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  In the beginning, it wasn’t the Hollywood Ten, but the “Unfriendly Nineteen.” This was the number of subpoenas issued to those designated in advance as “unfriendly witnesses,” directing them to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington, D.C., on October 23, 1947. Only eleven of the nineteen were actually called before the Committee. The eight who were not called up to testify were screenwriters Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, and Waldo Salt, directors Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel, and Robert Rossen, and actor Larry Parks. One called before the Committee who was not subsequently one of the Hollywood Ten was Bertolt Brecht. The German playwright double-talked the investigators so reassuringly that he managed to avoid the contempt of Congress citations that the other ten received. He then quite sensibly flew to Europe and left the fast-developing atmosphere of paranoia in America behind him, but found an even faster-developing atmosphere of paranoia when he arrived in East Germany.

  Everybody in Hollywood knew the subpoenas were coming. Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, Representative John McDowell of Pennsylvania, and Committee investigators Robert Stripling and Louis Russell had been out earlier in the year interviewing “key Hollywood figures,” all of whom turned out to be members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Stripling later declared that “we obtained enough preliminary testimony to make a public hearing imperative.” And those from whom they obtained that preliminary testimony were the very ones called first before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as its “friendly witnesses,” all of them members of the Alliance.

  Alvah Bessie, one of the Ten, gives an amusing account* of a visit to the Lazy-T just after the arrival of the subpoenas. Trumbo greeted Bessie and his wife and daughter there, playing lord of the manor, exuding optimism and good cheer as he took them on a tour of his palatial frontier estate. He had tried to put them at ease by telling them earlier, “Don’t worry about the subpoena—we’ll lick them to a frazzle.” But Bessie’s wife was skeptical:

  “Do you really think we’ll lick them to a frazzle?” Helen Clare asked.

  He took a swallow of his drink and said, “Of course not. We’ll all go to jail.” A realist to the end, Trumbo began the ordeal with his eyes wide open and his spirits remarkably high.

  There were meetings, endless strategy meetings, between the nineteen who had been subpoenaed and their attorneys. Every alternative was explored. Nobody wanted to go to jail. But for both practical and political reasons, they decided to make a cause of their plight. From a practical standpoint, many of them needed money. There would be trips to Washington and what looked to them like an endless future of legal fees. Two of the nineteen were unable to contribute anything at all to their defense and had to be carried by the rest.

  They also felt it was important to bring the issues before the public. What they wanted to make clear was that the essential question involved here—and ten of them went to jail on this very point—was freedom of speech. Besides themselves, the movie industry was most directly concerned. If the House Committee on Un-American Activities succeeded in intimidating Hollywood in these hearings, then it would be the beginning of motion picture censorship in America. Extreme as that may sound, it proved, in a covert and rather subtle way, to be correct.

  The Committee for the First Amendment was formed in Hollywood to give support to the nineteen and to publicize their predicament. For an essentially liberal organization which sprang into existence practically overnight, this one boasted more than the usual illustrious sponsors—four U.S. senators; Thomas Mann; Robert Ardrey; a major film producer, Jerry Wald, and (as Louis B. Mayer boasted of M-G-M) “more stars than there are in the heavens.” They contributed their names, their time, and their money in defense of the nineteen. By the time the nineteen were to leave for Washington, there was a great deal of popular support for their cause. It had become, as they hoped it would, a national issue. On the eve of their departure, the Committee for the First Amendment held a rally for them at the Shrine Auditorium. No fewer than seven thousand attended.

  They left the next day, preceded by a star-studded deputation from the Committee for the First Amendment, which flew in a chartered plane direct to Washington to keep public attention focused on the case and draw sympathy to those who had been labeled “unfriendly.” For their part, the nineteen flew by way of Chicago and New York, where they spoke at rallies. In New York there were further councils of war, where strategy was argued and re-argued among them. And there, too, another lawyer was added to the legal team that accompanied the witnesses to Washington.

  “I remember very well how I happened to get involved in the case. I was at a World Series game with a bunch of their lawyers. It was 1947, of course—the Yanks and Brooklyn—and this was the game where Cookie Lavagetto hit his double. Well, here I was sitting beside Bob Kenny, who was the president of the National Lawyers Guild then and a former attorney general of California. Naturally I was interested in what had brought him east. He told me and said he felt I could help, particularly since I was based in Washington.”

  This was Martin Popper talking, the husband of Katherine Trosper Popper, who knew Trumbo since his single days at Metro. Martin, of course, did not know him nearly so long but nevertheless considered Trumbo a friend. He is a New York lawyer and has been one all his life when I interview him. “But at that time,” he explains, “my firm had an office in Washington, and so for this case I was the local man, more or less.”

