 Welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater in the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. And a special welcome to those of you watching on our National Archives YouTube channel. I'm Tom Nastic, a public programs producer, and it's my pleasure to welcome you today, to today's program with Dr. Thomas Doherty, author of Showtrial, Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Black List. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs. On Wednesday, October 26th, here in the McGowan Theater, and also online on our YouTube channel, National Archives exhibit curator, Hallis Camps, will present an illustrated lecture on the conception, research, and execution of the exhibit, All American, The Power of Sports, currently on display upstairs in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery. And on Thursday, October 27th, at 1 p.m., we will present a virtual book lecture on our YouTube channel, In the Houses of Their Dead, The Lincolns, the Booze, and the Spirits, with author Terry Halford. In his book, Halford tells the story of Abraham Lincoln through the strange points of contact between his family and that of the man who killed him, John Wilkes Booth. To learn more about these programs and all of our programs and exhibits, please visit our website, archives.gov. And now it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema, Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. He is also the film review editor for the Journal of American History. In addition to the book he will discuss today, he is the author of Little Lindy is Kidnapped, How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century, published in 2020. He is currently working on a, excuse me, he is currently working on a book about the rise of the archival documentary in 1930s America. Unfortunately, we do not have copies of the book he will discuss today available, but my colleague Susan, who's up at the top of the theater, can hand you a signed book plate as you exit the theater and you can bring it up to the archives store, which is one level up, and they will order the book for you. So now would you please welcome Dr. Thomas Doherty to the National Archives. Hopefully this is working. Ah, there we go. Hi, I'd like to thank Tom for the kind introduction and for the invitation to be here in the National Archives, a place that I've spent many happy hours doing archival research. And I want to say a couple words about that maybe at the outset, but first, I like to always begin by giving a little quiz to my audience to get a sense of exactly how old they are. And to see how many of these people you recognize, this is a shot of the committee for the First Amendment who came to Washington 75 years ago this week to protest or the House on American Activity Committee investigation into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood. They resented the fact that the committee was configuring Hollywood as a hotbed of communist subversion. They were very careful, however, and we'll talk more about this in a second, not to align themselves with the toxic Hollywood 10 who were communists. The committee had their communist cards and these were a group of authentic liberals who kind of wanted to walk a tightrope between the right wing of the committee and the far left wing of the Hollywood 10 and the group of communists in Hollywood. You recognize some of these people? My students will not recognize anyone. So you're dating yourself at least, I'd say over 45, 50 here. If you recognize some of these people, here is a cheat sheet. Richard Conte, John Houston, the great director, Bogart, and Paul Henri behind him and Lauren Bacall right next to Humphrey Bogart, his wife. They were the, I don't know, they were the Olivia Wilde, Jason Sudakis of their time. They were like a huge star-studded couple and they attracted most of the attention at the time. Dylan Keyes here. This is the picture I wanted on the cover of the book but then my publisher said nobody would recognize this guy either, which I think is a better picture. Anybody recognize this guy? This is Robert Taylor who was the singular heartthrob of his age in the late 30s throughout the Second World War and afterwards. My friend Arnie Reisman, I did the documentary Hollywood on Trial which I'd recommend highly if anybody's interested in this topic directed by Mark Helper and written by Arnie Reisman, made in 1976 when many of the survivors of this era were still alive, willing to talk and it is the most comprehensive collection of archival footage from the 1947 hearings. When Arnie told me, I did not recognize this, to the left back row of the cop there, you'll see a picture of a woman and that is Patricia Neal, the actress who was in town. How shall I put this? You guys don't mind a little kind of Hollywood dirt along with the politics. She was in town to hook up with Gary Cooper who was a witness before the committee. I think her agenda there was not political and I wouldn't have recognized her unless Arnie had pointed that out for me. Before beginning, I'd like to just again acknowledge this place, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Jefferson Building, the Motion Picture Division. Because this is the National Archives it might be appropriate, just say a couple words about the archival background you have to master or the kind of places you need to go to put together a book like this. One of the things I wanted to do with this book is not to just reiterate secondary material but to go back to 1947 and see how people responded to the House on American Activities Committee at the time. That meant looking at the contemporary documents, looking at contemporary newsreels, broadcasting, the trade periodicals, all the FBI files, all the materials that would get you the texture of what's going on in 1947. When we look at the House on American Activities Committee hearings today, I think naturally tend to filter them through our own perspective in 2022. We're looking back at 1947 through all the accumulated filters of the last 75 years. What I wanted to do was sort of see it as an original moment in 1947 and try to perceive it through the eyes of the people in 1947. I think it required a little bit of this archival work and to supplement things like, you know, this is a great collection that we can now have publicly available, just the transcripts of the hearings, the congressional record, this is sort of where most people would start. What I don't get from the congressional record is any sense of the, you know, the vibes, the atmosphere, the yelling, the shouting, the laughter