Copyright Institute of Labor and Mental Health Sep 1995The Hollywood Blacklist and the Jew: An Exploration of Popular Culture
Paul Buhle, who founded the Oral History of the American Left at New York University, is interviewing entertainment blacklistees for a book about Jewish influences on American popular culture. His latest published volume is Images of American Radicalism (Christopher House), a massive pictorial history.
When Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota demanded in February that National Public Radio turn over the personnel files on all its employees to the Senate subcommittee on communications he chairs, a small stir passed through the ranks of civil libertarians, all the way up to The New York Times. Withdrawn quietly after objections, Pressler's move was perhaps only a trial balloon in a larger war over the use of tax monies for agencies dubbed "liberal" (however contradictory the real evidence) by the new Republican Congress. But what sequence of events might have been set in motion if NPR had actually turned over those dossiers?
Jewish old-timers--who remember better than anyone the McCarthy era's blacklist that played a central role in the film industry and television for several decades--heard ominously familiar signals in the Gingrichites' rhetoric. Pressler's offensive, together with the recent speech by Barbra Streisand at Harvard University defending liberalism and asserting the right of Hollywood celebs to speak out on political questions, evoked some vivid memories of 1947: Katharine Hepburn decrying the emerging militarization of the country and the planet, Dixiecrat J. Parnell Thomas chairing the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals pronouncing a universal ban on any writer, actor, director, producer, or technician unwilling to sign a loyalty oath.
One subtext of McCarthyism, nominally the pursuit of "communist subversion," was simply to stay in line or else. An ordinary person resisting the demands of the era could kiss a career, and in many cases a secure identity in mainstream American life, goodbye. Not very surprisingly, at least a hundred homosexuals were fired for every political "subversive" discovered in civil service. A second subtext, barely disguised, was anti-Semitism. The message--from rural Southern barber shops to Senate chambers--that "Jews control Hollywood" and that Jews were poisoning America had a special meaning to those faced with "investigation."
To clear oneself, to resume something like a normal life, it was never enough to declare personal departure from the Left (most intellectuals had already quit or were on their way out of the Communist Party, disillusioned by Stalin's tyranny and Russian anti-Semitism). One had to name names, most especially those of intimate associates who had shared decades of participation in social movements. A blacklistee recently reminded me of the race memories stirred by the red-hunting committees. In earlier days the czar, caliph, or general had demanded something strikingly similar: We let you live, Jew, if you inform on your friends. Otherwise...
It is an apt moment, then, to go back to the scene of the crime (or supposed crime, for conservative think-tankers and Christian Coalitionists still consider McCarthyism a healthy purge of poisonous symptoms). Ours would hardly be the first such trip. Since the days of The Front--written, directed, and acted by former blacklistees, with the notable addition of Woody Allen--and Barbra Streisand's more popular The Way We Were, fictional renditions of that era have proliferated in theater, television, and film. The American Movie Channel and BBC are each preparing treatments of the Hollywood Red Scare. NPR has planned for 1996 a drama series written by Tony Kahn, son of Gordon Kahn (sometime scriptwriter for Roy Rogers films and author of Hollywood on Trial), about the blacklist's withering day-to-day effect upon a Jewish family. Meanwhile, a small production company is completing a documentary of Hollywood's Great Survivor, Abraham Polonsky, writer for that famous Jewish radio show, The Goldbergs, master of the 1940s film noir, secret scripter for television's You Are There, and most recently film-maker of themes both racial (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here) and Old World Yiddish cultural (Romance of a Horse Thief).
This is where I come in. An odd gentile with a taste for Jewish culture and a dedication to oral history field work, I've spent years interviewing aged union activists and Yiddish newspaper editors, as well as Jewish poets of various generations, summer camp employees, and theatrical types of every left-of-center political description. The passage of time has lately taken me beyond the immigrant generations to a fascinating slice of the next one threatened with oblivion, the Jewish creators of 1930s-'50s popular culture. In some ways, I've realized an old fantasy of meeting my childhood heroes--people like Harvey Kurtzman, the late editor of Mad Comics--and married it to the grown-up intellectual pursuit of popular culture's deeper meanings.
