Life Among the Stalinists
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Life Among the Stalinists The Hollywood Writers' Wars By Nancy Lynn Schwartz (Completed by Sheila Schwartz) Knopf. 334 pp. $17.95. Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party in the...
...I had dropped into the old Rand School at 7 East 15th Street, where the NL then had its offices, to see whether I could cadge some good books for review...
...Here we find "progressive radicals" at daggers drawn with reactionary Red-baiters . The analytical acuity of the authors is best illustrated by the following delightful dichotomy: "The progressives of the IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees], like those of the SWG [Screen Writers Guild], the anti-Nazi League, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, were all accused by the forces of reaction of being front organizations [for the Communists...
...Having an uncappable curiosity (which my wife says will yet get me shot), I asked Woltman how he had come by the Duclos article...
...For an American audience, the most relevant aspect of Cockburn's work was Republican Senator William Borah's announcing in 1939 that he was better informed on world affairs than the President and the State Department and giving The Week as his "reliable" source...
...Maurice Isserman's history of the CPUSA during World War II can be disposed of briefly: He has matched Mary S. McAuliffe, author of Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals (1978), in offering me nothing I did not already know...
...The reactionaries kept accusing Lawson & Co...
...He wonders how Frederick Woltman, a notorious "Red-baiter" in party parlance, got a scoop of the Duclos article for the New York World-Telegram, where he covered the American Communist beat...
...As for using films to indoctrinate the masses, in general there was an unspoken consensus between the commissars and the producers: The industry's role for capitalist and Communist alike was to be financial...
...Sol suspected the mysterious "Manulsky" was in fact Dmitry Manuilsky, the Ukrainian apparatchik who, with Boris Ponamarev, took down the sign on the door of the Communist International in 1943...
...In Warren Beatty's saga the Bolshevik Revolution has much to do with the story as the Civil War did in Gone with the Wind...
...of using the movies for agit-prop to advance the "line...
...The cadres who persistently defined "Left" as "East" have now achieved honored status...
...True, the line goes, he committed evil deeds and American Communists should have chastised him, but they were so busy resisting the American police state that they had little time to evaluate the broad picture...
...It came in the next mail delivery...
...Part of the fun of reading the Schwartzes' volume is the way the authors—wholly unconsciously—depict life among the whores...
...In Willi Milnzenberg's picturesque phrase, Hollywood was the party's "milk cow...
...The obit described his personal newspaper, The Week, as "staunchly anti-fascist, particularly anti-Hitler...
...Last December 17, the Times gave the last rites to Claud Cockburn, the one-time leading British Stalinist who later wandered off into idiosyncratic Marxism...
...Was Socialist Home Secretary Herbert Morrison furious at its denunciation of the government for not being adequately "anti-fascist...
...Sol introduced me to Woltman and his journalistic accomplice, George Schuyler, the scourge of the Communists in the National Negro Congress and other fronts...
...Someone (the Schwartzes say it was Lionel Stander) did whistle the Internationale while waiting for an elevator—was it in Rio...
...In short, though, the Hollywood Stalinists may have blocked some good stuff such as Darkness at Noon, their real contribution to the party—and the Comintern—was money...
...Thus just about the time Joseph Clark, Joseph Starobin, John Gates, George Charney, and other veteran apparatchiks split and opened the party archives—with a massive assist from Philip Jaffe—a new generation appeared trying to glorify "The Romance of American Communism...
...It was a bit of a shock for the comrades to read of Browder's defenestration in a reactionary capitalist paper under Wolt-man's by-line...
...Forces of reaction" be damned...
...And they completely pass over the implications of Maltz' pathetic public recantation...
...When our Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) contingent rushed to see Madelaine Carroll and Henry Fonda, we discovered that "They fought the world to reach each other's arms...
...North Star and Song of Russia were "boy meets girl in heroic Russia...
...This is particularly true in The Hollywood Writers' Wars, essentially a history of the Screen Writers Guild...
...There was a great difference between those democratic radicals who opposed the Stalinist operation in Hollywood and the "forces of reaction" brought front and center by Nancy and Sheila Schwartz...
...I do find myself accidently in a position to help Isserman fill a gap...
...328 pp...
...Was he a regular subscriber to the Cahiers du Communisme, the theoretical monthly journal of the French Communist Party...
...Administrative costs," that is, paying the CP's "civil service"—so well described in Char-ney's memoirs—seemed to run rather high...
