The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (review)

With his latest book, a biography of the noted Communist writer John Howard Lawson, Gerald Horne makes another successful bid for a more nuanced approach to the story of American Communism. Horne reveals Lawson as an almost protean figure on the literary left, venerated both on Broadway and in Hollywood, whose career was interrupted—but not quite destroyed—by the Red Scare blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s. Lawson had been a darling of New York’s theater scene, with no less than nine plays staged by eminent production companies including the Theatre Guild and the Group Theater. In the late 1920s Lawson trekked to Hollywood, where he helped to define the cinematic architecture of the then-novel talkies, becoming a close associate of Hollywood eminences such as Cecil B. DeMille and Irving Thalberg. He counted among his friends such luminaries as Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Humphrey Bogart, and V. J. Jerome.

Yet for all that, Lawson has received little scholarly discussion. He earns only cursory mention in Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), the book that helped spark interest in the literary left. Lawson is more extensively treated in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund’s still-indispensable The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), though even there his story is fragmentary. The general indifference toward Lawson is both a product and a cause of the caustic labels attached to him. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s assessment of Lawson as a “notorious Communist” and “California’s outstanding Communist” seems to have fixed Lawson as the great icon of Communist Party conformity, the “Hollywood Commissar” who readily subsumed his art to politics. (See Memorandum from Director FBI to Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles, 3 June 1957, No. 100-21198; and FBI Case Report, 31 August 1949, No. 100–21198, John Howard Lawson file, both in Record Group 65, National Archives II.) “What is striking,” Horne observes, “is the ominous atmosphere said to surround Lawson, as if he were some kind of evil force of nature.” Burrowing deeply in the archives and Lawson’s voluminous papers, Horne has uncovered a more complicated subject. Despite Lawson’s reputation for critical ferocity, he was a contemplative, if committed, thinker who came around, belatedly to be sure, to the realities of Josif Stalin’s depredations and whose artistic views, if always forcefully expressed, were nevertheless genuinely felt and earned.

The son of a prominent Jewish newspaperman, Lawson enjoyed a privileged youth. He grew up and remained, as he said in his old age, “a bourgeois intellectual.” Lawson’s World War I service as an ambulance driver (a part of the story Horne truncates) is what made him, along with his friends John Dos Passos and e. e. cummings, a “charter member of the lost generation,” setting him on his path toward avant-garde art and political commitment. (Quoted from Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, p. 129.) Having decided years earlier to become a playwright, Lawson set out after the war, as he recalled in his reliable unpublished memoir, “A Calendar of Commitment: Another View of the Twenties and Thirties,” to write plays that would “defeat the forces that crush the spirit and mutilate the body of man.” He presented his first serious piece in 1923, the path-breaking Freudian/Expressionist drama Roger Bloomer, followed two years later by the daring Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life.

Although neither of these plays achieved clear commercial success, Lawson was fast becoming the toast of certain segments of Broadway, finding himself, Horne writes, “consorting with those against whom he was supposedly rebelling.” His next important project, from 1926 to 1928, was the New Playwrights Theater, established in collaboration with...