U.S. COMMUNIST PARTY HAD OWN BLACKLIST.

Byline: Anthony Palma 

Local View

I was a young playwright at the time of the American Communist Party's involvement in Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. I had returned from combat duty in World War II. My sentiments toward the Soviet Union, like many Americans, were still warm and grateful for its alliance during the war.

While attending USC, I wrote a play about my experiences as a prisoner of war, which was immediately put into production by a prominent theater group in Los Angeles, an offshoot of the Group Theater in New York City. Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan, with a host of many other famous theater and movie people, were members of the group. Odets was called in to help me rewrite the script.

Many young talented performers, being as idealistic and impressionable as they were, were easily persuaded to join the American Communist Party while it was still considered a relatively innocent thing.

Most were indeed young, idealistic and sincere and saw themselves as servants of truth, but others were knowledgeably servants of a foreign political movement seeking to weaken the American government from within.

Long before the House hearings and long before Communist Party members were blacklisted in the movie industry, the Communist Party had implemented a blacklist of its own: The goal was to block from employment those in the theater who were on the party's blacklist, those who wouldn't ``go along.''

At a theater group meeting I was drawn aside by a friend of mine who was a party member. He informed me that the Communist Party had blacklisted me and would keep me from employment, unless I joined the party. I couldn't because of my recent conversion to the Christian faith, and my basic recollection of what I had been fighting for during front-line action in World War II.

Later this warning was repeated, practically verbatim, by another performer. When I confided these warnings to Odets he was very upset. Angry, in fact. I quote him exactly. ``That's their problem,'' he said, ``They're too damned doctrinaire.''

It soon became evident that I would get no employment in my profession as a playwright.

In their frequent critical references to the House hearings of some 50 years ago, many present writers and apologists for the American Communist Party invariably fail to mention those vital factors of that era which explain and justify the House's hearings:

The United States had just come through World War II in which hundreds of thousands of American youths were killed, fighting for this country and its principles, and loyalty and idealism among Americans were at very high levels.

The Communist Party was not an innocent nor independent American political movement, composed simply of innocent idealists. It was controlled by Moscow and it took its orders from Moscow.

Sure, many American Communist Party members here were pure idealists, particularly those in the theater, who tend to be idealistic, emotionally sensitive and artistically and fundamentally sympathetic in nature. When the Group Theater introduced ``emotional truth'' into American acting, they flowered under the teachings of Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater. It was a revolution in American Acting and theater.

The movie ``On the Waterfront,'' directed by Kazan, reflected this search for emotional truth. The earlier plays of Odets did likewise. Both of these gentlemen were men of great integrity, men of principal and truth and could not be bought. They were also loyal Americans and sensitive to the fact we had just been engaged in a war of principles, for which hundreds of thousand of Americans had died.

They were both members of the party. Indeed, both of them named names when they were called before the House committee. They ``talked,'' for the sake of the country, which many of their theatrical peers couldn't understand: They talked because their idealism didn't allow them to betray their own personal integrity and loyalty. They named names, but only names already known.