John M. Barr
History 6393
Twentieth Century U.S.
Dr. Buzzanco
Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean
of the Hollywood Ten
“There are no dull subjects,” H.L. Mencken once observed. “There are only
dull writers,” and this biography by Gerald Horne examines both a fascinating
subject and important screenwriter, John Howard Lawson. Horne investigates the
life, work, and persecution of Lawson, using Lawson’s life and eventual
imprisonment in the early 1950s as an American morality tale, “a useful prism” in
Horne’s words, for illuminating social and political conditions in the United States
in the twentieth century, with its paranoid style of politics and a cast of notable
characters including, among others, future presidents Richard M. Nixon and
Ronald W. Reagan. Furthermore, although Lawson was later vindicated in the
court case, Wooley v. Maynard, his life is a cautionary and instructive story for all
Americans concerned with the tolerance of ideas with which they disagree.
John Howard Lawson was born in 1894, the year of the Pullman Car Strike,
and died in 1977 three years prior to the election of Ronald Reagan to the
presidency. Lawson grew up in a relatively affluent and well-educated Jewish
family, born in New York City to parents of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Briefly
attending Williams College in Massachusetts Lawson dropped out of school and
later served as an ambulance driver in Europe in World War I, or “the war to end
all wars.” The war was a definitive and transformative experience for Lawson.
Indeed, later in life he commented about its importance, saying that “like all the
men and women of my generation, the first World War was the matrix of my
1
creative life,” and, Lawson remembered “the experience of war brought us face to
face with the breakdown of values which [we] had been taught to regard as the
stable and permanent foundations of our society.”1 Married while in Europe to Kate
Drain, a marriage which did not last, Lawson returned to the United States and
quickly gained a reputation as an brilliant playwright and, later, screenwriter.
After the war, Lawson rapidly became known as a New York playwright of
“scintillating dialogue” and was, in the words of Horne, “considered the ‘hope’ of
the theater” especially for such plays as Roger Bloomer, Processional (a play that
ran for over 100 weeks on Broadway), Nirvana, and Loudspeaker. However,
Lawson “was becoming ever more critical of the system that had produced this
wealth.” Forming a “deep admiration for Leon Trotsky,” Lawson was progressing in
the 1920s toward a commitment to the Communist party that eventually brought
him both satisfaction and tribulation. Radicalized by the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti,
Lawson later noted that the trial of the two Italian anarchists accused of murder
was a “turning point in my life and work, it helped transform my anarchic
discontent into a clearer recognition of the nature of American society and the
need of fundamental change.” Also significant to Lawson’s evolving politics were
the New Playwrights, a group of writers that helped Lawson grapple, as Horne
puts it, with “answering the question of how to move forward effectively in the
capitalist society that he [Lawson] abhorred even while it benefited him
materially.”2 Still, Lawson was not a committed Communist at this point, but rather
a “liberal, middle-of-the-roader and unifier” and as Lester Cole put it “by no means
1
Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood
Ten, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) , 20.
2 Ibid. , 25-43.
2
a leftist.” Moreover, Lawson was somewhat disenchanted with writing plays, for he
understood “the potentialities of film.”3 V.I. Lenin concurred, opining “that of all the
arts, the motion picture is for us the most important” thereby cementing, in Horne’s
view, “the special role of the left and cinema.”4
Leaving Broadway and New York City for Hollywood in the late 20s,
Lawson was as successful a screenwriter as playwright, and possibly as
discontent. He arrived in Hollywood precisely at the time silent movies were in
decline and “talkies” on the rise, and Lawson took advantage of the expanding
need in Hollywood for gifted writers. Lawson penned the screenplays for such
movies as Blockade, the first feature film that realistically examined the Spanish
Civil War, Action in the North Atlantic, and Sahara, in Horne’s words “an antiracist
and antifascist classic.” Consequently, Lawson was elected as the first president
of the Screen Writers Guild, an organization he helped establish in 1933, after
writers wages were slashed nearly 50 % by the moguls of the movie industry. “The
formation of this guild,” Horne argues, “was a concrete step in Lawson’s march
into the arms of the Communists.”5 In addition, this organization was significant for
being, in Lawson’s words, “the first trade union of professional people in a big
industry controlled by finance capital,” which, according to Horne, was “an
accomplishment that his enemies would find hard to swallow and even harder to
forget.”6
3
Ibid. , 49.
