Oscar Flashback: The Blacklists and the Hollywood Ten

I promise to shelve the politics on this site from now on, but I did want to do a little deep dive into the Blacklists and the Communist scare of the 1940s and 1950s, in case some of you didn’t know what that was or why it matters today.

As John Nolte writes about in his column today, mentioning HUAC, the Blacklists, and the McCarty era, it feels like everything old is new again, and it does predict what might be a potential future ahead.

The first thing you need to know is that the people on the side of persecution is that they’re always on the wrong side. Always.  They might start out with the best of intentions to preserve a utopian vision for society. But they always end as the side that abused their power to punish people for their ideology or their “spectral” crimes.

Most people who see my situation in light of the Hollywood Reporter story probably think I look bad. Maybe they think it’s okay that publicists declare they won’t invite me to screenings, events, or advertisers pull ads. But they should be prepared for what lies ahead for them: someday, they will be the hated. History will not be kind.

The Hollywood Ten should be remembered today. After all, they were the victims of something playing out that resembles today’s Hollywood. Government and culture fused with the common goal of reflecting utopian American life.

But that Utopia was, to the post-war Americans, threatened by Communism. Once the Soviets got the bomb, that sent fear through our government and our culture that would ultimately be made worse by the outing of the Rosenbergs, who would be executed as spies and kickstart McCarthyism.

The Hollywood Ten happened a decade before Joseph McCarthy sought to purge the government of Commies. The Blacklists and HUAC happened in the late 1940s.

Like Oppenheimer, the Hollywood Ten were idealistic Communists. They were true believers who wanted to improve the world, and they wanted their art to reflect that. It’s ironic that Hollywood now is much like what they wanted it to be—reflective of a utopian vision for a better world.

Here is a good short explanation of the Hollywood 10 and their predicament. You can see why Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s. It follows the “confess as a witch to live” theme, but you must also accuse other witches or Communists.

Ironically, it’s taken us all this time, decades later, to come full circle. Now, the Left, aligned with the government, has become united in its goal of reflecting a utopian society. It’s the Left that has become the side that punishes dissent and helps to destroy the careers of artists and writers.

Our utopia began at the dawn of social media, the iphone and the election of Barack Obama. We were re-imagining a different kind of America where everyone got a seat at the table. It’s not surprising, then, that Trump’s win would ignite a mass hysteria event. He was seen as a “racist” winning the presidency. And thus began the endless purge of perceived “racists,” “rapists,” or “phobes.”

Our utopia had to become an authoritarian dystopia where ideology was mandated and everyone was forced to comply or else. It’s the same story playing out over and over again.

But back in the 1950s, it was fear of Communism that it was would be in our movies or in our schools or in our government. Blacklisting wasn’t just done to punish thought, it was done to maintain a level of purity in the content, not unlike what has happened to Hollywood today, where dogma has obliterated art. The mechanism is more or less the same, but the sides have switched places.

It’s still hard to believe all of this happened to the Hollywood Ten. We’re still in the early stages of our version of this episode. It is already is government, but it might get worse in the next four years or so. This documentary, made in 1950, details exactly what happened to each of them, how they were treated like criminals, and how their careers deflated.

Conformity then, like now, was mandated. Subversive thought and speech was punished.

But the worm turned because it always does. You have to try to stay on the right side of history no matter what. Those who confessed and named names were not well regarded by Hollywood even many years later, lest we forget Ed Harris and Amy Madigan refusing to stand for Elia Kazan.

Outside the awards, there people who protested. Everyone was asked to take a side and many of the same people going along with “cancel culture” now refused to stand.

Those who did not stand included Jim Carrey and Steven Spielberg. I guess that was an early version of “cancel culture” in its own way, but it does illustrate how fast and how dramatically the pendulum can swing once the fear or the threat evaporates (it always does).

Dalton Trumbo was the most famous of the Blacklisted writers and won two Oscars using a pseudonym. The film Trumbo might have been a good movie if it was being made today, not eight years ago. Now we’re living through it. We know better what it feels like to live in a climate of fear and have it infect every aspect of the film industry. Back then, it was greeted with a shrug.

Since the same Hollywood that once celebrated Blacklisted writers is now the side that supports Blacklists, I doubt they will be making movies about themselves any time soon.

