ABSTRACT Title of Document: from the BELLY of the HUAC: the RED PROBES of HOLLYWOOD, 1947-1952 Jack D. Meeks, Doctor of Philos
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: FROM THE BELLY OF THE HUAC: THE RED PROBES OF HOLLYWOOD, 1947-1952 Jack D. Meeks, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Dr. Maurine Beasley, Journalism The House Un-American Activities Committee, popularly known as the HUAC, conducted two investigations of the movie industry, in 1947 and again in 1951-1952. The goal was to determine the extent of communist infiltration in Hollywood and whether communist propaganda had made it into American movies. The spotlight that the HUAC shone on Tinsel Town led to the blacklisting of approximately 300 Hollywood professionals. This, along with the HUAC’s insistence that witnesses testifying under oath identify others that they knew to be communists, contributed to the Committee’s notoriety. Until now, historians have concentrated on offering accounts of the HUAC’s practice of naming names, its scrutiny of movies for propaganda, and its intervention in Hollywood union disputes. The HUAC’s sealed files were first opened to scholars in 2001. This study is the first to draw extensively on these newly available documents in an effort to reevaluate the HUAC’s Hollywood probes. This study assesses four areas in which the new evidence indicates significant, fresh findings. First, a detailed analysis of the Committee’s investigatory methods reveals that most of the HUAC’s information came from a careful, on-going analysis of the communist press, rather than techniques such as surveillance, wiretaps and other cloak and dagger activities. Second, the evidence shows the crucial role played by two brothers, both German communists living as refugees in America during World War II, in motivating the Committee to launch its first Hollywood probe. Third, an examination of the HUAC’s practice of requiring witnesses to name names shows this to be an on-going exercise of data triangulation. Finally, the documents in the HUAC archives reveal an overriding concern with exposing the activities and practices of communist front organizations, which the Committee viewed as powerfully effective venues for communist propaganda. In summary, the newly available archival evidence, upon which this dissertation uniquely draws, indicates the HUAC operated in a less sinister manner than previously supposed and, thus, revises previous scholarship on the HUAC. FROM THE BELLY OF THE HUAC: THE HUAC INVESTIGATIONS OF HOLLYWOOD, 1947-1952 By Jack D. Meeks Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Professor Maurine Beasley, Chair Professor Linda Steiner Professor Ray Hiebert Professor Keith Olson Dr. John Earl Haynes © Copyright by Jack D. Meeks 2009 Dedication I dedicate this to my son, Joshua, who has chosen to serve his country as a Marine officer; to my son, Jeremiah, who desires to serve his community as a police officer; my son, Zechariah, who has suffered so much, but chooses to overcome; but most of all to my wife, Janice, the love of my life, who has waited patiently for me to finish this dissertation. ii Acknowledgements I owe a debt of thanks to a number of fine individuals who assisted me at various stages of researching and writing this dissertation. Brian Hess, my graduate assistant in the early 2000s, was especially helpful with some initial bibliographic research and preliminary contacts with the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives. Over the years Dr. Terry Lindvall, Dr. William Brown, Dr. George Selig, Dr. Joe Kloba and Dr. David Clark showed great support and helped me find funding for various research trips to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California, and the National Archives in Washington, DC. Archivist Rodney Ross offered generous assistance first in understanding the research challenges within the organizational nature of the archives of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then in finding the appropriate archival boxes germane to my study. Lisa Herndon, Barbara Begley and Janice Meeks ably served as proof-readers. I am also grateful to the members of my dissertation committee who helped me hone the scope of this study to a manageable scale and wisely directed me to focus on certain critical aspects of the subject at hand. Finally, I cannot adequately express my deepest appreciation for the unfailing support and advice of my committee chair, Dr. Maurine Beasley, whose guidance was crucial to the successful completion of this dissertation. iii Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1: Introduction and Research Question ........................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Review of the Literature ............................................................................ 16 Chapter 3: Methodology and Plan of Organization .................................................... 44 Chapter 4: Background and Context ........................................................................... 66 Chapter 5: Examination of HUAC Methods of Investigation ................................. 113 Chapter 6: The Brothers Eisler – From Manhattan to Malibu ................................. 169 Chapter 7: Naming Names vs. Investigating Fronts ................................................ 233 Chapter 8: Summary and Significance of Findings ................................................. 303 Glossary .................................................................................................................... 332 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 338 iv Chapter 1: Introduction and Research Question It is fascinating and ironic that there is a link between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the necessity for a major reappraisal of a significant aspect of American media history. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR were boons for historians. The failed August 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to dissolve the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and take control of its assets, including its historical archives. By the end of December of that year, the Soviet Union was no more and the Russian Federation, the largest of the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union, permanently inherited most of the assets of both the former Soviet government and the organization that dominated it for its entire history, the CPSU. For several years thereafter, the dissolution of the USSR was a notion contested by many former hard-line communists who aspired to restore the Soviet Union in some form. Thus, in an effort to discredit his communist predecessors, Yeltsin in the mid-1990s opened the archives of the CPSU. They included the historical records of the Comintern, the international organization headquartered in Moscow through which the Soviet government exercised control of various national communist parties around the world. 1 Yeltsin’s idea was that a democratic society 1 The Comintern is a shortened form of the Communist International, also known as the Third International. Too much has been written debating whether the member parties of the Comintern were under the control of the USSR to recount here. Suffice it to say that I side with the historians who fall into the anticommunist tradition and Post-revisionists, who affirm that member parties were under the effective control of the USSR and CPSU. The revisionist historians stand in opposition to this thesis. I will briefly discuss these three groups later in Chapter Two as part of my review of the significant research on the subject of this dissertation. 1 should be open and transparent, while at the same time historians could document just how bad the deposed Bolsheviks really were. The Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was a loyal member of the Comintern until its dissolution during World War II. 2 After the war, the American communists continued to take guidance more directly from the Central Committee of the CPSU. Before and during the Cold War, the fear of intrusive investigations by the American government led the CPUSA to secretly ship its records – sometimes on microfilm, sometimes as regular hard copy documents – to the Soviet Union for safe keeping. Until the sudden fall of the Soviet Union, which allowed President Yeltsin to open those archives, most Western historians believed these records to be permanently out of reach. From the early 1930s to the early-1950s, American media in general and the motion picture industry in particular were an important locus of activity for the CPUSA. When investigations by a congressional committee of the United States House of Representatives called the Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as the HUAC) brought Hollywood under its scrutiny, the pressure of public opinion led the major studios to fire known communists and deny employment to those who refused to cooperate