In October 1947, a congressional committee began a series of hearings that dragged on for many years and ruined many lives. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), long a plumb assignment for some of the most unsavory members of the House of Representatives, decided to investigate whether Communist subversion was occurring in Hollywood. In other words, was the movie industry infiltrated by Communists bent on introducing Marxism to America’s masses through the medium of film? Before long, HUAC subpoenaed witnesses and demanded to know whether a parade of directors, screenwriters and actors were now or had ever been members of the Communist Party. Those who gave the wrong answer had their careers cut short. A few even went to prison.
With “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare,” the Jewish Museum Milwaukee mounts the first large-scale exhibition on the hunt for Communists in the movie industry since the 2002 exhibit organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The exhibit’s curator Ellie Gettinger was inspired by a Facebook post on one of the blacklist’s most famous victims, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (played in a 2015 film bio by Bryan Cranston). Like hundreds of entertainment industry professionals, Trumbo was banned by the Hollywood studios and forbidden to work, at least under his own name. Writing as Robert Rich, he won an Oscar for writing The Brave One (1956), a clip from which is screened as part of “Blacklist.” For his part, Trumbo actually was a Communist. Many of the blacklisted writers, directors and actors were not party members but saw their careers swept away in a wave of hysteria.
A multi-media exhibit with artifacts, text panels and motion pictures, “Blacklist” is prefaced by a six-minute animated video by Milwaukee’s Blackbox Visual that explains the fear of Communism and domestic subversion against the rise of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and Asia. The exhibit includes clips from several films deemed to include subversive elements by the FBI, whose agents spent a great deal of time watching movies and sending their reviews to Director J. Edgar Hoover. Some of their criticisms are surprising. The patriotic war flick Pride of the Marines (1945) was cited for grumbling among the grunts about postwar employment opportunities. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) was criticized because the villain, Mr. Potter, was a capitalist. According to the agent whose review surfaced in a redacted file, “This picture deliberately maligned the upper class.” A popular film about returning war veterans, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), was objectionable because a bank president was “portrayed as a mean and avaricious individual.”
Also included are clips from movies produced in response to pressure from HUAC, including On the Waterfront (1954), director Elia Kazan’s justification for informants (in light of his “friendly” testimony before the committee) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), an allegory for the threat of hive-mentality mendacity whether from Communist subversion or anti-Communist witch-hunters (depending on one’s perspective).
While ostensibly about rooting out the Moscow-controlled Communist Party from American life, HUAC’s subtext was grounded in anti-Semitism and the Red Scare became a right-wing tool to roll back New Deal reforms. According to Gettinger, the Hollywood studios implemented the blacklist against suspected Communists in part to preclude congressional legislation and boycotts by powerful pressure groups such as the American Legion. Since most of the studios were owned and managed by Jews, the moguls “were already under suspicion” by unapologetic anti-Semites in high places such as HUAC’s John E. Rankin and felt “the need to look as patriotic as possible.” Because many Jews in the movie industry worked for civil rights and other causes deemed “un-American” by HUAC and the FBI, a disproportionate number of names on the Hollywood blacklist were Jewish. Many of them were immigrants.
The components of “Blacklist,” Gettinger says, were “designed to point you to contemporary issues—and the First Amendment is the overarching connecting piece.” The exhibit will include whiteboards and an online forum for audience feedback. “We want it to be a conversation,” she adds.
“Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” runs Oct. 12-Feb. 10 at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave. There will be numerous speakers and other events throughout the run of the exhibit. For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.
