“I feel like a man who has had truckloads
of filth heaped upon him; I am now asked to struggle to my feet and talk while
more truckloads pour more filth around my head.” – John Howard Lawson
John Howard Lawson, more than anyone
else, was named twenty-eight times by the ‘friendly’ witnesses and informers,
and as the title of Gerald Horne’s book on him indicates, Lawson can be seen as
‘The Final Victim of the Blacklist’ and ‘The Dean of the Hollywood Ten’, as he
incarnates the conflicting ideologies of his period and its victimization
during the Cold War era and onwards. The director’s popularity in the
pre-Blacklist years speaks to the radical potential Hollywood had during this
period. For example, Lawson was nominated for an Academy Award for his script
of Blockade (1938) and he wrote two
popular anti-Fascist war films starring Humphrey Bogart (Action in the North Atlantic, Sahara). Lawson is also important for
his earlier theater work and his published theories on drama and the film
medium, work in and loyalty to social movements and the Communist Party, and for
unionizing labor in Hollywood and the creation of the Screen Writers Guild.
It’s
1947. In a congressional hearing room in Capitol Hill, Washington. The House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the much-publicized “epicenter of the
gathering Red Scare storm” according to Horne[1],
is interrogating John Howard Lawson regarding his Communist affiliation. Congressman
J. Parnell Thomas and his Committee ask Lawson the following questions: “Are
you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the
Communist Party?” Lawson’s rebuttal to the Committee, spoken with rage and
conviction, “The question of Communism is in no way related to this inquiry,
which is an attempt to get control of the screen and to invade the basic rights
of American citizens in all fields.” Their back-and-forth goes on. The Committee,
“We’re going to get the answer to that question, even if we have to stay here
for a week.” Lawson, “It’s unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this Committee
the basic principals of America… I’m framing my answer in the only way in which
any American citizen can frame his answer to your question.”
Lawson has a point. HUAC with its inquiry
was breaking the First and Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which
is meant to protect the rights of individuals to be able to refrain from
speaking, whether on religion or politics, and against unfair treatment in
legal processes. Lawson, and others from Hollywood, wanted to protest this
injustice. Philip Dunne, William Wyler and John Huston even created the
Committee for the First Amendment, which assembled an impressive cast, to go to
Capitol Hill to protest this injustice, but which unfortunately was prevented
from attending and speaking at the hearings – HUAC disallowed any public
statements that were not directly related to their questioning. After the
much-publicized negative portrayal of an indignant Lawson at the hearing, who
was screaming at the Committee and had to be escorted out by police, he quickly
lost many of his supporters and friends. And this would affect him even later
on in life as he quickly became, and would remain, a persona non grata in the film industry.
The ideologies of this period are
complicated. The American Communist Party (CPUSA) leading up to this era was founded
on the principals of justice, decency, fairness, equality, democratic rights,
and democratic socialism. It was nearly synonymous with serious political
engagement. Its popularity grew out of the depression and wartime efforts. It
was Stalinist, and had a strict Communist party line, though without truly knowing
of the crimes of Stalinism in Russia, which were not yet fully reported in the
United States. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle on the HUAC precursors,
“Although the year 1947, when HUAC
descended on the film industry, is widely regarded as the starting point of the
blacklist, the real roots of that scoundrel time – Lillian Hellman’s apt phrase
– can probably be found two decades earlier, in the Wall Street Crash of 1929,
which ushered in the Depression that paralyzed America.”[2]
The
Thirties, in general, was a politicized period due to the Depression, but also with
growing social causes like the Spanish Civil War and The Popular Front. But
after World War II, America was becoming more and more conservative. The
progressive ideas of the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the
populist and pro-Soviet film that it fostered along with the Office of War
Information, were now being criticized, and with the Cold War mentally in
place, HUAC viciously reacted against them. It was the Cold War and in America,
Communism was strongly associated with Russian politics, therefore
‘Un-American’. In this period even the non-Communist liberals that were in
support of the same political goals as them were ‘guilty by association’. And
the idea of political subversion, especially in Hollywood, which spoke towards
a global audience, was a frightening prospect for the American government and
population. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were investigating the ‘problem’.
Though the HUAC investigation of
Hollywood was just one aspect of it. As Lawson mentions, it was a full on
assault on the public sphere, and through Senator Joseph McCarthy the Committee
would hunt officials in the government, military, church and elsewhere. These
hearings would spiral out of control, and create an atmosphere of suspicion and
paranoia, which would also lead to a strong backlash. As the 1954 hearing
between the Military and McCarthy would attest. There McCarthy, who had been
ruthless in his self-glorifying and wrong accusations, would be censured for his
conduct that was unbecoming of a senator (this trial has been documented and
can be watched in Emile de Antonio’s Point
of Order).