of, you know, a live hearing. It can be like a dry stenographic account. And so I went to these trade press. The trade press are the motion picture industry weeklies and periodicals that covered Hollywood like a blanket. And the wonderful thing about the age of digital communication and research now is you sort of don't need to travel the way you used to. There are databases that you can research this material, scan the pages yourself, you know, sit there in your pajamas and with a cup of coffee and go through these wonderful primary materials. I know there are some scholars in the audience who sort of remember actually have to, moving your body through physical space to go to a library and then like have the librarian bring the periodical down and then go through it and have it Xeroxed. And the Felicity now, a facility rather with which you can do this research is really, we all complain about the digital world sometimes, but this has just been magnificent for myself and for upcoming students to do this kind of work. This database here which has just come online in the last few years was like a treasure trove of material. There's a public access database put together by a guy named Eric Hoyt at the University of Wisconsin which is utterly public access and you can scan whatever you want through this. YouTube which I understand we're on today is, stuff is always coming up on YouTube. You have to be careful about the provenance of this material because they put up anything you don't know where it's from, you don't know how it's edited, but there is just a lot out there now on YouTube. And sometimes the other great source is eBay. There's a record of the Bertolt Brex testimony. Eric Bentley, his biographer was in Brex House in Vienna I think at the time and somebody had made a recording of Brex testimony on 33 and a third LP and this was put out in the 60s. So I believe it's the only easily available record of the testimony of one of the witnesses. And also, and this is where it gets sexy or at least for a scholar, the FBI files. So you can, through the Freedom of Information Act, you can request files of various individuals because the Hollywood 10 are so celebrated their files have been pre-cleared and pre-approved other people have requested them so it doesn't take three or four years. And you can actually get some of the secret FBI files of the various testimonies. One of the things that's great about the older files as opposed to the newer files of redactions, they actually redacted it by hand with a magic marker. And so if you're lucky enough to have an editor wife who can count up the number of characters, she can give you with a fair degree of certainty that the redacted person is like, the name is eight letters. And through a process of elimination sometimes you can probably figure out who the redacted informant is. This is what the files look like and I just want to say one quick word. When I did the research on the House on American Activities Committee here in the National Archives, archivists tend to get a bad rap in popular culture. Some of you might know the scene in Citizen Kane where the reporter goes to the Thatcher Library and there's this old biddy archivist who is reluctantly letting him look at the pages of Old Man Thatcher's diary about his first meeting with Charles Foster Kane. And you can't imagine a more unpleasant, drier human being. I have never met anybody like that at the National Archives. They've all been extraordinarily gracious, generous. Not only do they help you with material, but they know the material so well they can point you in places you never would have thought of. So when you request the committee records from 1947 they'll bring up something like this on a carousel. The previous slide quoted the famous saying by Robert Cairo, the great biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he's got a saying that I think every scholar now is taken to heart, turn every page. So when the archivist comes and brings you a lot of material, just don't look at the sexy stuff you're interested in, but you've got to turn every page. And this is a kind of research that might no longer be done now in the future, but when I did this a couple of years ago, the top rank of files were the committee witnesses who had testified, the sexy people, Dalton Trumbo, Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, and in those days, and I don't know if this is still true with the National Archives, because we all now do our research with our iPhones and you take scans, right, you take little pictures, but in the past what you would have to do is you would mark the file with a long strip of white paper. Okay, I see some people nodding, and then the archivist would take out the piece of paper and Xerox it for you. Now the top rank here all had little pieces of paper because it was the sexy stuff that scholars had been through for years, but down in the bottom is the boring stuff that nobody had bothered to look at, like sort of the committee allocation for paper funds or whatever, like really accounting stuff, and it said like miscellaneous on it, but our government being our government, things tend to get mis-filed, so that bottom row of stuff, I'm pretty sure I was the first person to look at in close to 70 years that hadn't been opened and our government being our government, there are things mis-filed, especially telegrams, because every time somebody was named at the hearings and he felt unjustly, he was sent a telegram to Washington demanding that his name be cleared and demanding that he'd be called. So turn every page and appreciate your archivist here. Oh, the last thing, the last source you have as a scholar is real-life people who can sometimes tell you things that are really interesting. Unfortunately, there was only one survivor from the original hearings of the committee for the First Amendment, she's just passed away this year at the age of 103, 104 I believe, the wonderful actress, Marcia Hunt, who is a great screen actress and a very generous lady, still had all her marbles together when I spoke to her when she was a mere 101, and a very generous woman who told me what it was like to be on the plane, and that's sort of the grim, but I think it's well-heated saying that historians have better to be five years too soon than one day too late, and she is, I believe, the last of that group that could, we were there, and just, she's such a wonderful woman even in 1947 when she came to Washington, one of the anecdotes that she told me in which I saw her in the trade press as well is a local group of high school kids convinced