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  • Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal
  • Doug MacLeod
Alan Casty . Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal. Scarecrow Press, 2009. 376 pages; $50.00

Usually, when talking with my composition students about (in)tolerance in American culture, I briefly touch upon McCarthyism owing to its political, moral, and ethical significance. A paranoid time in American history, McCarthyism is considered by most as "a synonym for the anticommunist political repression of the early Cold War," although, the utter hatred for communism arrived well before McCarthyism existed. The reason for this hatred—according to one critic—was the irrational notion that outsiders threatened the nation from within. Projecting their own fears onto a demonized "other," many Americans found convenient scapegoats.

In other words, the "other" was always an organized, well-oiled machine filled with a rebellious conglomerate of faiths, races, and cultures, but distinctly not "American" or democratic in its ideological make-up. And it is because of America's fear of "organized otherness" that McCarthy went after Communist Party members. What the Wisconsin senator didn't realize, however, was that the organized "others" were not always organized, an idea that Alan Casty [End Page 126] examines in Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal.

The author hypothesizes that the meetings held to protest McCarthy's witch hunts representednot great moments but, instead, distorted idealism, while party members, who crusaded for free speech, submitted to censorship and accepted the denial of that very freedom. Casty further explains how silence in the face of freedom of speech does not equal loyalty and community.

Meticulously researched andtightly organized, Communism in Hollywood examines the complex history of communism's origins, its influence in Tinseltown, and how, after time, it became much like McCarthyism, wherein trials were eventually held, judgments were hastily made, and misconceptions about the atrocities that were actually occurring in the Soviet Union were not fully recognized. Casty believes that this turmoil between individuals within the American Communist movement eventually led to profound "immediate effects" on "their lives and careers," as well as "long-term moral paradoxes...in their actions and [in] the enduring moral and character judgments based on their actions, shaped by the power of ideology and unrelenting feelings of betrayal."

Casty shows these effects by using conversations, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews, historical texts, passages from other books in the field, biographies, and the films made at the time as evidence and he does so wisely and deftly. He speaks in-depth about Albert Maltz, Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Parker, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, amongst others; names that, in some way, will be remembered because of their involvement (and, in some instances, their betrayal) of the CPUSA. Particularly strong in Communism in Hollywood are Casty's chapters on Robert Rossen, whose career "in Hollywood provides a unique and significant case study, a quintessential narrative of a central figure's journey through these dynamic and crusading, idealistic and righteously deluded, tumultuous and troubled times."

Having published The Films of Robert Rossen in 1969, Casty is certainly knowledgeable about Rossen's affiliation with the party, his testimony against the party, and the films that he wrote while going through his own personal trials and tribulations. More important, Casty seems to have a great deal of passion not only for Rossen but also for the other people affiliated with the party, the time period, the history, the documents, and the movement. He tries to understand (and, in turn, wants his reader to understand) why the CPUSA did not succeed, even if the individuals who stayed silent, or stated very little, thought they had. Hollywood's CPUSA contributed to its own [End Page 127] demise at a time when it could have been doing a lot of good for the American people and the Soviet Union.

Doug MacLeod
dm8600@albany.edu
...

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