7 The Blacklist

SAN CRISTÓBAL

It was late in the summer of 1951, and the Jencks family was driving out of Silver City for a short vacation. They were exhausted by the Empire Zinc strike, which was becoming more tense as the deadline for a national copper strike drew nearer, and they knew the strikers could run things perfectly well without them: committees had long been in place to print leaflets, write radio programs, write bulletins, and try to talk to the company.¹ The Jenckses drove up the Rio Grande Valley to San Cristóbal, a small town near Taos pressed into the Sangre de Cristo range and watered by creeks running from 12,000-foot mountains into the Rio Grande a mile to the west. Their destination was a ranch owned by their friends Jenny and Craig Vincent.

This was not an ordinary ranch. Its mission was not raising livestock so much as fostering community among progressives looking for a refuge from the battles of the Cold War. On any given Saturday night, guests and neighbors of the San Cristóbal ranch gathered for song, dance, and socializing. One week might offer a square dance, the next a revue staged by kids at the summer camp run by the Vincents. They performed songs popularized by left-wing folksingers of the 1930s and 1940s, people like Earl Robinson, who wrote the famous labor song “Joe Hill” in 1936 while directing the music program at another children’s camp. Yiddish nursery songs, Irish jigs, Czech dances, and American slave ballads all made their way into the repertoire.

Jenny Wells Vincent was a classically trained musician who turned to folk music. She often performed at progressive gatherings (including one of the Mine-Mill conventions and a reception for the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana) and promoted the music and culture of northern New Mexico.² She had grown up in a privileged family in Winnetka, Illinois, and went to Vassar College, where she put to music the poetry of fellow students Muriel Rukeyser and Elizabeth Bishop. After graduation, she and her new husband, Dan Wells, moved to Europe, where they became alarmed at the rise of fascism and also developed a friendship with Frieda Lawrence, wife of D. H. Lawrence. It was because of the Lawrences’ ties to Taos and its artists’ colony that the couple moved to New Mexico later in the 1930s. They made friends with local families, most of them living and working on small farms, and soon found themselves helping to organize a school on their ranch. (The school closed during World War II.) In the late 1940s, Jenny Wells divorced her first husband and then married Craig Vincent, a former New Deal administrator. In 1949, the Vincents opened the San Cristóbal ranch as a vacation spot and summer camp for progressives from California to New York.³ The Vincents advertised their ranch in progressive publications such as PM, a journal published in New York by independent radical Cedric Belfrage. It was, in one visitor’s words, a “left-wing dude ranch.”⁴

In San Cristóbal, the Jenckses met another family looking for some rest and relaxation. Paul and Sylvia Jarrico were from Hollywood, and Paul had just been blacklisted from the screenwriting profession. The two couples liked each other right away. Paul described the blacklist, how he and his friends “were really feeling a sense of freedom that now they could really make some films that they really wanted to make, and that they were looking for stories to tell.” Clinton told them, “We’ve got a story to tell, let me tell you. You know, we’re down on the Continental Divide in the southwestern corner of New Mexico and nobody knows we’re on the planet. And we’re engaged in what for us is a life and death struggle for ourselves and the existence of our union and nobody knows about it.”⁵ Excited by the story of the women’s picket, the Jarricos later drove south to Hanover, where Sylvia and their son Bill joined the women on the picket. They returned to Los Angeles convinced that they had found the story for a movie.⁶ Sylvia Jarrico recalled that she was attracted by “everything about it. . . . It was irresistible motion picture material.”⁷

