Question for seniors:

Looking for first hand information about 1950s hysteria — did you know anyone who was blacklisted? I've heard stories about people losing their jobs who refused to take so-called "Loyalty Tests" and so on.

I'm trying to find out things that aren't in the history books such as people being targeted out of personal animosity rather than any real suspicious activity — i.e. being labeled as "subversive" just because they were different...especially at the local level. This is what happened in Nazi Germany and later in East Germany.

Ring Lardner, Jr. was a journalist and Hollywood screenwriter who later gave us the movie version of M.A.S.H. for which he won an Academy Award (you can Google him as well as "McCarthy Blacklist Hollywood").

Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" foreshadowed the 1950's "witch hunts."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible

Edit: Google gave me these names as well:

Charlie Chaplin
Orson Welles
Langston Hughes
Pete Seeger
Burgess Meredith (Holy Penguin, Batman!)
Lena Horne
Miller, of course
Gypsy Rose Lee
Leonard Bernstein
Dorothy Parker
Paul Robeson



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2020 08:02AM by SL Cabbie.

but I didn't know any of them personally.

Don't forget Dalton Trumbo, and all the other writers.......

Question:

"Know"?

Or, "know of"?

Okay. From a brief go-through of the lists I found online:

Knew personally [they are all now deceased]:
Norman Corwin
Sanora Babb
James Wong Howe

Know "of" [because I never met either of them]:
Lillian Hellman
Dashiell Hammett

I don't know much about Norman vis-a-vis the blacklist. During the years when I knew him, I cannot remember the blacklist ever coming up in conversation (which doesn't necessarily mean it did not come up--just that I don't remember).

Sanora and Jimmy (who were married to each other): I have some VERY vague memories that Sanora and Jimmy had blacklist problems, but did not find out until today that it was because Jimmy inadvertently got caught up in all of the mess due to Sanora's political views. Mostly, I was aware that when they got married (and afterwards for a longish while; it was a real problem), it was illegal for a Caucasian to be married to an Asian--and they had to do all kinds of weird things to "kind of" live in the "same" place: different apartments in the same building, etc.--but these difficulties (in my memory) were entirely due to the anti-miscegenation laws--not Sanora's political views. It wasn't until I looked them up today, in the context of the blacklist, that I learned they DID have blacklist problems, and in this case, the problems were Jimmy's: he was being judged for his wife's views, with the always threatening anti-miscegenation and anti-cohabitation laws looming over them as obvious, and omnipresent, complications.

If you are going to do a study on this subject, I think you should consider researching the foundation of, and the complications which then arose, of the various entertainment industry guilds ["trade unions" within the entertainment industry].

I think screenwriters (regardless of whether they were writing for film, or television, or whatever) had it the worst--though this may be because I am a writer and I know the Writers Guild of America [WGA, or WGAw[est], or WGAe[ast] ] history better than I know the very similar problems of those who were members of the other guilds. My memory is that directors had it very bad as well. There were a lot of blacklist problems which were crushing people's livelihoods, and the actual lives of their spouses and children, back then--and I've heard anecdotal stories through the years of a fair number of betrayals as well. [Nothing I can remember, just that everyone was scared back then, and their fears were rational--and those who they thought they could trust, sometimes they really shouldn't have trusted.]

The histories of the guilds, as those histories unfolded during the blacklist era, might be of value to you. [You can Google "Directors Guild of America, blacklist" (etc.) to start your inquiries. There are also histories of that era, from the viewpoint of the various guilds, which have been written and published, and if you get in touch with each of the guilds, you will likely be able to access these published materials, either from the guilds themselves, or from somewhere like www.abebooks.com]

Be aware that, on a human level, many, many people's lives were destroyed back then, which means: if you do personal interviews with people who have some kind of close knowledge, as they talk or otherwise communicate with you, they may be having sudden, very real, problems with anxiety spasms and depression. I am thinking mainly of the offspring of that generation, and then THEIR children as well. Think "Holocaust," and tread as gently as you would if you were interviewing Holocaust survivors or their children, about the real incidents they lived through.

