9 Anticommunist Assaults

“A WEAPON FOR RUSSIA”

On February 24, 1953, Donald Jackson, representative from California and a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), addressed his colleagues from the floor of the House of Representatives. Just next door to America’s nuclear headquarters at Los Alamos, he declared, Communists were making a subversive film that would inflame race hatred by depicting the United States as the “enemy of all colored people.” Jackson did not know the name of this film, but he was certain of its content. In one scene, he explained, “two deputy sheriffs arrest a meek American miner of Mexican descent and proceed to pistol-whip the miner’s very young son.”¹ (In fact, there was no such scene.) Jackson performed the anticommunist ritual that had become standard HUAC practice, reciting the names of people associated with the film and announcing that each had refused to answer HUAC’s questions about the Communist Party (CP). This film, a “weapon for Russia,” according to Jackson, warranted a full congressional investigation and legislation to ban the film’s distribution. Jackson was ready to “do everything in his power to prevent the film from being shown in public theatres.”²

Jackson had been warned about the movie by the American Federation of Labor’s Hollywood Film Council president, Roy Brewer. “No motion picture made by Communists can be good for America,” Brewer said on February 12. “Hollywood has gotten rid of these people, and we want the federal government to investigate carefully the picture being made at Silver City, New Mexico.”³ For his part, Brewer had become aware of the film both from the attempt by the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC) to line up a union crew and from Grant County residents. The events of February and March 1953, in fact, reveal how national and local anticommunism worked in tandem. Representative Jackson’s speech reverberated far beyond the floor of the House of Representatives, and it marked a turning point in the film crew’s experience in Grant County. For the next three weeks, the film crew was first intimidated, then threatened, and finally driven out of town by union antagonists set on freeing the county of communists. Nationally, the federal government chose this moment to charge Clinton Jencks with having falsified a Taft-Hartley affidavit with the National Labor Relations Board, and for the next several years he struggled to stay out of prison.

THE MOVIE CREW IN GRANT COUNTY

Things did not start out so badly. The relations between the film crew and the townspeople were friendly at first, not least because IPC had deposited tens of thousands of dollars in the American National Bank of Silver City and planned to spend it locally. Sonja Dahl Biberman and Paul Jarrico had persuaded the proprietor of the Bear Mountain Ranch, a few miles northwest of Silver City, to house the entire crew despite the presence of some African American technicians. No Jim Crow here, they were glad to find. An eccentric local rancher, Alford Roos, was pleased to offer his ranch as a shooting location. Will Geer shared his love of orchids with the ladies of the Green Thumb Garden Club, who were delighted to have a famous actor—even a blacklisted one—among them.⁴ Most small businessmen appreciated the commerce that accompanied film production in the vicinity, and some of the local officials, like Central mayor Frank Romero, granted permits to shoot in public spaces.⁵ Indeed, IPC had been quite careful in cultivating cordial relations with local officials.⁶ One night Sheriff Owen Mathews invited prop man Irving Hentschel to his office and, “with the lights low, produced submachine guns and rifles to use as models in the prop man’s workshop.”⁷ One of the local priests “urged area merchants to rent automobiles, furniture, and other goods [to the film crew] at low cost in exchange for God’s blessings. ‘Those sonsabitches,’ the priest muttered to assistant director Jules Schwerin after leaving the shops. ‘They hate the Mexican Americans. Let them make some sacrifices.’”⁸

But by the middle of February, local and national anticommunists had publicized the film in Grant County, forcing the filmmakers to respond to angry charges about the nature and purpose of Salt of the Earth. Late in January, a Hurley schoolteacher named June Kuhlman had written to columnist Victor Riesel (who joined the attack early in February), E. T. “Buck” Harris, public relations director for the Screen Actors Guild, and Eric Johnston of the Motion Picture Association of America, requesting advice on “how to do [her] American duty.” She had nothing but love for “these people,” she explained, and did not want to see them used by communists.⁹ Buck Harris then asked for information on the movie from Grant County newspapermen and from Ward Ballmer, public relations director at Chino. According to historian James Lorence, “Harris described all his informants as ‘most cooperative,’ although Ballmer demanded confidentiality because Kennecott had publicly adopted a ‘hands off policy’ on the movie. Together, they provided extensive detail.”¹⁰ Harris “suggested that one ‘positive step’ . . . would be to have the Immigration and Naturalization Service ‘check on’ [actress] Rosaura Revueltas’s citizenship status to see if she could be charged with violation of her visitor’s visa.”¹¹

In the town of Central, the John R. Storz American Legion Post had set up its own “Un-American Activities Committee.” On January 23, Leroy B. Bible, chairman of the American Legion committee, alerted Representative Harold Velde, HUAC chairman, of the movie being made in Grant County, and a few weeks later Bible asked Senator Dennis Chávez to help Velde “clean out this known group of ‘Communists.’”¹² The two anticommunist committees must have continued to work with one another, for Bible knew ahead of time that Representative Jackson would deliver a speech on February 24. Bible asked Chávez to mail copies of Jackson’s speech to radio station KSIL and to the American Legion “for local use.”¹³ Chávez’s office mailed copies of the Congressional Record to KSIL on February 25 and to Bible a few days later.¹⁴

The day after Jackson spoke, February 25, two federal immigration officials arrested Rosaura Revueltas on an administrative warrant for having illegally entered the United States on January 4.¹⁵ Her passport bore no stamp of legal entry. Revueltas explained that she had entered at El Paso in a station wagon operated by LAMSA Airlines and that the border official had simply waved them all through. But her account carried no weight with immigration officials, who took her to El Paso. “All the way,” she recalled, “they kept interrogating me. Was I a Communist? Weren’t the people I was working with Communists? Wasn’t this a Communist picture? For the first time I began to feel frightened. Not for myself, but for the picture. Some powerful man or men were out to kill our picture.”¹⁶ District immigration director Joseph Minton said he had been investigating Revueltas’s case for over a week and was “ready to move in on her” before Jackson’s speech; he also intended to investigate other cast members to verify that they were legally in the country. Asked if the passport technicality prompted her arrest, Minton replied, “In view of what has been going on up there and the people involved, I think anyone has the right to assume there might be other angles to this case.”¹⁷ Revueltas’s arrest might not have been sparked by Jackson’s speech, but it was clearly motivated by similar political considerations.

