy. Based on the true story of a librarian dismissed for refusing to remove communist material, it wasn't a very good film, but it showed, as the words inscribed on her cigarette case said, that ‘an actress is more than a woman’.”

“Herb Packer's appointment to the Stanford law school faculty was controversial before he set foot on campus. It was 1958, the height of the Cold War. He had been hired not only to teach but also to head a project backed by a $25,000 grant from the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, considered a liberal folly by Stanford's top ranks, including powerful alumnus Herbert Hoover.

“Packer's project was a legal post-mortem of testimony given by former American communists, including Whittaker Chambers, during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hoover believed the project was intended to clear alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss (it didn't), but he was unable to put a stop to it.”

“Every time you go to a cinema, you should remember the acronym HUAC. More importantly, film-makers should have those letters engraved on their hearts. It is now more than 60 years since they seemed to represent a death sentence for the movies. The worrying thing is that, subtly, it could all be happening again.

“HUAC stood for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which dedicated itself to rooting out what were quaintly known as reds under the beds. Any movie—or moviemaker—seen as vaguely communist, even just for associations with organisations bearing the word 'peace', was blacklisted. Film projects with themes that the committee did not like never got made. Hollywood was a convenient target—because every time a prominent film-writer or a film star was brought before HUAC, camera bulbs flashed and the newspapers had pictures of them trying to answer the question 'Are you now or have you ever been a communist?' It was wonderful publicity for a committee made up of congressman demagogues—including Richard Milhous Nixon—whose big dream seemed to be to make the Cold War grow hot.”

“HUAC Is Back? Today the House Un-American Activities Committee is best remembered as an early proving ground for a young Rep. Richard M. Nixon and for giving us the 'Hollywood blacklist' (often erroneously attributed to Sen. Joseph McCarthy). The committee changed its name in 1969 and formally dissolved in 1975—but to judge by an op-ed in USA Today, HUAC may be back.

"The article is written by Steny Pelosi (sic) and Nancy Hoyer (sic), the two top House Democrats. Its title: '"Un-American" Attacks Can't Derail Health Care Debate.' By 'un-American,' the duo seem to mean 'rude': These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views—but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.”

“Dr. Fisher's book makes it clear that Mr. Schulberg had long been engaged with the story—based on a 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the journalist Malcolm Johnson—of the overpowering corruption and violence on the West Side docks. A charismatic Jesuit priest, the Rev. John M. Corridan, was struggling to win the cooperation of disenchanted longshoremen. Mr. Schulberg was particularly taken with a sermon Father Corridan gave called 'Christ in the Shape-Up,' and he copied it almost verbatim in the riveting speech given by the film's Father Barry, played by Mr. Malden.

“Some mysteries remain. Curiously, Mr. Schulberg never asserted that he had written the screenplay before he testified. Mr. Fisher thinks he simply forgot. The new revelation also touches on Mr. Kazan. In pugnacious fashion, Mr. Kazan often asserted that he directed the film the way he did to refute critics of his 1952 HUAC testimony. But Dr. Fisher takes a different view. ‘Kazan said he did the movie to tell his critics to go to hell, but the fact was the screenplay had already been written,’ he said.”

Links