Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Just finished reading Ronald and Allis Radosh's book, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left -- a history of the Communists and their fellow travellers in the film industry. It was very enjoyable and interest-holding, and far more sober in tone than one might have expected from someone involved with FrontPage Magazine -- a web site I enjoy but who's enthusiasm for its viewpoint one must keep an eye on.
The Radoshes style is to take an era, then break it down by running through the role a select number of people played in that era and using their narrative to tell the story. The method works well enough.
I have heard it remarked that a large number of the far-left anti-Israel and antio-America sites and groups contain a remarkable overlap in terminology and membership. This comes as no surprise given the Leftist, Marxist roots of many of the principles. So it was with some interest that I read about the shout that echos on the web and in the peace marches today -- the Communist (now the Left/Islamist confluence) recognition that their real message is unpalatable, so instead they establish front groups with agendas they establish and who's steering they control in order to ensnare fellow travellers and well-meaning liberals whom they consider useful idiots. It was true then, it's true now.
Yes, there really were Communists in Hollywood who hated America and took their cues from Joseph Stalin. Yes, they had their own blacklist going before the House Un-American Activities Committee came along. It was a blacklist for those who didn't toe their ideological line or who had the bad judgement to leave the fold -- something they used the unions they controlled to enforce. Remember, these are people who believed in a one-party situation with acceptable thought dictated from above -- acceptable thought in politics and its expression in art. To grant them sincerity as champions of free expression in the face of a fascistic state belies credulity.
The picture painted by Red Star Over Hollywood is a nuanced view of the time. The HUAC (and most of the events in the book take place before the coming of Joe McCarthy) is painted neither as perfectly right, nor perfectly wrong, just as the records of those called before it are given in a full three-dimensions. As Dalton Trumbo, one of those Stalinists who eventually began to have second thoughts put it, there were "only victims" of the time.
In fact, my mention of Trumbo leads me to also mention one of the people in the book who does emerge in her pages, much to my enjoyment, as a hero -- one of my favorite actresses, Olivia de Havilland (still living in France where she has no-doubt been kidnapped to). Scheduled to give a speech in 1946 on behalf of the Communist front group, HICCASP (Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions) and written by Trumbo, de Havilland instead substituted her own speech, and it became one of the first open breaking points between the Communists and the genuine liberals:
De Havilland substitued a speech with an almost opposite point of view, underlining the growing differences between the genuine liberals and the Hollywood Communists. From 1932 to 1945, she told her audience, a "coalition of all liberal and progressive forces" made up a sizable majority of the New Deal supporters. But in the postwar era, "reactionary forces have driven a wedge into the liberal coalition" and were trying to make it appear "that the great liberal movement is controlled by those who are more interested in taking orders from Moscow and following the so-called Party line than they are interested in making democracy work." To prove otherwise, liberals would have to distance themselves openly from both Moscow and American Communists.
"We believe in democracy," she told the crowd, "and not in Communism." She reminded the audience that when the CPUSA [Communist Party USA] had endorsed Roosevelt for re-election in 1944, he repudiated their endorsement. Today, she acknowledged, Communists "frequently join liberal organizations. That is their right. But it is also our right to see that they do not control us. Or guide us...or represent us."
Trumbo exploded in a fit of rage when he heard what De Havilland had done...
Today's genuine liberals and friends of democracy would be well served taking note of Olivia de Havilland's example.
If this sounds like interesting history, here's a link to the book: Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left
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