Why Jews? And why so many of them leftish Jews, the very people who injected into nearly anonymous popular-culture objects of my generation's youngest years the otherwise scarce values of egalitarianism and social justice? Perhaps, as the politics and economics of the mainstream seem further and further from possible redemption, I'm only one more intellectual turning in the direction of culture. But here, nevertheless, I find my ideal: the old Jewish radical, full of spunk and insight.
I was listening to Abe Polonsky, spry at eighty-two and loaded with bons mots, in the lunchroom of Neiman-Marcus, not far from his apartment in West Los Angeles. While models in fabulously priced designer suits struck poses, Abe reminded me of an American ghetto past. Three-quarters of a century ago, in New York, his grandmother introduced him to the narrative: Night after night, she read the boy what he wryly calls "Huckleberry Finn on the Volga," American fiction remixed, reinterpreted, and rendered into Yiddish language and Yiddishkeit, the diaspora sensibility. From this origin, Polonsky developed the intellectual reflexivity to move from one cell of American popular culture to another, era after era, withstanding persecutions and transcending changes of political or commercial fashion.
Polonsky's recollections had special and welcome resonance for me. I had absorbed worlds of connections between Jewishness and popular culture, and between Yiddish and Jewishness, almost twenty years ago as I ambled along the boardwalk of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with Maurice Kish, an elderly painter/poet (also chairman of the Yiddish Kultur Farband's more-or-less defunct Art Section), asking him questions about his days as a Catskills dance instructor, amateur boxer, and portraiturist of vanished Coney Island settings like the spectacularly weird Luna Park. Like his contemporaries, Kish did not so much intellectualize about the Yiddish/vernacular connection as live it. But he managed to get the message across to me shortly before Alzheimer's eviscerated his memories--maybe because he knew that I was the only one listening.
Yiddish was, of course, the vernacular language of European Jewry for more than five hundred years, and the language within which Jewish socialism and modern Jewish literature took root simultaneously. I call it, with some irony, the lingua franca of popular culture, and I believe that its very adaptability from linguistic climate to linguistic climate conditioned the native Yiddish speakers to "translate" their culture into new forms, according to the possibilities at hand.
An endless number of show business anecdotes testify equally to the odd and adaptive Yiddishkeit of the generations that loved the Yiddish stage but also shimmied in jazz parlors, watched Charlie Chaplin, went to Hollywood, and created some of the strangest and most interesting popular art objects of the twentieth century. But before we get to Hollywood, we need to go backward a bit, scooping up some history along the way.
As far back as the Christian Middle Ages, the historians tell us, bits and pieces of folk culture and humor from the surrounding cultures were absorbed into Yiddishkeit, notwithstanding the efforts of religious authorities to keep out gentile contaminants. With the passage of time, the Yiddish language itself continuously grew and contracted, absorbing and casting off different elements as its speakers traveled, adapted, and readapted to the problems and possibilities around them.
This experience left a curious legacy for the modern period, when industrialization, urbanization, and the possibility of out-migration suddenly swept across the seemingly timeless Jewish world. If cultured German Jews declared Yiddish a mongrel tongue unfit for proper expression, Jewish writers like Mendel Mokher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem used the satire and wry humor native to its inherent ironies to make larger moral points. The Yiddishist is always plugged into the vernacular--and a little bit outside.
Any close reader of Sholem Aleichem will find in the credulousness of his Jewish masses, the rebellion of youth, and the philistinism of the wealthy classes several basic plot lines of the Jewish-American novel, film, and television drama, from The Rise of David Levinsky to "Molly Goldberg" to Goodbye, Columbus and beyond. For instance: Jewish immigrant (or descendent) grows rich in America, but realizes that he has lost his soul in the process. Or: Sons and daughters seek to escape vapid materialism, and in the process rediscover some Jewish essence. Or again: Jewish lower-class family gets nowhere in the material world, but sees itself through the comic eyes of tolerance and survival. In the very last scene of Molly, a film made about radio and television's Goldbergs, actress Gertrude Berg is in bed with Philip Loeb, who had played her husband for decades on the radio (and would commit suicide shortly after the TV series left the air; Berg bravely refused to fire him for his past left-wing connections). A small and mostly unsuccessful garment manufacturer, Jake complains that they will never conquer the world. No matter, Molly answers: "We only want to live in it." A Jewish, Yiddish thought if ever one was uttered.