Progressive networks permitted the Jenckses and Jarricos to meet one another, and shared experiences of Cold War repression formed the basis for an immediate friendship and for their seeing their situations as two aspects of the same battle.⁸ Clinton and Virginia Jencks, after all, worked for a left-wing union that had been expelled from the CIO in 1950 and would soon come under congressional scrutiny for “Communist domination.”⁹ Paul Jarrico had just been fired by RKO after his unfriendly appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in June, while Sylvia Jarrico had recently lost her job with the University of California because she refused to sign a state-mandated loyalty oath.¹⁰ Mine-Mill thus had more in common with the Hollywood Ten and other blacklisted filmmakers than simply a narrowing of opportunities: its officials and representatives, like Clinton Jencks, would face prison for allegedly falsifying their Taft-Hartley affidavits, while the Hollywood Ten faced prison for contempt of Congress. Paul Jarrico commented that Mine-Mill was “kicked out of the CIO in 1949 for being a left-wing union. We were kicked out of Hollywood for the same reason. So if there was some similarity in the thinking, it was no accident.”¹¹

In Chapter 3 I described Mine-Mill’s expulsion from the CIO. Here I move the story to Hollywood, explaining the growth and influence of the Communist Party (CP) in Hollywood, the studio system within which progressives in the industry were forced to work, the hearings conducted by HUAC, and the blacklist imposed by the movie industry.

THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN HOLLYWOOD

Progressives in Hollywood established the most flourishing CP presence outside of New York City and built organizations that attracted liberals and radicals alike. In 1936, the head of the CP’s Cultural Commission, V. J. Jerome, organized the first clubs in Hollywood, which were composed of radicals—mostly screenwriters—who came out of Hollywood’s union drives of the 1930s or from the New York literary scene.¹²

The party in Hollywood was independent of the Los Angeles chapter, its members enjoying an organizational leeway that reflected their importance in the eyes of party leadership. They faced looser discipline than did other Communists, and they were free of many party obligations, such as hawking the Daily Worker on street corners.¹³ Every couple of weeks each “talent branch” held a meeting at a member’s house.¹⁴ One member would typically give a prepared talk about a subject, and then the dozen or so people who attended would discuss the topic. The meetings were “relatively informal,” as Paul Jarrico recalled.¹⁵ After the discussion, “there would be a checkup of activities, just going around the room asking people to report on what they’d been doing, usually on the basis of assignments that they’d undertaken at earlier meetings: ‘How’s that coming along? What’s happening on that Guild committee? What’s happening on that janitors’ strike you were helping out with?’” The party pressured people to stay active, but, as Paul Jarrico explained,

The achievements of the Hollywood talent branches matched their prestige. First, the Hollywood Communists raised more money than any other club in the country. Second, the 1930s and 1940s witnessed an overwhelming florescence of Hollywood progressive political organizations in which Communists participated. A leftist political culture, quite unlike post-McCarthy Hollywood liberalism, grew out of the labor struggles of the talent guilds and of industrial unions, often in jurisdictional conflict with the conservative and corrupt International Association of Theater and Stage Employees (IATSE).¹⁷ This political culture reflected and deepened the commitment to radical causes among a broad spectrum of movie workers. And in a “world where networking meant everything, the Communist Party’s Popular Front was, from the middle thirties until the late forties, the network for the cerebral progressive, the inveterate activist, and the determined labor unionist.”¹⁸ During the Popular Front period (1935–39), radical and liberal activists worked together on compelling issues such as support for Republican Spain. Indeed, the most successful Communist Party activity was probably in those groups with limited, immediate programs “directed toward democratic (and often highly patriotic) goals.”¹⁹ The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, for instance, attracted liberals and even exiled European royalty to its banner. Sonja Dahl Biberman, Herbert Biberman’s sister-in-law and later an assistant director of Salt of the Earth, observed that “the Communist Party was much in evidence in all anti-fascist activity, but then so were the Republican and Democratic Parties.”²⁰ The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41 ended the Popular Front in Hollywood as elsewhere, convincing many liberals that Communists could not be trusted. American entry into World War II, though, pulled Communists back into the mainstream of American patriotism and therefore into American political life.²¹

