Kazan vs. Stalin's liars: for more than 50 years, the Hollywood Left and its co-conspirators in academia and the media have conducted a vicious vilification campaign against film great Elia Kazan.

First-hand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods.

It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries. I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies. I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever they are threatened.

--Elia Kazan, testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, April 10, 1952

News of Elia Kazan's death on September 28 touched off the predictable round of denunciations and diatribes by Hollywood's vengeful Stalinists and their revisionist cohorts in the press and academe. Even those obituary writers and pundits who acknowledged Kazan's legendary stage and film achievements felt compelled to note prominently the recurring charge that the 94-year-old director was a "rat" or a "stoolie" because he "named names."

According to USA Today's Robert Hanashiro, Kazan's testimony "ruined careers and damaged reputations." The Boston Globe's Cathy Young, though conceding that recent document releases from government archives show "Soviet infiltration of American government institutions was a serious problem," goes on to remark: "But that doesn't mean the McCarthy-era witch-hunts were justified. Many people who were caught in the net and had their careers and lives ruined were completely innocent; others were guilty of no greater sin than having attended some bohemian left-wing gathering. Even bona fide communists in Hollywood can hardly be seen as a serious security threat: The worst they could do was try to sneak--apparently very clumsily--procommunist or leftist messages into movies. These were the kinds of people Kazan named."

These examples are all too typical of the Stalinist mythology that has become institutionalized among America's intelligentsia. Anyone who believes that "Communism is dead" is pitifully oblivious to Hollywood's continuing love affair with Soviet totalitarianism. Kazan's death, like his hotly contested 1999 Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, sent Tinseltown's comrades to the barricades with renewed fervor. In print, in radio and television interviews, and in the never-ending flow of disingenuous documentaries about the "blacklist" period, the pro-Communist propaganda continues unabated since the 1940s. The Hollywood Ten and their fellow travelers are endlessly romanticized and lionized; those who exposed their treason--like Kazan--are anathematized.

Why Kazan?

Elia Kazan was not the only Hollywood star to testify against the Communists, but he has been singled out for special execration over the decades for several reasons:

* He identified the danger as an evil "conspiracy";

* He had personal experience as a member of that conspiracy;

* His testimony was not in the least equivocal;

* He followed up his testimony with an expanded condemnation which he paid for and ran as a prominent New York Times notice;

* He never backed down from his principled stand, despite the pressures and inducements to do so;

* He was one of the most influential and celebrated directors of his period.

On April 12, 1952, two days after testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), Mr. Kazan placed a notice in the New York Times that repeated much of his testimony and expanded on it. In this paid advertisement, he stated:

   I believe that Communist activities
   confront the people of this
   country with an unprecedented
   and exceptionally tough problem.
   That is, how to protect
   ourselves from a dangerous and
   alien conspiracy....

      I believe that the American
   people can solve this problem
   wisely only if they have the
   facts about Communism. All the
   facts.

      Now, I believe that any American
   who is in possession of such facts has
   the obligation to make them known,
   either to the public or to the appropriate
   Government agency.

Elia Kazan testified that he had been a member of the Communist Party less than two years, during the period of 1934 to 1936. He had joined because "it seemed to me at that time that the party had at heart the cause of the poor and unemployed people whom I saw on the streets about me. I felt that by joining, I was going to help them, I was going to fight Hitler...."

His Communist Party experience soon left him disillusioned; he was one of the early Communist idealists to break ranks with the Party. Kazan was especially appalled by Party demands that he work secretly to gain Communist control of the theater guilds, and that he submit all of his acting and writing to Communist Party officials for approval. He testified:

   I had enough regimentation, enough
   of being told what to think and say
   and do, enough of their habitual violation
   of the daily practices of democracy
   to which I was accustomed. The
   last straw came when I was invited to
   go through a typical Communist
   scene of crawling and apologizing
   and admitting the error of my ways.
   The invitation came from a Communist
   functionary brought in for the occasion.
   He was introduced as an organizer
   of the Auto Workers Union
   from Detroit.