Mine-Mill and its supporters acted quickly. Morris Wright, public relations representative for the film, denied Jackson’s accusations. The film was not produced by the CP but rather by Mine-Mill. No one was “pistol-whipped,” nor was violence directed against a Mexican boy. The picture promoted ethnic harmony and would “serve as a good ambassador for the United States” in Latin America.¹⁸ Paul Jarrico spoke more bluntly. Jackson, he said, was an “unmitigated liar” who should “take off his cloak of congressional immunity and fight like a man” about the production of Salt of the Earth.¹⁹ From Mexico, too, came criticism of Revueltas’s detention. Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Padilla Nerva, instructed the consul in El Paso, Raúl Michel, to give “all possible protection” to Revueltas and to ask for a delay in deporting her.²⁰ The Mexican National Association of Actors angrily condemned her arrest; prominent actor Jorge Negrete, president of the association, stated that “unless Rosaura Revueltas is freed to continue her work on Salt of the Earth every Hollywood actor now in Mexico will be suspended and barred from continuing their productions.” Productions that would be affected included Growing Wild, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, and Second Chance, featuring Anthony Quinn, Ward Bond, Robert Mitchum, and Linda Darnell.²¹ Revueltas’s attorney, Ben Margolis, filed for a writ of habeas corpus from U.S. district judge R. E. Thomason, and Revueltas “regained [her] hope of an early release.”²²

Revueltas’s optimism faded during the habeas corpus hearing, however, when she saw Margolis “win argument after argument and yet lose on the basic plea. . . . And [she] began to realize that the forces trying to stop the completion of [the] picture were more powerful than [she] had imagined.”²³ Judge Thomason refused to release her on bond.²⁴ Her choice was simple: she could voluntarily return to Mexico and apply for readmittance—which no one in the film company believed she would receive—or she could undergo deportation hearings. Revueltas finally left the country “voluntarily” on March 6, crossing into Juárez and then flying to Mexico City.²⁵

Thus the actions of a small number of political figures, administration officials, and journalists threatened the film’s completion. IPC public relations director Morris Wright told the Silver City Daily Press that the film company could “go on for awhile shooting those scenes in which Miss Revueltas does not appear, . . . but we can’t finish it without her.”²⁶ For some scenes, Biberman simply used a double, Anita Torrez’s sister, who had arrived in Hanover to babysit.²⁷ For other scenes, he continued filming without Revueltas and then, some weeks later, filmed her in Mexico. The Mexican shooting, predictably, drove up production costs.²⁸

Extralegal violence also threatened the crew, IPC, and union families. People who had opposed the Empire Zinc strikers took Jackson’s speech as license to exact their own vengeance on the union. And they did so through intimidation and violence, which they justified as the only way to fight communism. On March 2—after radio station KSIL rebroadcast all twenty minutes of Jackson’s speech—a group of eight or ten men confronted the film crew in front of the Central post office. Larry Martin, of Martin’s Grocery Store, later explained, “When the movie people said they had permission from the Mayor to take the pictures, they were told, ‘The Mayor doesn’t run this town.’ After that we told the crew we would bust the cameras if they didn’t leave.”²⁹ Martin and his companions exchanged angry words with the crew members, who eventually left the area.

Central mayor Romero tried to remain neutral, supporting neither the members of the film crew nor the men who harassed them. Juan Chacón claimed that “Romero apologized to the film unit for the rude treatment.”³⁰ But Romero quickly backed away from any association with the film company: “I didn’t apologize to anyone,” he said the next day. “I would like to refute that statement.”³¹ Romero admitted that he had granted a film permit to Jules Schwerin but that, because of the negative publicity, he had tried to discourage both Schwerin and Jencks from actually coming to Central. Romero’s disavowal did not, however, directly sanction the assault on the film crew. Before the confrontation began, he had received a telephone call from Bayard. A “group of citizens [was] ready to help us out,” Romero stated. They “wanted to know if I would back them up. I told them to stay in Bayard, because I didn’t want any violence.”³²

The day after the incident in Central, Bayard citizens assaulted the crew, who had set up cameras just south of Bayard’s business section, across the street from the 890 union hall. Mayor Bill Upton had not granted even nominal permission to film in that town, and he insisted that the land in question was private property and that the owner had placed it in Upton’s care.³³ Joined by some twenty other “citizens,” the mayor told the crew to “leave and not come back.”³⁴ Pharmacist Earl Lett, who had proudly attacked Clinton Jencks during the Empire Zinc strike, assaulted him again and shared the story with the Silver City Daily Press. Lett “told the movie makers ‘that we didn’t want any communists taking pictures’ [and] said he caught Jencks by the coat and hit him. About that time, . . . Juan Chacón . . . jumped on his back. A couple of others got into the fray.”³⁵ Union members from the nearby Local 890 hall defended the crew; after fifteen minutes, Deputy Sheriff John Turney and City Marshal Leslie Goforth managed to break up the fistfight. No one was arrested. The crew returned to Alford Roos’s ranch to resume shooting.³⁶