...They were far too smart and meretricious to read Lenin aloud in a bordello...
...Isserman confirms the Browder-Jaffe thesis of American ignorance...
...Tobesure, Mission to Mosco w was a different case, but (unless memory slips) I recall roaring with laughter when the Soviet Generals conspired with the Nazis at a reception...
...As Jaf fe has reconstructed it, Andrei Zhdanov—in those days the rising Kremlin star—drafted the Duclos blast, sent it to France with Maurice Thorez (the 1939 French CP leader who had deserted and fled to Moscow, and whom DeGaulle pardoned in 1945), and subsequently used Manuilsky, who was in the U.S...
...The parallel with Reds comes to mind...
...The Schwartzes' book has a lot of interesting material on the growth of the Screen Writers Guild...
...The American Communist Party in the Second World War By Maurice Isserman Wesleyan...
...Well, I wasn't certain—because Starobin had been so positive to the contrary—that the American CP had no advance notice of the 1945 essay by Jacques Duclos that occasioned the downfall of Earl Broder and his talk of greater cooperation between West and East...
...Actors and actresses who didn't know a Communist from an antelope would contribute their names and faces...
...And they played rough: James T. Farrell told me that Studs Lonigan was set for production until Lawson blocked it, and Joseph Freeman's Never Call Retreat was vetoed by Howard Fast...
...19.95...
...It was banned in 1941, along with the Daily Worker, for its persistent sniping at the British War effort...
...I can't guarantee it was Manuilsky, of course, but Woltman was fed the article by a Soviet functionary...
...Why in 1941 would a "staunchly anti-fascist, particularly anti-Hitler" paper be banned in tandem with the Daily Worker...
...One result has been the conversion of Stalin into essentially a marginal figure...
...They have, for example, a problem understanding why everybody got so mad at Albert Maltz for writing some favorable comments in the New Masses about Jim Farrell...
...unfortunately, they totally lack sophistication...
...Of course not...
...Courtesy of Uncle Sam, I took in more movies between 1943-46 than I have in the years since...
...A recent classic example will suffice...
...It was almost impossible to distinguish between the good guys and the bad in this low-grade schlock...
...Read that again, it's a beauty...
...From our vantage point on the democratic Left, the Communist apparat in Hollywood simply had one overwhelming task—to raise money...
...And my ideological radar was on...
...Cock-burn, like editor William Rust of the Daily Worker, had endorsed the Nazi-Soviet Pact and in 1940 was organizing a "People's Convention" to undermine British involvement in an imperialist war...
...Reviewed by John P. Roche A BY-PRODUCT of the number of "Red-diaper babies" who turned up in the New Left has been the seemingly interminable effort to legitimize their Stalinist "roots...
...Dore Schary enlightened me about his proposed filming of Darkness at Noon—he was informed he would have to run the cameras and install the sets by himself...
...I learned this in the Manhattan salon of Sol Levitas, executive editor of THE NEW LEADER, around 1948...
...As a matter of fact, during our wartime love affair with the Soviet Union I saw only three movies with a somewhat pro-Soviet pitch...
...These groups were "front" organizations, run by tough Stalinists like John Howard (Jack) Lawson, Howard Fast, and their minions...
...I remember hoping the film capital would speak up for the Spanish Republic and learning about a blockbuster called Blockade being in the works...
...What subsequently happened to the money remains a mystery: One government study of a Stalinist fund-raising project for the Spanish Republic indicated about 10 cents of every dollar crossed the ocean...
...He said he had received a call from a Russian named "Manulsky" who reported he would shortly be sent an item of great importance to the future leadership of the American Communists...
...Another interesting consequence of treating the international Communist movement as having travelled on a different track from Stalin has been the rise of Orwellian newspeak in discussing party hacks...
...The answer is that Woltman was provided with a translation of the Duclos polemic by a Ukrainian, a member of the Ukrainian SSR's delegation to the San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations...
...All we learn from the Times, however, is that for some inexplicable reason the British in 1941 suppressed a worthy publication...
...Possibly today a New York Times obit of Hitler would list him as a "population control activist," although I somehow doubt it...
...Levitas and Woltman were friends—indeed, Sol fed Woltman a number of tips on the work of the CP in the American labor movement...
...at the time, to spread the tidings...
...The Anti-Nazi League could fill the Hollywood Bowl with a benefit for Spain...
...Yet the term "radical activist," or some version of it, is routinely employed in farewells to veteran Stalinists...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 10