Weapon of Culture

Kazan refused to grovel before the commissar, but the Hollywood Ten "martyrs," and hundreds more like them, prostrated themselves before Stalin's culture thugs and agreed to serve as propaganda pimps. They agreed to use "the weapon of culture" against their homeland, against their fellow Americans, against our Constitution, against all that is decent and holy. Their perfidious "duty" was spelled out with unmistakable clarity in a manifesto by top Communist Party functionary V. J. Jerome, entitled Grasp the Weapon of Culture. The booklet, published in 1951 by International Publishers, the Party's official printing house, was a distillation of instructions that bad already been operational for many years.

"As against the death-dealing role assigned to science by capitalism, there has arisen the life-giving science of Socialism," declared Comrade Jerome. "Soviet science, inspired by the Party of Lenin and Stalin, is exclusively the servant and instrument of mankind in its inexorable march to a world of peace, abundance, and truly humanist culture."

"Of course," the commissar continued, "it is the task of Communists to help the non-Communists in the united front to understand that the cultural forces with their pursuits and talents can, in alliance with the working class, labor and struggle to hasten the end of a system which historically doomed, enslaves and humiliates them."

"Only as it learns to grasp the weapon of culture and lights with it," said Jerome, will the Party be able to lead "the working class and the people, and to mobilize them to fight with that weapon." All modes of artistic expression --art, films, literature, plays, music--were expected to be harnessed as weapons in a war of cultural subversion that was an integral part of the Communist world revolution. The arts were not to be expressions of beauty, truth and creativity; Communists, like the Nazis, were under orders to use the arts as ideological weapons to conquer for their global criminal conspiracy.

John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screen Writers Guild, was one of the Hollywood Ten "heroes" who groveled before the Party commissars and was rewarded by being made an "enforcer" to whip the other Party members in line. "I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position and to do so in the most specific manner," Lawson boasted in a 1934 article in New Theatre. Hollywood Ten icon Dalton Trumbo boasted in the Daily Worker that he and other Hollywood comrades had succeeded in blocking the publication of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar and other anti-Communist works. Ring Lardner Jr., another of the sainted and sanctimonious "Ten," boasted years after the hearings that "We [Communists] did play a part, I think, in most everything that was going on in the Hollywood scene." Red fronts like the League of American Writers, he said, "would not really have functioned anywhere near the extent that they did without the very active participation of Communists in their forefront."

Edward Dmytryk, director of Hitler's Children, Behind the Rising Sun, Tender Comrade, Back to Bataan, Cornered, and Crossfire, was one of the Hollywood Ten. Like his fellow Reds, he refused to answer questions during the 1947 HCUA hearings. It was part of the legal and agitprop strategy devised by the Party's lawyers. John Howard Lawson had already perjured himself in earlier hearings of the California legislature by denying under oath that he was a Communist Party member. However, Party officials knew that HCUA investigators had proof he had lied: They had copies of his Party membership documents as well as the testimony of multiple witnesses. And the Party suspected (correctly, as it turns out) that the HCUA also had similar documentation on the other nine as well. Although the Hollywood Ten could not be prosecuted for being Communist Party members, they knew that lying under oath would lead to a perjury conviction for at least Lawson and likely cost them their own privileged positions in a Hollywood that was under popular pressure to "get the Reds out."

The Communist lawyers advised the Ten to turn the tables on the committee by wrapping themselves in the cloak of the Constitution, righteously declaring that the HCUA had no authority to question them. It was the committee itself--not they, the Hollywood Ten--that was un-American, they shrieked, in a disgraceful display that shocked and outraged even many of their former comrades and sympathizers. Thanks, however, to comrades in the press who seized this ploy and began to attack the committee, the Communists succeeded in pulling off a magnificent dialectical triumph: the HCUA became known popularly as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), indicating that it was the committee, rather than those it was investigating, that was un-American.

