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Elia Kazan's first testimony to the house committee on Un-American activities, executive session, 14 January 1952

2005; Routledge; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680500138068

1465-3451

Brian Neve,

European history and politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Thanks to Charles E. Schamel, Centre for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20408, USA. Brian Neve is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath, and also teaches in the University's Cinema MA programme. He is the author of Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (Routledge, 1992), and is working on The Cinema of Elia Kazan (I. B. Taurus, forthcoming). Notes Elia Kazan, Executive Hearing, 10 April 1952, in Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968 (New York, 1971), pp. 482–495; this includes Kazan's paid advertisement, which first appeared in the New York Times, 12 April 1952. Executive Session, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, 82nd Congress, First Session, 14 January 1952 (RG 233 Records of the House of Representatives, National Archives). The Center of Legislative Archives also released a small name file for Elia Kazan, comprising various clippings. The website of the National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) is http://www.archives.gov Brian Neve, ‘HUAC, the blacklist, and the decline of social cinema’, in Peter Lev, Transforming the Screen 1950–1959, History of the American Cinema series (New York, 2003), pp. 65–68. On the Hollywood blacklist, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley, 1983); John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, I—Movies (New York, 1956); Cavid Caute, The Great Fear, The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (London, 1978); Howard Suber, ‘The anti-Communist blacklist in the Hollywood motion picture industry’, Ph.D. thesis, UCLA, 1968; Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (eds) Tender Comrades, A backstory of the Hollywood blacklist (New York, 1997). Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Boston, 1998), p. 272; Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston, 1998), pp. 190, 203. Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, pp. 92–94. Walter Goodman, The Committee (London, 1968), p. 312. The Matthews article appeared in The American Legion Magazine, December 1951, pp. 13–14, 49–56. On Elia Kazan see Kazan, A Life (New York, 1988); Michel Ciment (ed.) Kazan on Kazan (London, 1973); Jeff Young (ed.) Kazan, The Master Director Discusses His Films (New York, 1999); Thomas H. Pauly, An American Odyssey, Elia Kazan and American Culture (Philadelphia, 1983). Kazan, A Life, p. 432, 445. The Schulberg and Dmytryk testimonies are in Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, pp. 376–400, 434–457; Richard Collins, 12 April 1951, Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion Picture Industry—Part 1, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington, 1951), p. 254; Schulberg in Navasky, Naming Names, p. 246. Kazan, A Life, p. 446; the full membership of the Committee is given in Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, p. 956. Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama, The Group Theatre and America, 1933–1940 (New York, 1990), p. 158, 252; Kazan, A Life, p. 131. John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, which Kazan sees in the testimony as influencing his radicalisation, was published first in 1933. On the Tenney Committee, chaired by California State Senator Jack B. Tenney, see Caute, The Great Fear, pp. 77–78; Smith, Real Life Drama, pp. 157–159, p. 252. V. J. Jerome was chairman of the Communist Party's National Cultural Commission. Budd Schulberg calls him a ‘didactic party overseer’, known at the time as the ‘American cultural commissar’, Schulberg, ‘Any which way he could’, American Film, 13(9) (1988), p. 55. Jerome was the author of The Negro in Hollywood Films (New York, 1950). He was convicted under the Smith Act, of ‘conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow by force and violence’ of the US government, and served a 3-year prison term, 1954–1957; Biographical Note, Yale University Library; Smith, Real Life Drama, p. 253. Jack Warner to Elia Kazan, 20 February 1952, Warner Bros. archive, University of Southern California. See Robert Sklar, City Boys, Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (Princeton, NJ, 1992), pp. 220–224; see also Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way, The Life of John Garfield (New York, 2003). On Lionel Stander see the interview by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, pp. 607–625. On John Berry see the interview by McGilligan in McGilligan and Buhle (eds) Tender Comrades, pp. 55–89. Also on Berry ‘ducking’ his subpoena, see Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, p. 382. Edward Dmytryk appeared as a cooperative witness on 25 April 1951; his testimony is in Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, pp. 376–400. Of other figures mentioned, Harry Bridges was President of the International Longshoremen; Kazan remembers admiring him as late as 1950, when he and Arthur Miller were discussing their waterfront project at