  In an interview earlier Albert Maltz had asserted that those called as witnesses knew very well that they could have pleaded the Fifth Amendment and escaped the contempt of Congress citations they received. Maltz explained that they took the First Amendment instead, reasoning that under the right to free speech was also understood the right to keep silent. I ask Martin Popper about what Maltz had told me and if it was as sound legally as it seemed politically.

  Popper nods emphatically. “Well, yes,” he says, “some such thinking had gone into it, and it might have worked. Because, you see, if the Court had sustained our contention that the Committee had no right to inquire, then it would have been the end of the Committee. It was a gamble, a calculated risk.”

  There is nothing pedantic in his manner. He is simply trying to make it clear. “You see,” he continues, “the First Amendment is the arch—no, say, the keystone in the arch—of the entire Bill of Rights. When these amendments were framed, the principle they followed was that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. This was held inviolate. And from that fundamental right flowed the right to join political parties, to form organizations. Here was the Committee apparently ready to interpose itself between the individual and that right. What the Committee seemed to represent here was a point of view on the relationship of the individual to the government quite the opposite of the one represented in the Bill of Rights.

  “Now, the witnesses in this case thought they were standing on strong constitutional and philosophical grounds. So they were ready to take the First, rather than the Fifth. It was only as a result of the Supreme Court refusing to hear the Hollywood Ten case that the Fifth was so widely used afterward. So what I’m saying is that it wasn’t strictly a matter of the First Amendment covering the right to keep silence. I don’t mean it was not that, but that it was something else as well.”

  “Do you think they would have had a chance before the Supreme Court?” I ask.

  “Yes—as it was constituted when they appeared before the Committee. It was that Court they were betting on. But then Justices Rutledge and Murphy died. They had always given individual liberties a preferred position. We could have been almost optimistic. With them died our petition for cert.”

  It all happened more than a score of years ago, of course, but it is important to Popper still. “Yes, I know what some of these guys went through during the hearings and afterward—the blacklist and all. I was the man in Washington, of course, and I had to see them off to jail. I
remember visiting Dalton after his first night in the D.C. jail. He told me that in the middle of the night the police had brought in a guy who was supposed to be part of a gang. He was charged with some heinous offense—assault with a deadly weapon or something. This is what he told Dalton. Then this gang member asked him what he was in for and Dalton told him. This tough guy shrank back. ‘Holy Jesus!’ he said. ‘Contempt of Congress!’ He was impressed, overwhelmed, as most people are. But let’s make no mistake about it. Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, nothing more.”

  The hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the “Communist Infiltration of the Motion-Picture Industry” were gaveled to order by Chairman J. Parnell Thomas on October 20, 1947, with the testimony of the “friendly” witnesses. It was quite a lineup. The parade began with Jack L. Warner, head of Warner Bros. Studios, and among the others there were actors Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou, and novelist (formerly screenwriter) Ayn Rand. It would be wrong to attempt to characterize the testimony of these or the other “friendlies” who appeared before the Committee with the usual cant adjectives, such as “reactionary.” There were great differences in the quality and style of testimony given by them, from the reckless Red-baiting of Jack Warner and Robert Taylor, to the somewhat more responsible manner of Reagan (who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild), or to the uncomfortable reticence of Gary Cooper. Testimony varied with each witness. But the picture that emerged from the early days of the hearings, the one the Committee members themselves sought to paint, using the testimony of individual witnesses as colors on their canvas, was one of a Hollywood caught in the grip of the Communists; of studios and guilds virtually at the mercy of militant Reds who took their orders from Moscow; and of directors, and especially writers, who managed to twist the message of their movies, to coax Communist propaganda out of even the most modest material.

  Richard M. Nixon was there as a freshman congressman, then sitting on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was to have his first big triumph the following year as he pressed the case against Alger Hiss; this would provide him with the springboard that would shoot him into the Senate, and then into the vice presidency. He owed his career, such as it was, to the Red Menace.

  This is probably the only time that he and Dalton Trumbo were ever even in the same room together. When the “friendly” stars left the stage and the “unfriendly” witnesses came on, writers and directors all, Nixon vanished, suddenly finding other legislative matters more pressing. But the nineteen had their own contingent of stars on hand, the group from the Committee for the First Amendment who had made the trip to Washington to demonstrate their support. It included Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Jane Wyatt, John Huston, and Sterling Hayden, among others. To their credit, they hung right in there during the testimony of the “friendly” witnesses, kept right on giving interviews and holding press conferences which were intended to alert America to the clear and present danger, etc. Somehow, though, the members of the Committee for the First Amendment hadn’t been prepared for the testimony of the Ten. They expected them to be more polite, to remember that, bad as it was, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was nevertheless a unit of the Congress of the United States and if only for that reason deserving of respect. Well, when John Howard Lawson was called on October 27, 1947, he gave the Committee none. Although all of the “friendly” witnesses had been granted the right to read statements, Lawson (the first of the Ten to appear) was denied that, and the few minutes he spent under the lights in the caucus room were consumed, for the most part, in a shouting match with Chairman J. Parnell Thomas over the question of whether or not his statement might be read. When, at the end, he refused to answer the big question: “Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” many of the group who had come to offer moral support were profoundly disturbed. Following Lawson’s appearance, the support of the Committee for the First Amendment began to erode very swiftly. Those who had come across the country together, so full of high purpose, began leaving in ones and twos, feeling vaguely betrayed by the very men whose cause they had come to Washington to fight for.

