OR “HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE “C”-BOMB”

“My one unvarying line, which I always snapped into a telephone, was: “Give me the city desk. I’ve got a story that will crack this town wide open!”"–admitted thespian Ronald Reagan

Ed Morrisey compares the double treatment given to director Elia Kazan by Hollywood to the treatment Hollywood is giving to fugitive sex-offender Polanski. Kazan of course “named names” in 1952 and renounced Communism. Naturally, many in Hollywood support the rapist and shunned the anti-communist.

Well, as they say, it’s Chinatown, Ed.

I doubt that he accepts the full Hollywood Received Wisdom on the Blacklist and RFK’s mentor Joe McCarthy, but I have to part with the good Cap’n when he goes on to say this:

I think Kazan chose poorly and that the HUAC effort was a Constitutional affront. The First Amendment guarantees the right of political speech and thought, and membership in the Communist Party then and now should not have been an issue on which anyone needed to testify under oath to Congress. I understand that the Cold War was in its most fraught stage and that times were different, but the Constitution applies at all times, or it doesn’t apply at all.

Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Elia Kazan all thought differently. They all believed that sunlight was the best disinfectant and perfectly consistent with the civil liberties they all cherished. And so do I. They were “Transparency Czars”(an Orwellian term-ite if there ever was one) before “transparency” or czars were cool.

After the Reagan Push and the Wall fell, the Black Book of Communism was published in Europe so that no one would forget those crimes. This is my own Little Black Book for America. You may read it as history if you wish. It’s damned interesting. But I don’t read it that way. But, here, you take a look:

One day after giving one of my speeches to the men’s club at the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church where I worshipped, our pastor came up to me and said he agreed with what I’d said about the rise of neofascism. But he said: “I think your speech would be even better if you also mentioned that if Communism ever looked like a threat, you’d be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism.” I told the minister I hadn’t given much thought to the threat of Communism but the suggestion seemed like a good one and that I’d begin saying if the day came when it also posed a threat to American values, I’d be just as strongly opposed to it as I was to fascism.

Not long afterward, I was asked to give a speech to a local citizens’ organization. I made my usual speech defending American values against the new fascism that seemed to be abroad in the land and was applauded after almost every paragraph. I was a smash. Then I finished up with my new line at the end: “I’ve talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world, but there’s another ‘ism,’ Communism, and if I ever find evidence that Communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against Communism as I have fascism.” Then I walked off the stage – to a dead silence. A few days later, I received a letter from a woman who said she’d been in the audience that night. “I have been disturbed for quite some time,” she said, “suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don’t like.” Then she added: “I’m sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned Communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for Communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day.” Thanks to my minister and that lady, I began to wake up to the real world and what was going on in my own business, the motion picture industry.

Ronald Reagan in a 1957 speech to the graduates of his alma mater Eureka College:

“In a phase of this struggle not widely known, some of us came toe to toe with this enemy this evil force in our own community in Hollywood, and make no mistake about it, this is an evil force. Don’t be deceived because you are not hearing the sound of gunfire, because even so you are fighting for your lives. And you’re fighting against the best organized and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and decency that has ever been abroad in the world. Some years ago, back in the thirties, a man who was apparently just a technician came to Hollywood to take a job in our industry, an industry whose commerce is in tinsel and colored lights and make-believe. He went to work in the studios, and there were few to know he came to our town on direct orders from the Kremlin. When he quietly left our town a few years later the cells had been formed and planted in virtually all of our organizations, our guilds and unions. The framework for the Communist front organizations had been established.

It was some time later, under the guise of a jurisdictional strike involving a dispute between two unions, that we saw war come to Hollywood. Suddenly there were 5,000 tin-hatted, club-carrying pickets outside the studio gates. We saw some of our people caught by these hired henchmen; we saw them open car doors and put their arms across them and break them until they hung straight down the side of the car, and then these tin-hatted men would send our people on into the studio. We saw our so-called glamour girls, who certainly had to be conscious of what a scar on the face or a broken nose could mean careerwise going through those picket lines day after day without complaint. Nor did they falter when they found the bus which they used for transportation to and from work in flames from a bomb that had been thrown into it just before their arrival. Two blocks from the studio everyone would get down on hands and knees on the floor to avoid the bricks and stones coming through the windows. And the 5,000 pickets out there in their tin hats weren’t even motion picture workers. They were maritime workers from the waterfront–members of Mr. Harry Bridges’ union.