The blacklist wasn't to that same extreme of course, but it was, very frequently, terrifying. If you mentally think "Holocaust" as you are interviewing, it will probably elicit more productive results for you than would otherwise be the case.

Fair winds to you in your work.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2020 11:21AM by Tevai.

> Be aware that, on a human level, many, many
> people's lives were destroyed back then, which
> means: if you do personal interviews with people
> who have some kind of close knowledge, as they
> talk or otherwise communicate with you, they may
> be having sudden, very real, problems with anxiety
> spasms and depression. I am thinking mainly of
> the offspring of that generation, and then THEIR
> children as well. Think "Holocaust," and tread as
> gently as you would if you were interviewing
> Holocaust survivors or their children, about the
> real incidents they lived through.

The same thing happened to State Department and other government officials. Some of those people killed themselves, others saw their careers and reputations ruined. Some drank themselves into oblivion. Many of those people likewise bequeathed legacies of pain and suffering to their children.

McCarthyites, past and present, have harmed families "unto the third and fourth generation."

Thanks :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/27/2020 09:50AM by anybody.

https://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/how-mixed-chinese-western-couples-were-treated-century-ago

I don't remember the name of the book but the main characters — a Chinese student and a white American woman — had to go by train to another western state (Nevada? Utah? Wyoming?) to be legally married. Apparently, this was so common that the first stop past the state line was some kind of Las Vegas for turn of the century mixed Asian marriages. I always thought it would have been ironic for this to have happened inside the Zion Curtain.

Yes.

Jimmy and Sanora traveled to Paris to get married.

Perfectly legal there.

Illegal here.

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Mountain-Aimee-Liu-eb
> ook/dp/B07QZ4X9KH/ref=sr_1_1

Thanks, anybody.

I will look it up.

most of those blacklisted were being spied on by the FBI and J Edgar Hoover, the idea was that they were looking for "prominent people" like movie producers. Ordinary folk weren't getting on the list, because they didn't have a big social impact. So not many of these folks would be people Reformers would know. (just my suspicion)

The movie High Noon has themes about blacklisting, It's a great movie.

But what about people who just wanted to get someone out of the way by denouncing them?

This is what happened during the witch trials, French Revolution, Stalinist terror, Nazi Germany, etc.

anybody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> But what about people who just wanted to get
> someone out of the way by denouncing them?
>
> This is what happened during the witch trials,
> French Revolution, Stalinist terror, Nazi Germany,
> etc.

Yup.

I can't remember the details, but I did hear (or I overheard) stories, from time to time, told by people who had "been there" and knew. (I was growing up as most of this was going on, so sometimes, although I was clearly able to hear the spoken accounts, I was not able to figure out, or fully figure out, the real meaning(s) behind the words.) My uncle was a film director, and when he came to family dinners, etc., frequently there were stories told.

This kind of personal battling was occasional (it wasn't the general rule), but it did happen (in the sense that "this" director was hired instead of "that" one, or "this" producer got their project okayed and financed while "that" producer did not, or "this" performer was cast rather than "that" one).

My husband's doctor when he was a child was blacklisted because he was Jewish. My husband knows of no other reason.

Dr Lippman treated him and cured him of Nephritis. One of the first in the world to be cured. His name was Richard W Lippman. Dr Lippman later died of Nephritis himself.

Was this in Nazi Germany? It sounds like a fascinating story.

Nope! It was here in the 1950s.

Tragic. Thank you for sharing that history.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/22818121/richard-w-lippman-1959/

It seems that Dr Lippman was an associate of another famous nephrologist named Thomas Addis:

https://paulingblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/thomas-addis-the-man-who-saved-pauling/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Addis

"At the end of his career, Stanford University took away Addis's laboratory, perhaps on account of his leftist political views. He supported the loyalists in the Spanish Revolution, and was chairman of the San Francisco chapter of the Spanish Refugee Appeal, an organization that aided refugees from Franco's Spain. Addis toured the Soviet Union in 1935 and came away impressed by the communist country's medical accomplishments. He was friends with Harry Bridges and other leftwingers. Addis was chairman of the San Francisco chapter of Physician's Forum, an organization that supported national health insurance. Shortly before his death, he was expelled from the American Medical Association for refusing to pay his annual membership fee, which he did to protest the AMA's lack of support for President Truman's national health insurance plan.