Among the Hollywood Communists were several individuals, connected by family, as well as political, ties, who would later create Salt of the Earth. Sylvia and Paul Jarrico, the assistant producer and producer, respectively, of Salt, joined the party in the late 1930s. Both hailed from Russian Jewish immigrant families. Paul Jarrico was proud that his father, “a poet and a fighting man,” had formed an armed self-defense group that prevented a pogrom in their native town of Kharkov.²² He “simply grew up thinking that fathers go to political meetings every night.”²³ He was a Young Communist in 1934 and 1935 while attending Berkeley and became a screenwriter almost immediately after graduating from the University of Southern California in 1936, an occupation he pursued “almost continuously” until his dismissal from RKO after receiving a subpoena in 1951 to appear before HUAC.²⁴ In the late 1930s, he wrote No Time to Marry (1938) and Beauty for the Asking (1939). His screenplay for Tom, Dick and Harry (RKO Radio) was nominated for an Academy Award in 1941, and during World War II he wrote The Face Behind the Mask (1941) and Thousands Cheer (1943) and cowrote Song of Russia (1944) for MGM.

Sylvia Jarrico, while not a screenwriter, immersed herself in the same left-wing milieu, joining the party toward the end of the Popular Front because she was attracted by the Marxist critique of economics and politics. Stunned by the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, she convinced herself that the party leaders had acted in good faith. Her faith was renewed by World War II: “We were heart and soul in the war effort. We felt ideologically well equipped for it. And we were glad to have so many others with us now.”²⁵ After the war, she pursued graduate study of motion pictures and ideology, “how [motion pictures] reflect, how [they] influence reality.”²⁶ From 1945 to 1951 she was the managing editor of the Hollywood Quarterly, a journal of film criticism published by the University of California Press. The Hollywood Quarterly grew out of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, a wartime collaboration between left-wing writers at the University of California at Los Angeles and in the motion picture industry.²⁷ She lost this job in 1951 after refusing to take the loyalty oath required by the State of California. “There was a panic . . . at UCLA that precisely mirrored the panic in the motion picture industry,” she explained. “And the Hollywood Quarterly was the point of contact.”²⁸

Michael Wilson, who wrote the screenplay for Salt, came from a “zealously Catholic” family in Oklahoma that moved first to a Los Angeles suburb and then to the Bay Area.²⁹ Like his brother-in-law Paul Jarrico, Wilson became radicalized as a student at Berkeley in the mid-1930s.³⁰ He joined the “tiny, virtually inactive” CP branch on campus in the spring of 1937, and, after a year in Europe, “returned to Berkeley a dedicated Marxist-Leninist.”³¹ Rather than beginning graduate school, as he had planned, Wilson devoted his considerable energies to political organizing and teaching classes in Marxism, while still aiming to become a writer.³² After trying to write short stories about minority workers, Wilson was persuaded by Paul Jarrico to try screenwriting. He moved to Hollywood in 1940 and earned five screen credits, including several Hopalong Cassidy movies, before serving in the Marines from 1941 to 1945.³³ Just before being blacklisted in 1951, Michael Wilson won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for A Place in the Sun.

Herbert Biberman, Salt’s director, was a generation older than the Jarricos and Wilson and arrived in Hollywood after working in radical theater in the East. He had earned a master’s degree in theater from Yale and had studied theater in the Soviet Union early in the 1930s. Shortly after moving to New York City, he joined the Theater Guild, where he met actress Gale Sondergaard, his future wife. At the Theater Guild, he directed a Soviet play called Roar China, in which workers from New York’s Chinatown performed alongside professional actors.³⁴ His Hollywood career was apparently less successful than those of his comrades; at the time of the 1947 HUAC hearings, Biberman was under no contract with a major studio. His sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, was also very active in Popular Front organizations, serving for several years as executive secretary of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and then of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. She would prove indispensable to the worker-artist alliance that produced Salt of the Earth.

THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM

The Left flourished in Hollywood, but not in the sense of openly influencing the content of film. The Hollywood studio system successfully and consistently limited radical film content, if not radical political organizations, in order to appease outsiders clamoring for movie censorship. Motion pictures had long been a target for groups concerned with upholding morality, such as the Catholic Church, women’s clubs, and the American Legion. Many people believed that the movies, like the theater, were inherently immoral and, if not controlled, would corrupt audiences. In key respects, as we will see in the next chapter, they shared with many left-wing cultural critics the view that audiences risked cultural degeneration in the face of offensive imagery.