Around 1:30 on the morning of March 4, vigilantes shot four bullets at Jencks’s car. Later that day, Jencks filed assault charges against Lett and asked that Lett be put under a “peace bond” like those issued against Empire Zinc strikers the year before.³⁷ Recapitulations, and sometimes inversions, of events that had occurred during the Empire Zinc strike continued on both sides of the moviemaking conflict. Later in the afternoon of March 4, for instance, a parade of some 250 cars swept through Grant County, harking back to a similar car parade of Local 890’s supporters in the summer of 1951. It formed in Central, drove past the Roos Ranch, and then passed through Santa Rita, Hanover, Bayard, and, finally, Silver City. “Citizens” organized this parade, one participant stated, “to show people we don’t like communists or what they are doing.” It was led by Charlie Smith, the former Asarco local officer who had invited the Steelworkers in during the Empire Zinc strike.

Events surrounding the film shooting may have occasionally looked like those surrounding the Empire Zinc strike, but vigilantes soon carried the tensions to an even higher pitch. About seventy small businessmen delivered an ultimatum to Jencks and the film crew on March 4: leave town in twelve hours, or leave in black boxes.³⁸ Fearing that the vigilantes would destroy the film itself, armed union men guarded the ranch throughout the following nights. Radio station KSIL suggested a less violent but no less virulent tactic: that Grant County citizens turn on their porch lights all day on March 5 as a “freedom demonstration” against communism. On March 6, businesses in the county closed and one movie theater screened an anticommunist film, The Hoaxters, all day long. Aircraft flew above the Roos ranch to disrupt filming with noise.

Anticommunism was the means by which some people expressed their citizenship. People who opposed the union and the film company consistently described themselves as “citizens,” arrogating the mantle of legitimacy and patriotism and implying that the communist filmmakers had no place in Grant County or even the United States. Yet some of these citizens cheerfully broke the law to achieve their ends, resorting to physical assaults, gunfire, and death threats. To men like Bayard mayor Bill Upton and Earl Lett, it appears that the imagined nature of communism—underground, insidious, and aimed at undermining the very foundations of democratic government—warranted antisocial and lawless methods in order to defend democracy. Lett told journalist Elizabeth Kerby: “[I] asked [the film crew] as nicely as I could to leave town, but I have a son in Korea, and I’m against Communism.”³⁹

By taking the law into their own hands and running “undesirables” out of town, Grant County anticommunists were simultaneously waging a local battle in the international Cold War and drawing on the history and the mythology of vigilantism in the American West to justify their actions. They took Representative Jackson’s call to action as license to exercise what they perceived as a local prerogative to act in self-defense, outside the law if necessary. For some, Jackson’s words threw fuel on local fires still smoldering from the days of the Empire Zinc strike, renewing their determination to settle old scores. For others, the notion that a “weapon for Russia” was being built under their own noses was enough to mobilize them against the filmmakers, regardless of their feelings about the Empire Zinc strike. Coverage of the controversy in the Silver City Daily Press only fed the anticommunist fervor. One particularly pungent editorial on the subversive nature of the film stated,

While the editorial appeared to be based on actual concerns of Grant County residents, in fact, the “community” expressed its fears of a “communist-inspired” film in exactly the same language in which Representative Jackson had denounced the film a week earlier; moreover, every Daily Press report on the film in the following months included Jackson’s assertion, with no caveat or attribution, that the movie was a “weapon for Russia.” Similarly, Central mayor Frank Romero, described in the New York Times as a “scholarly World War II veteran,” affirmed that he was “as anti-Communist as anybody.” “I hope the Government will find some way of preventing the export of this picture because it would be very bad for our Latin-American relations,” he said. (Romero, unlike Lett and Upton, wanted the prevention to take place within the law.)⁴¹ Media coverage on radio station KSIL and in the New York Times and the El Paso Herald-Post employed the same anticommunist rhetoric.

The rhetoric of anticommunism and citizenship was coupled with revealing comments on race, nationality, and class. The Silver City Daily Press took pains to contrast “Mexican Americans” with “Spanish Americans”: “Most of Mine-Mill’s devoted following are of Mexican background—as distinguished from New Mexico’s own native people, who are Spanish-Americans and proud of it.”⁴² Bayard mayor Bill Upton, too, linked the working class with Mexicans and hinted that this combination was particularly conducive to the spread of communism: “We have Spanish-American families here who are just as fine a people as you ever saw. But on the other hand the laboring class is not the same class of people. . . . We’re just sitting on dynamite here until something is done about these Communists.”⁴³ For his part, Earl Lett asserted, “[I’m not] against Spanish Americans. Some of my best friends are Spanish Americans.”⁴⁴ These commentators contrasted the “good” Hispanics (those who were Spanish Americans, whose families had resided in New Mexico for centuries and who, importantly, were not of the working class) with the “bad” Hispanics (presumed to be recent arrivals from Mexico) and blithely denied any racism in the distinction by claiming to like the good Hispanics. Making this distinction was a common way for New Mexicans to define social position, one that reflected “a statewide preoccupation with the supposed cultural uniqueness of New Mexico.”⁴⁵ In fact, though, the ethnic and national mixture in Grant County did not lend itself to such a simple analysis. People who had recently come from Mexico joined those whose families had long lived in the Mimbres and Gila valleys to form the backbone of Mine-Mill in Grant County; small businesspeople not only came from the same mixture as did workers, but they often came from working-class families themselves.

