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225 14 Red Hollywood Thom Andersen New Inquisitions: Books about the Hollywood Blacklist More than a quarter of the century has passed since Hollywood began its purge of Communists and fellow travelers, but the Hollywood blacklist, as it has come to be known, has not yet passed into history, although it has already had at least three generations of historians. We know what happened, or we can find out easily enough if we are too young to remember. And the meaning of these obsessively remembered events should also be obvious enough. Anti-Communist hysteria produced a senseless, vicious purge whose victims happened to be famous and, in some cases, glamorous or interesting. But do we know how we should regard these victims? Are they martyrs? Or did they to some extent bring their troubles on themselves? They were privileged before they were blacklisted, they were “creative ,” but were they also artists? And should we then regard their personal loss as a loss to our culture in general, to the art of cinema specifically? Although these events are not contemporary with us, the arguments are still alive. It is a shard of history that brings to mind the opening words of Christa Wolf’s A Model Childhood: “What is past is not dead; it is not even past.” And a few sentences further on in her novel about forgetting and remembering the recent past of Germany, there is a phrase that could serve as a motto for this essay: “The difficulties haven’t even begun.”1 For all the books that have appeared touching on the 1947 hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry and its aftermath, there has not been one that seems likely to stand as a definitive study, that could even stand as such at the time of its publication. Such books seem to come in waves. It is possible to isolate three distinct cycles of interpretation with lulls between each. In the first wave from 1948 to 1956 came the pamphlets. These were partisan works, obviously, written in the belief that their arguments could change people’s lives. Only two of these are still read today as history: Report on Blacklisting (1956) by John Cogley, commissioned by the Fund for the Republic, which earned Cogley a subpoena from HUAC, and Part of Our Time (1955) by Murray Kempton. Both these works came at the end of the cycle, after the crest of the wave, and they are summations of positions that had been evolving since 1947. Both are critical of the blacklist, as were most of the earlier polemics expansive enough to be published by themselves. Chap-14.qxd 9/17/07 2:22 PM Page 225 But it would be wrong to assume from this apparent consensus that only McCarthyite right-wingers supported the purge of Communists and fellow travelers in Hollywood or in other professions during the fifties. Louis Berg, writing in Commentary in November 1952, summarized one of the liberal anti-Communist positions: “A free society may have to tolerate its enemies, but it is not called upon to reward them.” There may be jobs for which no political tests or loyalty oaths are appropriate, jobs in which a Communist could do no harm, but the positions in question are among the most prestigious, the most influential in American society. Berg cited the instance of an instructor at Columbia University who had used the prestige of her position to lend credence to the Communist-sponsored charge that the U.S. forces were practicing germ warfare in the Korean War. He could not be so specific about the damage done by Communists in motion pictures or in radio and television, but, “in the cold war, the question of who commands a public forum looms no less large than the possession of air bases and planes in Korea.”2 This is a perfectly defensible position, always cogently argued under all its variants in the pages of Commentary and the New Leader, and it is unfortunate, I think, that those survivors from this camp of liberal anti-Communism who have felt called upon during the 1970s and 1980s to defend their politics of the 1950s have been so ambiguous about their positions on the purge of the Communists. They invoke their opposition to McCarthyism to demonstrate that their hatred of Stalinism did not compromise their commitment to civil liberties; and indeed...

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