Ibid. , 52.
5 Ibid. , 95.
6 Ibid. , 97.
4
3
Hence Lawson considered joining the Communist Party.7 Horne writes of
Lawson’s final decision to join the Communist Party:
As he saw it, the dramatic resolution of the dilemma of the role of
the artist, trapped between mammon and politics, was to opt decisively
for the latter. It was shortly thereafter [1934] that Lawson – nearing
forty – joined the Communist Party. And this commitment led to others –
a reaffirmation of his marital vows, organizing the Screen Writers Guild,
and a further dedication to political struggle generally.8
Why did Lawson finally decide to join the Communist Party? Several factors
were decisive, including an attack from future fellow Communist and literary critic
for the New Masses Mike Gold, his experience in Alabama with the Scottsboro
Nine, and a flourishing anti-Semitism and Nazism on the West Coast of the United
States. Gold, Horne writes, “criticized Lawson in 1934 for being a ‘bourgeois
Hamlet,’ unsteady, unsure, and unreliable.” Lawson was upset by Gold’s attack,
although he admitted some of it hit the mark. Stung, Lawson promised himself that
in the future his work would “answer with due consideration and with as much
vigor and clarity as I possess” his answer to the question of “where do I belong in
the warring world of two classes?”9
The Scottsboro Nine were a group of African-Americans falsely accused of
raping two white women in Alabama early in 1931. Lawson, like many American
Communists, decided to lend his time and prestige to the young AfricanAmericans and, as in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, was transformed by the
experience. “This was not just a geographic journey but a political and ideological
one,” Horne writes, “because placing his celebrity at the disposal of a movement
7
Horne, John Howard Lawson, 73-74.
Ibid. , 83; Lawson had remarried, to Sue Edmonds by this time.
9 Horne, John Howard Lawson, 82.
8
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for justice was an essential aspect of Lawson’s renewed commitment” to politically
radical causes. Lawson later wrote that “the course of embryonic Fascism in the
South was exactly analogous to its course in Hitler [‘s] Germany.” With foreboding
and prescience Lawson thought “liberals who think they are immune will soon find
that the wiping out of ‘radicalism’ would include ‘wiping out all independent thought
and culture.’10 (emphasis mine)
A final element influencing Lawson to join the Communist Party was his
encounter with Fascism and a virulent anti-Semitism in Los Angeles, his adopted
home. “It was not uncommon,” Horne writes “for mass rallies of Nazis to occur in
Los Angeles.” Consequently, Lawson believed “the Communists were the only
global, well-organized force willing to dole out bitter medicine to the fascists.” 11
Horne continues with this significant passage:
Thus from Lawson’s viewpoint, the rising tide of fascism that he
could espy from his comfortable doorstep had to be confronted
by a force of formidable potency. This created another dilemma,
however. Lawson’s disdain for the liberalism from which he had
only recently escaped was palpable, not least since he was unhappy
with how this force confronted the fascist beast, but this disdain
made it difficult for these very same liberals to rally to his cause
when he came under siege: he was trapped in a circle hard to
square.12
During World War II Lawson authored the screenplays for two excellent
films, noted earlier, Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic, both of which were
well-received publicly and critically. Horne asks an intriguing question when he
queries “Why would the Bank of America, not to mention a film studio, turn over its
precious investment to a Communist screenwriter? Why would a wartime
10
Ibid. , 84-86.
Ibid. , 89.