Lawson
had a major position in the Hollywood division of the American Communist Party,
which made him an important target for HUAC. The Hollywood Party at the time, with
its majority of Jewish members and screenplay writers, along with spreading
messages supporting working class solidarity and global communism, also
espoused strong anti-fascist views and an opposition to anti-Semitism. Lawson had
a deep understanding of the Communist Party line, lead meetings, and was
infamous for his bullying orthodoxy (Cf. his response to Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run). The interrogation
of Lawson at the hearing was a public spectacle, which was to make an example
out of him. It was a means to vilify Lawson and to show the country the
negative face of American Communism and its subversion. Congressman Thomas was
known for making these media events into sensations, which were also a form of
self-aggrandizing promotion, and the hearing’s media presence, from all of its
journalist and photographers to its television recordings, illustrate its
public spectacle quality. Lawson during his hearing refused to answer the
Committee’s questions and was charged for speaking in contempt and for being an
obstreperous witness.
The footage of Lawson at the event
portrays him very negatively. He is escorted out of the hearing room by police to
loud audience reactions and boos. In front of more than one hundred reporters, the
hearing, a mixture of charade and theater, is chaotic and full of interruptions,
yelling and gavel pounding. The committee is there to put on a show. In front of
all of these cameras and newspapermen, Congressman Thomas and his Committee, is
there to lacerate Hollywood in general, and Lawson in specific, for its past
and current ‘Un-American’ behavior. After Lawson is escorted out, the Committee
then read a memorandum, detailing Lawson’s Communist affiliation and then cited
him for contempt. Lawson would submit a vindictive statement towards the
Committee, which was never included as a HUAC public statement, where he
defended his work and politics as a writer and American citizen. Lawson, “They
don’t want to muzzle me. They want to muzzle public opinion. They want to
muzzle the great Voice of democracy.”[3]
Neal
Gabler in An Empire of their Own discusses
Lawson in relation to his Jewish identity, early work in left-wing theater, relation
to politics, move to Hollywood, work in the Party, and eventual blacklisting. Some
of Lawson’s key themes according to Gabler includes, “Whether it was Jew versus
American, artist versus politico, intellectual versus activist or middle class
versus working class, Lawson was very much a man in between searching to be the
whole.”[4]
On Lawson’s early theater work Gabler describes Processional (1928), which is about a coal miners’ strike, as a
“didactic, fire-breathing play,” and sees in Success Story, from the Thirties, as “the classic American-Jewish
dilemma” of “a young American Jew who wants to desperately to arrive and
assimilate but who realizes, as he fulfills his ambitions, that success comes
at the experience of his deeper self and his roots.”[5]
Dorothy Healy, the chairperson of the Los Angeles Communist party, in 1934,
describes Lawson as “a tragic figure… He was a man of talent and ability, but
he was struggling so hard to prove he was not a petty-bourgeois intellectual.”[6]
And to prove his credentials, Lawson would travel to Scottsboro, Alabama to
show his support for the Scottsboro Boys, the nine black teenagers who were
(wrongly) accused of rape and whose legal case was a miscarriage of justice,
which included racism and the fabrication of witness testimonies. These
experiences deepened Lawson conviction that commitment
was essential to the artistic process. Lawson would return to Hollywood in 1937
and Gabler describes this changed man as now “articulate and brilliant, he was
now also dogmatic… He had the certitude and fervor of the converted, and his
rhetorical skills – among people, after all, who made their living with words –
were extraordinary.”[7]
In the Committee’s hearing with Bertolt
Brecht the German playwright undermined the interrogation process. Brecht would
have been included, and would have made the eventual group the Hollywood Eleven,
if he had stakes in the American film industry and had wanted to stay in the
United States. But because he would return to Europe right after his hearing, Brecht
would treat it more like a mockery than his more serious colleagues who were
fighting for their livelihood. Brecht demonstrated the committee inability to
directly cite specific examples of scenes from films as illustrating subversive
ideas. After this the Committee would be more concerned with inquiring about
the individuals specific ties to the American Communist Party.