their teacher to let them out of their civics class if they came to the committee hearings and watched the committee for an afternoon, and she invited them back to the hotel where all the stars were saying, and she sort of huddled with them in a room and talked to them and said, you're doing in your civics class in high school what we're doing here, and everybody in the democracy lives in a constant civics class, so she got to meet her, and she's a very gracious lady, and of course there are a lot of secondary sources on this material. I wanted to say I was chatting with somebody earlier about Lauren Bacall who I guess was invited to a blacklist panel back in the day. I read a lot of Hollywood memoirs for this book, or at least I scanned a lot, like maybe 30 or 40 of them. They were almost all useless. They told you very little. They were obviously ghost written, very seldom did they have any fresh information, and if you're interested however in a good Hollywood memoir Lauren Bacall's by myself was the only one that I found just fascinating and valuable. She spoke with great intelligence of this moment in American life besides being very frank and honest about her own terrific career. I wish they had all been like that, but very few of them were. Most of the Hollywood 10 did their own memoirs, which I think were pretty self-serving, and then some of the stars also wrote memoirs but their memories have either faded or were never there. But Lauren Bacall is really sort of a special one. As I said, Hollywood on Trial by Arnie Reisman and Mark Helpin. Now saying all that is preliminary. What I wanted to do in the book as I said is to give you the impression of 47 as it happened. We look upon 47 as to us the past. In 47 of course they're looking at a different kind of past and as I probe the hearings I found that so much was about backstory. And that means that what's happening in 47 is a sort of the obvious post-backfire of two events in their historical memory, which are the 1930s and the political squabbles, especially in Hollywood that erupt over what's called the popular front, which I'll talk about in a second, and then of course the Second World War. I mean it sounds obvious, but like I think we always forget that 47 is a product of those two moments in American history. And so it really is about the backstory first of the 1930s and second of the Second World War. The 1930s backstory that is most significant involves a political alliance called the popular front. Now the popular front is this rubric that we use to describe a group of people on the left as they called themselves. And it wasn't an organization that had stationery or a meeting place. The popular front was just the name we gave to a group of people, basically liberals but a big umbrella of liberals from FDR, New Deal Democrat, Blue Collar, Irish Catholic maybe, conservative bench, but still a good solid Democrat to people all the way on the far left who represented members of the Communist Party. And everybody in between from so-called fellow travelers, which was the name people used, usually pejoratively, to describe people who weren't authentic members of the Communist Party, but almost always adopted the Communist Party line on any given issue. Maybe they didn't want to be bothered to go to the meetings or pay the dues, but they were kind of reliable allies of the Communist Party. And then you got your socialist and anarchist and, you know, far leftist. And what united this group and it really was a popular front were two principles. One was anti-Naziism in our foreign policy overseas. So they were deeply anti-fascist and also they were pro-civil rights at home for African Americans, for labor, for women. And those two broad principles united an incredibly diverse group of people. So you have somebody like John Ford, the Hollywood director who we don't think of as a raving liberal, marching on a picket line with John Howard Lawson, who is probably the most notorious Stalinist in Hollywood. And these guys would be like marching in the same picket line in front of a newspaper office that had tried to fire its members or something. And so when they call it the popular front, it really was popular. And in Hollywood, they coalesced around a group called the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had about 5,000 members at its height of Hollywood personalities who were devoted to alerting America to the rising threat of Nazism overseas. And they tried as best they could to get anti-Nazi sentiment in Hollywood movies, usually allegorically. We don't see a Nazi uniform on the Hollywood screen until April 1939 with confessions of a Nazi spy. That's the first explicitly anti-Nazi film by a major Hollywood studio. But in 37 and 38, the League is trying to get anti-Nazi pro-tolerance sentiment into Hollywood movies. So a good example is Boys Town. Does anybody know that film, the great Spencer Tracy film? And there's an opening scene in that where all the boys are sitting down in the Catholic orphanage to have grace. And every one of the boys says grace in his own way. So there's a Catholic grace, a Protestant grace, and there's a picture of a Jewish kid with a yarmulke reciting grace in Hebrew. Now if that is on the screen in 1938, it is a pretty implicit anti-Nazi pro-tolerance statement. So the group wanted those kind of messages in Hollywood film. However in August 1939, the Hitler-Stalin pact is announced. And what this means is that the communists of the popular front are now no longer as anti-fascist as they used to be because Hitler and Stalin have this alliance. And so virtually overnight, the communists in the Hollywood anti-Nazi League reverse their positions. They are no longer for intervention overseas. They are no longer for strong American defense. Overnight. This needless to say creates a breach between that wing of the popular front and the rest of the wings of the popular front. And what happens is the liberals bolt from the Hollywood anti-Nazi League. And even the newspaper goes out of publication. So that's in August 1939. War erupts. The Hollywood communists are against Hollywood having military preparedness films. They're against intervention until June of 1941 when the Nazis invade the Soviet Union. And everybody in the Communist Party switches 180, is now for intervention, is now for a strong defense. Now if I am a Hollywood liberal like say Melvin Douglas or Frederick March or Edward G. Robinson and I haven't changed my position in either moment. I'm still pro-FDR, pro-defense, pro-intervention, pro-Lenlis. I'm looking at these guys and I kind of suspect that