12 Ibid. , 129.
11
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government ignore the powerful medium that was film?”13 Horne contends, and
contemporary evidence supports his argument, that it was simply impossible for
Communist propaganda to weave their way into American films without notice. “In
short,” Horne concludes, “the U.S. authorities monitored Hollywood assiduously,
and given such strict filters, it would be virtually impossible for images and ideas to
emerge that they found repellent . . . . indeed, it would be astonishing
malfeasance,” he continues insightfully, “on the part of any ruling elite to be
indifferent to the production of such potentially powerful propaganda tools.”14
Thus the reason for Congressional investigation into Lawson and other
Communists in the Hollywood community was not only “Red subversion of scripts”
but rather two larger issues, “the strength of writers in Red Hollywood,” and the
desire of Lawson’s enemies to attack “larger game than a mere affluent
screenwriter – ultimately they were after the organized left, notably the Communist
Party, and its alternative view of how society should be administered.”15 Hence,
when the war ended Lawson and other Communists were scrutinized by the
federal government and the film industry’s elite, desirous of breaking the power of
unionized screenwriters who “thought they should be appropriating a larger share
of the fruits of their labor.”16 In addition, Lawson personally became the focus of
attacks, not only for his Communism, but also because he was Jewish and
“relatively affluent and therefore seemed to be a class traitor. He was considered
ungrateful, betraying a system that had supposedly served him well.” 17
13
Ibid. , 154.
Ibid. , 156.
15 Ibid. , 157.
16 Ibid. , 175.
17 Horne, John Howard Lawson, 173.
14
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Thus on October 27, 1947 Lawson and other Hollywood writers were
hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947,
which included Congressmen Parnell Thomas and Richard Milhous Nixon, a rising
star in the Republican Party, to testify whether they were now, or ever had been,
members of the Communist Party. Horne gives a gripping account of Lawson’s
appearance before HUAC. Eventually, Lawson and nine other writers (e.g. the
“Hollywood Ten,” six of whom were Jewish) were cited for contempt of Congress
and sent to prison, two for six months, the remainder for a year. Lawson himself
became so enraged during his testimony that he was dragged forcefully from the
witness chair. Essentially, as Horne writes, “what HUAC did amounted to a bill of
attainder, an unconstitutional targeting of one recognizable group –Communists.”18
In consequence, the motion-picture producers association released a
statement from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City saying “We will not
knowingly employ a Communist or member of any party or group which advocates
the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force, or by any illegal or
unconstitutional method.”19 Hence the Hollywood Ten were blacklisted and, as the
historian Robert Sklar argues, their imprisonment sent a chilling effect throughout
all of Hollywood where “a perverse kind of democracy was practiced: all
accusations, no matter from whom, were taken equally seriously.” Horne agrees,
writing “that the crackdown on Lawson and his comrades simply presaged a wider
purge in Hollywood that drew into its ambit anyone to the left of conservatism.”20
As Charlie Chaplin described it, somewhat facetiously, “These days if you step off
18
Ibid. , 199.
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, (New York: Random
House Books, 1975) , 265.
20 Horne, John Howard Lawson, 204.
19
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the curb with your left foot they accuse you of being a Communist.”21 The
iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone worried publicly about the implications of the
HUAC hearings, writing in The Nation magazine of his concerns that “If a
Congressional committee can investigate ideas in the movies, it can investigate
them in the press. The purpose,” Stone told his readers, “is to terrorize all leftists,
liberals, and intellectuals; to make them fearful in the film, the theater, the press,
and any school of advanced ideas.”22
After leaving prison in 1951, Lawson spent the remainder of his career
“blacklisted”, that is, he “could continue to ply his trade,” says Horne, “albeit being
paid considerably less, hiding his light under a bushel of a ‘front.’” For example,
Lawson did write – anonymously - the critically acclaimed anti-apartheid film Cry,
the Beloved Country.23 In the early 1960s he spent significant time in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe and was profoundly disillusioned. He was, in fact, quite
critical of the Soviet project. Lawson died in 1977, although not before witnessing
the disgrace of former HUAC committee member Richard Nixon, who resigned
from the presidency in 1974 amidst the scandal of Watergate.