In the 1910s, the industry frequently submitted its films to locally run boards of review, which used the volunteer labor of women’s clubs to evaluate film content.³⁵ In the early 1920s, religious groups and other reformers threatened massive boycotts of Hollywood films. Unwilling to take a chance on reduced profits, Hollywood producers formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1922 and in 1930 adopted a production code by which the industry could regulate itself. All films had to pass through the Hays Office, which monitored voluntary adherence to the code.³⁶ Specifically banned were any depictions of “white slavery,” miscegenation, sexual “perversion,” and ridicule of the clergy; strongly discouraged were subjects like rape, drug use, murder techniques, and lustful kissing. Bowing to pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, as well as Protestant and Jewish groups, in 1934 the MPPDA strengthened the code with fines and more rules.³⁷ Unlike other kinds of writers, then, screenwriters labored under the censorship of an industry code. And unlike the press, motion pictures enjoyed no First Amendment protection before 1952.³⁸

Hollywood executives bowed to the pressure of censors, and their ability to enforce the production code rested on their iron hold over the industry, itself partly a result of the Depression that drove many studios into bankruptcy and a few into efforts to make film production more efficient along industrial lines.³⁹ Five studios ran the show from 1930 to 1948: Warner Brothers, Loew’s (which owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount, RKO, and Twentieth Century Fox. Three others—Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—gradually edged their way into the market but wielded less power than the Big Five.⁴⁰ Vertical integration characterized this industry as it did the industries in the manufacturing sector; the same corporations owned production and distribution rights, and they used this power to control almost all of the films that made it into movie houses. The major studios may have appeared to compete with one another, but, in fact, they colluded to corner the market. Movie theater chains owned directly by the Big Five got the best deals; block booking and similar marketing strategies forced independent exhibitors to accept the entire programs that the major studios offered. Money came from New York corporate offices and dictated to Hollywood executives exactly how many films were to be made and at what cost.⁴¹

On their own turf, movie executives were autocrats. Screenwriters gathered in the writers’ colonies of the studio lots to write assigned scripts or parts of scripts in return for a set salary. Creativity was cramped by studio bureaucracy: the story department, not the individual screenwriter, supplied the stories, and screenwriters adapted them to studio specifications. As one successful screenwriter put it, “[The producers] owned you; you were a commodity; they were paying you so much a week, and you belonged to them. And there was never any kidding about that.”⁴² A screenwriter’s job security rested on accumulating screen credits, but before labor unions gained power in the late 1930s, no individual screenwriter could be certain of receiving them.⁴³ The nature of piece work, in which different parts of a script were farmed out to different writers, allowed less-than-scrupulous executives to attribute scripts incompletely.⁴⁴ Studio management monitored the comings and goings of all people associated with the studio and readily forced particular stories on its writers.

Adrian Scott, one of the Hollywood Ten who later helped form the company that produced Salt, developed ulcers and gastritis as he struggled to balance his own vision of Crossfire (1946), a film that dramatized the dangers of bigotry and anti-Semitism, against the prescriptions of studio executives. Speaking to a conference on thought control in 1947, shortly before the HUAC hearings began, Scott denounced the effects of movie censorship:

Still, as historians Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner have argued, radical screenwriters managed to include humanist values and concern for the underdog in their movies, particularly those in less reputable genres like horror and science fiction, which attracted less scrutiny from the Production Code Administration than regular dramas.⁴⁶

THE BLACKLIST

Radical politics—though never radical film content—had gained some legitimacy in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, attracting conservatives to scrutinize the film industry as one especially vulnerable to communist infiltration. During World War II, Walt Disney had persuaded the Tenney Committee (California’s state equivalent to HUAC) to investigate Hollywood’s subversive films, but the hearings were widely ridiculed and their backers quickly gave up. After the war, Hollywood began to produce a few tentative offerings of a more sophisticated nature than its earlier fare. Films like The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, and Pinky confronted social problems like veterans’ adjustment to postwar America, anti-Semitism, and racism. But the Cold War, waged in HUAC hearings, froze any trend toward more films that dealt directly with social issues.

