-Caveat Lector-
Elia Kazan directed movie, "On The Waterfront." During House
Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, Kazan named
names. Some see his subsequent movie, "On The Waterfront" as
Kazan's justification; hero in the movie "snitches" on corrupt
union leaders. Kazan to receive honorary Oscar, but there will
be protests based on Kazan's HUAC testimony, where he had
named names. Below is editorial on subject, from NYTimes.
February 28, 1999
Hollywood Hypocrisy
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
E lia Kazan is a wonderfully creative director who has contributed
brilliantly to the arts of drama and film in the 20th century. He
is also a man who in 1952 gave the House Committee on Un-American
Activities the names of people he had known during his brief
membership in the Communist Party 16 years before.
And he is a man whose impending recognition by the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is driving some people into orgies
of self-righteous frenzy. Mr. Kazan, they say, is a scoundrel who
should apologize for past misdeeds in politics before he receives
an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement in the arts.
Mr. Kazan, the protesters say, is an informer, and his offense is
unforgivable. But is that what the protesters really mean? Is
informing unforgivable in all circumstances? Had Mr. Kazan been a
member of the German-American Bund naming underground Nazis, would
they have condemned him just as much? Or a former Klansman who
informed on his hooded brethren? Or a former Mafia thug who
informed on the mob? Or a member of the Nixon White House who
informed during Watergate? Or a whistleblower who disclosed
government malfeasance?
No, informing per se is not Mr. Kazan's offense. His true offense
in the minds of the Hollywood protesters is that he informed on the
Communist Party. Now, informing on former associates is not an easy
choice, even though Mr. Kazan named no names not already known to
the committee. Under the pressure of the time, Mr. Kazan searched
his conscience and went one way. Others searched their consciences
and went another way. Those who were not subject to the pressures
of the time should not rush to judgment. "No one knows what he'd
do," Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actors Studio, told Mr.
Kazan, "until he's in it."
Mr. Kazan's critics are those -- or latter-day admirers of those --
who continued to defend Stalin after the Moscow trials, after the
pact with Hitler, through the age of the gulag. One wonders at
their presumption in condemning others for recognizing the horrors
of Stalinism -- horrors that the entire world, including Russia,
acknowledges today.
The presumption is especially acute when it comes from those who,
when they testified before HUAC, declined to declare their true
beliefs. (Bartley Crum, one of their lawyers, urged that they
declare them.) Instead they preserved secrecy, refused to argue
their beliefs and posed as champions of a Bill of Rights that a
Stalinist regime would instantly have abolished. If the Academy's
occasion calls for apologies, let Mr. Kazan's denouncers apologize
for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism.
Those were horrid times. Little has disgraced Congress more than
the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Its inquiry into
Communism in Hollywood was among the most indefensible, scandalous
and cruel episodes in the entire history of legislative
investigations. The idea that the presence of a few Stalinists and
fellow-travelers in the film industry was a grave threat to the
republic rates high in the annals of Congressional asininity.
Collaboration with these Congressional clowns had its elements of
disgust and shame, as Mr. Kazan himself admits in his memoir.
But was it worse than collaboration with the Communist Party -- the
party that for years, as Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1945, "taught
the philosophy of the lie."
"They taught that allegiance to the party and acceptance of orders
from party heads, whose interests were not just those of the United
States, were paramount" she said. "Because I have experienced the
deception of the American Communists, I will not trust them."
These were indeed horrid years -- horrid for HUAC's unhappy
targets, horrid for HUAC's unhappy collaborators. In 1970 Dalton
Trumbo, a major target, spoke interesting words to the
Screenwriters Guild.
"Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere
individuals," he said, "each person reacted as his nature, his
needs, his convictions and his particular circumstances compelled
him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty,
courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and
stupidity, good and bad on both sides."
Mr. Trumbo concluded: "When you who are in your 40's or younger
look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally
you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or
saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims."
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian, has twice won the Pulitzer
Prize.
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