What was the Hollywood blacklist?

A list nobody admitted

No studio ever admitted that a blacklist existed. It began with a House committee’s hearings in October 1947, told in Who asked “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”. A month later the studio heads met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and announced that they would fire the ten men who had defied the committee and would not knowingly employ a Communist.

After that, the list worked through silence. In June 1950 a pamphlet called Red Channels named 151 people in radio and television, and sponsors and networks dropped many of them. Through the 1950s the list grew to hundreds of actors, writers, directors and musicians. There was one road back: appear before the committee and name others.

The Hollywood Ten

The first ten were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. All were, or had been, members of the Communist Party, which was legal. They refused to say so, arguing that the First Amendment shields a citizen’s beliefs and associations. Congress cited them for contempt, and the studios let them go. When the Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals in 1950, they went to federal prison, with sentences of six months to a year. One of them, Dmytryk, changed course in 1951, testified, named names and went back to directing.

Trumbo’s Oscars under other names

Dalton Trumbo, once among the best-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, went on writing under cover for a fraction of his former rates, while friends and invented names signed his work. In March 1954 the story of Roman Holiday won an Oscar in the name of Ian McLellan Hunter, who had fronted for him. In 1957 The Brave One won under one of his false names, Robert Rich, and Trumbo could not claim it.

In 1960 Spartacus and Exodus credited Trumbo under his own name, and the blacklist began to crack. The Academy handed him the Oscar for The Brave One in 1975, and gave the one for Roman Holiday to his widow, Cleo, in 1993. Looking back in 1970, Trumbo said it was useless to search those years for heroes or villains: there had been “only victims.”

Naming names

For others, the price of work was a list of their own. The director Elia Kazan, a Party member in the 1930s, testified in 1952 and named eight people who had been in the Party with him during his theater years. Two years later he directed On the Waterfront. A number of colleagues never forgave him, and when the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in 1999, part of the audience stayed seated and did not applaud. Others refused to name anyone and lost years of work. Kazan’s friend Arthur Miller answered with a play, discussed in Is The Crucible about McCarthyism?.

Moscow’s purges in the same years

The other side of the Cold War policed its artists too. In 1946 the Soviet Communist Party condemned the poet Anna Akhmatova, who was expelled from the Writers’ Union. In 1948 it denounced the music of Dmitri Shostakovich as formalist. A blacklisted American lost work, and the Ten served up to a year in prison. Under Stalin, writers and artists were among the millions sent to the Gulag camps.