The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) invited HUAC to Hollywood in 1947. John Cogley, who wrote about the blacklist for the liberal Fund for the Republic, described the MPAPAI as a “militantly anti-Communist, pro–free enterprise group” that included such luminaries as Walt Disney, Ayn Rand, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and John Wayne.⁴⁷ HUAC quickly accepted this invitation, announcing that summer that it would investigate the CP infiltration of the motion picture industry. All of the MPAPAI members testified as “friendly witnesses” in the 1947 hearings. But nineteen of the other witnesses under subpoena declared that they would be “unfriendly.” The committee had no right to question their political beliefs, they said, and none of them would cooperate with what they considered a serious threat to the Constitution.⁴⁸

As the hearings opened in October 1947, with J. Parnell Thomas presiding, the nineteen unfriendly witnesses enjoyed the support of a number of Hollywood liberals and leftists who criticized the congressional investigation.⁴⁹ Representatives of the Committee for the First Amendment flew to Washington to register their opposition, and the studios’ producers testified that Communists did not influence film content or other aspects of production. Paul McNutt, counsel for the producers, denounced HUAC: “It does not require a law to cripple the right of free speech. Intimidation and coercion will do it.”⁵⁰ Eric Johnston, president of the national Chamber of Commerce and representative of the studio executives, sent word to the witnesses that the studios would not blacklist the unfriendlies.⁵¹ During the hearings, Herbert Biberman returned the favor by praising the editorials and the industry’s spokespeople who recognized that the hearings were only a “smokescreen under which [this committee was] trying to prescribe a film diet for the American people” and “to drive a wedge into the component parts of the industry.”⁵²

The unfriendly witnesses chose the First Amendment as their defense, and Biberman’s comments typified their strategy and aggressive rhetoric. HUAC was trying to replace the Bill of Rights with the “rule of accusation,” he said, to poison the public mind with scare tactics. “If I were guilty of acts of force or violence,” he continued, “I would never have been called before this committee. I would be in the courts. And if I were guilty of such acts . . . I should be in the courts, and convicted and condemned. It is because I have been an active citizen that I am here. No slothful, lazy, self-satisfied or cynical citizen is brought here—except those who are in the service of, or in the same bed with, the members of this committee.”⁵³ For his part, Adrian Scott stressed that the Constitution guaranteed the rights of minorities.

Thomas stopped the hearings after only ten of the unfriendly witnesses had been called. Those witnesses, soon dubbed the Hollywood Ten, were cited with contempt of Congress, a charge upheld by a House vote of 346 to 17.⁵⁴ Some of them, like Adrian Scott, returned to their jobs—but not for long. In December, the industry’s executives issued the “Waldorf Statement” (after meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on October 24), which explicitly blacklisted all of the unfriendly witnesses. Dore Schary, widely perceived as one of the more liberal Hollywood executives, testified in 1951 that he had tried to get Scott to sign a letter denying CP membership so that RKO would not have to fire him. Scott, according to Schary, agreed to sign an affidavit denying sympathy for a party seeking to overthrow the government by force, but he would not sign any letter denying he had ever been a Communist.⁵⁵ Scott’s subsequent dismissal letter from the president of RKO declared that Scott and Edward Dmytryk, another of the Ten, had brought themselves and the studio into “disrepute” and had “otherwise violated the provisions of Article 16 of [their] employment agreement.”⁵⁶ Article 16 was the “morals clause,” a standard element of studio contracts that executives used to dismiss people for political beliefs.

