Coggins7 wrote:
Keep in mind, this is the person who claims the Soviet Gulag system was eliminated in the fifties
CFR on where I claim anything like that. It was 1960
You mean this:
General liquidations until Gorbachev?!? There were some exiles even after Stalin, but that's it.
All the historical sources I've checked indicate that the Soviet Politburo began dismantling the Gulag system within weeks of Stalin's death. Stalin passed away in 1953. But the Gulag system was not eliminated, only its sheer size decreased, and its main funtion turned from mass slave labor to the detention of political dissidents (especially, as the sources in my articles I posted pointed out, in the 1970s during a period of increased political repression).
Quote:
and that the Hollywood Ten were actually unfairly accused and questioned by HUAC (we now know as a matter of the historical record that all ten were, on all essential points, exactly what HUAC claimed they were) This person believes that the United States in the 1950s was holding "political prisoners".
So they weren't political prisoners? Oh, that's right: the official reason was contempt of Congress. And McCarran Internal Security Act? Why, that's just an anti-American myth.
Correct. They were or had been Communists working with the CPUSA, directly or indirectly, to subvert American society through the insertion of Communist concepts, ideas, and propaganda within the scripts of various Hollywood films. They were, most ways that matter, traitors working in behalf of a hostile foreign power who's official ideology and longstanding pronouncements made it clear that it was at war with the U.S. and the West for ultimate supremacy. The Cold War was a real war, Zoid, and aiding and abetting the national enemy of your country is traitorous. Communists were not brought before HUAC because they espoused Communist theory or personally believed Communist doctrines, but because they were suspected of activity in behalf of an external national entity seeking our destruction. We now know, from the Venona transcripts and from the opening of the general Soviet and KGB archives for a few years after the breakup of the Soviet Empire (I think they were only open to western scholars for around 5 or 6 years, when they were closed again) that the Hollywood Ten were guilty, for all intents and purposes, just as HUAC charged them.
Ark Eckstien, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, has written an excellent essay on the subject, that gives some of the excesses of the blacklist their due but takes a strongly historical realist view of the Ten, and takes apart the pop cultural myths and modern Hollywood culture revisionism of the era. The entire article is here:
And here is some relevant material from the text:
At this point in the discussion we should also begin to distinguish among the victims of the blacklist. It is the Unfriendly Ten (and those around the Ten) who Hollywood memory has chosen to canonize as martyrs, making them into admirable American “rebels” and innocent, victimized heroes. In the order of priorities for our sympathy, I think this is the opposite of where sympathy for the blacklist victims should lie.17
Many people on the Left in the 1930s and 1940s were attracted to the various positions advocated at one time or another by the Communist Party of the USA. Some merely became involved in the many front groups with nice-sounding names that the Party secretly controlled (e.g. the Progressive Citizens of America, or the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League). Some actually did join the Party itself. Yet the vast majority of those who joined the Party only lasted a relatively short time before leaving. Why did they leave? Because the Party’s choking atmosphere of intellectual control drove them away, or because the Party’s position on whatever social issue had originally attracted them suddenly reversed on orders from the Soviet Union. Tragically, many of these Leftists were persecuted later by the government, and/or blacklisted in Hollywood.18 The main point I wish to make, however, is that the average length of stay even for those Leftists who did join the Party in the 1930s was only about three years.19
The Ten, however, do not and cannot represent the relatively transient population that made up the Party rank and file. The latter were social idealists or radicals loosely tied to the Party and committed to specific issues rather than to the organization itself. In the heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, they made up the Party’s relatively unstable mass base. The Ten, by contrast, were mostly long-term Party militants, cadres, and functionaries. Bessie, Biberman, Cole, Lardner, Lawson, and Polonsky had all been in the Party for ten years or more when the first HUAC investigation opened in 1947, and Trumbo only a little bit less. The very fact that they had not wavered at any point, despite the series of radical shifts and reversals in Party policy since 1935, set them apart from the vast majority of Party members, and the vast majority of blacklist victims.
