Many factors contributed to the party’s growth in the state: the devastation of the Great Depression, the rising specter of fascism, the widely shared perception (particularly among minorities) that other organizations were ill-equipped to combat racism, the upsurge by labor, the defense of immigrants. However, in terms of generating a grassroots response in the state, few events moved Californians as much as the campaign to free labor organizer Tom Mooney (and his comrade Warren Billings). The pair had been jailed after allegedly planting a bomb at a 1916 rally in San Francisco organized by conservative business interests to generate support for the United States’ entry into World War I. It was the Mooney case that provided an opening for Communists to work more closely with trade unionists, and this was a major step toward Red influence in Hollywood.30

Lawson, however, was neither the highest paid nor, perhaps, the most talented left-wing screenwriter. Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Buchman, Ring Lardner Jr., and Abraham Polonsky were likely Hollywood’s best leftist writers. However, in some ways Dalton Trumbo stands head and shoulders above the rest not only in terms of income, but also in his ability to add gloss and sheen to what might be called formula dramas. By the year of the 1946 lockout, Trumbo had obtained from MGM the best contract ever held by a writer in the industry to that time: a straight five-year contract, without option on the part of the studio, which gave him the option of a $3000-per-week salary for the length of the job or $75,000 per script. He had complete freedom in selecting or rejecting subject material, a rarity among writers. The amorphous “morality clause,” which gave the studios virtual carte blanche to terminate a contract on the flimsiest of grounds was absent from Trumbo’s contract. Of French-Swiss origins, Trumbo—who hailed from Colorado—had U.S. roots stretching back to the American Revolution. He was at the peak of his profession, which included 1,200 writers in Hollywood with only permanent year-round labor for 350—with many of the rest working part-time, if at all.77

Various intelligence agencies kept a close watch on real and imagined Communists in Hollywood, even during the war when the ostensible basis for anticommunism—the USSR’s supposed designs on the United States—had been submerged. Sidney Buchman, “executive producer and assistant to Harry Cohn” of Columbia, was identified by military intelligence as a “strong communist sympathizer; possibly a fellow traveller.” Intelligence’s “mail cover” on Buchman revealed that he subscribed to a Red newspaper.87 With precision the military analyst described Buchman as 5′9 1/2″ tall and 165 pounds, with a “freckled scar on right cheek.”88 It was not altogether clear why military intelligence would be so concerned with writers and Hollywood figures—but they were. Theodore Dreiser was described as a “communist fellow traveller or an ‘intellectual communist’”; he “has served the cause of the party,” it was reported, “as faithfully and probably more effectively than the rank and file of known party members.”89 The screenwriter Sheridan Gibney was deemed a “communist sympathizer.”90

Writers became a topic of intense concern for many reasons, including their attempts to affect the content of movies and their antiracist activism. However, writers were also targeted because of their efforts to receive a larger slice of the wealth they were generating. A pioneer of film noir, James Cain, concocted the idea of an American Authors’ Authority (AAA) that would seek to claim more rights—and royalties and profits—for authors; this notion was perceived as a direct challenge to studios and publishers, and was red-baited mercilessly. Meanwhile, the organ of the Screen Writers Guild claimed that this idea was “capitalism, naked and simple. But it is capitalism for writers.”92 The attack on this meritorious idea was yet another example of how anticommunism was deployed demagogically for stark reasons of power and mammon. The mainstream press—which had to be concerned about what its own writers would think of this heretical notion—disagreed.93 This AAA, one newspaper boomed, “would possess dictatorial power over all screen writers, radio writers, dramatists and authors.” It “could organize boycotts against publishers or producers who accept the work of the unorganized.”94 That is precisely the point, countered Trumbo and Lawson, two prime supporters of this concept.