As historian Ellen Schrecker has shown, anticommunism in the late 1940s and early 1950s employed complex set of mechanisms to expose supposed Communists.⁵⁷ The congressional committee, fueled by professional witnesses provided by the FBI, was one of the most important of these, setting the stage for government, private industry, and other organizations to prove their loyalty by expelling Communists and other progressives. In 1947, the industry claimed—as it had in the 1920s and again in the early 1940s—that it could regulate itself. This time, though, its leaders chose the blacklist as the means by which to do so. Industry executives would probably never have bothered to throw out radical screenwriters, but, faced with governmental hostility, they joined the campaign of national politicians to rid the industry of supposed Communist influence and, not coincidentally, to score political points. The government, moreover, might not have tried to force the issue directly had not the industry’s big names sanctioned its political goals and methods.

Cast out from the industry, the Ten turned to fighting to stay out of prison. They produced a short documentary film, The Hollywood Ten, which their families and political allies distributed. A group of liberals signed an amicus curiae brief on their behalf, but their convictions were upheld in 1950. On the eve of sentencing, they issued a statement to the press. The Hollywood Ten, said Ring Lardner Jr., were the first victims of the Cold War. Although in 1947 the Truman administration did not explicitly condone the hearings, Lardner charged, events of the past three years had propelled the Democrats into the camp of the Republicans:

Alvah Bessie warned the country that while they were the first victims of the Cold War, they would not be the last: all Americans were “potential victims of the hot war that [was] being brewed in the Pentagon Building these days and nights.”⁵⁹ Their comments came a matter of weeks before the start of the Korean War, in July 1950. They all went to prison, some for six months, some for a year. Sylvia Jarrico recalled that she was part of a diminishing group of supporters: “We were planning a large welcome home demonstration for the eight [who remained in prison]. We thought our fight to rehabilitate their reputations was going pretty well and that they would come home as heroes.”⁶⁰ They came home, however, to a new round of HUAC hearings on Communist subversion.

In 1951, HUAC targeted the financial support that Hollywood furnished to the CP, rather than party influence—which it could never find—on film content. And this repression spread far beyond ten people. Hundreds were called before HUAC, each faced with the unpalatable choice of going to prison, being blacklisted, or informing on others.

The experience of the Hollywood Ten revealed the weakness of a defense based on freedom of speech and the First Amendment. Using that defense, the Hollywood Ten wound up in prison for contempt of Congress. The Fifth Amendment offered protection against self-incrimination, so it could protect witnesses from going to prison, but it could not protect them from the blacklist: central to the spectacle of the HUAC hearings was self-abnegation and the repudiation of any radical or even liberal past activities, and only by capitulating to the committee’s agenda could one avoid the blacklist imposed by the studios. Hollywood interpreted “taking the Fifth” as an admission of guilt, and the studios were unwilling to run the risk of employing anyone so tainted. Nor could one simply admit one’s own radical background; having once forfeited the Fifth Amendment’s protection by answering any questions, one opened the door to further questioning and one could not withhold information about other people. According to this line of legal reasoning, answering questions about oneself but then refusing to answer about others constituted contempt of Congress. Many witnesses thus found themselves trapped between clearing their own names and drawing other people into HUAC’s system of repression.⁶¹

Paul Jarrico appeared before HUAC on April 13, 1951, and, like most of the unfriendly witnesses in the second round of hearings, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, although he answered some questions. When Representative Doyle asked him if he would not want to help the committee uncover subversion, Jarrico replied, “One man’s subversion is another man’s patriotism. I consider the activities of this committee subversive of the American Constitution.” Later, Jarrico filed a statement in which he declared: “It is not our loyalty to our country that is being judged, but our loyalty to the particular economic system that prevails here. And that is the biggest lie of all: that capitalism and democracy are somehow the same thing, that it’s un-American to stand for social change.”⁶²