Interestingly, the criticisms of Salt had nothing to say about women’s activism. When critics talked about the film’s content, it was to emphasize race hatred. This may be because the government was more concerned about international criticism of racism. The “weapon for Russia” was a weapon because of the influence of movies on foreign opinions of the United States and because the United States was sensitive to criticisms of racism and not, apparently, to criticisms of sexism (if there ever were such criticisms); the movie was a weapon for Russia because it was made by communists, who, by definition, owed allegiance to the Soviet Union. A simpler explanation for the absence of commentary on women’s roles is that none of the film’s opponents actually read the script. Thus, ironically, the very essence of the film project—that which attracted the Hollywood filmmakers in the first place, and which union families were most concerned with conveying—failed even to register in this anticommunist discourse.

Mine-Mill and its supporters did not suffer these affronts silently. Hundreds of men and women, meeting at the union hall on March 4, issued an indignant statement against the attacks. They connected the current uproar with the Empire Zinc strike, declaring that the attack on their movie was an attack on their union. And they drew attention to the people in Grant County—98 percent, they claimed, although there is no explanation for how they arrived at that figure—who did not “go along with gangsterism and Ku Klux Klan tactics.”⁴⁶

Some local clergy tried to defuse the crisis. They supported the filmmakers’ right to dramatize the Empire Zinc strike on film, and four of them issued a statement requesting the public “to abstain from all physical violence in this time of tension and to leave all ultimate decisions to be made by properly constituted authorities.” Even Bishop Sidney Metzger of El Paso, who had publicized what he considered to be a communist threat in El Paso’s Mine-Mill Local 510 (and had encouraged a Steel-workers raid there), supported the Grant County priests’ statement. One Catholic priest, probably Father Smerke of Hanover, criticized the “scandalously untrue news stories” about Salt of the Earth. He and Father Linnane of Silver City convened a group of law enforcement officials, local Mexican American business leaders, and the film crew to try to protect the crew from violence.⁴⁷

The efforts of the clergy and state police prevented additional violence but did not create a climate in which the crew could continue to shoot the film. On March 7, with barely enough footage to make into a film, the crew left Grant County. But conflicts continued to rage in the region even after the filming ceased. The union hall in Bayard mysteriously caught on fire on March 8; the hall in distant Carlsbad was destroyed by arson; and union member and actor Floyd Bostick’s house burnt to the ground the following week.

THE STRUGGLE WITH HOLLYWOOD

The problems in Grant county mirrored IPC’s trouble in Hollywood, where the repressive political climate had made it hard to hire a film crew.⁴⁸ Earlier in 1952, Simon Lazarus tried to line up a union crew but got a definitive “no” from Roy Brewer, president of IATSE. Brewer had made a name for himself in the late 1940s as an uncompromising anticommunist. In 1945, a dramatic and violent strike by studio technicians belonging to the left-leaning but non-Communist Conference of Studio Unions became an opening for Brewer and his IATSE to secure jurisdiction over the entire Hollywood industry.⁴⁹ Brewer capitalized as well on his membership in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anticommunist organization, to wrangle for himself an unofficial position as arbiter of the blacklist. As someone whose own power rested precisely and firmly on the blacklist, Brewer was unlikely to smile upon an independent company consisting of blacklisted directors, producers, writers, and actors. Thus it was no surprise that he declared in 1952 that IPC’s film would simply never be made. RKO mogul Howard Hughes echoed Brewer’s comments shortly before IPC began shooting in early 1953.

The troubles with Hollywood craft unions had prompted IPC to seek a formal arrangement with Mine-Mill’s international office in Denver in the summer of 1952, beyond the informal alliance that IPC and union families had created in Grant County. Biberman first toured southwestern mining towns with Mine-Mill executive board member Orville Larson in June, concluding that Bayard, or possibly San Cristóbal, would work best as a film site.⁵⁰ He requested Mine-Mill’s collaboration later that month. Without the strength of the entire union behind this project, Biberman stressed, IPC might have to film the story in Mexico rather than among the very families whose story they were telling. Biberman seemed to think that Mine-Mill was in a better “bargaining position” than IPC was with respect to IATSE, and he asked that Mine-Mill sign on as official producers.⁵¹

Biberman’s hopes on that score were misplaced, to say the least. IATSE continued to block technical support for Salt of the Earth, even with a union’s name on the production roster. From October to December, Biberman and Jarrico turned instead to the CIO’s Association of Documentary Technicians and Film Cameramen (ADTFC) in New York. The ADTFC was interested in the project, but it hesitated to associate with IPC for fear of red-baiting: locked in a jurisdictional dispute with IATSE in New York, the ADTFC fretted that IATSE could lure technicians into the AFL union. Biberman had “two pretty tough weeks in New York” trying to persuade individual technicians that they could handle “association with [Biberman and Jarrico] and with” Mine-Mill.⁵²

In October 1952, Mine-Mill and IPC agreed that the latter would place money in a bank account under the name “International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Special Motion Picture Production Account,” and that Mine-Mill would officially hire and pay all technicians and actors. This arrangement would both relieve Mine-Mill of financial obligations and reassure the ADTFC. The crew signed on in the middle of October, demonstrating, according to Biberman, “more than willingness, . . . actually real enthusiasm for the undertaking.”⁵³ But Jarrico reported in December, just two weeks before shooting was to begin, that the ADTFC was still worried “about servicing this picture at all,” not only because of red-baiting, but also because hostility toward the film could leave its members high and dry: there might not be money to pay them. Jarrico stressed that Mine-Mill’s “formal responsibility for the hiring of the crew” was critical in “protect[ing] those within the AD[TF]C who have tried to overcome this trepidation.” Mine-Mill, he stated, “must assure [them] that their own union regulations will be adhered to strictly, and that money is available to cover not only their travel expenses but their wages.”⁵⁴ But even Mine-Mill’s name behind the film could not get that crew to Grant County. It backed out at the very last minute, leaving Jarrico and Biberman to scrounge for a “rump” crew of blacklisted technicians just days before shooting was scheduled to begin in January 1953.

