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Introduction 1 It happened so often that it seemed to be a new Hollywood ritual. Contrite, often ashen, a penitent would sit in the witness chair in a hearing as members of Congress, often on an elevated platform, stared strategically downward . Then, with eyes often downcast and heart often heavy, the witness would proceed to unburden himself—or herself—of the names of others who also had once strayed down the wrong political path toward the Communist Party or its ill-defined “fronts.” Often the name relinquished was Lawson’s. He was “named 28 times (more than twice as often as anyone else) by the various ‘friendly’ witnesses and informers.”1 Expiation completed , the witness could then resume a—presumably—lucrative career. As with Lawson’s 1947 appearance, there was something more than vaguely theatrical about this variety of congressional investigation, often suggested by the presence of cameras, particularly those from the newly powerful television networks that broadcast these minidramas into living rooms nationally.2 When the barrel-chested, prematurely graying Budd Schulberg appeared before Congress, the results were similarly dramatic— albeit for different reasons. Though a fluid and fluent writer, he had something of a speech impediment, which led him to speak in a “hop-skip-jump manner—a few words, then a pause, then another rush of four or five words and another pause.” This, said one analyst, “gave the impression of great earnestness and obviously made a deep impression on the Committee ” as he “piled up fact on fact” as to “why creative writers should not be Communists.” In his “halting” and “intense manner,” Schulberg, “speaking with almost no prompting, . . . concentrated the interrogation on the relationship between the witness’ experiences with the Communist Party in Hollywood and the pattern of control in Russia.”3 The villain of this set piece, as so often during this political ritual, was John Howard Lawson, in this case his attempts to squelch Schulberg’s intriguing—and still compelling—novel about Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run? Here as elsewhere, Lawson’s alleged approach—his “dogmatic, ad hominem style of argument,” which, in the words of one historian,“became the rule, not the exception, in the Hollywood party”—was analogized to the kind of pain inflicted on Soviet writers during the darkest days of Stalin’s rule. Or, as Martin Berkeley put it during his testimony, Lawson was the “‘grand Poo-Bah of the Communist movement’” who “‘speaks with the voice of Stalin and the bells of the Kremlin.’” His “official job description,” it was said, was the “enforcer position.”4 Lawson, according to the former Communist director Edward Dmytryk, was the “Gauleiter of the Hollywood section of the Communist Party.”5 These hearings were latter-day morality plays, with Lawson often playing the role of the reviled off-screen presence, the object of fear and loathing . As the screenwriter Walter Bernstein once said, “the Soviet Union was the Great Satan,” and Communists like Lawson populated its “American coven,” doing the “devil’s work, taking the place formerly occupied by witches, warlocks and occasionally goats.”6 Hence, to the extent that he is remembered at all, John Howard Lawson is constructed as the epitome of the humorless, rigid, dogmatic, unsmiling, doctrinaire Communist, mixing ruthlessness promiscuously with insensitivity . Certainly, despite stiff competition from the likes of Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. Du Bois, Lawson may very well be the most notorious U.S. Communist; therefore, the inexorable gravity of anticommunism may help shed light on why this screenwriter’s image has been so tarnished. And, since Lawson spent much more time in the Communist Party than either Dreiser or Du Bois, the filings of anticommunist hatred clung to him magnetically. Yet Lawson was made to take the weight for traits that were not so much his own as they were components of the industry he served. For it is well known, as the Los Angeles Times once noted, that Hollywood was “so competitive that people routinely root for friends to fail,” with “bad behavior . . . permanently embedded in showbiz DNA,” generated by a “briar patch of feuding moguls, narcissistic movie stars and egomaniacal directors .” Routinely “the miscreants kowtow to the powerful and let fly at their inferiors.” Hollywood, it was said, was “teeming with unhappy, insecure people with a lethal combination of big egos and low self-esteem,” while the “analysts’ couches” received “quite a beating in this business.” Rudeness was rewarded;“in fact, the ‘hip’ Hollywood insult” as the twenty...

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