Sylvia Jarrico had already experienced political repression before McCarthy’s rise: she had lost her job at the Hollywood Quarterly for refusing to sign a loyalty oath required by the state of California. Now her husband was blacklisted as well. Not only did Paul Jarrico lose his job with RKO, but Howard Hughes also denied him screen credit for The Las Vegas Story, which Jarrico had written before HUAC subpoenaed him. The Screen Writers’ Guild took Hughes to court and lost. Thereafter, the union could not guarantee anyone’s right to work or credit for work already done. Michael Wilson weathered similar storms. His Academy Award for A Place in the Sun guaranteed him no protection against the blacklist after he appeared before HUAC in September 1951. In 1953, Wilson and twenty-three other unfriendly witnesses filed a civil suit against Loew’s, Inc., for conspiracy to blacklist, seeking $51 million in damages. Like Jarrico, they lost.⁶³ And like Jarrico, Wilson saw his name removed from a script—Friendly Persuasion (1956)—this time with the consent of the Screen Writers’ Guild. During the blacklist, Wilson, along with Dalton Trumbo, operated a clearinghouse for others to take on scripts under pseudonyms; in this manner he wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). His name appeared on no screen until 1965, and only in 1997 was his name restored to The Bridge on the River Kwai.⁶⁴

The term “Cold War” aptly describes the events in Hollywood from 1947 to 1960. As HUAC hauled motion picture workers into hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood, and as producers agreed to an informal blacklist, a chill spread over film production in all its aspects. Who would propose a script dealing with racial justice or with the honest struggles of a trade union if it could elicit a subpoena? Who could afford, after the 1951 hearings began, to argue their First Amendment rights, the tactic that had landed the Hollywood Ten in jail, or to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to silence, which the studios treated as an admission of guilt and rewarded with a place on the blacklist? One major Hollywood film did take industrial unionism as its subject, but the union in question was portrayed as corrupt. Coming from a director who had recently protected his career by informing on his Hollywood colleagues, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront raised the snitch to a heroic level.⁶⁵

For the Hollywood Ten and others on the blacklist, the informer was no hero. They experienced abusive investigators, unsympathetic judges, and prison because they believed that to grant even a shred of legitimacy to HUAC by cooperating was to betray the Constitution, their beliefs, and their friends. Out of this experience, some radicals fought back by suing their former employers and by forming their own film company. Wilson’s, Jarrico’s, and Scott’s visions of aligning their politics with their craft could now come to fruition, but only outside the system. As Paul Jarrico put it, “It wasn’t until 1951, when we were good and dead professionally, that we could get involved in movies that packed a real social and political wallop.”⁶⁶ Now they could finally commit “a crime to fit the punishment.”⁶⁷

According to Biberman, Paul Jarrico and Adrian Scott began to plan an independent film company just ten minutes after Jarrico’s appearance before HUAC in April 1951.⁶⁸ When Biberman heard of their idea, he contacted an attorney for the Hollywood Ten to begin setting up a company. This lawyer told him that Simon Lazarus, a movie exhibitor who ten years before had suggested an independent company to Biberman, was again expressing interest in such an enterprise. With one share each, Lazarus, Herbert Biberman, Adrian Scott, Paul Jarrico, and an attorney formed the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC) in September 1951.⁶⁹ Lazarus, Scott, and Biberman took on the challenge of raising money, with Lazarus investing $5,000.⁷⁰

Indeed, their efforts to finance the company show the paradoxical effect of anticommunism. They found investors in two groups of people, both responding—though in different ways—to the anticommunism that prevailed in American political culture. The first group consisted of opportunists who were simply not disturbed by the red tinge on the company and were eager to profit from the talents of blacklisted artists freed of the studios’ control. “The blacklisted!” cried one businessman. “They’re like gold laying [sic] in the streets!”⁷¹ The second group of investors found ideological reasons to back IPC financially, although they were themselves not Communists, leftists, or necessarily even liberals. They supported IPC because they did not believe that politics should limit how they spent their money. When Lazarus or Biberman explained the possible consequences of supporting IPC—harassment from HUAC or other government agencies, from the American Legion, or from IATSE—these investors were positively insulted that anyone would presume to dictate the terms under which they could invest their own dollars.

After only a few months, the company had raised some $50,000, and by the summer of 1952, when IPC approached the Mine-Mill international to collaborate on a film, the company had raised about $95,000.⁷² They planned to use it to produce the story of the women’s picket in Hanover.