Once the film processing phase began, IPC found that negative publicity had scared all laboratories away from Salt of the Earth. The laboratory that had processed the sound refused to do any more work, and Salt’s editors had to work under cover of night, in a former bathroom, to process the film. IPC recorded the musical score with union musicians who had been told that they were working on a film called Vaya con Dios.

The company pinned its hopes, though, on winning audiences over once they did see the movie. Its strategy was to organize audiences, calling on trade unions to publicize the movie among their members; to this end, the company persuaded the Mine-Mill international to send an advance man, Bill Gately, to a number of cities to drum up support. Local promotion committees were to be formed in each community, and they were to include “representatives from trade unions, women’s organizations, minority groups and prestige people (e.g., clergy, educators, artists, business men, etc.).”⁵⁵ The committee was supposed to arrange a preview of the movie, inviting about a hundred “leading citizens” who could then be counted on “to build the kind of audience for the film that will really represent a cross-section of the community.”⁵⁶ Blacklisted actress Anne Revere toured the country, giving readings from the script that were very successful, according to Jarrico, Biberman, and Wilson. And to counter the negative publicity, IPC and Mine-Mill distributed copies of the screenplay for people to see for themselves. California Quarterly, the publication of the Hollywood Arts, Sciences and Professions Council of the Progressive Citizens of America, published the script along with photos and interviews with the cast and crew. “Today there is a battle going on,” Juan Chacón wrote in an open letter printed in the Silver City Daily Press, “between the book-burners and Americans who recognize what these forces have in mind for the rights of all of us to read and write and speak and think. To us, our movie, ‘Salt of the Earth,’ is our part of this fight. First, our right to make it—and secondly, your right to see it and make your own judgments on its qualities.”⁵⁷ On another front, Paul Jarrico sued Howard Hughes and Roy Brewer for conspiracy to suppress the movie’s production and distribution. The suit failed.

“The simple fact,” Biberman wrote to Maurice Travis late in March 1953, “is that the appearance of this picture, magnificently played by miners and their families, is going to pull the rug out from under the labor-baiters and red-baiting Congressional racketeers and put the real issue before millions and millions of Americans.” Salt of the Earth would be a platform for labor unions to redefine, as he put it, “what Americanism really is and how you fight for a better America.” And the union people’s performances, Biberman anticipated, “will knock people into a new realization of the culture and beauty and artistic skill which resides in working people. How could this not be so. . . . Perhaps workers themselves had better begin to realise how talented they are in all ways.”⁵⁸

Biberman was far too optimistic in imagining Salt’s success. It is possible, of course, that Salt of the Earth could have had an effect similar to his vision. Certainly many of the people who did see the movie—particularly women—responded favorably to it. But Salt of the Earth did not reach many people. Movie houses that initially agreed to show the movie backed out, fearing that the American Legion would make good on threats to boycott the theaters and that Hollywood distributors would cut them off from other films. Labor unions like IATSE prohibited projectionists from working in theaters that contracted to show the film. In the end, the story that women had persuaded Michael Wilson to dramatize reached almost no one. After a rocky beginning in New York in April of 1954, the film reached commercial audiences in only a very few cities before fading away, only to be seen by small numbers of Americans. The only Grant County theater to show the film was the Silver Sky Vue drive-in.

As the film moved further and further away from Grant County, the alliance between the filmmakers and the union families encountered difficulties. Several people in the union could not understand why, month after month, the film was not released. And after the film finally opened, in April 1954, Mine-Mill and Local 890 could not understand why they saw absolutely no profits from the movie. Angie Sánchez, some twenty years later, believed that she was supposed to have received a salary for her role. In fact, only the people who had lost time from paid jobs drew a salary during the filmmaking, and IPC budgeted no salary for Salt’s director, writer, or producer.⁵⁹ But her suspicions point to the difficulty of sustaining the trust that had enabled the two groups to work together in Grant County in the face of violence and intimidation.

GOVERNMENT HARASSMENT OF MINE-MILL

The anticommunist assaults on Salt of the Earth were accompanied by similar attacks on Mine-Mill. In October 1952, a Senate subcommittee held hearings in Salt Lake City on the administration of the Internal Security Act of 1950. (That same month, Herbert Biberman was facing expulsion from the Screen Directors Guild for his Communist affiliation, despite the fact that he had helped found the guild in the 1930s.) Chaired by Nevada senator Pat McCarran, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) hearings were intended to publicize and thereby condemn the Communist “domination” of Mine-Mill.⁶⁰ McCarran had already denounced the union as “subversive” by the time the hearings began on October 6, 1952.⁶¹ The hearings were similar to others held by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Subversive Activities Control Board, designed less to generate information than to cast Communists and progressives beyond the pale of civil society, often through the publicity that resulted in witnesses getting fired from their jobs.⁶²

For four days the Senate subcommittee questioned past and present Mine-Mill members and officials, as well as paid informants like ex-Communist Harvey Matusow. The subcommittee established the parameters of debate by beginning with respectful questioning of a series of anticommunist witnesses, such as Homer Wilson, a former Mine-Mill vice president and CIO international representative from Alabama who had encouraged the Alabama locals to secede from Mine-Mill and join the Steelworkers in 1948.⁶³ R. B. Matthews of New York City, formerly the research director for HUAC in the 1930s, explained that Mine-Mill was “Communist-dominated” because its policies and published statements matched those of “the known line of the Communist Party.”⁶⁴ The CIO’s Stanley Ruttenberg shared details of the CIO’s 1949–50 expulsion of Mine-Mill.⁶⁵