But were the films of the blacklist
victims politically distinctive or artistically distinctive? McGilligan and
Buhle argue that, “Yet the screen work that most of the blacklistees were doing
was subtly humanist and progressive –
a subtlety largely lost on HUAC.” And they go on, “The films of the 1930s and
1940s that the Hollywood leftist were most proud of were not a transcription of
the Communist Party platform, but stories suffused with feeling for people and
their ordinary concerns.”[8]
The HUAC hearings were more a public
ritual of denunciation and self-laceration for its witnesses. The ‘friendly witnesses’
would go up and denounce their past actions and associations, and then list
their collaborators and friends who are, or have been, in the Communist Party. Sterling Hayden, years after he ‘named names’
to use Victor Navasky’s expression, wrote about his experience, and his
resentment towards his psychiatrist for encouraging him to speak,
“If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t
have turned into a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t think you have the
foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that
thing. Fuck it! And fuck you to! I’d like to take a two-page spread in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety and let go the goddamnedest
blast – let people know who the real subversives
are!” [9]
McGilligan and Buhle describe the HUAC
congressional hearings as a “dark watershed in America’s cultural history and a
stain on the national conscience.”[10]
The first ten victims, who are known collectively as the Hollywood Ten,
included actors, (seven) screenplay writers, directors and producers. They were
Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian
Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz (another screenplay writer, and leading
activist in the Party), John Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo (who, might
overshadow Lawson, as the most successful blacklisted screenwriter). They all claimed
the First Amendment and refused to answer to the Committee. HUAC and the U.S.
courts of appeal, however, disagreed and they were all found guilty of contempt
of Congress. For example, Lawson was fined $1,000 and was sentenced to twelve
months (though he only served ten) in Ashland Federal Reformatory in Kentucky in
a cell that was described to be tiny and clammy.[11]
This prosecution of members of the Communist Party could be done under the
Smith Act, which was for conspiring to advocate or teach the necessity or
desirability of forcibly overthrowing the government.
Though this 1947 hearing was only the
first HUAC investigations of the show business. It would continue onwards into
the early Fifties with major hearings in 1951 and 1952. Because of this it is worth
discussing the studio executive’s relation to HUAC. Lawson has spoken about the
animosity on the part of the producers against his unionizing of the
screenwriters and that of the creation of the Screen Writers Guild, and he
partly viewed his severe punishment as a collaboration between HUAC and the
studios to punish him for this. As Buhle and Wagner write, “No events of the
1930s and 1940s were as bitter or divisive within the industry as the
never-ending union battles.”[12]
This government ordained blacklist also legally
allowed the studios to not employ certain people, which the studio executives were
initially worried could get them into actual legal problems. Anti-Semitisms
also haunted HUAC. Six of the Hollywood Ten, those surrounding Lawson, were
Jewish. John Rankin, who was the Chairman of the Committee, was known to be a
vicious anti-Semite, and he told Eric Johnston, the President of the Motion
Picture Association of America, that Hollywood need a “house cleaning.” Gabler
hypothesizes that to appease HUAC the moguls made a blacklist of studio talent,
which help rid Hollywood, an industry founded by Jewish-Americans, of their
Jewish intellectual, therefore surrendering their control of the industry. As
well there are anecdotes from studio executives privately acknowledging their
general frustration and confusion about the whole matter. [13]
The situation was very complex.
There
are some key points from Lawson’s biography that are necessary to contextualize
his work. He was born on September 25th, 1894. Lawson worked during World
War I for the Red Cross where served as a driver in Italy, and afterwards he
would travel Europe. Lawson’s wartime experience would profoundly mark his
spirit and his subsequent creative output, especially his anti-fascist war
films. Lawson wrote plays as early as 1915 and then his first show on Broadway was
in 1921 with Roger Bloomer and then Processional. Bernard F. Dick describes
these plays as ‘expressive,’ and influenced by European modernism. Dick
describes Lawson’s theory of drama, as discussed in Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936), as being “based on the
classical model of an action – or what Lawson preferred to call “a system of
actions” – that undergoes various permutations and shifts of balance until,
through conflict and crisis, a resolution is reached, restoring the system to a
state of equilibrium and the play to a state of organic wholeness.”[14]
In this period Lawson also wrote for the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, which led him to attending
the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, and whose reporting got him arrested numerous
times.
Lawson was invited to Hollywood by MGM.
His early screenplays are note-worthy for their discussion of class. He wrote
commissioned dramatic scripts that usually included a romance between two
members of the opposite gender where one was wealthy and the other working
class. As well Lawson would Hollywoodize foreign films for their American
remakes, and this includes his script of Algiers
(1938), which was a remake of Pépé le Moko (1937), and Sahara which was a remake of Mikhail Romm’s The Thirteen (1936).