Columbia Pictures (Kazan, A Life, p. 411). The concert singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson was, like Bridges, politically controversial given his pro-Soviet views and associations. Kazan would have known the musician Pete Seeger (Peter Sieger in the transcript) and the archivist Allen Lomax through Nicholas Ray. Seeger was a defiant witness before HUAC in August 1955. Burl Ives was a folksinger and actor who worked with Kazan in East of Eden (1955) and in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Norman Corwin began working as a radio director in the 1930s. On John Howard Lawson see Gary Crowdus, The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, 1994), pp. 243–44; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York, 1982), p. 88. Lawson was a key figure in organising the Screen Writers Guild, and wrote a number of respected texts on drama and film, including Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York, 1953). Kazan, A Life, pp. 456–457. On the role of Lawson and the Communist Party in the demise of New Theatre and Film (previously New Theatre) see Herbert Kline, ‘Afterword’, in Kline (ed.) New Theatre and Film, 1934–1937, An Anthology (San Diego, 1985), pp. 363–367. Molly Thatcher Kazan was assistant editor of the magazine. Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller, His Life and Work (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 193. Counterattack, 15 February 1952, Harvey Matusow Papers, 1950–1955, University of Sussex Library. Hollywood Reporter, 19 March 1952, p. 2; Val Holley, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood (Jefferson, NC, 2003), pp. 104–105. W. R. Wilkerson, in Hollywood Reporter, 2 December 1947, cited in Joseph Foster, ‘Entertainment Only’, New Masses, 66 (1948), pp. 21–22; Kazan, A Life, p. 451, 455. George F. Custen, Twentieth Century's Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York, 1997), pp. 312–316. Holley, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood, p. 6; Barbara Leaming, Marilyn Monroe (London, 1988), pp. 44–45. Jeff Young discusses the effects of the Hollywood Reporter story on the Awards ceremony in an interview in Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin, Thirteeen/WNET broadcast, 1 September 2003; Variety, 26 April 1952, p. 17; Kazan, A Life, pp. 455–456. Steinbeck to Annie Laurie Williams, 17 June 1952, in Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (London, 1975), p. 450; Kazan, A Life, p. 460, 465, 569; Gottfried, Arthur Miller, p. 194. For other accounts of the meetings with Miller and Hellman see Arthur Miller, Timebends, A Life (London, 1987), pp. 330–335, and Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York, 1976), pp. 63–64. Molly Kazan, The Egghead, undated typescript in the Theatre collection, Library for the Performing Arts, New York Public Library, New York. Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, pp. 482–495; on Tony Kraber see Kazan, A Life, pp. 684–685. See the testimony of Clifford Odets in Bentley (ed.) Thirty Years of Treason, pp. 498–533. In January, Kazan had mentioned that there were nine members in the unit; in April he named eight, arguing that he did not, on reflection, remember attending any meeting with Michael Gordon. As well as three Party officials, V. J. Jerome, Andrew Overgaard and Ted Wellman (a.k.a Sid Benson) Kazan's affidavit also ‘named’ four members of the League of Workers Theatres, which he called ‘unquestionably a Communist-controlled unit’, Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason, pp. 487–488. While Kazan always maintained that he had been truthful, some have suggested that Kazan ‘named names’ selectively; see Pat McGilligan, ‘Scoundrel tome’, Film Comment, June 1988, pp. 14–15. On the advertisement, Kazan did say in 1988: ‘I signed the ad. It was my fault. I’ve often wished I hadn’t done that. It seemed like I was asking other people to join me. I had no right to ask them, did I?’, New York Post, 5 May 1988, p. 37. Brian Neve, interview with Elia Kazan, New York, 16 September 1980; McGilligan on Jules Dassin, in McGilligan and Buhle (eds) Tender Comrades, p. 213; The Nation, 26 April 1952, p. 395; Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘History of the Week’, New York Post, 4 May 1952, p. 3M; Pauly, An American Odyssey, p. 160. Schlesinger Jr, whose The Vital Center, The Politics of Freedom (New York), had been published in 1949, continued to support Kazan; see his piece on Kazan's 1999 Award, New York Times, 28 February 1999. On the relationship between Kazan's film projects and this period, see Neve in Lev, Transforming the Screen, pp. 78–82, and Brian Neve, The Cinema of Elia Kazan (forthcoming). Navasky, Naming Names, pp. 319–324; on Navasky see Thom Andersen, ‘Red Hollywood’, in Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (eds) Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society (Columbus, OH, 1985), pp. 158–165; Jarrico quoted in Michael S. Ybarra, ‘Blacklist whitewash’, The New Republic, 5–12 January 1998, p. 23. Alan Wolfe, ‘Revising a false history’, Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1999, p. M1, M6. See also Larry Ceplair, ‘Preface to the Illinois Paperback’, in Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood (Urbana, 2003), pp. xi–xix.