The subcommittee’s interactions with secretary-treasurer Maurice Travis, as with all of Mine-Mill’s current leaders, immediately became hostile. Interrogators posed compound questions that included assumptions about Communist membership and about the nature of Communist activity and commitments. Chairman Pat McCarran asked attorney Nathan Witt where Witt had first met Whittaker Chambers. Witt, lawyer that he was, responded that McCarran’s question was phrased much like the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”⁶⁶ Either way one answered would confirm the assumption contained in the question, that Witt had beaten his wife. Similarly, McCarran asked Graham Dolan, Mine-Mill’s director of education and assistant editor of The Union, “Was your book number in the Communist Party No. 45712?”⁶⁷ And of executive board member Al Skinner, McCarran asked, “Were you living in Salt Lake City when you went to the Communist school?” When Skinner objected to the question, McCarran stated that the question “call[ed] for an answer of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”⁶⁸

McCarran insisted that these hearings did not constitute a trial. The subcommittee, he claimed, sought only to uncover “facts” about the CP and its activities in defense industries, “so that the people may judge just how great is the danger to this country of ours from Communism.”⁶⁹ Moreover, he portrayed himself as a stalwart friend of labor, one who had supported labor rights during almost twenty years in the U.S. Senate and, prior to that, as a Nevada legislator and judge.⁷⁰ McCarran’s comments notwithstanding, witnesses opposed to the subcommittee’s mission and methods believed that this was indeed a trial. The lines of questioning—along with McCarran’s unabashed equation of love for labor with hatred of communism—signaled to these witnesses that “taking the Fifth” was the only protection against a citation for contempt of Congress.

Al Skinner, for example, criticized the subcommittee’s attempt “to make the Fifth Amendment something sinister that you hide behind,” but McCarran countered, “you are the one doing the hiding.”⁷¹ Jack Blackwell, a miner from Idaho, objected to the subcommittee putting “words in [his] mouth” whenever he invoked the Fifth Amendment.⁷² And Clinton Jencks used the Fifth Amendment, despite the apparently innocuous nature of some of the questions, because he did not trust the subcommittee to interpret his comments fairly. It was “quite possible,” he stated, “that any answers given before this committee might be” used to incriminate him.⁷³ Simple “facts” that the subcommittee was ostensibly seeking to uncover, Jencks felt, could be manipulated. The subcommittee equated invoking the Fifth Amendment with admitting guilt. “Do you not realize,” McCarran asked him, “that by . . . [declining to answer on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment] you are inferentially declaring yourself to be a Communist? . . . If you were not a Communist, the word ‘no’ would be the answer, would it not?”⁷⁴

Jencks knew perfectly well that “no” would not necessarily get him off the hook, because the House Un-American Activities Committee had already shown what would happen to people who answered any of its questions. A witness who admitted to being or once having been a Communist would be forced to name names and thus ultimately play into the subcommittee’s agenda. The Salt Lake City hearings, like the HUAC hearings, were premised on a set of monolithic assumptions about what communism was and what CP membership meant. There was no room for nuance or explanation in answering questions designed only to elicit confessions and the naming of names.

CLINTON JENCKS UNDER FIRE

The 1952 Salt Lake City Mine-Mill hearings set the stage for many more years of government harassment of Mine-Mill. Reporting on the hearings, SISS recommended amending Taft-Hartley so as to forbid “a member of a ‘Communist organization’ to hold office or a job in a labor union and [to permit] employers to discharge ‘persons who are members of organizations designated as subversive by the Attorney General.’”—The subcommittee urged the Justice Department “to determine whether perjury prosecutions should be brought against union officers identified as Communist.”⁷⁵ One of the first people targeted was Clinton Jencks, who was ultimately forced to resign from Mine-Mill in the late 1950s.

In March 1953, during the furor over making Salt of the Earth, New Jersey Zinc executive Richard Berresford spoke to the House Committee on Education and Labor, the committee considering SISS’s recommendation. Berresford argued that the law should require international representatives, not just elected union officials, to sign noncommunist affidavits. Clinton Jencks was an example of why the existing law was inadequate. Jencks had signed Taft-Hartley affidavits twice while an officer of Local 890. At the time of the “disruptive, subtle, confusing, mean, tricky, and unfair” Empire Zinc strike, Jencks was no longer an officer of the local but remained an international representative.⁷⁶

The timing of Berresford’s testimony was more important than its content, for it built on the publicity surrounding Salt of the Earth and gave new impetus to the government strategy of prosecuting progressive unionists for falsifying their Taft-Hartley affidavits. Jencks could be convicted for having filed a false affidavit within the previous three years if the government could prove that Jencks was still a Communist at the time he filed it, but the government would have to indict him no later than April 1953, when the three-year window would close.⁷⁷ Jencks was “convinced that the government wouldn’t have gone forward with the indictment if it hadn’t been for all the publicity” surrounding the Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth.⁷⁸

