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

12. Jailed for Ideas

12 Jailed for Ideas 202 The roasting encounter endured by Lawson in Washington in the fall of 1947 was a turning point for this writer, now well into his fifties. Since his romantic diversions some years back, his marriage to Sue Lawson had stabilized ; yet this ordeal, combined with his “blacklisting” from Hollywood, placed added pressures on his family. She found these unfortunate occurrences “simply terrible.”As with so many others compelled to undergo this vale of misery, her “stomach” was feeling “entirely ulcerated.” Thus “I know,” she told her spouse, “what yours must feel.”1 Sue Lawson’s response to the congressional inquisition was not unique. The actor Mary Davenport was a Communist like her husband, the screenwriter Waldo Salt, whom she had married in 1942.When the “blacklist” hit them and the Party was scattered, it was “emotionally, personally,” devastating : “It was like the family that I lost. And this was a much more brilliant and meaningful family, because it was a set of values that seemed so generous. . . . Nobody other than our own dearest friends and comrades would have [anything] to do with us, nobody would speak to us. Nobody would have dinner with us. I couldn’t even buy meat from the local butcher. I had to change where I bought—I would go to different supermarkets or butchers. I couldn’t be seen there. My neighbors didn’t want anything to do with me.” Her children may have been affected even more, since the turbulence “created a need to belong, a feeling that they didn’t belong.”2 They were not alone.3 When Sue Lawson was brought before HUAC and questioned about her “connections with the organization called the Southern California Peace Crusade,” she “declined to answer,” but “because of her extreme nervous condition, the Committee dismissed her without further questioning .”4 There was a brutal physical and psychological toll exerted on Red Hollywood—and liberals, too, as the plight of Dore Schary suggested— that was little recognized, then or now.5 Red Hollywood was disintegrating; as early as 1949 the L.A. writer Carey McWilliams had detected a “great decrease of political interest and political activity in Hollywood.” It was not just the congressional inquisition , either.The strike, then lockout, of production workers in the industry, had taken a severe toll. Even Lawson had not realized altogether how progressives in Hollywood were ultimately dependent on the existence of a solid corps of left-leaning production workers. Once they were wiped out, undermining the writers became virtually foreordained. Hollywood could hardly be allowed to avoid the heightened anticommunism that was becoming de rigueur when other institutions were moving to embrace it. But the impact of Lawson and his comrades was not entirely eviscerated even after they had been ousted from the scene. For Jailed for Ideas / 203 figure 9. Lawson (his photo is at the far right of the speaker, Jeanne Prior Cole, wife of the screenwriter Lester Cole) was the most notorious member of the Hollywood Ten, the “blacklisted” writers and directors. This was one of many rallies held on their behalf. (Courtesy of Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research) McWilliams correctly noted that “racial tolerance is apparently the one controversial theme that may be presented from the liberal or progressive point of view,” as Pinky, Intruder in the Dust, and a number of other films then in production or debuting exemplified.6 The larger point, however, was that the crackdown on Lawson and his comrades simply presaged a wider purge in Hollywood that drew into its ambit anyone to the left of conservatism. This purge took many in Hollywood by surprise, perhaps understandably, since the moguls had been hiring Reds for some time.After Lawson was dragged away from his congressional testimony, Eric Johnston, head of the industry’s trade association, strolled to the witness chair.7 He was expected to reaffirm, even in the vaguest terms, the typical feel-good rhetoric about freedom of expression and association. He did not. He was asked bluntly, “If all of the evidence which was submitted was proved to your satisfaction to be true, would you say Mr. Lawson had any place in the motion picture industry as a picture writer?” Without skipping a beat, Johnston replied just as bluntly, “If all of the evidence there is proved to be true, I would not employ Mr. Lawson because I...