We won our fight in Hollywood, cleared them out after seven long months in which even homes were broken, months in which many of us carried arms that were granted us by the police, and in which policemen lived in our homes, guarding our children at night. And what of the quiet film technician who had left our town before the fighting started? Well, in 1951 he turned up on the Monterey Peninsula where he was involved in a union price-fixing conspiracy. Two years ago he appeared on the New York waterfront where he was Harry Bridges’ right hand man in an attempt to establish a liaison between the New York and West Coast waterfront workers. And a few months ago he was mentioned in the speech of a U.S. Congresswoman who was thanking him for his help in framing labor legislation. He is a registered lobbyist in Washington for Harry Bridges.”

About that bus Reagan mentioned; he was being modest. Not “everyone would get down on hands and knees” as noted by Peter Schweizer in ‘Reagan’s War’:

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared in Life magazine that he believed it [Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions] was a Communist front, an organization in which “its celebrities maintained their membership but not their vigilance.”

Stung by this criticism, a small group within HICCASP, including RKO executive Dore Schary, actress Olivia de Havilland, and FDR’s son James Roosevelt, decided to put their fellow members to the test. At the July 2, 1946, meeting, Roosevelt noted that HICCASP had many times issued statements denouncing fascism. Why not issue a statement repudiating communism? Surely that would demonstrate that the organization was not wholly communist.

Reagan rose quickly and offered his support for the resolution, and a furious verbal battle quickly erupted. Musician Artie Shaw stood up and declared that the Soviet Union was more democratic than the United States and offered to recite the Soviet constitution to prove it. Writer Dalton Trumbo stood up and denounced the resolution as wicked. When Reagan tried to respond, John Howard Lawson waved a menacing finger in his face and told him to watch it. Reagan and the others in his group resigned from the organization.

Sorrell gathered his resources for the fight. Along with financial support from the Communist Party, he also could count on help from Vincente Lombardo Toledano, head of Mexico’s largest union and described in Soviet intelligence files as an agent. The slender, well-dressed and poised young lawyer was one of Moscow’s most trusted agents in Mexico, regularly putting his resources behind Sorrell, providing money while pressuring Mexican film industry executives not to process any film from Hollywood as a show of solidarity. He also appeared at a rally in Hollywood to encourage the strikers.

Herb Sorrell had promised violence if he didn’t get his way in the studio strike, and it didn’t take him long to deliver. Led by his “sluggers,” strikers smashed windshields on passing trains and threw rocks at the police. One studio employee went to the hospital after acid was thrown in his face. When the police tried to break up the melee, things got even worse. As actor Kirk Douglas remembered it, “Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles and chains.”

Sorrell and his allies wanted to shut down the studios entirely, so anyone who crossed the picket line became a target of violence. Jack Warner insisted on keeping up production, and the studio remained open. To avoid injury, workers, including stars who were shooting movies, were forced to sneak into the studio lot through a storm drain that led from the Los Angeles River.

Reagan, getting ready to start production on “Night Unto Night,” was furious about the violence. And unlike his approach to the little battle with the Communists in HICCASP, he was not in a mood to retreat.

Blaney Matthews, the giant-sized head of security at Warner Brothers, had seen this sort of violent strike before. He advised Reagan and other stars to use the storm drain to get onto the lot safely. Reagan flat-out refused. If he was going to cross the picket line, he was going to cross the picket line, he told Matthews.

Matthews then arranged for buses to shuttle Reagan and a few others through the human gauntlet outside the studio gate. But he offered a bit of advice: Lie down on the floor, or you might get hit by a flying Coke bottle or rock. Again, Reagan refused. Over the next several days, as he went to the studio lot to attend preproduction meetings, a bus would pass through the human throng of violent picketers, with a solitary figure seated upright inside.”

So we see that Rosa Parks was not the only one to ride a bus for freedom.

Objectivism Reference Center:

She [Rand] did believe…that it was acceptable for the committee to ask people whether they had joined the Communist Party, because the Party supported the use of violence and other criminal activities to achieve its political goals, and investigating possible criminal activities was an appropriate role of government. “I certainly don’t think it’s any kind of interference with anybody’s rights or freedom of speech,” she said.

Regardless of the effectiveness of the hearings as a whole, Rand was glad to have the opportunity to gain media exposure on the subject. She also supported the efforts of private employers to reduce the influence of Communists on the movies. As she put it in an earlier essay she had written on the subject, “The principle of free speech requires … that we do not pass laws forbidding [Communists] to speak. But the principle of free speech … does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense.”

