During the 1950s Red Scare, screenwriter Martin Berkeley accused 155 people of ties to Communism before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Berkeley named friends, Hollywood colleagues and people he barely knew — all in an attempt to clear his own name from the suspicions of leftism that could ruin his career.
The investigation and intimidation that Berkeley, other Hollywood creatives and federal workers faced during the Red Scare is the subject of the Capital Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “Blacklisted: An American Story.” By telling the nuanced stories of blacklisting during the Red Scare, “Blacklisted” asks visitors how the government should reconcile freedom of speech with national security.
On March 5, the Capital Jewish Museum hosted a reception to celebrate the exhibit’s opening. The museum was bedecked with decorations nodding to the 1950s — pink-and-white flower arrangements on tables were topped with faux maraschino cherries, while events staff checking identification for security purposes offered visitors Coca-Cola bottles and openers. The light-hearted evening grew more somber as speakers engaged with “Blacklisted’s” weightier themes.
Museum president Chris Wolf addressed “revisiting… a charged and cautionary chapter in history” in his remarks. The Red Scare, he said, “upended lives… fear and national security collided with identity and freedom of speech. At the same time, it encouraged a complementary story of resilience.”
The Capital Jewish Museum’s exhibits, Wolf said, “should inspire us to be better for today… in values and…grit.”
Ellie Gettinger, who curated the exhibit, which first opened at Jewish Museum Milwaukee, and Diane Webber, a Sidwell grandparent and Capital Jewish Museum board member, emphasized the continued relevance of the Red Scare.
Webber, who planned to lead a tour of the exhibit for a diplomatic delegation, noted the importance of hosting those figures. Gettinger, who first learned about the period while writing a high school research paper about it, noted “the real interesting contemporary resonances” between 2018, when she began developing “Blacklisted,” and the 1950s, mentioning the first Trump administration’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim nations.
“We are constantly in a place where we wonder what rights look like,” she said in her remarks.
“What happens when the government impacts the way culture is made and spread?” Gettinger asked, citing statistics showing that, before the Hollywood blacklist, 28% of Hollywood movies produced “had some social or political content.” In 1952, that percentage shrank to 6%.
“How are we reflecting, who is doing the reflection, and what are the limits on that reflection?” reception speakers asked.
“Blacklisted” begins with a history lesson outlining the Red Scare and its principal actors. It explains the significance of HUAC, founded in 1938, which monitored organizations and people deemed Communist and called them to testify before Congress. Often, film industry workers who testified were “blacklisted –” companies like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer considered them to be too closely affiliated with Communism, and thus risky, to hire. Even when these filmmakers managed to make a film, they were picketed by organizations like the American Legion, which organized film boycotts.
“I’m a man of a thousand faces, and all of them are blacklisted,” said actor Zero Mostel, as quoted in the exhibit.
Blacklisting lasted until the release of the films “Exodus” and “Spartacus,” both by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, in 1960, when then-president John F. Kennedy crossed the American Legion picket line to watch Spartacus.
The only way a person called before HUAC could “clear” their name was through “naming names,” giving the Committee yet more people to call, as Berkeley had done. The practice became common — Elia Kazan engaged in it, as did Ronald Reagan, who named more than 50 people. Many actors, however, were horrified.
“I don’t think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since that day I did that,” wrote actor Sterling Hayden on naming secretary Bea Winters, actress Karen Morley and writer Robert Lees.
“This is not the American way… not American justice,” actor Larry Parks, whose career was destroyed by HUAC, said.
The exhibit also explores the Committee’s legacy of racism and antisemitism. HUAC members described the Ku Klux Klan as an “old American institution” and targeted Jewish artists, attempting to persuade the American government to forbid Holocaust survivors from immigrating to the United States. “Blacklisted” also notes that many of the supposedly “Communist” groups whose members HUAC investigated were actually anti-Nazi and anti-segregation organizations.
What makes the exhibit so special, though, is not the general history it covers so much as the human stories it tells.
The exhibit focuses on the Hollywood Ten, movie-industry workers like Trumbo who, unwilling to inform on and incriminate their colleagues, refused to answer HUAC’s questions and were convicted of contempt of Congress and jailed for doing so. “Blacklisted” tells these artists’ stories through fascinating personal artifacts; its segment devoted to Alvah Bessie is perhaps its most intriguing.
In “Blacklisted,” the Capital Jewish Museum sought to “make more proximate the human connection to the Red Scare… and the American story [so that] we start to see ourselves as part of history,” executive director Beatrice Gurwitz said. Bessie’s story, told through vibrant artifacts, does just that.
After being jailed and blacklisted, Bessie, a screenwriter who served in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, continued to write and create. He collaborated with Lenny Bruce to write the screenplay “The Degenerate,” which was never filmed and is shown at the exhibit.
Bessie’s relationship with his family and friends, displayed in the poems, letters and drawings they exchanged during his time in prison, is a moving reminder of HUAC’s human cost.
“When you were very young / I went away from you to fight a war,” Bessie wrote from prison in a poem for his sons, “neither of [whom] then possessed a way to understand so cruel a separation.” He urged his sons to remain steadfast and endure his absence.
“Though there is a scar, a knitted bone” left by his arrest, he wrote to his sons, “doctors will assure you that a knitted bone is stronger than it was before the break.”