their loyalty is not to Washington but to Moscow. Now during the Second World War all is forgiven because we're all on the same side. So all of these disputes of the 30s are put on hiatus during the Second World War. However at the end of the war it all comes back here. Now one of the things the war does that's absolutely crucial to understand the hearings in 1947 is it changes our notion of Hollywood cinema. It changes the government's notion, Hollywood's notion, the average moviegoer's notion that prior to World War II the Hollywood industry thought of itself as, and I think most moviegoers did too, as an entertainment machine. We will give you diversion. The depression is ugly and terrible. Come to Hollywood movies and see Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz and forget your terrible depression-wracked existence for a while. It's escapism. Now we all knew Hollywood movies was a really influential transmission belt for values. We always knew that. But during the Second World War we all know it in our bones because the military has been doing instruction films, Hollywood has made propaganda films, Hollywood has made a whole bunch of films that expertly put together Hollywood entertainment and wartime messaging. And they do it in that way Hollywood can only do. So maybe the best example that you all know is the film Casablanca. And that's such a wonderful Hollywood propaganda film because it takes the conventions of a typical romance and uses them to persuade us that the problem of three little people ain't worth the hill of beans in this crazy world, right? And that I, Humphrey Bogart, have to make the supreme sacrifice and relinquish my passion for Ingrid Bergman and go off and fight the Nazis with Claude Reigns, right? And the film does that so persuasively. And there are a lot of Hollywood films that do that during the Second World War. A film like Air Force 1943, some of you might know, in which it teaches you the value of teamwork and tolerance. So Hollywood had always told us that the most important person in the air is the pilot. He's the romantic guy. He's the top gun, right? He gets the girl. But during World War II they tell you that a B-17 has nine members and you need all nine members for the B-17 to complete its mission and the rear gunner and the navigator and the bombardier and the mechanic and the co-pilot are just as important as the pilot, okay? And it does it in a way that is just so persuasive and emotionally moving, right? And so if previously the Hollywood message and the Hollywood ethos would be summed up by this phrase by Sam Goldwyn, famous phrase, if you want to send a message use Western Union you don't come to Hollywood to get political messages at Sam Goldwyn. When I first started teaching I would have to tell my students what Western Union was. Oh, it's a telegram company and now I have to explain to them what a telegram is. So it's kind of like if you texted somebody and they had to deliver the iPhone to the actual other person. And this is the ethos of Sam Goldwyn right here. Now during the Second World War we know otherwise. So we come off the second but this is from Air Force. But we come off the Second World War now and the movies have really changed. And we have changed as we watch movies. We know movies can do things besides just entertain us. That they are powerful transmission belts of values that they affect the culture. That they're ideologically message driven. And the most popular film of 1946 is both politically and commercially is this marvelous movie which is the best years of our lives. And it's the number one box office attraction of 1946. And it's the kind of film that would be unimaginable without World War II. It just assumes so much of the audience, a level of maturity about life. It's the first portrait of a handicapped man in major Hollywood cinema played by Harold Russell, a real Navy veteran who lost his hands in a terrible fire aboard a ship during the Second World War. And he's not going to get his hands back by the end of the movie. There will be no Hollywood happy ending. No gay ox machina. And it's an amazingly smart moving motion picture. And that's what Hollywood is now. And we all know it. We know it in Washington, we know it in Hollywood, we know it at our local Biju. So the one thing I think you could say that the House on American Activities Committee gets right, they know movies matter. And that's what those hearings are about. They're about movies suddenly really matter to us and whatever you think about how subversive they find Hollywood content, the basic mentality is that movies are now going to be kind of an arena of conversation for us in America forever after. And even today when we want to talk about race, sexual harassment, American history we tend to go to the movies or to our popular culture to air some of the disputes that we have. And it really starts happening with this event in 1947 involving these fellows from the House Committee on on American Activities. I don't know how far we need to go back with the House Committee. But maybe one person we should know about is this really bizarre despicable individual, John Rankin, who is responsible for turning the House on American Activities Committee from a standing committee into a permanent committee. The committee had actually come about in the 1930s. The first iteration was in 1933-34. But as a standing committee it had to be reauthorized every year. And it wasn't reauthorized again until 1938 under the ages of a Texas Democratic congressman named Martin Dice. Now during the war again everything's on hiatus but after the war, when the Democrats still have control, this guy John Rankin, who despite being an anti-Semitic racist from Mississippi, and a really extreme individual even by the standards of the time, but a great parliamentarian gets the committee to be against Congress to vote the HUAC into a permanent committee. He however is toxic even in 1947. And the new chairman when the Republicans take over is for the 80th Congress is this guy in the center and this guy here J. Parnell Thomas, a Republican congressman from New Jersey who had been on the Dice Committee and I think as a lot of politicians in the post-war era realize that you can ride the anti-communist wave into prominence. Now this is three years still before Senator Joe McCarthy takes over kind of the face of anti-communism. And I guess if there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this talk is to correct in your mind the popular misconception that you cannot blast out of the public imagination with dynamite that conflates Joe