The Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, and Conservatives Should Say So Plainly

Here is a sentence some conservatives find difficult to say: the people who were blacklisted in Hollywood were wronged, even though some of them belonged to a movement that deserved to lose.

I will say it again, because it is the thesis. A person who belongs to a bad movement may still be treated unjustly, and the injustice is no less real because his politics were poor. If you cannot hold both thoughts at once, you do not yet believe in the principle you claim to defend.

The principle is that Americans may not be punished for what they believe or say, only for what they do. It is the principle we invoke when a teacher is dismissed for a lawful opinion, or a sales manager is hounded out of a company for an old donation. We invoke it loudly. We should be willing to invoke it when the person in the dock is someone whose opinions we despise. That is the test, and the blacklist is the classic case. It is easy to love free speech when it is a speech you wrote yourself.

Define the terms

The blacklist, in this post, means the practice, which took hold after 1947, by which Hollywood studios and other entertainment employers refused to hire people because of their actual or alleged Communist affiliations or sympathies, or because they declined to cooperate with congressional inquiries into the subject. The Hollywood Ten were ten screenwriters, directors and producers who were cited for contempt of Congress in 1947. Communism, in the context of the postwar Soviet Union, means the ideology and political apparatus of a regime that held millions in forced labour and answered to Moscow. I choose that definition deliberately, and I will not soften it. The argument of this post does not depend on Communism being less than evil. It depends on the principle that a free country punishes crimes, not convictions.

The history, in order

October 1947: the hearings. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, known as HUAC, opened hearings in Washington on October 20, 1947, on alleged Communist influence in the motion picture industry. The committee's chairman at the time was J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. The "friendly" witnesses included studio executives and figures such as Jack Warner, Walt Disney, the novelist Ayn Rand and the actor Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild. The committee also subpoenaed a number of "unfriendly" witnesses, many of them screenwriters, who were expected to resist.

The Ten. Ten of the unfriendly witnesses refused to answer the committee's central question, whether they were or had been members of the Communist Party, and several argued that the question itself violated their First Amendment rights. The ten were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. Notice the position they took: they did not invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination. They argued that the First Amendment protected them from being forced to disclose their beliefs and associations. The tactical decision to rely on the First rather than the Fifth was later widely regarded, by sympathisers and critics, as a mistake, and the courts did not accept the argument.

November 1947: contempt. On November 24, 1947, the House voted to cite the ten for contempt of Congress by a lopsided margin. They were indicted, tried in 1948 and convicted. Sentences of up to a year in prison and fines followed, and after the Supreme Court declined to review the convictions in 1950, the men served their terms.

The Waldorf Statement. The day after the House vote, on November 25, 1947, the heads of the major studios met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, under the auspices of the Motion Picture Association, and issued a statement. They announced that the ten would be discharged or suspended without compensation and not re-employed until they were acquitted or had purged themselves of contempt and declared under oath that they were not Communists. The statement added a pledge that the industry would not knowingly employ a Communist. That is the document that turned a congressional dispute into an industry-wide employment bar.

The 1950s: the list grows. The Waldorf Statement did not stay confined to ten men. In 1950, the pamphlet Red Channels named 151 people in broadcasting as suspected of Communist ties, and careers narrowed or ended. Hundreds of people in film, radio, and television found themselves unable to work, some for more than a decade. Some left the country. Some worked under pseudonyms, or through "fronts," people who lent their names to scripts written by others.

1960: the cracks. The blacklist broke in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo, one of the Ten, received screen credit for the film Spartacus, after its star Kirk Douglas announced that Trumbo had written it, and for Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger, who chose to give him the credit. Trumbo had been writing under other names for years, and he had won an Academy Award for a story credited to a pseudonym. The public did not boycott the films. The system collapsed not because of a ruling but because someone with enough standing was willing to put a name on the screen. In Hollywood, it turns out, the most radical act is a credit.

The honest facts about the Party

Now the part that a sympathetic retelling usually blurs, and I will not.

The Communist Party of the United States was not simply an unpopular political party, like the Greens or the Libertarians. In its leadership and its orientation, it took direction from and defended the policies of the Soviet Union. The record includes the 1939 reversal in which American Communists, who had been loudly anti-Nazi, reversed their line after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Historians of the period who have worked in the Soviet-era archives, and the decoded Soviet cables known as the Venona project, have documented that Soviet intelligence did recruit sources inside the American government. Espionage was real. Julius Rosenberg was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed in 1953.

And as for Hollywood, the claim that no one in the film colony belonged to the Party is false. Several of the Ten, according to the historical record and in some cases their own later accounts, were Party members in the 1930s and 1940s, and some of them were active in Party affairs. Lawson in particular was a prominent Party figure in Hollywood. Some of the writers took part in the Party's cultural circles and sometimes defended Soviet policy. It is not a smear to say so. It is the record, and the Ten's defenders weaken their own case when they pretend otherwise.

So let us stipulate it all: the Party was a pawn of a brutal state, some of those blacklisted belonged to it, and some defended things that ought not to be defended. The question is not whether those men were right. It is what the government and the industry were entitled to do about it.

The numbered argument

1. The First Amendment protects belief and association, and not only popular belief. The text protects "the freedom of speech, or of the press" and "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." The Supreme Court held in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943) that no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics. See Barnette's Fixed Star, Reading the 1943 Opinion on the Pledge Passage by Passage. A principle that protects only agreeable opinions is not a principle. It is a taste.