His Stanford colleague Frank W. Weymouth wrote about him:

Injustice or oppression in the next street ... or any spot inhabited by men was a personal affront to Thomas Addis and his name, from its early alphabetical place, was conspicuous on lists of sponsors of scores of organizations fighting for democracy and against fascism. He worked on more committees than could reasonably have been expected of so busy a man. ... Tom Addis was happy to have a hand in bringing to the organization of society some of the logic of science and to further that understanding and to promote that democracy which are the only enduring foundations of human dignity."


Blacklisted because of this?
Insane.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2020 12:35AM by anybody.

Thank you so much for this. I read the articles to my husband. He said that Dr Lippman was a very kind man and both he and his parents really liked him. They went to his memorial service.

Heidi GWOTR Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My husband's doctor when he was a child was
> blacklisted because he was Jewish. My husband
> knows of no other reason.

Yes, Jews have often been suspect just because they were Jews--a phenomenon which has been documented back to pre-Christian times (which is why it has been called "the oldest hatred in the world").

In the United States, and despite very early Jewish/crypto-Jewish immigration (Columbus's crew was heavily Jewish, as were the earlier, subsequent, post-Columbus waves of European immigrants to the New World), through the post-WWI era at absolute minimum, this continued--for all kinds of "reasons," some religious/cultural, some historical, and some based on the very real new possibilities available, which, in the New World overall, synched exceedingly well with established Jewish cultural strongpoints. (The constant Jewish emphasis on the primacy of education....the very long experienced histories of past mercantile success--often going back many centuries of generations in different families....the genuine needs of the colonies for numerate and financially able new immigrants to insure the survival of colonial communities, etc.)

After an initial period of harmony in colonial American times though, anti-Semitism gradually began a kind of negative "renewal," especially in certain geographic areas.

When I was in high school, most of the Jewish students I grew up with were fully aware they didn't just need to qualify for the top colleges (SATs above a certain, very high, number.... leadership positions like Student Body President....individual accomplishments like winning top honors in national competitions such as Science Fairs, etc.), they ALSO needed to be accepted into the MUCH smaller (like 10% of the total new admissions) "Jewish quota."

If a given student was Jewish or of Jewish descent (two possibly very different things), if they had a "Jewish name" or [literally!] a "Jewish nose," then that often made the difference between MIT/Harvard/Yale (etc.) or UCLA--most especially for admissions which led to medical schools, etc. (I don't know if this was true for Caltech; I would assume that a theoretical Jewish quota, if it in fact did exist at Caltech, would have been much more accessible for potential new Jewish students seeking admission, but I don't know this for a fact.) [EDITED TO ADD: If anyone knows if Caltech EVER had a "Jewish quota," I would be very much interested in that information. :) ]

In Hollywood, especially during the entire twentieth century, you just assumed going in that most everyone was Jewish (at least: Jewish by descent) unless there was some reason to think otherwise. The entertainment industry has always been, at least since vaudeville times, a haven for Jewish people and Jewish talents of all kinds. First you change your nose (if necessary), then you change your name ("Jill Oppenheim" becomes "Jill St. John"). The game of "Who is a Jew?" has been an inside-the-entertainment-industry pastime since the earliest beginnings of film in the late 1800s.

Being blacklisted because you are Jewish (or have a "Jewish name," or a "Jewish nose")?

It happened, and it happened throughout American society for at least the duration of the twentieth century, and in some places,
and in some economic sectors, possibly more on each end.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2020 12:35PM by Tevai.

A very important observation.

If you choose to believe, what difference does it make?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2020 02:17PM by anybody.

Yes. My daughter's grandparents.