Listing Enemies
GARDNER, MARTIN
Listing Enemies A Journal of the Plague Years By Stefan Kanfer Atheneum 306 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Martin Gardner Staff writer, "Scientific American"; author, "The Flight of Peter...
...In addition, California State Senator Jack Tenney published a report of his Committee of Un-American Activities...
...No, God...
...It is now a vague monster compounded of Black Panthers, Maoists, Castroists, remnants of the Weathermen, Democratic partv liberals, the New York Times, Daniel Ellsberg, Jack Anderson, and so on, but it's the same old paranoia...
...Their witless rhetoric had nothing in common with the anti-Communism of the democratic Left...
...A radio talk show moderator, John Faulk, sued Aware for libel and Nizer was his attorney...
...Although Kanfer does not cover Joe McCarthy's antics, mainly because the Senator from Wisconsin had little interest in show business subversion, he does devote several incredible chapters to the hearings of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas before he was packed off to prison for padding payrolls...
...indeed, the liberal anti-Communist usually found himself on the blacklist...
...before the film cut to a close-up of a Soviet plane...
...Bing Crosby...
...It is easy now, writes Kanfer, to see the old Leftists of show business as ridiculous...
...The people included Norman Thomas, John Dewey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, Robert Hutchins, Freud, Einstein, H. L. Mencken, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder...
...True, they did their best to sneak propaganda into films, but whenever a producer or director spotted such a ploy he chopped it out...
...Kanfer adds a footnote: "Fagan was still thriving in 1973...
...Colonel McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, hoped the Red Network would have a big sale "so that Americans will know who are the enemies of society within our gate...
...When Kanfer wrote that sentence, the last sentence of his book, he did not know that the funny sounds would soon be coming from the white walls surrounding a former HUAC member, Richard Nixon...
...A few were killed by the plague...
...it isn't on the level...
...A Jewish veteran said he couldn't get a job because his name wasn't Jones...
...Mady Christians, of / Remember Mama, was hounded until her ordeal ended in a massive attack of hypertension...
...When Hitler turned on Russia, the novel dropped out of sight for three decades, only to surface again after the U.S...
...Even at the top of its influence, the American Communist party was nine-tenths windy bombast...
...Residues of the plague still linger...
...Philip Loeb, papa of the Molly Goldberg television show, committed suicide after a long period of unemployment...
...Some actors were denied work solely because their last names were the same as those of blacklistees...
...author, "The Flight of Peter Fromm" Periodically throughout history political leaders, sometimes entire nations, are smitten by paranoia...
...There were moments of comedy during the HUAC hearings...
...How can we sum up...
...There was Myron C. Fagan's Red Treason in Hollywood and Documentation of Red Stars in Hollywood, the latter containing what Kanfer calls a white list of "touchables": John Wayne, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy...
...His grim pacifist novel, Johnny Got His Gun, is the one literary product by members of the ten likely to escape the dustbin...
...A few years ago he made a movie out of Johnny Got His Gun and won the International Critics Award...
...If they were strident or philistine, they have paid their dues, paid them at usurious rates...
...But at their meanest, they did subscribe to a faith in, and not against, the human potential...
...Was their strategy admirable or craven...
...On the other hand, HUAC and everyone in Hollywood knew about the ten (eight were active party members), so their defiance was less an effort at concealment than a first attempt to resist the plague...
...There were hundreds of lesser tragedies...
...The bugaboo varies (Satan, a church, a country, a race, a social class, an idea), but the behavior of the extremists is invariant: hysterical actions that do more damage than the dreaded malevolence...
...Hundreds of actors, writers and directors were infected by the plague, and Kanfer examines it all...
...Dilling he was a Protestant fundamentalist...
...Elizabeth Dilling's Red Network, the first published blacklist, was divided into two parts: organizations and people...
...How much influence did the Hollywood party-liners have on the political views of moviegoers...
...the rats make funny sounds as they gnaw at the walls...
...The most talented among the eight was Dalton Trumbo...
...The script called for Ginger to say "Share and share alike-That's democracy...
...The committee's most famous victims, the "Hollywood Ten," were jailed for refusing to talk about their Communist ties...
...asked the committee's chief investigator...
...From the beginning, the plague was spread mainly by fuzzy-minded Christians...
...After the '50s the plague began to fizzle even faster than the Communist party...
...Some of the victims had indeed been members of the Communist party, or fellow travelers, but most of them had done little more than join a front group or sign a petition or march in a May Day parade...
...became involved in Vietnam...
...Kanfer reminds us that it was first serialized in the Daily Worker during the period of the Hitler-Stalin treaty...
