The Blacklist's real victims weren’t just Communists - The Jewish Chronicle

It was almost as though a fat, balding man conducting a meeting in a wood-panelled office in Washington and chomping on his ever-present cigar, banged on his desk and called out with a laugh: "Right, now we can get at the Jews."

It is a fantasy but the results of that meeting were precisely that. His name was J. Parnell Thomas, at the time Chairman of the House [of Representatives] UnAmerican Activities Committee, known simply as HUAC.

He announced proudly that his committee was going to root out Communists and Communist influences in Hollywood.

What he really wanted was publicity. To get film stars to give evidence to the hearings planned by his committee (which included a young Congressman called Richard Milhous Nixon) was a guarantee of pictures in the newspapers and items in the newsreels. There was one other factor which nobody talked about - extraordinary antisemitism.

The result was the establishment of kangaroo courts in which writers and directors were subject to a barrage of questions they were not given time to answer (they were not allowed to make statements or have legal representation).

Kirk Douglas insisted that Dalton Trumbo got a full credit

When they attempted to reply to the initial onslaught from Thomas - always the same question, "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist" - their answer was drowned by the sound of the chairman's gavel.

The men had, in effect, become defendants in "trials", in which the committee were judges, prosecutors and members of the jury. The result was that the defendants were immediately blacklisted, which meant they were not allowed to earn a living for 12 years. Some died, some were imprisoned. And many were Jews.

All this forms the backdrop for the new film Trumbo, based on the trials (literally) and tribulations of the writer Dalton Trumbo, later to be one of the two central players of the episode that ended the blacklist for ever.

Anti-Communism was the committee's cover - one that was enthusiastically embraced by the Hollywood establishment - not least the, mostly Jewish, studio heads. They issued what became known as the Waldorf Astoria Declaration - after the New York hotel where they all met and declared that they would never allow Communists to appear in their films or write their screenplays.

This was the cowardly reaction of a group of immigrants who feared for their reputation of draping themselves in the Stars and Stripes. Had they had nothing to do with HUAC, there would have been no committee hearings, no deaths and no blacklist.

But they lent their support. Some of them (notably, not Sam Goldwyn) rushed to have their photographs taken with committee members.

Without their support, the famous Hollywood Ten (mostly writers) would never have had to go to jail. The Ten became symbols of the affair. Five were Jews. But, as the number of the blacklisted grew, it was clear Jews were in the majority of those arraigned. Like the actor J. Edward Bromberg, who died of a heart attack after being named and put on the blacklist. The powerful star John Garfield (born Julius Garfinkle) died the day before he was due to appear before the committee to answer charges of being a Communist and naming others who might have been.

It all had its repercussions. In the House of Representatives, Congressman John Rankin made a speech that consisted of almost nothing but the names of Jewish stars: "One of them is Danny Kaye. We found his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Then there [is] Eddie Cantor. His real name's Edward Iskowitz. Edward G. Robinson. He is Emmanuel Goldenberg. There's the one known as Melvin Douglas. He is Melvyn Hesselberg…"

Take a scene in the Woody Allen film, The Front enacted by the original star of Fiddler on the Roof, Zero Mostel. Before the investigations began, Mostel had been a popular attraction at the Borsht Belt hotels of New York's Catskill Mountains.

Once identified as a blacklistee, his bookings dried up. But one hotel owner agreed to give him work - although he would have to take a 50-per-cent cut in earnings. Reluctantly, Mostel agreed. When he picked up his cheque just before going on, he saw the fee had been cut by another half. Again, he had no choice - which the proprietor knew only too well. Mostel did his act - with certain changes. Like cursing the hotelier in Yiddish.

Some writers, who were the main Jewish victims, still managed to get their scripts accepted - by agreeing to the arrangement depicted in The Front: getting people who had no connection with the film business to sell the wordsmiths' work under their own names.

As the writer Melville Shavelson remembers: "They took 10 per cent of the fee. Then 20 and then 30 or 40 per cent." When the writers complained, one Front beneficiary said: "All you have to do is sit by your typewriter and smoke your pipe. I have to sell this stuff." The writer Lillian Hellman famously joined the fight when she was told to appear. Her reaction was as feisty as any in her writing. "I cannot and will not," she declared, "cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

There was a huge amount of cynicism in the whole affair. Arthur Miller was about to be called to the committee when he had a phone call from the then HUAC chairman, saying he could easily escape interrogation - if the chairman could have a photograph taken with the writer's wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller said no, but still escaped the committee's clutches.

Some Jewish actors and writers fled abroad. Carl Foreman came to London - and discovered while here that the screenplay Oscar for Bridge on the River Kwai, which he had written, went to the writer of the original French language book, a man who couldn't speak English, let alone write it.

Years later, as Foreman was dying, the motion picture Academy rectified this and gave him his own statuette. The actor Sam Wanamaker came to London, too, and went on to recreate Shakespeare's Globe Theatre .

By then, the blacklist had ended. When Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, Kirk Douglas, the star and producer of the film, insisted on giving him full credit instead of a Front. That was all it took to end the blacklist after 12 years. Kirk Douglas is, of course, Jewish.