Moreover, the radical shifts and reversals in the policy of the CPUSA did not reflect developments on the American socio-economic scene itself, and were not reactions to them. On the contrary, they had their source in a foreign country and its interests, in the specific responses of the government of the USSR to events in Europe. One classic case is of course the American Party’s faithful support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-1941. The alliance was a startling reversal after years of proclaimed Party dedication to ferocious “anti-Fascism.” Instead, the line switched from “anti-Fascism” to “peace,” i.e. a ferocious dedication to keeping the US from aiding the nations fighting Hitler (“The Yanks are NOT coming! We’ll be for peace until the cows come home!” to quote Herbert Biberman). Yet just as the Party’s staunch “anti-Fascism” ended the moment that Stalin became Hitler’s friend, so the Party’s staunch belief in “the peace movement” ended the moment the Soviet Union was attacked by the Nazis on 22 June 1941. Then the war against Hitler finally became justified.20
This means that most of the Ten, as long-term Communist Party militants, were people who (to paraphrase Lillian Hellman) were prepared to cut their consciences to fit the political fashions of the moment. Such obedience to a notoriously changeable political line, such inability to stick to loudly proclaimed principles if the Party suddenly went back on those principles, is a fact. Another is that there was one thing these men were not, and that was rebels. It is wrong to see them that way and to give them that honorable appellation.21 Moreover, the political fashions to which they cut their consciences were the needs of the Soviet state, not the American. Thus, the very nature of their long-term Communist Party militancy points to their dependence upon the wishes of a foreign government.22
This situation was not unique to the American Party, but rather was a fundamental characteristic of all Communist Parties throughout the Stalin era. On all major issues the “national” Communist Parties were controlled from Moscow, either directly or via the Comintern. The subservience of the Communist Party of France to Soviet interests and orders is the classic example of the phenomenon, and it helps to underline the type of politics actually engaged in by the historical (as opposed to the mythical) Ten. If American historians of the CPUSA were thoroughly trained in foreign languages, they would better be able to discern parallels between the behavior of the American Party and all other “national” Parties around the world, and they could put the CPUSA into its proper international context. American historians would see how closely the sudden and radical policy shifts of the American Party were exactly like those of every other “national” Communist Party, because the policies of all these organizations were dependent upon policy decisions made in Moscow. But of course, most American historians nowadays are not trained in foreign languages, resulting in a bias toward seeing everything in a purely American context and perspective.23
Even Paul Jarrico, one of the Ten, has recently acknowledged that the American Communists were constantly forced into counter-productive politics by virtue of continually having to be the fervent guardians of Soviet (i.e. foreign) interests, and members of a Party whose policy was determined in Europe. Not that Jarrico ever deviated from the Party line at the time.24 Similar statements have come from another of the Ten, Alvah Bessie, who has ruefully remarked, “It began to be obvious that the Party was not speaking the language of the American people. It took me almost twenty years to find this out...Pretty stupid of me.”25 The opinion of the famous blacklisted director Jules Dassin (Riffifi; Never on Sunday) is the same. The Party tried very hard to present Communist or Socialist ideas as an advance in America’s development that was in fact rooted in American tradition. Well, they failed in this. The American people couldn’t buy it. The association with the Soviet Union was too powerful. I remember one slogan, “Defend the Soviet Union.” It was not “Defend the Socialist Idea” or “Defend a Fairer System.” It was “Defend the Soviet Union.” It was a tough slogan to sell; impossible.
