COURAGE IN MODERN AMERICA...
George Clooney as CBS producer Fred Friendly and David Straitharn as famous journalist Edward R. Murrow in Clooney's 2005 pic, "Good Night and Good Luck."
There's a famous quote about the South and the Civil War by William Faulkner:
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
I was reminded of that anew after re-watching a 1976 Martin Ritt movie, "The Front," starting Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Michael Murphy, and others. The premise of the movie- based on a true story- was that in the 1950's there was a Hollywood blacklist of anyone who was named or suspected of having had Communist sympathies at any time in the past, including during World War II, when we were allies of the Soviet Union. No studio or network would hire them, including some very talented and well known actors, witers, and directors. Some out of work black listed writers selected a "front" man through whom to secretly submit their scripts under his name to popular network television shows. The network paid the front man (Allen) who by agreement kept 10% for himself and gave 90% to the writers. An infamous House committee- the House Un-American Activities Committee- conducted an actual (almost literal) witch hunt, subpoenaing numerous persons to appear before the committee and forcing them to "name names" of other persons suspected of being communists. Anyone who didn't cooperate was blacklisted.
People like John Wayne, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan, viewed by many right wingers as "true patriots," were actually the opposite, as they wholeheartedly supported the "work" of the committee. That committee was, unironically, very well named. There was nothing more "un-American" and violative of the First Amendment's freedom of association than that committee and the blacklist that it inspired by studios and networks fearful of being smeared as "communist sympathizers."
The "front" worked out, somewhat, for writers, but directors (including Martin Ritt, who directed this movie and who famously later directed Hud (Paul Newman), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Richard Burton in the John LeCarre thriller) and Norma Rae (an Oscar for Sally Field), and actors, such as Mostel and Bernardi and others in the movie, could not work at all. For years.
Kirk Douglas, who was not just the star of the 1960 Oscar winning movie Spartacus but the person behind gettng the movie made, contributed greatly to ending the blacklist when he insisted that a terrific- but blacklisted- Hollywood writer, Dalton Trumbo, be given on screen credit for the script.
Bryan Cranston, who, along with Tom Hanks, is probably Hollywood's premier actor of this era, starred in an excellent movie, Trumbo, based on the true story of Dalton Trumbo's life and the blacklist.
The 2005 George Clooney movie, "Good Night and Good Luck," starring David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow, visited this 1950's era in the true story of the depradations of one alcoholic, demagogic, Wisconsin Republican Senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, who single handedly almost crashed the State Department and the United States Army in fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower's administration. McCarthy literally waived fake lists of alleged communists in the State Department, never being able to keep the numbers straight in his various press outings. He ended up ruining the lives and careers of persons brought before his Senate committee to falsely accuse them of being communists or sympathizers. Which was something that every American had a First Amendment right to be or to believe in (however flawed their economic theories or reasoning).
If you haven't figured it out by now, the Faulkner quote is to remind us that the "past"-- the era of blacklists and McCarthyism-- is not the past. When state after state has its Republican State Committees censure and vow to remove or defeat any Republican senator or Congressman who dared to vote to impeach or to convict the former president, the Loser of the 2020 election, that is a very vivid reminder that there still exists in this country a vocal- and sometimes violent- minority who intend to make them pay a political cost for having a conscience, for daring to have the courage to stand up for their beliefs. And the past will not be the past until this country's Republican Party and its state committees repudiate the unthinking, undemocratic (small "d"), narrow minded bigotry of those Republicans who support those efforts to censure any member of their party with the oourage to tell them that their emperor has no clothes.
posted by James Finkelstein (Ga.) at 10:46 PM
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