From her ‘47 HUAC testimony:

Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.

From Ronald Reagan’s 1947 HUAC testimony:

STRIPLING: Mr. Reagan, what is your feeling about what steps should be taken to rid the motion picture industry of any communist influences?

REAGAN: Well, sir, 99 percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think, within the bounds of our democratic rights and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well organized minority. In opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work.

In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake. Whether the party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party — and I think the
government is capable of proving that — then that is another matter.

I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work; I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology. …Sir, I detest, I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.

And lastly, (via Victor Navasky of ‘The Nation’, “a pinko magazine published on cheap paper,”) excerpts from Kazan’s ‘52 HUAC testimony:

“…I did wrong to withhold these names before, because secrecy serves the Communists, and is exactly what they want.

…I was instructed by the Communist unit to demand that the group be run “democratically.” This was a characteristic Communist tactic; they were not interested in democracy; they wanted control. They had no chance of controlling the directors, but they thought that if authority went to the actors, they would have a chance to dominate through the usual tricks of behind-the-scenes caucuses, block voting, and confusion of issues. This was the specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had enough regimentation, enough of being told what to think and say and do, enough of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. The last straw came when I was invited to go through a typical Communist scene of crawling and apologizing and admitting the error of my ways…. I had had a taste of police-state living and I did not like it.

From the full-page ad Kazan took out in the NYTimes:

I got out in the spring of 1936.

The question will be asked why I did not tell this story sooner. I was held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and employment of people who may, like myself, have left the Party many years ago.

I was also held back by a piece of specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals. It goes like this: “You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the people who attack civil liberties.” I have thought soberly about this.

It is, simply, a lie.

Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists.

Liberals must speak out.

I think it is useful that certain of us had this kind of experience with the Communists, for if we had not we should not know them so well. Today, when all the world fears war and they scream peace, we know how much their professions are worth. We know tomorrow they will have a new slogan.

Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always. It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies. I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever they are threatened.

The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to direct represent my convictions.

I expect to continue to make the same kinds of pictures and to direct the same kinds of plays.

Polanski’s not even in the same league. Anyway, as I said, I don’t view this as ancient history.

Chesterton said “There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.”

P.J. O’Rourke:

Marxism is a perfect example of the chimeras that fueled the sixties. And it was probably the most potent one. Albeit, much of this Marxism would have been unrecognizable to Marx. It was Marxism watered down, Marxism spiked with LSD and Marxism adulterated with mystical food coloring. But it was Marxism nonetheless because the wildest hippie and the sternest member of the Politburo shared the same daydream, the daydream that underlies all Marxism: that a thing might be somehow worth other than what people will give for it. This is just not true. And any system that bases itself on such a will-o’-the-wisp is bound to fail. Communes don’t work. Cuba doesn’t either.

No, but we’ve got a president who works with Cuba’s dictators, while ignoring Cuba’s dissidents. And Venezuela’s. And Russia’s. And…

This stuff is not just about the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Or even the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. It is as “fresh as the first flowers”.

We’ve got a president whose parents were a college socialist and a Marxist bureaucrat. His mentor a Party apostle. His Columbia professors radicals and his Harvard colleagues thoughtful enough to hide his Soviet apologia thesis. Years of Alinsy-ite agitation, decades at an Afro-Marxist church, his cubicle-mate for years and years an unreconstructed Communist cop-killer, who probably ghostwrote his memoirses–”if true, these revelations over authorship strongly suggest that Ayers is, in a very real sense, “Obama’s” creator.”

But biography aside, auto-or otherwise, he pushed the Socialized Mortgage program with ACORN. When it predictably melted the economy down, he nationalized the banking and financial industries. And the auto industry. And now the health care and insurance industries if he can. Ditto the Energy Sector. And now the creepy schoolkid chants and subborning of the arts, coupled with the steady gutting of our defenses.

He’s not a Stalin, but he’s not a democrat, either. If he’s not a Communist politician, he’s the closet thing to it we’ve ever produced. Including socialist vice-president Henry Wallace, who Roosevelt wisely dumped in favor of Truman.

Rand, Reagan and Kazan did not believe in outlawing communism or even in censoring communists. But they did believe in telling the truth about it. And so do I:

The reason we so have much turmoil in America these days is not because of racism; it’s because of communism.

Put that in your little book. It’s already in mine.