The unbreakable association with the USSR, the subservience to whatever the prevailing line of Stalin’s dictatorship happened to be, the overriding CPUSA purpose to “defend the Soviet Union” under any and all circumstances (including conflict with the United States) were policies dictated to the CPUSA from Moscow, and accepted willingly by Party headquarters in New York. In what sense was this “rebellion” within the honorable American tradition?26
The Hollywood Ten were not, as it happened, spies for the USSR, but they belonged to a Party that –as even left-wing “revisionists” now acknowledge– planted spies for the Soviet Union throughout the US government as a matter of course. Ellen-Shrecker, the chronicler of the blacklist as it functioned in educational institutions, has admitted that Earl Browder, the leader of the CPUSA during its most “liberal” period (1941-1945: the Second Popular Front), was in fact a key talent scout and recruiter of spies for the Soviet Union, “routing volunteers to the KGB and identifying secret Party members who could be of use.”27
Although only one Hollywood Communist (the minor Hollywood producer Boris Morros) is known to have been a long-term NKVD spy, that does not mean that the Hollywood Communists would not have spied for the Soviet Union if they had been asked. Indeed, the recently decoded “Venona” documents suggest that Walter Bernstein, one of those blacklisted, had offered information to the NKVD more than once. This should not come as a surprise. When Arthur Koestler secretly joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1932, he remained a newspaper reporter, but he accepted as a matter of course that he would be asked to spy on his employers in the Ullstein newspaper corporation–the same people who had saved him from penury during the Depression. 29
Although not involved in spying, the Hollywood Party organization was nevertheless especially important to CPUSA headquarters in New York. This was demonstrated by the fact that the Hollywood section was not under the supervision of the Los Angeles or California Party organizations, as one might expect, but reported directly to the Center.30 And in the spring of 1945, when hard-line Stalinist William Z. Foster expelled the “liberal” Browder from the Party and took over as General Secretary at Stalin’s behest, one of the first places he visited was the Hollywood Party.31
The reason for the special importance of the Hollywood section is not hard to discern. The Soviet government had an early understanding of the crucial power of film as propaganda in a mass society. Communist influence in Hollywood filmmaking was therefore seen as both culturally and politically important in spreading ideas among the masses to prepare for the Revolution, or at least to curb popular opposition to the USSR. Party members boasted of “sneaking” Marxist dogma into otherwise bland Hollywood films, though they later denounced this suspicion as fascist propaganda.32 The intent was quite clear. Ring Lardner, Jr., for example, gleefully told the story of his blacklist period in the 1950s when he worked as a secret screenwriter for the British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, and slipped frequent anti-capitalist messages into a show set in medieval England. His purpose, he said, was to subvert the younger generation’s beliefs in free enterprise.33 In the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, however, the anti-ideological domination of the studio moguls meant that Communist writers could only slip in a few bits here and there, and such bits could not have much effect. Rather, as Party leader Foster told the Hollywood section of the Party during his visit in 1945, the Party intended its influence on film production in Hollywood at this point to be primarily negative. Communists were to block and prevent the production of any films with an anti-Communist bent, or with a theme detrimental to the interests of the Soviet Union.34
In keeping with this subterfuge, most Party members in Hollywood were secret Party members, operating under noms de guerre. The strict cell structure of the Hollywood Party, and the secret meetings of the cells, kept many people from knowing more than a dozen fellow Party members. Director Edward Dmytryk, in fact, worked with the producer Adrian Scott for two years before he knew Scott was a fellow Party member.35 The Party was not organized this way by accident, or merely out of a traditional conspiratorial or paranoid mindset, though that mindset obviously existed and was fundamental. There were two specific reasons for secrecy: (1) so that opinions presented during their daily work in the studios by secret Communists could masquerade as independent artistic opinions, since filmmakers dealing with the secret Communists would not know they were dealing with Communists; and (2) so that secret Communist operatives could control the bien pensant front organizations mostly populated by liberals and ordinary leftists.
An example of the latter is the Hollywood Citizens Committee on the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). Most of the HICCASP’s members were liberals and independent leftists, but the crucially influential post of executive secretary of the organization was held by a secret Communist.36 The Communists operated like cuckoos, as Edward Dmytryk said, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests.37 Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that some prominent Hollywood people who wanted to join the Party were forbidden to become members, but were nonetheless trusted to wield influence over Hollywood individuals and organizations on behalf of Party policies all the same–influence all the more effective for coming from people known merely as “leftists.”38
Hollywood Ten member Jarrico has given an insightful summary of the impact of the Party’s penchant for secrecy. In the broadest sense, the political situation of the CPUSA changed dramatically with the coming of the Cold War. It was one thing to be a Communist in the 1930s, when the USSR was on the distant horizon for most Americans, or during the Second World War, when the USSR and the United States were allies. But after 1945, as the United States became involved in a fierce worldwide struggle directly with the USSR, and Americans were being called upon to give their lives to fight against Communism internationally, Jarrico has admitted the logic of seeing Communists and Communist sympathizers as a potential fifth column.39 This fundamental political situation was made worse, Jarrico has said, by the fact that the CPUSA obviously slavishly followed whatever the political line was from the USSR. He added:
Well, you get the gist of it. I suggest reading the entire article because its an educational experience. Now let's get a few more aspects of the history straight: McCarthy had nothing to do with the blacklist or with the Ten. The blacklist came from within the Hollywood studio system itself, not from McCarthy. McCarthy was a senator who's main responsibility was to root out communist agents of influence or spies within government agencies. The Ten appeared before HUAC, not Joseph McCarthy (and, let it be said again, we now know from the Venona transcripts and Soviet archival sources that there were in fact, a large number of Soviet agents, or indigenous sympathizers to that cause, working within the United States government in various capacities at the time. Indeed, the archival sources indicate a larger number than even McCarthy himself suspected).
