The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth": How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America.

by James J. Lorence. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 279 pp., illus. Hardcover: $45.00 and Paperback: $19.95.

In every discipline there appears at least one personality or event so basic that no student contemplating a career should fail to study it. In anthropology it may be Margaret Mead, in evolution, obviously Charles Darwin, and in filmmaking the focus should be Salt of the Earth. No movie made before or since has attempted to reflect such honorable and progressive sensibilities while simultaneously attracting the venom of its own industry, the United States Congress, and our government's agents overseas. In short, it accomplished what every filmmaker should aspire to do at least once in his or her career. We're not talking offending Jesse Helms's delicate temperament here, or getting an X rating when your movie deserves an R. Salt of the Earth, an independent 1954 production based on a militant New Mexico miners' union strike a half-century ago, "challenged corporate America," writes James J. Lorence, "the studio system, and Cold War orthodoxy." And that was just in the opening credits.

The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth" documents the labor struggle that attracted the blacklisted filmmakers, the cooperation between the filmmakers and the local union in making the movie, the attempts by sniveling film industry and congressional powers to bludgeon the film to death, and how the union and the film, having gone their separate ways, played out in the ensuing decades. The Salt of the Earth story is one that deserves retelling at least once every decade because it's vital to our history, but also because both the story and the movie are provocative and entertaining. Salt of the Earth, whose filming began under acceptably difficult conditions, ended up under disagreeably disastrous circumstances. Lorence's methodical account is entirely worthwhile, one that puts the drama in its historical framework, brings much previously buried information to light, and misses only a few elements of the drama.

His book, which casts the film as a "statement of resistance to the predominant social, economic, and intellectual themes of Cold War America," is an impressive complement to Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt's Salt of the Earth (which includes the screenplay), which calls the movie's traditional form "a love story moving inevitably toward a happy ending." (A third like-named book, by director Herbert Biberman, gives a first-person account of the film and its subsequent legal and financial difficulties.) Lorence excels in giving the strike context within the complexity of the labor movement at the time and the dynamics of the film industry in McCarthy America. More mention is needed, though, of the sense of civic entitlement that Mexican-American soldiers brought home from World War II and how this empowerment contributed to the miners' determination. The GI Forum and LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) built on this phenomenon in New Mexico and elsewhere throughout the country. Still, The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth" clarifies how the Grant County mining community practically eliminated the racial divide among workers and turned the labor action into a class struggle.

A brief precis of this struggle might prove helpful. For about eighteen months, beginning in the fall of 1950, Local #890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), went on strike against Empire Zinc. The local, based in Bayard, New Mexico, was comprised primarily of Mexican-American workers, and its nemesis, based two-thousand miles away in New Jersey, was headed by intransigent industrialists. As the strike progressed and negotiations didn't, a judge, at the behest of Empire Zinc, barred strikers from picketing. Miners' wives took over the line the next day and held it for months against company goons, scabs, and sheriffs deputies. This attracted support from around the country and interest from Independent Productions Corporation, a fledgling movie company made up of blacklisted filmmakers looking for material for their first effort. The principals--producer Paul Jarrico, director Herbert Biberman, and screenwriter Michael Wilson--each visited the union community in Southwes t New Mexico and spoke at length with strikers, picketers, and union organizers. The union resolved to cooperate; for its part the production company agreed to grant script approval to Local #890.

Company housing for Mexican-American miners was pitiful, with indoor plumbing a rare luxury. These same workers earned half the wage paid Anglos and suffered segregated toilets and washrooms. As the women's picket line gained confidence, both against the company and against their hesitant husbands, they added housing conditions to the list of strike demands. Offering guidance throughout was Mine-Mill organizer Clinton Jencks, an outside agitator in the best sense of the term. When Michael Wilson presented the local with the script, what Lorence calls an "upbeat interpretation of the events," the miners insisted on a number of changes, mainly to combat stereotypes of Mexican-Americans.

When it came time for casting, most of the miners and their families were played by miners and their families. For Esperanza, the female lead who embodied the women's growing political awareness and emerging dignity, Biberman went with Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas. For the union organizer and his wife, Clint and Virginia Jencks played themselves. After considering different possibilities for the leading man, the producers chose Juan Chacon, a leader in the strike, to play Esperanza's husband, Ramon Quintero. Because the Hollywood crafts unions forbade its members from taking part in the location shooting, Local #890 provided skilled labor. Local businesses, while wary, benefited from the infusion of production dollars at their stores, and for a while things went smoothly, or at least not rocky. Until mid-February 1953, anyway, when red-baiting labor columnists and then The Hollywood Reporter screamed about commies in the desert, a cry that California Congressman Donald L. Jackson took up on the floor of the House of Representatives. The film industry from Howard Hughes on down did what it could to sabotage production and eventual distribution. The Immigration and Naturalization Service deported Rosaura Revueltas before filming was complete. (A few scenes with Revueltas were later shot near her home outside Mexico City, then brought into the States cloaked as audition footage of an aspiring actress--one of the few ingredients to the drama Lorence neglected to note.) The U.S. Information Agency and the CIA made sure Salt got as little overseas distribution as possible.

Heroically, some in Hollywood allowed their facilities to be secretly used for processing the film, a procedure that required tight security and covert operations. When it came time for Salt's release, mainstream distributors threatened theater owners that they'd be cut off if they showed the film, and the projectionists' union and others did what they could to ensure that theaters wouldn't show it, either. The American Legion lobbied against its release. Eventually, a handful of theaters in major cities--and the Silver Sky Vue drive-in outside Silver City, New Mexico--premiered the film for extremely brief runs. Reviews were generally excellent, but comparatively few people got to see it and financially it was a disaster. Overseas the situation was almost as glum despite Salt's enthusiastic reception in Mexico and Soviet bloc countries.

For years Salt of the Earth was reduced to an organizing tool at labor rallies in Southwestern mining camps. That is, until the 1970s, when it surfaced as a focus for interest in Mexican-American history, women's studies, film courses, Cold War hysteria, and labor studies. Since then it has aired nationally, become an easily obtainable video, and made authentic heroes out of the strikers and filmmakers. A 1984 documentary, A Crime to Fit the Punishment, tells the Salt story, and Esperanza, an opera based on Salt, premieres in Madison, Wisconsin late this summer.

The book suffers from the fact that Lorence had the burden of initiating his personal interviews after most of the principals had died, although he also benefits from the historian's advantage of using distance from the events to give perspective. Examples: he misses the fact that actor Will Geer, who played the somewhat sympathetic county sheriff, allowed his Topanga Canyon ranch to be clandestinely used for postproduction work. But he gives us the secret machinations in the AFL's cowardly decision not to support the movie's distribution.

Mine-Mill's militancy sealed its fate, as Lorence tells it, and most locals, including #890, signed on with the Steel Workers in the 1960s. The FBI never succeeded in finding Soviet money behind the film production. At one point in mid-controversy, Congressman Jackson said that Salt was doing its job "carrying distortion, inaccuracy, and American-made Red-propaganda to millions." Whereupon Paul Jarrico called him an unmitigated liar" and challenged him "to fight like a man." Imagine a Hollywood producer today publicly rebuking Jesse Helms and making the same challenge.--

Tom Miller is the author, most recently, of Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro's Cuba (Basic Books).