...John Garfield tried to salvage his career by agreeing to put his name on a Look confession, "I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook," but before it could be printed he died of a heart attack in the bedroom of an actress friend...
...Two Thousand Years ago a Man named Jesus died on a Cross," wrote Fagan (like Mrs...
...At their worst they were blind visionaries who believed that by walking forward they ascended into the air...
...Mary's, because he had "a character in there that they do not like...
...The bigger personalities survived by various stratagems, some by weeping and naming the same old names, but on the lower levels of show business there were permanently blighted careers...
...Later blacklists were less preposterous, but not much...
...No act was too trivial to escape the eagle eyes of the Red-chasers...
...Among the subvcsive organizations were the NAACP, the New School for Social Research, even the YM and YWCA...
...Trumbo's skyrocket success since he emerged from limbo, about 15 years ago, has made him Hollywood's richest radical...
...There have been previous efforts to document parts of the crazy affair?Merle Miller's ACLU analysis of the television blacklist, John Cog-ley's Report on Blacklisting, Robert Vaughan's PhD thesis, memoirs by various victims and observers...
...A few days before the trial ended, when it was clear that Hartnett hud blown the case, his sidekick...
...Louis Nizer delivered the knockout punch...
...Ginger Rogers' mother explained why she wouldn't let her daughter appear in Trumbo's Tender Comrade...
...The bugaboo, of course, is not quite the same...
...But, in the end, they deserve more...
...The Reverend Billy Hargis is still fighting Communism in Tulsa, and books and pamphlets about the Red Menace still bemuse the innocent...
...It is hard to quarrel with Kanfer's opinion...
...Lionel Stander whistled the Internationale...
...In 1953 Catholic lawyer Godfrey Schmidt established Aware, Inc., an even bigger investigative organization...
...They were furtive when they should have been open, romantic in an era that needed social realism, molten when they should have been crystalline...
...No film scripter lives in a larger, more ostentatious mansion...
...Socialists of an earlier, less covert American radicalism never hesitated to stand up and be counted...
...A few scenes did slip by...
...Dilling's handbook, it showed a microphone leaning to the left, a scarlet hand about to seize it...
...Lawrence Johnson, a Svracuse grocer who had somehow become the nation's number two Red-hunter, checked into a motel and killed himself with sleeping pills...
...Hartnett, the officer of Aware who had fingered Faulk, admitted he had been "sold a barrel of false information," and in 1962 the jury awarded Fauik $3.5 million...
...In the United States, from the '30s throughout the '50s, the bugaboo was Communism...
...Going My Way and The Bells of St...
...Not until the appearance of this astringent study by Time editor Stefan Kanfer, however, has the full story been told so well...
...Farce is tragedy out for a good time...
...Walt Disney's tongue slipped...
...There should be a thorough investigation...
...Why should Christians support those who . . . etc...
...None...
...Director Leo McCarey boasted that the Russians had panned his films...
...Red Channels, the deadliest of the blacklists, was issued in 1950 by Vincent Hartnett, an ex-Naval Intelligence officer who quickly became the leading foe of Communism in American show business...
...There were endless cases of mistaken identity and false hearsay...
...Eschewing the crimson cover of Mrs...
...Those papers preserved by John Dean are probably funnier and more frightening than Mrs...
...Oil-ling's papers...
...Dilling (this and all later quotes are from Kanfer's book), "that Eleanor Cop-enhaver, National Industrial Secretary of the YWCA, has recently married Sherwood Anderson, prominent Communist worker...
...Still, watching the Watergate hearings with their (so far) scrupulous regard for decency, catching sight of a bumper sticker that savs "Honk if you tbink he's guilty," and re^dine this balanced and witty book, I'm inclined to think our freedoms are going to survive...
...A similar fate cut down the black actor, Canada Lee...
...Gary Cooper solemnly said he was opposed to Communism because "from what I hear...
...An ex-Com-munist tells me," wrote Mrs...
...The names it included plus many more dotted the pages of such periodicals as Ed Gibbons' Alert, Alfred Kohlberg's Plain Talk, and Counterattack, mimeographed by three former FBI agents who had founded ABC (American Business Consultants) to investigate suspects for a fee...
...It is possible that this year / shall die-en a different kind of cross?for the safety of America and, God grant, the Peace of the Universe...
...Someone on the deck of a warship shouted "It's ours...
...The struggle to exorcise it may not have been a major plague, as world plagues go, yet the harm done was real enough, and nowhere more visible than in the entertainment world...
...It was a marvelous and profitable racket...
...He called The League of Women Voters a Commie front when he meant The League of Women Shoppers...
...It made them "controversial...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