Interesstingly, even the term "McCarthyism" that modern lefists throw around without the slightest understanding of what they're talking about is not of American provenance. The term is a creation of the NKVD and was first published in the Daily Worker (this was around 1953 it seems, but I haven't been able to track down the specific issue yet).
Also of interest should be this review:
What Red Scare? HUAC And Venona
By Ronald Radosh
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/29/2001
IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS, much has been made of the announcement that the US National Archives has released 600 boxes of previously sealed records from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, including material pertaining to their famous 1940s investigation of Communism in Hollywood, civil rights and antiwar activists from the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan, and the investigation of Alger Hiss.
An Associated Press story by reporter Deb Riechmann, dated August 24, stresses that "what witnesses told the committee in executive session has been sealed until now." Reichmann quotes from the testimony of various friendly witnesses before the Committee, including screenwriter Jack Moffit, Warner Brothers executive Jack Warner and unfriendly witness, composer Johannes Eisler. The only problem with her report is that her comments are all from the one box currently available not from an assumed treasure trove of 600.
It just so happens that the same day Riechmann looked through that box, I was at the National Archives going through the same material, and putting in a request for material from other boxes. I was informed that all the material has to first be vetted by the staff, and that was a process that could take months until the material was made available. What the archivists have done is release one single box of material they thought would be most interesting to the public and indeed, that one box actually contains few if any surprises. Historians have long known that the Congressmen who composed HUAC were most often publicity seeking clowns, and that much of their investigations backfired. As Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, author of Hollywood Party and a contributor to these Web pages told Riechmann, "the hearings were a circus…they discredited themselves and… gave the Communist Party a real publicity coup." And Billingsley correctly pointed out that their big mistake was to wrongly focus on the content of movies, rather than on the Communist Party’s attempt to coopt the entire film industry.
If the AP story was misleading, the August 20 New York Times was even more egregious in the attention it focused on the archives. The paper featured a very long oped piece by historian Rick Perlstein, titled "A Look at the Architects of America’s Red Scare." As a historian, Perlstein should be the first to know that evaluation of documents and archives has to be based on what is found in them. Perlstein, it turns out, has not examined the new socalled archive, not even the one open box. Comparing the new release of HUAC material to that of the release of the Venona papers the former top secret Soviet decrypts released by the CIA and NSA Perlstein writes that "this unsealing may have lacked the ceremony of the first. It should share its import."
He then continues to quote from long available transcripts of HUAC sessions transcripts that have been mined to the hilt and quoted over and over by historians of the McCarthy era material that he admits is from "documents already available." Yet somehow this scholar divines that "if Venona was about the heroic quest of divining how Americans helped the Soviets build their atomic bomb, HUAC shows the cold war at home in its everyday dress."
Actually, Venona, as readers of the magisterial work by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr know, is about much more than how the Soviets got the atomic bomb. That is only the tip of the iceberg, material made available in the very first Venona release. It is, rather, really about how Soviet espionage successfully penetrated the highest levels of the American government, and how it recruited willing agents from the ranks of the American Communist Party. It also, as Perlstein notes, included the names and cover names of 200 American spies, as well as others who to this date have still not been identified. Venona, in other words, was real news for the first time, it confirmed what the anti antiCommunists never acknowledged, that there was a successful Soviet penetration and espionage network operating in the United States in the 1940s, and that by deduction this meant good reason existed for viewing the American Communists not just as members of a regular albeit unpopular political organization, but as potential spies in waiting.