For several years, the National Labor Relations Board had been pressuring the Justice Department to prosecute progressive unionists for perjury, but the Justice Department had hesitated for several reasons. First, the language of Taft-Hartley was ambiguous, and in the late 1940s it was unclear if the law would be modified or even overturned; second, the FBI was reluctant to identify its informants by putting them on the witness stand; and, third, the FBI seldom had evidence that these unionists belonged to the CP at the time they signed the affidavits.⁷⁹ This was certainly the case with Clinton Jencks: even FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover admitted that “the evidence [of perjury was] not substantial” against him.⁸⁰ But with the new Eisenhower administration in 1953 came a new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, who pursued Taft-Hartley cases more aggressively.⁸¹

And thus it was that on April 20, 1953, the FBI arrested Clinton Jencks. Jencks was playing with his son in front of his house when two agents “roared up and jumped out and told [him he] was under arrest.” They showed him their badges. Jencks asked them if he could “just go inside and put on [his] shoes and socks,” but they told him they could not let him out of their sight, “like [he] was an armed fugitive or something like that.”⁸² Jencks spent the night in the Grant County jail, and the next day he was released on $5,000 bail posted by the international. He told the press: “This is just another effort of the companies and their representatives to use the Taft-Hartley act to stop unions. I am guilty of nothing other than fighting for the rank and file of our local union, and I intend to keep right on doing that.”⁸³ Unfortunately, the international decided that Jencks should not keep doing that, at least not in Grant County, and on June 1, 1953, it announced Jencks’s transfer to the Denver office.⁸⁴

Jencks’s trial opened in El Paso in January 1954 before federal judge R. E. Thomason, the vocal anticommunist who had overseen Rosaura Revueltas’s detention the previous year, and it followed the pattern of most anticommunist proceedings. There was a parade of experts on the nature of Communism and witnesses who offered circumstantial evidence for the Communist ties of the accused. Rev. J. W. Ford, who had been a member of the CP in Albuquerque and, beginning in 1948, worked as an FBI informant, testified that Clinton and Virginia Jencks were both Communists. He could not confirm Clinton’s membership past 1949, though.⁸⁵ George Knott, who had helped organize Grant County locals in 1942, testified that he had been a Communist from 1937 to 1947 and returned to Grant County in 1946 to “lay the groundwork” for Jencks to be hired as business agent.⁸⁶ By naming Jencks a Communist, declaring himself a Communist, and emphasizing his own role in bringing Jencks to Grant County, Knott tried to establish Jencks’s arrival as a Communist plan to establish a strong party presence in Silver City. Jesús Terrazas, a car dumper in Kennecott’s mill, claimed that he had been expelled from Local 890 for “fighting communism on the job.”⁸⁷ During his cross-examination, though, another explanation for his expulsion emerged: Terrazas was disappointed that a grievance had not been settled to his liking, and he took another union member to court over it. Union rules forbade individuals from taking grievances against other members to court.⁸⁸

In understanding how anticommunism functioned in this period, it is also important to consider those people who did not testify against Jencks. As he put it, “it was just fantastic” that Terrazas was the sole witness from Grant County’s mining district, given the thousands of people there who had come into contact with Jencks and the union.⁸⁹ Among them was José Campos, a union man whom the FBI approached to testify against Jencks. Campos was imprisoned for attempted rape—a conviction of dubious legality for which he was serving at least ten years—and the FBI offered to free him if he testified that Jencks was a Communist. He refused. According to Jencks, who learned of this several years later, Campos told them, “I don’t have any such information. And I won’t go in and lie about it.” Campos served his term and never got another mining job in Grant County.⁹⁰

The single most important testimony in convicting Jencks was that of Harvey Matusow, the only government witness to link Jencks to the CP after Jencks signed the Taft-Hartley affidavit. Matusow had belonged to the CP in New York, working in a left-wing bookstore and gradually becoming frustrated that he was not becoming a more important figure in the party.⁹¹ By 1950, he discovered that he could attain such importance—if he worked for the FBI. That summer, Matusow met Clinton Jencks at the Vincents’ ranch in San Cristóbal. Jencks remembered “scrupulously, carefully avoiding him because everyone thought he was such a weirdo.”⁹² Jenny Vincent had the same opinion—he was “arrogant and unpleasant”—but she tolerated him because he was an outstanding square dance caller.⁹³ Matusow later reported to the FBI on his San Cristóbal visit: “I have never attended a meeting of the Communist Party in New Mexico, and have never been present at a Communist Party meeting where Jencks was in attendance. I have never been told by Jencks that he is a member of the Communist Party, and I have never seen any direct evidence to prove that he is a member of the Communist Party. However, there is no question in my mind but that Jencks is a member of the Communist Party.”⁹⁴ Matusow soon found that life as a professional witness offered even more glory, and he joined the circuit of ex-Communist expert witnesses appearing before government committees and agencies. In the 1952 Mine-Mill hearings in Salt Lake City, Matusow told SISS that Jencks had confided to him that Mine-Mill was trying to sabotage the Korean War effort by striking against copper companies.⁹⁵ Matusow repeated these allegations at Jencks’s trial.

Matusow’s story was sufficient to convict Jencks of perjury and to sentence him to five years in federal prison. All along, Jencks had understood intellectually that this case was a political attack on his union; now, after the jury announced its verdict, Jencks understood the case on a deeper level: “I was standing there with the marshal holding one of my arms and [attorney] John McTernan holding the other, being pulled by both sides. That brought it really home that they were talking about my body.”⁹⁶ Jencks’s attorneys filed an appeal, and Jencks was allowed to return to his family.

Matusow began to have doubts about his role in Jencks’s trial, and later in 1954 he recanted but then denied recanting his story. By 1955, however, he was certain that he wanted to take back his testimony. He contacted a publisher, Cameron and Kahn, and soon holed up in New York to write a mea culpa and exposé of the government’s system of paid witnesses. Armed with this information, Jencks’s lawyers requested a new trial, which Judge Thomason denied. Thomason found that Matusow’s new testimony was merely a ploy by Communists to besmirch the justice system. Matusow was later convicted of perjury, and he served three years in prison.