McCarthy with HUAC. And if you just say the word Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe McCarthy House on American Activities Committee, it doesn't scan, does it? Because the House is the other branch of Congress. So HUAC which we conflate now with McCarthyism which it is, but it's three years before the term McCarthyism actually becomes public parlance in 1950. But this guy realizes early on that anti-communism can be the way to prominence and success and so he decides to have a series of hearings investigating communist subversion in Hollywood with his committee council there, a guy named Robert Striplin. I used to laugh at this portrait here where you're kind of looking at the film to see if you can find communism and then I realize that's sort of what I do which is, you know, you look at film to find ideological meaning so I probably shouldn't laugh at those guys. And this is from the kind of a test run of the big hearings in Washington where the committee went out to Los Angeles and had some closed door sessions where they invited some stars most notably Robert Taylor. Again, Taylor actually was quite angry that the committee in May in Los Angeles said immediately what he had said. You know, there's supposed to be closed secret testimony but Parnell Thomas had press conferences and everybody's basically spilling their guts and Taylor did not like that because he was assured anything he said would be held in secret. However, the big hearings are in Washington and there are a couple things that I find really interesting about the hearings right from the get go. First is the HUAC hearings are the first time we see this guy in public, Richard Nixon. He makes his bones on this committee. He's a junior congressman from California at the time and he will face off at one point one of the people he will be having a dialogue with is the head of the screen actors guild, a guy named Ronald Reagan. So these HUAC hearings in 47 is two presidents. There are kind of momentous, not to mention George Murphy who becomes the senator as well. The hearings really have this cascading significance in American life here. I mentioned this guy. Now he is such a notorious anti-Semite. He is so toxic and we use words like that kind of cavalierly these days you know we, you know, a racist is anybody who we happen to disagree with on any issue involving race. He was the real deal, you know, a staunch segregationist who would use ethnic and racial slurs on the floor of Congress that you can read in the congressional record. Now J. Parnel Thomas is smart enough to know if he has a big public hearing in October investigating Hollywood that this guy is going to attract all the negative attention and then an act of God intervenes that in Mississippi there is another anti-Semite racist who is a U.S. senator and he has this name Theodore Bilbo and he sounds like a character out of Al Cap the comic strip and Theodore Bilbo dies in office and so there is a special election that John Rankin goes down to Mississippi for and J. Parnel Thomas sees his opportunity and holds the committee hearings as Rankin is down campaigning for the office of senate so he is not going to be on the dais when the committee unfolds in late October of 1947 which is a really smart move on Thomas's part and Rankin doesn't win for what that's worth so all the back story now we come to the day of the hearings and you know how cleverly we've arranged this talk 75 years to the day October 20th 1947 the House on American Activities Committee hearing begins the committee has all kinds of advanced publicity they've subpoenaed and summoned dozens of people to come to Washington and as you can see it's the first great political media Washington Hollywood extravaganza of the post war era and it's going to set the pattern for everyone to come if you look at the my left hand side of the slide you can see the bank of newsreel cameras set up those are the five newsreel companies that were operative at the time and also there's a newsreel camera for television there as well and television is just an emergent medium at the time almost nobody has a television set but this almost was the first telecast congressional hearing television had got permission to put cameras into the hearing room you know live video cameras not the newsreel film cameras into the committee room but the cameras I think took DC not AC current and they didn't want to pay for the converter so it wasn't telecast over the television airwaves however the next year the HUAC hearings were and they weren't into Hollywood but if you're a congressional hearing buff you probably know that the second act the next year is in some ways even more politically has a bigger political consequence and those are the famous Elger Hiss Whitaker chamber's hearings which were the first televised congressional hearings and they managed to locate any kinescopes or any records of those hearings and those are the hearings in which Richard Nixon makes his bones because he has a suspicion that Whitaker chambers even though he's a manic depressive overweight kind of odd guy is telling the truth against the patrician darling Elger Hiss and that's what eventually makes Nixon a senator and then the vice president the next year Nixon is smart enough to leave the hearings after the first week and so this is the sensation every reporter in Washington who wants to buy line is down there for this great political extravaganza the first witness is poor Jack Warner who is really perplexed by this whole thing because Warner's studio Warner Brothers did more than any other Hollywood studio for the American war effort and in fact they made a hallucinatory film called Mission to Moscow a pro-Soviet film which now the committee is berating him for making pro-Soviet films during the war when we were allies of the Soviet Union and poor Jack Warner just can't figure out why they're yelling at him now it's like everybody has amnesia you didn't realize three years ago and then throughout the first week Hollywood does pretty well in fact they invite their best people and the present screenwriters Guild head Reagan and then two former screenwriters Guild members Robert Montgomery and George Murphy Reagan makes a great appearance contrary to what you read he did not name names he is still an FDR liberal at the time he is the one of the only witnesses who doesn't bring a lawyer he says why do I need a lawyer I got nothing to hide and he has a great cross examination he makes a great articulate statement and Quentin Reynolds of PM Magazine as he covers Reagan and he praises PM is a real left wing magazine