The plots get worked and reworked over generations and from Manhattan to Los Angeles, as immigrant themes increasingly give way to those of psychological alienation and gender conflict. But the essence remains in many ways unchanged.
By the time the future Hollywood writers of the 1930s and '40s were born, between around 1905 and 1920, a last major Yiddish literary wave (called di Yunge, the young ones) had taken its stand on the value of the language and on the historic, but also malleable, culture that language expressed. Short-story writers and playwrights like Leon Kobrin ("the Jewish Zola") wrote about the pathos of slum life, with poverty, sickness, family and sexual longing, upward mobility, and disappointment as features of the American bargain. Sholem Aleichem, who actually died in the Bronx (cared for by a young woman, whom I interviewed in her ninety-second year, still in the Bronx), confirmed the Weltschmerz of the Jewish intellectual. He described himself as Pagliacci, amusing the masses while crying on the inside. The melancholiac Yunge Moshe Nadir described going to movies and watching newsreels of mass murder in war, wondering how Jewishness would survive both the horrors of the war-torn Old World and the soul-killing, seductive attractions of America. It's still a relevant question.
In just this atmosphere of mixed fascination and revulsion, movies became an extraordinarily significant factor in the ways that Jews would affect modern culture at large. Jews also rewrote, popularized, and to some degree transformed jazz, the basic American music rooted in African-American culture. They became a business force and creative talent behind comic books a generation or so later. And they penned best-seller after best-seller, psychologized and tantalized readers with dozens or hundreds of Dr. Ruths and Jonathan Kellermans. They did marvelous things on Broadway. But it was film where they could be moguls and writers, scenarists and even stars for the masses--under gentile names, at least for the first several generations.
Most of those who got to Hollywood in the 1930s found disappointment waiting. The studio system was more than a little like a plantation. Entrepreneurs and executives raked in enormous profits, paid most of the help very badly, and made it clear that "Jewish" issues were not going to surface in films made for the goyishe mass audience. They were also bitterly anti-union, although they tolerated the craft (or graft) stagehands' organization that shared their contempt for the contemporary industrial union movement.
Anti-fascism and the drive for unions created a bloc of Hollywood progressives (mostly, but by no means entirely, aligned with the small group of communists, nearly all of them Jewish). It was a West Coast commonplace to say that social movements had real life in them, while movies were only a way of making a living. Yet to take only a single, contrary case in point: Easily one of the oddest and most remarkable of all low-budget production Hollywood directors, Edgar Ulmer--the real Ed Wood if Ed Wood had been an artist--had fled from Vienna to Hollywood and turned out one of the outstanding horror classics of the screen, The Black Cat (he claimed it was an allegory about capitalism) in 1935. Sickened by the studio system, he embarked on a series of independent projects, some involving the very cream of the Yiddish stage. Raising money from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and other sources, he filmed Gruene Felder (Green Fields) in 1937, often considered the most artistic Yiddish-language film and certainly the most commercially successful ever made. (Shot in rural New Jersey, it nevertheless won an Academy Award for the best foreign film of the year.)
There was another sense in which Hollywood progressives didn't give themselves enough credit. The idea or ideal of the public intellectual, not a handful of noted idealists but of a mass of artistic-intellectual toilers in the field of popular documentation and presentation, emerged during the later 1930s at the leftish fringes of the New Deal. Government agencies such as the Works Progress Administration helped make this possible. But the driving concept, of a radically democratic pluralism, had important origins in the networks of the heavily politicized Yiddish stage, and the Yiddish backgrounds of Left cultural figures, including painters and writers as well as movie people. More than anyone else, these people had the need to envision a multicultural, multiracial America in order to imagine a worthy place for themselves in it.