Long after the Hollywood Ten and HUAC, after Eisenhower won the election and the Cold War was in full swing, the fear of Communists escalated and became a matter for the President. It would be Eisenhower, ultimately, who shut it down after he saw McCarthyism was tearing the country apart. Oh, if only we had an Eisenhower now. We do not.

We also haven’t yet seen what is happening in Hollywood now with the new Blacklists spread fully to the government as it did back in the 1950s. We’ve seen episodes like Senator Al Franken being pressured to resign, but we haven’t seen hearings and persecutions of government officials — not in the same way. I guess you could put January 6th in that category. After all, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were put in prison for the same thing the Hollywood Ten were: Contempt of Congress.

There’s also a possibility it could flip again, and the Conservatives could hold power and treat “wokeism” like they treated Communism. In their efforts to get it out of schools or Hollywood they could have hearings like those we saw in the McCarthy era. I don’t see that happening because they don’t have all of the power like the Left does now and like the Conservatives did back in the 1950s.

Hollywood wrote about this era in so many great ways, most notably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. But Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone seemed to capture the paranoia of the era best, with the Monsters Are Due on Maple Street:

And of course, the best one:

The idea of utopias that become dystopias was portrayed beautifully in Black Mirror’s Nosedive, which was made before the mass hysteria became stronger and more institutionalized like it is now:

Nosedive is one of the best episodes of Black Mirror. I worry that it will never be that good again, with few exceptions.  So much of the content on Netflix or any streamer is so ideologically compliant that it is unwatchable.  So many younger generations have never seen really great movies because what they do see has been sanitized and stripped of any real meaning.

We used to be the kind of industry that understood who the good and bad guys were. Back in the day, this is how we remimagined dealing with witch hunts:

Now, people who do that very same thing, like Elon Musk (who probably never saw The Front), are seen as the bad guys. Advertisers, corporations, the government are seen as the good side, the protectors of “democracy.”

Some of us aren’t built to shut up and sit down. It’s as simple as that. And we’re all going to pay a price for that.

The most shocking hanging in Salem was Rebecca Nurse. She was so devout they named her a “Visible Saint” in her church. She was in her 70s and had birthed many children and grandchildren. But when the bratty little girls accused her of being a witch, people who had known her all of their lives suddenly were afraid. “Is she?” Though some did try to stop the inevitable execution of an innocent woman, ultimately, they had no choice. One woman had already been hanged. If they suddenly decided none of it was real, they’d all be murderers. So Nurse had to hang.

The worst part for her was that they excommunicated her just before they hanged her. From the book A Salem Witch:

“THE PUNISHMENT FOR A CHURCH MEMBER found guilty of witchcraft was the death of both body and soul. If one signed an accord with the Devil, one sinned against God and forsook their place among the saints in Heaven. As such, church members condemned for witchcraft suffered a spiritual death through excommunication from Christ’s church, and then bodily death through hanging as an enemy of the commonwealth.”

Rebecca Nurse had to be true to her God, not to the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, and to do that she had to hear these words just before they put a noose around her neck and hanged her in front of her friends and her fellow Puritans:

“For these and many more foul and sinful transgressions, I do here, in the name of the whole church and in the name of Lord Jesus Christ and by the virtue of that power and authority which He hath given to His church, pronounce you to be a leprous and unclean person, and I do cast you out and cut you off from the enjoyment of all those blessed privileges and ordinances which God hath entrusted His church withal, which you have so long abused. . . . And I do exclude you not only from the fellowship of the church in all the public ordinances of the same, but also from all private fellowship and communion with any of the servants of God in this church, except only in those relations in your own family. . . . And for the greater terror and amazing of you, I do here, in the name of Christ Jesus and His Church, deliver you up to Satan and to his power and working, that you who would not be guided by the council of God may be terrified and hampered by the snares and power of Satan—for the destruction of your proud flesh [and] for the people, I do from this time forward pronounce you an excommunicated person from God and his people.”

The people who know you will suddenly not know you as they are taken under by irrational fear. It is too easy for them to conclude that the best thing for society is to get rid of someone they’ve known most of their lives. Then, they figure, they will feel safe.

I hope that one day, Hollywood can write honestly about this era. In ten years, maybe in twenty. I hope I live to see it.