  Except for Lawson, Dalton Trumbo was probably the Committee’s least cooperative and most “unfriendly” witness. He came to the stand on October 28, 1947, at ten-thirty A.M., just one day after Lawson had caused such an uproar in the caucus room. Trumbo was met by hostility from Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, and he gave as good as he got. The two began with a preliminary skirmish on the question of whether or not Trumbo might be allowed to read the opening statement he had brought with him. Thomas inspected the statement, conferred with the other members present, and refused him, telling him the statement was not “pertinent to the inquiry.”

  The next point went, surprisingly, to Trumbo. As it turned out, it was the only one he would score. The “Mr. Stripling” who addressed him here is Robert Stripling, counsel and chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities:

  Mr. Stripling: Mr. Trumbo, I shall ask various questions all of which can be answered “Yes” or “No.” If you want to give an explanation after you have made that answer, I feel that the committee will agree to that.

  However, in order to conduct this hearing in an orderly fashion, it is necessary that you be responsive to the question, without making a speech in response to each question.

  Mr. Trumbo: I understand, Mr. Stripling. However your job is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. I shall answer “Yes” or “No” if I please to answer. I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered “Yes” or “No” only by a moron or a slave.

  The Chairman: The Chair agrees with your point that you need not answer the question “Yes” or “No.”

  Mr. Trumbo: Thank you, sir.

  It was then that Trumbo sought to introduce into the record twenty screenplays that he had written. While this may have seemed a rather outlandish thing to do, it was really nothing of the kind. The hearings had supposedly been called by J. Parnell Thomas in order to substantiate his charges that Hollywood films—and in particular, those films on which the “unfriendly” witnesses had worked—had been packed full of Communist propaganda (a point never proved by the Committee). The work Trumbo had done in the movies was under attack; there was no defense to offer, really, except the work itself. But the chairman denied him the request: “Too many pages.” He also blocked Trumbo’s attempt to have read into the record various commendations of his work by personages above suspicion (even by the Committee) such as General H. A. “Hap” Arnold, wartime head of the Army Air Corps.

  The two clashed next on the question of whether Trumbo was or was not a member of the Screen Writers Guild—another simple question which, as he saw it, was not nearly so simple as it seemed. Chairman Thomas himself had announced to the press in Los Angeles on an information-gathering sortie earlier that year that the Screen Writers Guild was “lousy with Communists.” Well, if Thomas believed that, then Trumbo could certainly tell in what direction they were headed:

  Mr. Trumbo: Mr. Chairman, this question is designed to a specific purpose. First—

  The Chairman (pounding gavel): Do you—

  Mr. Trumbo: First, to identify me with the Screen Writers Guild; secondly to seek to identify me with the Communist Party and thereby to destroy that guild—

  Then, after the two had sparred a few minutes over that point, Robert Stripling hit Trumbo with the Sunday punch: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Trumbo never answered that, either. Instead, discussion between them dissipated into a wrangle over whether or not Trumbo would be allowed to see an alleged “Communist Party Registration Card” made out to “Dalt T” which Committee investigators had earlier shown to the press. Of course he was not shown it, though it was entered into evidence minutes later. Not, however, before Tru
mbo was led away from the witness chair, shouting his anger at the Committee and its chairman:

  Mr. Trumbo: This is the beginning—

  The Chairman (pounding gavel): Just a minute—

  Mr. Trumbo: Of an American concentration camp.

  The Chairman: This is typical Communists’ tactics.

  For refusing to answer two questions, “Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” and “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Trumbo was, immediately after his testimony, voted “in contempt of the House of Representatives of the United States” by the members of the Committee then present.

  So it went, with two major exceptions, through the witnesses who remained to be called before the Committee. All those who followed were somewhat more subdued than Trumbo and John Howard Lawson had been. Ring Lardner, Jr., managed to inject a bit of his own wry humor into the proceedings when he was asked repeatedly by Chairman Thomas if he were a Communist and at last responded, “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.” A few were even permitted to read the statements they had prepared. But in the end, there were ten—the Hollywood Ten*—who refused to cooperate with the investigation. All were cited for contempt of Congress.