The war suddenly made the public intellectual, even the Jewish left-wing intellectual, a precious resource. As the Red Army held Hitler's legions at bay and powerful liberals urged an anti-fascist propaganda campaign, Left film writers collaborated in a string of remarkable (and sometimes hit) features. Films such as Action in the North Atlantic, Hitler's Children, Edge of Darkness, Tender Comrade, Pride of the Marines, and, yes, Casablanca reflected an unprecedented articulation of democratic but also cryptically Jewish social values. Especially in those starring John Garfield, the Everyman struggles in an alien world for love and community. Bogey's Rick was a Spanish Civil War vet and a goy with a Jewish heart, his Cafe Americain a little piece of America where the melting pot still contains the elements of hope in a dark world. As the postmodernists might put it: skepticism, but within that, also hope.
The Jews who wrote and in some cases directed these films were making a career for themselves in a commercial medium, make no mistake about it. That was (and is) the way Hollywood works.
But consciously or unconsciously, they were reweaving the fabric of the past, their own past, into the present. Yiddish language virtually never appeared in the Hollywood film, but Yiddishkeit was not absent.
Left-wing Hollywood came out of the war, as many Americans did, with remarkably naive optimism about the future. And why not? Their films were boffo at the box office. Director Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell as the beleaguered private eye, was a magnum success that proved the commercial possibilities of film noir with its vivid night scenes, paranoid loners, and cynical desperados. Dmytryck's Crossfire, a brilliant frontal attack on anti-Semitism (and one of the favorite targets of congressional investigators seeking Hollywood "subversion"), introduced Robert Ryan as the perfect, twisted face of hate. Till the End of Time and The House I Live In (an award-winning short feature, starring Frank Sinatra singing an ode to anti-anti-Semitism) verified the hopeful themes of postwar promise.
But the further America (and the world) got from the optimistic, antifascist unity days, the more noir things looked in real life. In a brief moment of relative artistic freedom for anti-capitalist messages, Jewish left-wingers made their aesthetic statement and took their political stand. Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, called by Andrew Sarris "one of the great films of the modern American cinema" and re-released this March in the "Martin Scorsese Presents" video package, shows corruption at the very heart of the system. His John Garfield, emblematic as always ("Call me Julie," as the Jewish actor began private conversations, shedding his gentile mask), is the perfected man on the make plagued with inner doubts precisely because something inside him knows better.
A variety of other remarkable experiments, such as the heavily-gendered features I Can Get It for You Wholesale (written by Polonsky) and The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (written by his sometime collaborator Robert Rossen), reflected women's challenges to men's world, or took up the social themes of postwar Jewish working-class life in transition. Jewish left-wingers like Carl Foreman also pressed, without much immediate luck but great confidence of long-run success, for serious cinematic treatment of race relations in America.
All this bold experimentation ended with the black-list. A host of writers, directors, and technicians, overwhelmingly Jewish, faced ruin. Most never got work in films again. But to look only at the short-run consequences in Hollywood films would be to miss the larger significance of the blacklistees and the meaning of what I call their Yiddishkeit. Left to their own devices, and with the breakup of the big studios, they probably would have invented the American art film on something like the Italian neorealist model--but a lot more Jewish. Returning instead to disguise, they and a younger cohort of Jewish progressives who eluded the blacklist continued to experiment with various popular culture mediums, especially television. There they reoriented their Left/New Dealish sensibility to the changing scene. The problem of community in a world of cultural transitions and alienated teenagers, of determined women, troubled races, and continuing injustices found its answer in an ethos of tolerance, real justice, and an openness to learn from new and unfamiliar cultures.
Polonsky himself "greylisted" (wrote under pseudonyms) for "You Are There," television's earliest self-proclaimed "quality" show, directed by a former Group Theater child actor, Sidney Lumet. He and his collaborators, Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff (whose wife, Lee Grant, was blacklisted for refusing to testify against him), wrote most of the episodes, projecting faux "newscast" episode-dramas--"a day like all days...only you are there"--with heavy emphasis on the historic struggle for free speech and assorted civil liberties.