1. Government may punish acts, not membership in a disfavoured group. Espionage, sabotage, conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and the like are crimes, and the government may and should prosecute them. The Court has held, in cases ranging from the Smith Act prosecutions of Communist leaders in Dennis v. United States (1951) to the later, narrower rulings that required evidence of active, knowing membership and specific intent, that the line between advocacy of abstract doctrine and incitement to action matters. By the time of Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court had settled on a rule that protects even advocacy of force unless it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. See Brandenburg v. Ohio Protected a Klansman's Speech, and It Protects Yours Too. The blacklist did not wait for evidence of any act.

1. A congressional committee has no power to punish by exposure. Congress may investigate in aid of legislation. But the Court later cautioned, in Watkins v. United States (1957), that there is no congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure. The blacklist ran on that engine. It converted the power to ask questions into the power to destroy livelihoods.

1. The employers' decision was private, and also coerced. The studios acted, formally, as private employers. But they acted under the shadow of a congressional committee, with the threat of regulation, boycotts and public pressure. A private decision made under threat of governmental reprisal is not an ordinary exercise of freedom of association. Conservatives understand this argument perfectly well when it is applied to government pressure on platforms, as in NRA v. Vullo and the Unanimous Rule Against Government Jawboning. It cannot change its force when the target changes.

1. Many of those harmed were not Party members at all. Because the standard was suspicion, it reached people who had merely signed a petition, attended a meeting, or shared a name with someone else. A system without a fair process, where an accusation is enough, will always catch the wrong person. This is the same objection we make to modern mob campaigns, and it is no weaker for being old. See Cancel Culture Has No Judge, No Jury and No Statute of Limitations.

The strongest case for the blacklist

I want to give its defenders their due.

The studios were private businesses with a legitimate fear. The audience, in the early Cold War, was anxious; Soviet espionage was real; the Korean War was on the horizon; and a boycott of films associated with Communists was a real commercial threat. The argument says: the employers were entitled to choose their employees, and the public was entitled to refuse to pay to see films made by people who admired Moscow. Hollywood was also an influential medium, and the claim that Party writers wanted to put propaganda into movies was not absurd on its face. Besides, the blacklisted men were not jailed for their opinions. They were jailed for contempt, for refusing to answer the committee's questions, which is a different offence.

That is a real argument. Let us answer it.

The answer

First, the contempt convictions were the consequence of a question that should not have been put in that form. The committee demanded that people declare their political affiliations on pain of punishment. A government that may compel you to say what you believe, and may punish you if you refuse, has reduced the freedom of conscience to nothing. Barnette's rule, that officials may not force citizens to confess by word or act their faith in an orthodoxy, applies to the reverse as well.

Second, the employers' right to choose is real, and it is not the question. A studio may hire whom it likes. The question is whether we, as citizens, should admire a system in which employers enforce a political test under pressure from the state. A free-association principle that was meant to protect the baker and the bookshop from government compulsion is badly served by being invoked to defend a purge organised by a congressional committee.

Third, the harm to the culture was lasting. The blacklist produced fear, and fear produced timidity. Writers avoided subjects; studios avoided risk. The fear did not distinguish between Communists and others. What it did was teach an industry to ask not "is this good?" but "will this be attacked?" That is the thing conservatives rightly object to in the modern industry, and we should recognise its ancestry.

Fourth, the defence of free speech must be consistent, or it will be worthless. The strongest argument conservatives have against modern speech policing is a principle: no one should be punished for lawful speech and association without due process and proportion. If we apply that principle only to our friends, we are not defending it. We are exploiting it. When critics of the right say that conservatives cry "free speech" only when it helps them, the blacklist is Exhibit A, and the answer is to say, simply, "It was wrong, and we say so." The same applies to the demand for loyalty statements in our own day, which is treated in DEI Statements Were Loyalty Oaths, and the Old Oath Cases Show Why. The old oath cases and the blacklist teach the same lesson from opposite directions.

What the Founders would say

The Founders had a view of loyalty tests. The Constitution's Article VI says that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." The Founders wanted no test of conscience for public service. And the lesson of 1798, when the Sedition Act was used against critics of the government, is that wartime anxiety and foreign threat are exactly the conditions under which a republic is tempted to punish opinions. See The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell. The republic's best answer was always the same one: prosecute acts, protect opinion, and trust the public.

There is something else, and it is a point of pride. The same industry that was cowed in the late 1940s had sent its stars and studios to war in 1942. See When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942. Patriotism in Hollywood was not the monopoly of the accusers, and it did not need a blacklist to prove itself.

Why saying so helps

I said at the start that conservatives gain credibility by admitting this. Here is why in practical terms. If you want the public to believe you when you say a mob is punishing a person for lawful speech, your audience will check your record. If your record includes applause for purges when the targets were unpopular, you have given them the answer. If your record includes the sentence "the blacklist was wrong, even though its targets were not admirable," you have shown that your principle is real. That is how a principle becomes persuasive: by costing something.

The case in brief

1. The Hollywood blacklist began with the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of October 1947, the contempt citations against the Hollywood Ten in November 1947 and the studios' Waldorf Statement on November 25, 1947.
2. The Communist Party was aligned with a brutal Soviet regime, some of the Ten were members, and Soviet espionage was real, and none of that changes what the government and industry were entitled to do.
3. Government may punish acts, such as espionage and incitement, but not belief and association, and Congress has no power to expose for the sake of exposure.
4. The employers' decision was nominally private but made under governmental pressure, and it swept in people who had done nothing more than sign a petition.
5. Conservatives defend speech more credibly when they apply the principle to opponents, and the blacklist broke in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo's name returned to the screen.

What you can do: Read the First Amendment and Article VI in the Constitution, and the next time someone you disagree with is being pressed to lose a job over lawful opinions, say publicly that the principle applies to them too.