Jencks lost his appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The Court accepted Jencks’s argument that the defense should have been allowed to see the prosecution’s evidence, including the interviews with paid informants, and it reversed his conviction. While Matusow’s new testimony was less decisive in overturning Jencks’s conviction than his false testimony had been in convicting him, his book played an important role in discrediting the FBI’s use of paid witnesses, which in turn likely influenced the Supreme Court in restricting prosecutory conduct.⁹⁷ Jencks saw in Matusow’s recanting a validation of his humanity. If Matusow “hadn’t had a seed of human being that eventually gave him the courage to turn around and admit that he’d lied,” Jencks later commented, “I would have served five to ten years in prison. I didn’t win because of the overwhelming strength of the American people, but [because] one human being, after he had lied, finally couldn’t live with it anymore. I wrote Harvey Matusow a letter. I said: congratulations for rejoining the human race.”⁹⁸

The international office in Denver, meanwhile, decided that Jencks was a lightning rod for union opponents and that the union simply could not afford to keep him on. In Jencks’s opinion, members of the executive board had “lost the belief in their own capacity to survive, and [decided] that in the interests of the membership, they were going to have to sacrifice some of their principles, some people if necessary.”⁹⁹ The board asked for Jencks’s resignation, along with that of Maurice Travis, who had also been prosecuted for filing a false noncommunist affidavit. Jencks thought this was a strategic mistake; instead of easing the pressure on Mine-Mill, such a move sent the message that the union was on the run. Mine-Mill kept Jencks on the payroll until the Supreme Court agreed to hear his case, but it would not send him back to New Mexico. Jencks believes that this was because he had stirred things up too much there. International officers joked that Jencks was “trying to build socialism in one county”—Grant County—and should ease up on the rank-and-file activism, referring in particular to Clinton and Virginia Jencks’s emphasis on women’s rights.¹⁰⁰ When members of Local 890 learned that the international would not allow Jencks to return to New Mexico, they were angry and wanted to hire Jencks themselves, but Jencks reminded them that they now had Mexican American leadership that made him redundant.¹⁰¹ He regretfully took up organizing work in Arizona and Colorado until the Supreme Court took his case, and then he left Mine-Mill for good.

Freed from the threat of prison, Jencks was nonetheless trapped by the blacklist. He moved from job to job in the Southwest, impressing his employers with his skills as a machinist and millwright until they got wind of his politics and fired him. “We’ve got a new classification to cover you, Jencks,” said one official in California’s employment office. “You’re politically unemployable.”¹⁰² In yet another paradox of McCarthyism, by making him unemployable in an industrial setting, the blacklist freed Jencks to consider a different career altogether, and he won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study economics at Berkeley. By this point, in the early 1960s, anticommunism had waned enough that the university and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation supported Jencks in the face of government intimidation. Jencks wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on miners in England—it was still too politically hot to write on Mine-Mill, which he had hoped to do—and joined the economics faculty at San Diego State University.¹⁰³

Clinton Jencks’s experience was one of hundreds of examples of individual lives damaged by the anticommunism of the 1950s. McCarthyism, as historian Ellen Schrecker has shown, rested on a complex network of government and private forces that relied most basically on denying people a livelihood. The blacklist paradoxically allowed Herbert Biberman, the Jarricos, and Michael Wilson to form an independent film company, but the repression generated by Grant County union opponents, Hollywood studio and union executives, and the federal government bankrupted IPC. The Hollywood blacklist did not completely prevent these artists from working, but it forced them into exile and closed off the alternative path they had tried to mark out for creating popular culture.

The blacklist also affected other Mine-Mill activists in New Mexico and other parts of the country. While many union men continued to work for the mine companies, some found that they could not get work easily if they ever left the jobs that had provided union security. Albert Millán, for example, worked for Kennecott for thirty-three years and was a union representative that whole time. In 1967, the Steelworkers (with whom Mine-Mill had recently merged) struck, and Millán went to California to look for a job. The first thing he heard, he recalled, was “You’re a Communist,” and he could not get a job.¹⁰⁴ Juan Chacón kept his job at Kennecott (although he had to fight to keep it in the 1970s), but his wife, Virginia, believes that their union activism prevented their sons from ever getting work in Grant County’s mines.¹⁰⁵ The union could protect its members, but it was harder to protect people, like the children of union activists, trying to break into the industry.

Jenny and Craig Vincent were forced to close down their ranch in San Cristóbal in December 1953. The FBI was routinely shadowing ranch visitors and taking down their license plate numbers, and Craig Vincent was called before Senator McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to answer charges that the ranch was a meeting place for Communists. “We decided,” the couple said, “that we could no longer, in all fairness to our guests and ourselves, subject them to the overt danger of being framed in this way, to satisfy the evil political purposes of those who would subvert the constitution. . . . Our guest business is a casualty of war and McCarthyism—not of free enterprise.”¹⁰⁶ Reflecting on these events fifty years later, Jenny Vincent said they “taught [her] what the FBI can do to somebody—they can practically kill your career.”¹⁰⁷ Indeed, even without jeopardizing their jobs, government harassment took its toll on union activists and their supporters. Virginia Chacón recalled the FBI as a constant presence outside the Chacón home in the Mimbres Valley. She was especially angry that one of them was a Mexican American. “Do you know what you are?” she asked him in Spanish. “Un vendido, a sellout, that’s what you are. That’s all you are.”¹⁰⁸