Fellow blacklistee Paul Jarrico, best remembered as producer of the classic film, Salt of the Earth, wrote for what historians consider television's finest early sitcom, "The Phil Silvers Show" (or "You'll Never Get Rich"), depicting a racially integrated troop of soldiers led by the sentimental (and for anyone but the culturally hard of hearing, the emblematically Jewish) schemer Sergeant Bilko. If a political message would be hard to demonstrate here, in the midst of McCarthyism, an anti-political message might do. The bureaucracy and stupidity and sheer superfluousness of military life (at the height of the Cold War) could perhaps be read as a subscript that those militant anti-fascists, the Marx Brothers, would have easily understood. The sympathetic portrayals of the ordinary soldiers, and the ludicrousness of visiting martinets, punctuated this hilarious lampoon of a peacetime army devoted to meaningless pursuits.
For a teen growing up in the 1950s, television played the role that movies had ten or fifteen years earlier. A viewership of "Adventures of Robin Hood" (1956-58), with its episodes written largely by blacklistees and produced by Hannah Weinstein, lead publicist of Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential publicity campaign (and matriarch of Hollywood's current Jewish feminist dynasty), was far more likely than any film of the day to drive home the message of the system's corrupt character and the rebel's fun-loving adventure. For a younger child, "Lassie" might possibly provide a maudlin version of an idealist and animal-lovers' message, with malefactors determined to dynamite a lake or otherwise victimize the innocent; a few years later, "Flipper" would go ecological-minded writers one better, supplying an animal protagonist literally depending upon the survival of an endangered environment. Both were written, in many episodes, by Hollywood blacklistee (and former Abbott and Costello comedy writer) Bobby Lees in his secret return from the blacklist. Were these animals Jewish? Well, they had heart.
The opening of "adult" television to socially critical content began in the 1960s with the trickle of such weekly social dramas as "East Side/West Side" (1962-63) and "NYPD" (1968-70), both produced by David Suskind and scripted in part by Writers' Guild activist Eddie Adler, or "The Defenders" (1961-63) written in part by Robin Hood veteran (and later sometime "Kojak" scripter) Albert Ruben. Adopting what neoliberals would later mean-spiritedly call "victimology," these shows dealt sympathetically with the poor and their heroic defenders. The Vietnam War and the appearance of grown-up but still youthful consumers ready to purchase durables and offended by redneck politics prompted a new wave of "social comedies" such as "All In the Family" and "M*A*S*H."
Norman Lear, a former radio writer from the small milieu of almost exclusively Jewish, progressive professionals, had actually been an officer in the short-lived Television Writers of America, a union destroyed for refusing to accept the blacklist. Lear's auteurship began with "All in the Family," an adaptation of the English sitcom "Steptoe and Son," with some of the look and feel of ersatz Clifford Odets: a New York extended family with large doses of yelling. Stripped of most of the useful or sympathetic ethnicity, family members strive to accommodate (or to resist) the racial and other social changes around them. Spinoffs such as "The Jeffersons" and "Maude" carried the momentum forward. They had the built-in limitations of the "problem" format (one problem per show, from abortion to interracial sex) which seemed to trivialize the real issues, and a need to reconcile conflicting characters sentimentally. Still, Lear had opened things up.
"M*A*S*H" offered better opportunities for hard politics and a limited but real artistic experimentation. Based upon blacklistee Ring Lardner, Jr.'s co-authored Oscar-winning script for the Robert Altman film, the television version drove home dissenting, humanist themes, striving to find genuine incidents in the lives of U.S. Army medics in Korea and to portray them accurately. Auteur Larry Gelbart, another seasoned writer from the Cold War days, was best known for his playscript of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which (until The Front) was arguably the biggest showcase of Jewish blacklistees. Once the half-Jewish Alan Alda had become America's wholesomely anti-war sweetheart, the cooperative writing and even directing of episodes was unprecedented in U.S. television. All told, "M*A*S*H" offered another side of the legacy of Abe Polonsky's Hollywood generation: truths through entertainment that documented the horrors of the modern world. Indeed, the television-writing process would never be quite so flexible again.
