of McCarthyism have never been, perhaps cannot be, computed. How do you count, no less put a political, cultural or even commercial value on plays and screenplays unwritten, careers not undertaken or cut off at birth, families and psyches smashed from the pressures of uncertainty compounded by the realities of unemployment? How to quantify the cost of inventions not invented, ideas not explored, hypotheses untested. Television itself was born, shaped and came of age in the context of McCarthy era assumptions, when a crazed grocer in Syracuse, who maintained a list of suspected Reds, held sway over prime-time employment decisions. Who is to say what contribution the great red scare made to the bland and timid television culture which prevails to this day?
Though these may not be the questions that preoccupy Ring Lardner, Jr., in this memoir, through it he offers us a very personal way to consider them anew. At the time he appeared in front of HUAC, he was gaveled down by J. Parnell Thomas before he could finish his statement. The full statement, printed in this book, is eloquent, but the book itself, this tale of life as a Hollywood communist offers the real answer to the Committee’s question. That is the red meat, as it were, of a thoroughly unapologetic memoir by a man without many illusions.
Lardner makes clear that far from being glamorous, life as a Hollywood comrade was often time-consuming, boring and repetitious. Only occasionally did ideology enter the picture. Thus Lardner recommended to David O. Selznick that he not acquire Gone With the Wind “because I objected on political grounds to the glorification of slave owners and the Ku Klux Klan.” Given the shortage of US Communists today, what is truly weird about this account of life just before, during and after the anti-Communist hysteria which dominated the political culture in the 1940s and 1950s, is its contemporary resonance. It is almost as if confronted with the absence of a 21st century Red Menace, a new generation of post–cold war would-be red baiters decided to rehabilitate the old one. These anti-anti-anti-communists—citing both a cache of recently released cables between Moscow and its agents in this country that were intercepted during World War II; and also selectively leaked documents from KGB archives— seem to argue that, in effect, McCarthy & Co. were right all along: That the new documents reveal that American did indeed suffer from an internal red menace, that Washington was a nest of spies, that those, like the late editor of The Nation, Carey McWilliams, who called the old congressional investigations a witchhunt, were either fools or knaves deploying a misleading or misinformed metaphor. There were no witches in Salem but there were indeed Communists in Washington.
No matter that there are a host of real, unresolved questions surrounding the new cache of cables (as deciphered they are incomplete, fragmentary, include false identifications, chronological discrepancies, internal inconsistencies, fail to distinguish witting from unwitting sources, to mention only some of the problems); no matter that the spin accompanying many of the newly “released” KGB documents turns out to be an updated version of the old McCarthy era equation: to be a liberal is to be a pinko is to be a communist is to be a spy; no matter that any fair reading of the new evidence suggests that it cuts more than one way and that the jury is still out on the role of the US Communist Party vis-à-vis Soviet espionage; no matter that although there were indeed live Communists on the American scene only an infinitesimal number of them may have deserved the demonized traitor/spy label. (Lardner, by the way, makes clear that there was undoubtedly espionage on both sides; indeed, he tried to serve in the OSS and wrote the script for a wartime movie starring Gary Cooper as an OSS agent.) The unseemly and ahistorical rush to reconvict the American left based on half-baked evidence, suggests the weakness of the new post–cold war red baiter’s case, and reminds one of the political hysteria that is supposed to be part of our so-distant-as-to-seem-antique past.
Eventually HUAC was brought down by history, with a little help from the Yippies, building on the Lardner-Trumbo tradition of what Mark Twain once called the “assault of laughter.” Jerry Rubin appeared before HUAC in a red Santa Claus suit. And Abbie Hoffman showed up for his testimony in a red, white, and blue T-shirt, duly ripped by unruly souvenir-hunting demonstrators and/or the cops. Asked by the judge if he would like to make a statement on his own behalf, he replied, “Yes, your honor. I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.” By that time, 1968, it was possible to laugh HUAC and its roadshow out of town.
In this tragicomic memoir, full of fabulous Hollywood charm as well as political sadness, Lardner reports that he is often asked “Can it happen again?” His answer is, “Yes, but not in the same way.” I would agree, and one of the reasons it can’t happen in the same way is that Lardner, his buddy Trumbo, and a small platoon of other resisters over the years, made it so.
–Victor Navasky
October, 2000
On an autumn morning in Washington, in 1947, I appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as an unwilling expert on the problem of “subversive influence in motion pictures.” Presiding over the day’s events was the committee chairman, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. A former insurance salesman, Thomas was short and round and an aide had helpfully placed a telephone directory and a red silk pillow on his chair, thus putting him in full view of a chamber packed with reporters, photographers, radio commentators, newsreel crews, and spectators, and affording him physical parity, at least, with a publicity-conscious lineup of fellow probers who included the young Richard Nixon.
The committee counsel, the wan and clerical-looking Robert Stripling, did most of the interrogating. But Thomas had a habit of taking over whenever he felt a witness was not being properly responsive, and that’s how he felt, justifiably, at several points during my testimony.
“Aren’t you a witness here?” Thomas demanded at last.
I acknowledged that I was, and our colloquy continued:
THOMAS
All right, then. A Congressional Committee is asking you: Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild? Now you answer it yes or no.
ME
Well, I’m saying that in order to answer that—
THOMAS
All right, put the next question. Go to the sixty-four-dollar question.
ME
I haven’t—
THOMAS
Go to the next question.
STRIPLING
Mr. Lardner, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
ME
Well, I would like to answer that question, too.
STRIPLING
Mr. Lardner, the charge has been made before this Committee that the Screen Writers Guild which, according to the record, you are a member of, has a number of individuals in it who are members of the Communist Party. This Committee is seeking to determine the extent of Communist infiltration in the Screen Writers Guild and in other guilds within the motion picture industry.
ME
Yes.
STRIPLING
And certainly the question of whether or not you are a member of the Communist Party is very