paper at the time praises Reagan and at the end of his article I love this detail he says you folks might think I'm getting a little extreme here but if this guy Reagan ever decides to leave acting and go into politics I think he could really have a career for himself and of course he does Robert Montgomery also makes a great appearance he's a authentic World War 2 hero and he has the biggest applause line of the entire hearings when the committee is sort of questioning the patriotism of Hollywood and Montgomery says like many men of my generation I gave up four years of my career to fight a totalitarian called fascism and I would gladly do it again to fight a totalitarianism called communism and of course the committee of the entire gallery rubs an applause here there's Reagan's Gary Cooper he's the biggest star he testifies for like 12 minutes and he plays dumb Cooper was not dumb he educated in prep schools in England you know everybody thinks he's like high noon or something you know he's dumb doesn't name names gets off the stand really quickly Leo McCary the great director testifies afterwards he has the biggest laugh line of the hearings when the committee says did you get any money from going my way in the bells of St. Mary's from Russia and McCary says no we haven't gotten a ruble from the Soviet Union we've got a character in those films they don't like and McCary says Bing Crosby and McCary says no God and the committee laughs everybody laughs this is the committee for the First Amendment that I mentioned previously the stars who come out to Hollywood or come out to Washington to protest the committee after the first week they land a lot of publicity Danny Kay there on the right some of you might remember him and that Lauren Bacall gives all kinds of interviews that's her famous picture with Harry Truman on the piano and I wish everybody saw Truman look like he played the piano on a bordello with Bacall but the second week of hearings features the antagonistic witnesses who will be very famous very quickly as the Hollywood 10 and these are the recalcitrant witnesses who refuse to cooperate with the committee they stand on their first not fifth amendment rights that is they say the committee has no right to impinge upon our freedom of expression or assembly you just don't have the right to answer that or to question us on this which is why they have those vociferous and vituperative exchanges because they did not want to shut up if they took their fifth if they stood on their fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination they would just refuse to answer and would have to remain silence but these guys wanted to take on the committee and that's why they stood on their first amendment rights which proves to be a good publicity strategy maybe but a bad strategy for their future freedom because they are held in contempt of congress for refusing to answer the president of the motion picture association Eric Johnson comes down and tries to smooth feathers unsuccessfully just quickly the German playwright Bertolt Brecht testifies as well and he answers the so-called sixty four dollar question which in those pre-inflationary times was are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party and that's the question the Hollywood 10 refuses to answer Brecht is part of the unfriendly 19 10 refused to answer and he is the 11th and it could have been the Hollywood 11 but Brecht is a German so he does what a sophisticated European communist would do which is lie and he's unlike the the righteous Americans who are gonna refuse to say anything he basically says now there's no way I was a member of the communist party and people argue about whether he was an authentic member or not but he basically says I'm a guest in your country so I'll answer the question okay the guy who I think is the hero of the hearings and I'll close up in just a couple of minutes here is this unheralded fellow Emmett Lavery he was head of the screen actors screenwriters guild at the time he was a devout Roman Catholic he was a lawyer as well successful screenwriter and his dilemma is very profound head of the screenwriters guild and that summer congress had passed something called the Taft Hartley act and the Taft Hartley act said if you were a communist head of a union or you could be reasonably suspected of being a communist your union could be decertified by the national labor relations board so if he aligns himself with the Hollywood 10 that means he can be suspected of being a communist and the union that they have fought so hard for since 1933 could be decertified so what does Emmett Lavery do does he testify like a friendly witness and name names does he shut up and thereby align himself with the Hollywood 10 and risk his union what he does is he very cleverly when he testifies says when they ask him the 64 dollar question he says I don't think you have the right to ask me that question however to alleviate the suspense let me say I'm not a communist I've never been a communist I have no intention of being a communist I'm a devout Catholic and I get my social conscience not from Karl Marx but from the Gospels of Jesus Christ and this kind of shuts up the committee fairly effectively and he says I've been a lifelong Democrat and if you'd like to know why I'm a Democrat and then at that point he shuts them up and says we're not interested but that is the moment where the screenwriters guild might have been decertified but this guy was clever enough to get around that and that's why we still have a screenwriters guild now at the end of the committee the tenors cited for contempt of Congress and then the consequence of this is the motion picture association of America adopts the enabling document for what will be the infamous Hollywood blacklist it's called the Waldorf statement in November 25th about a month after the hearings all the moguls and the studio heads meet in New York and they get together and they decide the publicity is so bad that we are going to forbid any communists from working with us we will publicly announce that we're not going to hire any communists and this is the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist in which a generation of Hollywood artists we really don't know how many are affected by the blacklist one way or the other certainly scores probably hundreds had their careers either terminated or derailed or truncated in one way or the other as Hollywood goes on kind of an anti-communist campaign we will not knowingly employ a communist or member of any party or group this blacklist is in effect throughout the 1950s if you