In the very odd way that classic film noir mixes disillusionment with social breakdown and exaltation of the loner, even "The Rockford Files"--the leading detective show in reruns by a long shot--is part of the Jewish blacklist diaspora. Its co-producer, Roy Huggins, and its lead writer, Meta Rosenberg, were among Hollywood's friendly witnesses who decided to make peace with the witch-hunters in order to keep working. The utterly charming James Garner, Noah Beery, and the rest of the cast (especially Stuart Margolin, who played the small-time grifter Angel Martin) face a world of incompetent cops, neurotic mobsters, conspiratorial CIA agents, and cruel fate with all the effort they can manage to create their own community of sorts. In "Rockford"'s better moments, we see shadows of shadows: the noir detective of the 1940s, continuously beaten, anti-heroic in his unwillingness to glamorize himself and his profession, lost but never truly forlorn in the dark world of modern reality.
The blacklistees had less effect upon the later world of films, because the field was quickly crowded with social-minded competitors better tuned into the generational pop scene. But they still had something important to say. Take the oeuvre of Martin Ritt, blacklisted as an actor and not as a director. From No Down Payment, a 1957 assault on middle-class apathy, dys-functionalism, racism, and plain greed in the `burbs," he moved on to The Front, Sounder, The Molly Maguires, and Norma Rae among others, all of them examples in one way or another of what the classic cinematic Jewish Old Left had in mind. Walter Bernstein, who collaborated on several of these, wrote the anti-nuke drama Fail Safe and a neglected anti-fascist classic of the late 1980s, The House on Carroll Street, frankly admits that they are not punkish, cartoonish, or outside reality like, for instance, Natural Born Killers or Pulp Fiction. Unfashionable, perhaps, they possess a comforting solidity: They tell the story.
There's more to the legacy, by a long shot. Next time you wade through hours of Malcolm X, hang on for the credits: Arnold Perl, ten years dead and a blacklistee to boot, is there as co-author with Spike Lee. Who else but a Jewish ex-red from a Yiddish background? If you've answered that one, then try another: What do we miss now that they're almost gone? Perhaps Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker profile of Woody Allen a couple years ago, put it right on this score: Without the aging, Yiddish-accented scoffers who made fun of the contrast between popular life and artistic pretension, a fundamental reference point of Jewish comedy has disappeared. And without the eschatological vision of a cooperative society in the future, so perhaps has the uniquely Jewish dramatic tension.
But in our media-sogged world that has become a vast cross-referenced library, some crucial legacy of those traditions is not really lost at all. Check out a classic sci-fi flick like Creature from the Black Lagoon, and ruminate on the Freudian-ecological message that the Jewish producer, a close associate of Orson Welles in earlier years and scriptwriter for a kids' psychology radio show of the late '40s, claims he intended. On another dull night, look at "Hogan's Heroes," tinged with anti-fascist themes scripted by the former president of the Television Writers' Union, and featuring a long list of Jewish crypto-progressives. And get yourself ready for the canon of Jewish Left 1940s movies likely to be unleashed on the video market soon.
As an oral historian, I bitterly regret missing conversations with John Garfield or Moe Howard, the cerebral member of the Three Stooges (two of them Jewish) who in one of his last interviews cursed Nixon and the Vietnam War. Or even Groucho, in his day quite a unionist and a secretive but substantial financial contributor to the cause of the blacklistees. About a week after he died, I saw Groucho clearly in a dream and pressed him about his old left-wing connections. He replied: I can't answer now, I'm much too busy.
This last one is not much of a story, but goes to the heart of my personal pursuit. It is not really political in the way the Old Left would consider the term, but neither can it entirely escape the old controversies that raged through the Jewish community with special passion. Murray Kempton, decades after he savaged the blacklistees, changed his mind about them. Dead wrong in their views of Russia, they had nevertheless been braver in their convictions and their deeds, and suffered considerably more, than those who condemned them so easily at the time. No doubt Vietnam, and also the passage of time, had a lot to do with Kempton's shifting judgment. But I think he was ready to reclaim these American Jews, with all their failings, for his own. Gentile Yiddishist, television watcher, movie lover, I can't help wanting to do the same.
My Research
