Awww Skuzzy! That HURTS!
MT, if you read it that's something at least. I left that tidbit in there just for you.
I'm not against the principles of the First Amendment...I'm against hypocrites like some of the Ten who attempted to hide behind the protections inherent in those principles. Several members of the Hollywood Ten denied those principles to their colleagues who fell out of favor with the Party and yet cried "rape" when having to testify before Congress.
One last blurb:
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In 1945...Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott were expelled from the Party for refusing to accept the crude propaganda of lawson's hand-picked screenwriter, John Wexley, for their film "Cornered." Robert Rossen faced a similar inquisition over "All the Kings' Men" in 1949. The Hollywood Party objected to this classic film's them of "power corrupts" (too close to Stalin, apparently), and forced Rossen into an excruciating "criticism" session. Rather than submit and recant his work, Rossen agrily resigned from the Party. What is stunning is that the savage "jurors" in the Rossen inquisition were the Ten themselves.
Abraham Polonsky summed up the grim situation in a 1997interview: "The Party style of Marxism didn't have a chance here {in Hollywood}, or in New York either, among intellectuals. The leadership's behavior violated the whole intellectual life of Marxism."
Despite this fine statement on behalf of intellectual freedom, throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Polonsky went along faithfully with whatever the prevailing Party line happened to be, including the condemnation of Maltz. Polonsky's personal predilections toward "liberalism" were suppressed in the Maltz case in the name of the Party.
Their studied stance of "martyrs" contrasts starkly with one of their lesser known traits...that of "stool pigeons." When the political occasion demanded, these men were perfectly prepared to be "stool pigeons" themselves. The most notorious case is that of Dalton Trumbo. The Ten have derided those people who appeared before HUAC and "named names." But in 1944, Trumbo personally invited the FBI to his house to turn over the names of people who had asked him for copies of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun."
This fiercly anti-war novel, published in 1939, had been a big hit with Communists during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but after June 22, 1941, it became a political embarrassment, and Pearl Harbor only added to the problem. The novel dropped out of circulation, so people who opposed WWII despite Pearl Harbor wrote to Trumbo to find out where they could get copies. Trumbo voluntarily denounced these people to the FBI as "defeatists, pacifists [!], and anti-Semites," and turned over names and correspondence. Needless to say, he did not notify the people whose names he had named of what he had done.
Years later, when the Communists were under pressure, historian Arthur Schlesinger suggested in print that people such as Trumbo were so ruthless politically that they would never uphold the civil rights of those with whose politics they disagreed, such as Trotskyists on the left and Ku Klux Klansmen on the right. Trumbo responded with a haughty public denial (filled with sneers at Schlesinger) that he would ever allow the government the right to investigate a person's political beliefs. But of course we now know this printed rebuttal of Schlesinger was a lie. Trumbo had already helped the FBI to do so, and at his own initiative.
Is such a man to be viewed as a hero of freedom of speech?
Regards, Shuckins