Venona was indeed big news. Yet Perlstein, given a tremendous and unusual amount of space by our paper of record, writes with disdain of the "outpouring" of comments about Venona. "Books issued forth, and magazines covered the debate’s every twist," he writes, "They still do." Indeed, he asserts that as a result of Venona’s release, the popular culture has "cemented" the conclusion that "long derided coldwarriors" should be honored. Would that were so. His evidence: one column by journalist Nicholas von Hoffman and one unusually atypical episode of "West Wing," in which a character on the program has his liberal faith challenged when he learns that a Hiss type figure was in fact a Soviet spy. Naturally, Perlstein leaves out of his account the scores of films, documentaries and programs extolling the virtues of the old Communists and the Hollywood Left. Perhaps he somehow missed these in the past ten years.
Calling for a "more complete view," Perlstein’s point is that by turning the focus of our attention on HUAC rather than on Venona, he asserts that "for those who care about America’s achieving a more mature and complete understanding of our own past, HUAC matters more." Its records, he assures us, will "be a window onto the vast complexity of the cold war at home, while Venona is only a peephole."
Some peephole. An actual archive that has proved that the testimony of long discredited and condemned exCommunists like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley was essentially correct despite the years of protestations and arguments of the leftliberal community is seen as of minor importance, while the already existing transcripts of HUAC’s years of investigations, hearings which often worked only to foment a large popular rebellion against the Committee and eventually led to its demise by vote of Congress, is seen as somehow more important. If, as Haynes and Klehr put it, "the CPUSA was indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War," doesn’t that mean that a staple of the leftwing argument, that it was simply a group persecuted for its noble and well intentioned ideas, is in fact what was essentially wrong, and that hence our understanding of the nature of Communism and the response of antiCommunism has to be reexamined? Doesn’t that fact even suggest that in spite of its grandstanding and often corrupt and publicity seeking members, HUAC in fact was on to something? After all, who is it who nailed Alger Hiss? It certainly wasn’t the Truman administration. Doesn’t the evidence from Venona indicate that the loyaltysecurity program of the Truman administration, as well as Congressional looks at Communism, had a rational basis? After all, the Communist Party, as Venona revealed, did indeed assist the Soviet espionage apparatus. That was part of the Soviet Union’s "unrestrained espionage offensive," as Haynes and Klehr put it.
What, then, of equal import or more import does HUAC’s record show us? Perlstein and others would have us see a system of institutionalized political repression, including Statewide "little HUAC’s," bodies that investigated those fighting segregation or those opposed to atomic testing, etc. To Perlstein this was a "system," one that includes private groups such as a Chicago body that held its own files of suspected subversives. And Perlstein argues that with the new release of HUAC files, we can finally find "how this whole system worked." As a historian, Perlstein should know to hold his conclusions until such time as he looks at what the files show. Unlike Venona, in truth he has no idea at all, aside from his own wishful thinking. He writes that the new "behindthescenes HUAC records will be far more revealing, and damning, than the hearing transcripts and official reports we already have." Perhaps Perlstein is a futurist fortuneteller, and not a historian. More likely, the HUAC files closed sessions of friendly witnesses who testified first before their public appearances will only reveal these people saying essentially the same story they told when they went public. After all, most unfriendly witnesses were hostile in both closed and public appearances, and refused to answer any questions put to them by Committee members.
Hedging his bet, Perlstein concludes that "HUAC has had intelligent defenders," and that some will still argue that "HUAC is just a historical distraction to the main story of decent, necessary, Trumanesque liberal antiCommunism." Sure, but clearly, this historian’s own agenda is to denigrate liberal antiCommunism as the moral equivalent of McCarthyism something he manages to do by proclaiming the import of the new files before he actually knows what is in them. In his very last sentence, Perlstein admonishes that debate "did not begin with the Venona cables and certainly should not end with them." Wouldn’t it be a start for Perlstein and others to first acknowledge what the Venona cables have revealed, and integrate their findings into the picture they paint of the socalled McCarthy years? Maybe if they did this, I would have less trouble listening to some of their other points.