go on to IMDB and look at say Marsha Hunt's credits you'll see suddenly she stops getting hired or Lee Grant dozens of other Hollywood stars who have their careers truncated until then most of the Hollywood ten go to jail for six months or a year most of the committee for the first amendment has to recant Bogart for example Leo McCary starts making anti-communist films and the blacklist and I'll end on this anecdote because it's Washington DC centric the blacklist goes on until Kirk Douglas breaks it by hiring Dalton Trumbo one of the members of the Hollywood ten to write under his own name the screenplay for Spartacus and Trumbo at the premiere of Spartacus sees his name on the screen for the first time since 1947 the film comes out in late 1960 and even then the American Legion and the Catholic League of War veterans are still protesting this film because it's been written by a known communist who had been blacklisted and this is the film that's going to break the blacklist however it's a huge hit and there's one moment I'd like to end on that I think is emblematic at the end of the blacklist and that is a moment in February 1961 here in Washington DC Spartacus is playing at the Warner theater which is right down the street a couple blocks right and in the White House is John Kennedy and he's having a conversation with his brother Bobby and Bobby has just seen this terrific film called Spartacus and he's really excited about it but the White House doesn't have 70 millimeter projection and JFK says it's playing it you know where do you see it and Bobby says well I saw it at the Warner theater and JFK says well yeah let's go I want to see it and so you know in those days you didn't sort of need like five months of secret service advanced planning and so the secret service calls up the management of the Warner theater and says you know the president's coming over to see Spartacus and the manager like flips out and says the film's already started and you know Kennedy drives the three or four blocks over you know just in the secret service limo a couple people and he and the manager by then has put up the lights and gone to the front of the theater and said ladies and gentlemen I know we're in the middle of the film the first 20 minutes or so but the president of the United States is coming over and he'd like to see Spartacus from the beginning and I'm sure nobody had mind if we start the film up for the president now today of course 50% of the audience would probably object you know just on principle for the other guy but in it was a different time in 1961 and everybody said oh of course and JFK comes in and watches Spartacus and what he does is symbolically cross the picket line because he's a Catholic and he's a veteran and he's backing Spartacus and so if you had to pick any moment that is sort of symbolic of finally the blacklist's ending is when John Kennedy in Washington DC comes to see Spartacus so any questions yeah Mike go to the mic if you would yeah well Mike's talking the other anecdote about Kennedy at Spartacus at the Warner Theater is before the lights go down he spots his secretary of agriculture in the audience and he taps the guy on the shoulder and says this is a hell of a way to plan a farm program just to add to that comment as you and I both know it wasn't easy to rewind the film in those days to the beginning you know 70 millimeter print and very slow rewind you know but I was going to ask about the committee for the First Amendment we always hear you showed the Bogart piece that he wrote saying I was a sucker and so I guess I have a question people like Marcia Hunt did they also back off from their support? Marcia didn't yeah I think the question is how many of the committee for the First Amendment backed off and most of them did Bogart most famously wrote that mea culpa here because he was getting word from his producers that he was having trouble getting financing for his next project and so he backs off and a few of the others them back off and you would have to kind of recant your position the committee dissolves itself a few months later because it's so difficult for the liberals of this time to kind of walk that line where you don't want to be associated with the toxic communists on the one hand right but you also don't want to embrace the committee and the name naming and so there are very few people who kind of managed to come out of this with dignity and I guess that's one of the reasons I admire Emmett Lavery so much is he managed to not name names if he answered the 64 dollar question he professed his liberalism and democratic fidelities he saved his union and you know you came away pretty well Gary Cooper comes off pretty good he doesn't name names and he's clearly dissembling and he's playing dumb because he's Gary Cooper because the tight lipped Gary Cooper but he's a very eloquent guy about this and Reagan, Montgomery and Murphy all of whom didn't name names and all of whom really I think stood up in a way that you know when you imagine yourself in those times you always you know there's a famous moment in Woody Allen's The Front where you know the committee calls them and he you know walks out righteously and tells them to perform an unnatural act on themselves and we all kind of think of that we will be that guy right and it's usually a little complicated in life and I think those people came off with a kind of dignity that might have been difficult under the circumstances. Yeah, Tom? Sure, could you speak up? Question from the online audience? Sure. Apparently it's a former student of yours, Stuart Feinberg great talk can you please talk about the committee for the First Amendment and why it fell apart. Talk about more about the committee for the First Amendment? Yeah, you probably already. Yeah, well it's a fascinating group. It was put together by John Houston, William Weiler and Phillip Dunn, all old school Hollywood liberals who had been through those popular front wars in the 1930s and when they put the committee together they were very insistent that we're not communists, we're not allies of the communists we are objecting to the committee investigating us and slurring us as communists subversives and in fact before everybody got on the plane William Weiler took them aside and said look if any of you guys are members of the Communist Party or have been, get off the plane now don't get on, don't cause us this trouble because we don't want to have our liberal motives libel to be slandered if people found this out about you and two of the members actually did get on the plane who were communists and Dunn is really