Every member of the Hollywood Ten was sentenced up to one year in prison on charges of contempt of Congress, for refusing to cooperate. By 1951, however, Dmytryk knew he had made a terrible mistake. By then, the spy trials of Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon and others had shown that the Communists were indeed traitors who had sold out our country. Much had been revealed about Stalin's purge trials, the Ukrainian famine genocide, the Katyn Forest massacre, the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, the ruthless suppression of Russian artists and intellectuals, and many other crimes. Moreover, Communist North Korea, backed by Soviet Russia and Communist China, was at war with the United States. Dmytryk was aghast that many of his former Hollywood comrades refused to defend their own country against what was now unquestionably a global Red Menace.

Dmytryk testified that the Communists had three primary objectives in their effort to penetrate and dominate Hollywood. The first was to tap into the enormous wealth of the movie industry. The second was to avail themselves of the prestige that Hollywood stars could lend to their numerous front organizations. The third and most important was to infiltrate and eventually take over the industry guilds and unions to gain control of the content of movies.

Deathlist vs. Blacklist

Dmytryk and others were never forgiven by the Hollywood Reds and their sympathizers for "betraying" them. Author and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, likewise, was deemed a pariah for cooperating with the HCUA and naming names. But Schulberg also named the names of famous authors, poets, musicians and artists who had been killed, imprisoned, tortured, silenced and broken by the same Stalin whom his ex-comrades in Hollywood now so slavishly served. He condemned these sanctimonious hypocrites for their complicity in this atrocious injustice. "All these people," he said of the Hollywood apparatchiks, "helped by their silence to create not a blacklist but a deathlist."

Yes, it is the deathlist that should be re membered--not the mythical, self-serving "blacklist" ritually cited with such nauseating disregard for truth. Stalin and Mao, whom the "blacklisted" cadres idolized, were slaughtering human beings by the tens of millions. After the HCUA hearings, the studio moguls felt compelled to deny jobs to about three hundred Communists in Hollywood and about half that number in television and radio. This included the Hollywood Ten and other unfriendly witnesses who refused to cooperate with the committee. However, these folks were not "completely innocent," nor had they merely attended some "bohemian left-wing gathering," as the Globe's Cathy Young asserted. Nor were "tens of thousands" blacklisted as writer/producer Bernard Gordon claimed in a 1999 diatribe against Kazan in USA Today.

Although public pressure forced the studio executives formally to blacklist the most notorious Reds, many of them were allowed to continue working under assumed names. Dalton Trumbo, for instance, won an Oscar for The Brave One, written under the pseudonym Robert Rich. The real story is the unofficial blacklist, the one that was used to punish those who showed real integrity and courage by testifying against the fifth columnists serving the "alien conspiracy" Kazan had warned against. Talented writers, directors and actors who testified against the Reds scarcely worked again or saw their careers plummet. In typical Stalinist fashion, they were regularly vilified and their work panned. The names on this unofficial blacklist include Dmytryk, Schulberg, Morrie Ryskind, Adolphe Menjou and Robert Taylor.

Elia Kazan was almost unique in breaking through this hidden blacklist, though his career undoubtedly suffered as well. By the time he testified in 1952, he had already won acclaim for his Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Death of a Salesman. He had also established himself as one of the hottest Hollywood directors with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman's Agreement, and the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. He would continue to be a dominant influence in film throughout the 1950s. His films and the actors he directed won numerous Oscars. He pulled down two of the coveted golden statues for best director (Gentleman's Agreement, 1948, and On the Waterfront, 1954). Kazan is regularly credited with drawing the best acting performances from some of filmdom's celebrated icons: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift, to name a few.

Although a courageous anti-Communist, Kazan was no conservative. His liberal social views and his sexually provocative movies, together with his brilliant directing talent, undoubtedly explain much of Hollywood's ambivalence toward him. However, though many of his colleagues may admire the unmatched accomplishments of his stage and cinematic oeuvre, the hardcore elements of Stalin's artistic vanguard continue to hold sway in Tinseltown. They continue to grasp the weapon of culture and are determined to demonize or expunge from history all those who stand athwart their subversive agenda.