In this period Lawson would work with
numerous producers and studios but most note-worthy are his collaboration with
the Hungarian-born director Zoltán Korda and the Warner Brothers studio (whose
executive Jack Warner was a major Roosevelt supporter), which were more
permissive to make social-issue films. Thom Andersen is sympathetic to Lawson
in the essay Red Hollywood,
“No one would question Lawson’s talent,
only how much of it was still intact in 1947. The blacklist may have freed him,
as it did Biberman and Lardner. He had written three good off-beat war films
during World War II, Count-Attack
(1945), Action in the North Atlantic
(1943), and Sahara (1943), all of
them notable for pro-Soviet sympathies, and Hollywood’s single pro-Loyalist
film, Blockade (1938). Counter-Attack, the most radical film of
the war, is the only American movie with a Russian Communist as hero, and Saraha (1943) is one of a handful
adapted from a Soviet film.”[15]
These films are international in their
scope and argue for solidarity and anti-fascism. On the reputation of Lawson
and some of these films: Horne writes about Blockade,
“He was one of the few screenwriters capable of penning one of the few movies
that addressed what may have been the chief real-life moral drama of his era:
the Spanish civil war.” James Agee praised Sahara,
“Indeed, Lawson was probably the premier cinematic critic of white supremacy.”[16]
Lawson’s scripts reflect an equalitarian
spirit when it comes to class and race, as well as pro-Soviet messages, which
is one reason some commenters have reduce them solely to Communist propaganda. For
example in Action in the North Atlantic
there are episodes, which are non-narrative conversational scenes, on the ship of
the multi-ethnic American marines discussing blatantly social issues from a ‘Leftist’
persuasion. And as the film reminds the viewer, especially after opening with a
Roosevelt quote which defines the American character, these social causes are
also a defining aspect of it. Though one can probably understand the
Committee’s ire with something like the ending of the Action in the North Atlantic ending when the American ship arrives
to Soviet Russia, and is being embraced and embracing the country, and then
Humphrey Bogart quips about having not wanting to return, and go on that long
and dangerous journey, back home.
Sahara
is a desert WWII film
set in North Africa. It focuses on a small group as an allegory of war. In a
typical Lawson fashion they are multi-ethnic, working class, and collectivist.
In it there are associations between racism and fascism, as it shows the
international group of soldiers (American, British, Italian) in solidarity in
their opposition to it as incarnated by the German soldier. Everyone
internationally is against fascism. There is even one of Hollywood’s first
dignified, even heroic, portrayals of a black character (Rex Ingram) as the
Sergeant of the Sudanese Battalion. In the film there’s Lawson’s reoccurring
interest, through discussion, of the Spanish Civil War, and there is a running
joke of the Americans arriving late to the war.
After Lawson’s blacklisting he would move to Mexico. In this period he would begin to write Marxist interpretations of drama and film-making such as The Hidden Heritage (1950), Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953) and Film: The Creative Process (1964). He also wrote one of the first anti-apartheid movies under a pseudonym for Zoltán Korda, Cry, the Beloved Country (1951). On his book The Hidden Heritage, though, which was never published, Dick, writes about it, “It is the least known of Lawson’s works, yet it has a humanistic range and a panoramic breadth that would surprise even those familiar with the range of his critical work.”[18] It is this loyalty to the ideas of the Communist cause, and knowledge of its many battles throughout history, and the idea of a better, more equalitarian future society that enriched Lawson’s dramas and motivated him to fight where he saw injustices.
[1] Horne, Gerald. The
Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dead of the Hollywood Ten.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
[2] McGilligan, Patrick,
and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A
Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012.
[3] Horne. Ibid.
[4] Gabler, Neal. An
Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. United States of
America: Anchor Books, 1989.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] McGilligan and Paul
Buhle. Ibid.
[9] Bentley, Eric. Are
You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the
Un-American Activities Committee. New York: Harper & Row Publishers,
1972.
[10] McGilligan and Paul
Buhle. Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Gabler. Ibid.
[14] Dick, Bernard F. Radical
Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten. University of Kentucky
Press, 1989.
[15] Krutnick, Frank, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter
Stanfield, eds. “Un-American” Hollywood:
Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2007.
[16] Horne. Ibid.
[17] Krutnick, Frank, Steve
Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds.
[18] Dick. Ibid.
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