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7 Struggle 116 The explosive debut of Blockade had cemented further Lawson’s eminence, and at this juncture, the fact that he was a Communist did not erase this grand status. His financial problems seemed to be over, as he resided in a prosperous, sun-dappled neighborhood in Southern California with his wife and children and hobnobbed with the Hollywood elite. His life was not as luxurious as that of his future cellmate, Dalton Trumbo, but it was not far behind.1 Yet there were not too distant roars and rumbles that carried the potential to disrupt this pleasant reverie that had enveloped Red Hollywood.The Communist Party, of which Lawson was a preeminent member, had endured a semilegal existence during its early years and after escaping from this rockiness had to navigate through the choppy shoals of intense surveillance . The notorious Los Angeles Police Department contained a hyperactive “Red Squad” that whiled away hours monitoring Communists.2 The mogul Louis B. Mayer—“like his friend and hero, J. Edgar Hoover, whose photograph was on prominent display in his office”—“insisted on knowing everything about everybody,” and this most definitely included Reds, like Lawson, who had supped at his table.3 Cecil B. DeMille, with whom Lawson had collaborated upon arriving in Hollywood in the 1920s, one-upped Mayer, having “started the Hollywood chapter” of the “American Protective League,” a “civilian secret service operating as an auxiliary of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation.” At its “peak the APL had between 200,000 to 250,000 members organized with militarystyle ranks in 1200 different divisions.”4 It was said that there were “approximately 1550 members of the Communist Party in Los Angeles” and that “there were many Communist sympathizers in other organizations and that the total number of such sympathizers might reach as high as 25,000.” In 1934 a horrified police agent attended a Red rally and was stunned to see that “the speakers were of all races and nationalities, including several Negroes and a Japanese.”5 It seemed—or so the authorities believed—that a good number of the comrades subjected to surveillance were Jewish, and this could only mean ill for Lawson. One late 1937 intelligence report that focused on the “Hollywood Section” of the party found it worthy of note that “there were 29 members present, 28 of whom were Jews.”6 By then it was reported that “the CP now has more than 2300 members in Los Angeles, and when it is taken into consideration that the Party really started with only 19 in the year 1920, one must agree that the Party is making headway.”7 In 1938 Culbert Olson was elected governor as the “state overthrew forty-four years of Republican rule. At the same time Los Angeles progressives won a fight to recall the corrupt Republican Mayor Shaw.”8 The screenwriter Philip Dunne alleged that the Olson campaign was the first major instance of the politicizing of the artist. “Hollywood won that election ,” he concluded. “They saw how you got headlines.”9 The nervous HUAC in turn had reason to believe that Olson “‘fraternizes with and accepts the program of the strategy committee of the Communist Party.’”10 The Communist Party grew accordingly as its main conservative predators were knocked back on their heels. John Weber, a Party organizer, recalled later that “there were never more than 300 members in the Hollywood Communist Party. Not quite half of them were writers and the rest were actors, directors, various white collar workers and even some backlot workers.” Weber, who also had served as an agent for the powerful William Morris Agency and as a producer in France and Italy, had touched on one of the weaknesses of the Party apparatus in the film colony. For its Marxist theory would have suggested that “backlot workers”—the carpenters , painters, the veritable “proletarians”—should have been better represented in the ranks of the party that described itself as the tribune of the downtrodden working class. That writers were overrepresented was anomalous though rarely articulated. Instead, the Hollywood party was walled off—presumably for reasons of security—from the rest of the party in the region, which may have deprived it of a kind of ideological ballast that could have kept it afloat when storms loomed. As a result, Lawson—who quickly became the most visible spokesman and leader of the Hollywood party—dealt directly with the party center in Manhattan...

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