still mad at them 50 years later when he writes his memoir one of whom was Sterling Hayden who later than you know recants before the committee in names names so this committee was really an interesting group of Hollywood liberals who in the end many of them couldn't walk the line Danny Kay never recanted and Danny Kay is a name I think some of you know the actor amazing guy amazingly versatile performer, comedian doesn't seem to be remembered today at all by the present generation of film goers, yeah I find it quite curious because he is really multi-talented and very articulate when he spoke for the committee Gene Kelly was also part of the committee for the First Amendment you don't see him in the picture because he had broken his ankle on the set of Easter Parade right and then he was replaced famously by Fred Astaire so he's not out walking in the committee, yeah? One question with respect to you know the initial hearings in 1947, 75 years ago when you know of course it was sort of the first major go around and you know people were sort of on both sides trying to figure out what they were how to handle it but we know several years later and we think of in the 50s with Elia Kazan you know naming names there was a kabuki you had to name names cleared but was it at that point a requirement that people named names or was that even expected that people would name names if they were to get on the good side of the committee? That's a really good point how in later iterations of the House on American Activities Committee it became almost a kind of you know darkness at noon ritual where you would have to name names even if the committee had the names in order to prove your ideological purity right and it became like a real ringer for people like Larry Parks and well maybe Elia Kazan more willingly. My sense is not in this first round of hearings that the people who testified the friendlies and especially the screenwriters who are always kind of getting payback for the arguments of the 1930s there's a very complicated tango between two unions claiming to represent the screenwriters in the 1930s the screenwriters guild and then a company union called the Screen Playwrights and they had a get to for about four or five years before the screenwriters guild gets certified by the National Labor Relations Board but the union members who backed this union are still mad 13 years later so they're naming all these people as communist and some name like a whole bunch of people right but you can kind of get away with it so Gary Cooper when he plays dumb you know they ask him well have you ever read a subversive script and he says yeah I think so and say can you remember the script and he says no I just in the names they just can't get them so he manages to like play dumb and occasionally somebody could do that or they just wouldn't name names in their testimony. Robert Taylor to his eternal discredit names, three names during his testimony and he really didn't want to come back and testify again in the files downstairs in fact or in this building there is a blistering letter that Robert Taylor writes to Jay Parnel Thomas about how you're going to have to subpoena me because you betrayed me in May so you know that point about the ritual really kicks off in the 1950s and it becomes particularly anguishing I think Carl Foreman and Michael maybe you can correct me on this I believe Carl Foreman was the only screenwriter who manages to get D blacklisted without naming names because usually you had to go through the ritual Any other comments or questions? Oh yeah, hi Could you speak up a little bit? Yes I have a question regarding the worldview, can you speak a little bit about how the hearings were perceived and reported in the world press and along those lines was there any ripple effect in the film industries in our ally nations because of the hearings here and also a kind of whatever happened to question is were any of the actors or players in Hollywood that were affected in their careers cut shorter curtailed by being named or being associated with Communist Party were any of them able to find work or subsequent careers in foreign film markets in our ally nations? Right that's a good question to address the last part first that some of the Hollywood 10 and other writers who were blacklisted or about to be blacklisted did go to Europe especially England guys like Joseph Lausie Carl Foreman actually went to who wrote High Noon actually goes to England so some of them did find employment overseas and of course famously many of them also wrote under assumed names or had fronts at some point in the late 1950s and especially after McCarthy himself in 54 is kind of terminated in terms of his political influence even though McCarthy has got nothing to do with the Hollywood side of it things start opening up and it becomes more like an open secret that we are hiring or Hollywood is hiring blacklisted screenwriters now actors have another problem because their face is always going to be on screen so it takes actors much longer for that and it does discuss the second part of your question it does discredit sort of Hollywood in America in the eyes of the world if we're persecuting people you know allegedly we're you know the beacon of freedom in a bipolar world we're persecuting people for their political affinities and political associations but by the late 50s you really see it start opening up so it's kind of an open secret that Dalton Trumbo has written the brave one and it's an open secret that Nedrick Young has written the defiant ones people in Hollywood just kind of know at a certain point and then in 1960 two famous directors both announced that they're going to hire Dalton Trumbo under his own name Auto Preminger for Exodus and he announces it first and then Kirk Douglas says he's going to do it and Spartacus comes out before Exodus the next year although there are people who are blacklisted and you know it takes some people longer than others to try to get you know back into the industry some have just kind of you know lost their mojo by that point and will never have the careers they might have had Pete Seeger I think has the the folk singer probably has the longest record for blacklisting he's blacklisted in 1949 and isn't put on television again until the Smothers Brothers bring him back in 1967 so I think that's the record for the longest period of blacklisting so it goes on for a long a long time you know I'll be happy to you know chat afterwards thank you for showing up in your corporeal material selves you know non virtual people are really nice to see so thanks again