Maltz’s tryst with controversy started innocently enough when, in suggesting that an artist can be reactionary and still produce great art, he cited Friedrich Engels’ view on writers such as Balzac. The recognition of artists like James Farrell, a Troyskyite, and Richard Wright, who was hostile to the party,120 drew public and private rebuke from party stalwarts like Joseph North, Howard Fast, et al.121 Maltz retreated, and party chief William Z. Foster weighed in, warning of “left sectarian” dangers (i.e., all art produced under capitalism is decadent) and “right” dangers (i.e., the artist is free and should have nothing to do with class struggle).122

For his part, Trumbo felt that “the freedom of the artist to express himself decreases in proportion to the increase of capital investment required for the production of the work.” Thus, the “freest form is the pamphlet,” and it is “not, therefore, difficult to understand why the theater deals less frequently with progressive subject matter than the novel”—and why the movies deal with it least of all. “Hollywood workers speak always of the industry, never of the medium. For motion picture workers are purely industrial workers,” which is why they had such a propensity for organizing and striking.132

image It was true that the singular conditions of the war had allowed the Communist Party to grow more quickly than it had previously. However, the party’s dirty little secret was that its Hollywood organization—which proclaimed vigorously the vanguard role of the proletarians—was disproportionately composed of intellectuals, particularly writers and directors. This situation was a problem, for as the party’s theory suggested, painters and carpenters were more likely to lead far-reaching battles against the moguls and to press for democratic gains for society as a whole; the strike of 1937, and that of 1945, suggested this idea. Hence, when the strike of 1945 and the lockout of 1946 occurred, the party did not have as much influence with CSU leaders as the moguls imagined.

It is easy to see why the party attracted proportionately more writers than other sectors of the labor force. Communist writers often contended archly that they joined in greater numbers because they were smarter: however, more mundane forces were at play. Unlike virtually any other work in the industry, writing was done in isolation, with the writer’s presence often found undesirable on the movie set; this situation contrasted with the collectivity that characterized the film process as a whole. For the writers, the party was the collective. Paradoxically, however, this collectivity was stunted, since security concerns often meant that party writers knew few Reds beyond those who could fit comfortably into a Southern California parlor.

Nancy Lynn Schwartz has pointed out that “in a town of isolated residences and little cultural activity outside movie making, political involvement provided a connection for the Hollywood castaways—not just with the rest of the world but between husbands and wives…. [F]or the first time politically aware Hollywood wives had a broad social framework into which they could meaningfully channel their activities.” In a world of casual labor and transience, the party was a constant. In a city “without roots, peopled by orphans from urban centers and European refugees, the Party also provided a family of sorts that would not evaporate.” This helps to explain, she suggests, why “there were more writers than any other cultural worker in the Hollywood CP.” This shallowness of roots may also shed light on why—correspondingly—one of the nation’s strongest right-wing movements could arise in Southern California concomitant with the post-World War II boom.1

Organizations that included Communists—for example, Actors Equity—began to purge them. There was a “long and heated debate” in their highest councils that was characterized by “hysterical, name-slinging brawls….”197 “Hysterical” was one way to describe the editor of the San Diego Weekly, C. Leon De Aryan, when he claimed, “you can tell a Communist by the guttural sound of his voice.”198 In a similar mode, Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger Rogers, complained that Dalton Trumbo tried to put “Communist” propaganda in the script of Tender Comrade: for example, lines like “Share and share alike, this is democracy.”199 Continuing this trend, at the California AFL convention in 1947, staff refused to seat a “duly elected delegate” because he was, evidently, a Communist.200 Lillian Farmer, mother of actress Frances Farmer, ostensibly agreed with this decision when she charged that “Communists in Hollywood and elsewhere caused the mental breakdown of her daughter,” which occurred after Farmer’s trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and her relationship with the left-wing writer Clifford Odets.201 In response to this delirium, L. A. County was in the process of passing a law that “made it illegal for a [member] of the Communist Party to go from one city in the county to the next without first reporting his first whereabouts to the police.”202 AFL leader Matthew Woll apparently sympathized with the county solons when he suggested that movie houses showing films of “treasonable stars and writers” be picketed.203 Communists were under fire on all fronts, and bullets aimed at them wounded CSU grievously.