This is a vividly written and meticulously documented biography of a
fascinating and illuminating twentieth century American life. Horne gives a proper
account of Lawson’s background and the factors that led him to making a
commitment to the Communist Party. Horne’s account, furthermore, deepens our
understanding that is was not only a fear of Communism that led to Lawson and
the Hollywood Ten’s persecution, trial, and ostracism; also at issue was the desire
21
Ibid. , 207.
I.F. Stone, The Nation, November 8, 1947.
23 Horne, John Howard Lawson, 222.
22
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of movie producers to break the power of the Screen Writers Guild and by
extension, liberal Hollywood. In addition, the element of Anti-Semitism cannot be
dismissed, as Horne makes clear, in accounting for the maltreatment of Lawson
and the Hollywood Ten. Nor does Horne shirk this tough question: “But what
about Lawson and his rather steady devotion to the now disappeared Soviet
Union? Does that discredit him or his critique of the society in which he lived?”
Horne thinks not and indeed the biography is, in a sense, an extended
commentary of Horne’s on the tragedy of Lawson’s life and his missed opportunity
to properly “comment on – and influence – his society, his roots, his country,”
because of the blacklist. Horne makes the brilliant and pertinent point that
“devotees of a nation that benefited from the horrors of the African slave trade. . . .
above all should be hesitant about sweeping condemnations and . . . should be
guarantors of nuance.”24 Horne’s biography elucidates as well the chilling impact
of the blacklist on all of Hollywood, not just Communists. Historian Robert Sklar’s
assessment is appropriate:
Even so, the damage to Hollywood was very nearly fatal. For the first halfcentury of American movies the industry had had a fascinating and
curious relationship with the American public. It had always stood slightly
aslant the mainstream of American cultural values and expressions,
seeking to hold its working-class audience while making movies attractive
to middle-class tastes, and therefore never quite in step with other forms
of cultural communication. Movies were always less courageous than
some organs of information and entertainment, but they were more
iconoclastic than most, offering a version of American behavior and values
more risqué, violent, comic and fantastic than the standard interpretation
of traditional cultural elites. It was this trait that gave movies their popularity and their mythmaking power.
And it was this trait that the anti-Communist trait destroyed. Creative work
at its best could indeed not be carried on in an atmosphere of fear, and
Hollywood was suffused with fear. It dared not make any movie that might
24
Ibid. , xxii and 268.
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arouse the fire of anyone. . . . the studios tried to avoid making movies
that would offend any vocal minority. As a result they lost touch both with
their own past styles and with the changes and movements in the dominant
culture at large. Let it not be said that television killed the movie industry;
the movie industry must take that responsibility itself.25
It is unfortunate, that Horne does not adequately address Lawson’s
shortcomings in this work. Little is said that is critical of Lawson’s oeuvre and
Horne quotes sparsely from the screenplay’s themselves. Surely this would
vindicate Horne’s point that it was ludicrous to believe that Lawson was
surreptitiously sneaking Communist propaganda into American films? 26
Still, Horne’s biography of Lawson, importantly, illuminates the American
mind, especially what the historian Richard Hofstadter labeled in the Paranoid
Style in American Politics; a style of “uncommonly angry minds” with “qualities of
heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” believing
devoutly that this “conspiratorial network” is “designed to perpetrate acts of the
most fiendish character.”27 Lawson’s story is one that every American concerned
with freedom and independent thought ought to ponder, for, as George Orwell
once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what
they do not want to hear.” It can also mean, as Lawson’s life demonstrates, the
right to not say anything at all.
25
Sklar, Movie-Made America, 267-68.
See the criticisms of Horne’s biography in Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times, December 3,
2006.
27 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1964) , 3-40.
26
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