BY BERNIE SENTER
SAN FRANCISCO -Militant Labor Forums held here March 20 and
in Los Angeles the night before called for protesting the
Academy Award for "lifetime achievement" given to director Elia
Kazan. Nick Castle, a member of the Directors Guild of America,
the Writers Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences; and Joel Britton, a member of the Socialist
Workers Party's National Committee, spoke to more than 100
people at the combined programs.
Castle pointed out that Kazan was one of the most highly regarded movie directors of his era, and had the right of first refusal for directing the best plays on Broadway. "But Kazan also has another claim to fame, another lifetime achievement," Castle explained. "For over 40 years he has carried with him the stigma of being one of Hollywood's most famous informers during the anticommunist witch-hunt of the 1950s," Castle said. "A stigma he wears, if not proudly, at least without public regret."
In April 1952 Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He identified eight colleagues as members of the Communist Party. They were subsequently blacklisted from the industry.
Britton told the audience, "Kazan named names to the U.S. government, a government that was on a drive to break the power of labor unions that had made tremendous gains through the 1930s."
Following World War II, Britton explained, "the capitalist ruling class of this country had to recover from the weaknesses they came out of the war with. Everyone talks of the strengths of U.S. imperialism, vis-a-vis other imperialist powers. And that's true."
But the U.S. government was unable to use its power to successfully roll back the advancing anticolonial and anticapitalist revolutions in China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The labor upsurge and strike wave that swept the United States following the war was an enormous liability. The witch-hunt was the bosses' response.
Witch-hunt `sanctioned state terror'
Castle said that Washington used the anticommunist offensive
to "blacklist workers out of their jobs, imprison people, and
in the case of the Rosenbergs, execute them. It was sanctioned
state terror by congressional committees whose job was to break
the spirit of anyone willing to put up a fight, to turn brother
against brother. In the Hollywood witch-hunt, Kazan played
their game."
Castle recounted, "Hollywood was not unaffected by the radicalization of the 1930s and the fight for union recognition. Battles by writers, actors and directors were sometimes bitter fights."
Castle played excerpts from Hollywood on Trial, a documentary that showed how the witch-hunt was initially orchestrated by the liberal Democrats in the Truman administration following the war. It gave wind to and was carried further by the incipient fascist current led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.
"Lives were ruined," said Castle. "And of course the blacklisting and witch-hunting spread to most every other institution in the United States." It finally began to be reversed "when the blacklisting went a little too far in targeting central figures in the military brass," and with the rise of worldwide anticolonial struggles, the civil rights movement, and a little later, the Cuban revolution.
The March 10, 1952, issue of the Militant was on display at the San Francisco forum with it's headline, "Witch Hunt Aimed at Unions, Detroit Smear Hearings Show." As the Militant pointed out at the time, the witch-hunters were really aiming their fire at the rank and file of the unions. In Detroit, with the aid of the union tops, the HUAC communist-baited the largest local of the United Auto Workers, Local 600.
Britton related the record of the Socialist Workers Party, "a good example of a working-class party, a communist party, that stood up to the witch-hunt and addressed every crime committed by the U.S. government and those who carried out its interests."
Throughout the witch-hunt the party ran candidates for public office, and with others waged an ultimately successful campaign to win the reinstatement of James Kutcher, a World War II veteran who was fired from his government job because of his membership in the Socialist Workers Party. That eight-year fight, which won substantial backing within the labor movement and among supporters of democratic rights, is recounted in the book The Case of the Legless Veteran.
Record of Stalinists in war, witch-hunt
"The SWP record and practice in opposing the witch-hunt
stands in contrast to that of the misnamed communists in the
Stalinist Communist Party [CP] on this question," said Britton.
"During World War II, the CP joined in the most patriotic
jingoism of the ruling class. In the name of fighting fascism,
they politically disarmed the workers movement, subordinating
every consideration in the class struggle, in the human and
civil rights struggles to Washington's war effort.
"This included fingering people to the government, such as maritime workers who took off too much time between jobs. It included fingering people in war plants who refused to buy into campaigns to purchase government war bonds. The CP opposed the civil rights movement during the war, as helping the Nazis."
All these things the CP did were self-defeating and counter to the working class axiom of An Injury to One is an Injury to All. "They introduced a poisonous influence into the workers movement," said Britton.
"The Socialist Party of Norman Thomas trotted right along side the conservative labor officialdom, balking only if innocent non-communists were mistakenly charged," Castle said. "The Communist Party, which had looked toward the liberals, got the rug pulled out from under them by these so-called friends. Since they didn't have any orientation to the rank-and-file workers, they had no place to turn for support. The blacklisted [individuals] were left mainly on their own."
Many of those who in the current controversy supported the award to Kazan, such as liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., have tried to justify their stance by pointing to the "horrors of Stalinism." There's all the difference in the world between the life-and-death questions that must be fought out within the workers movement and giving names to the greatest enemy of the workers of the world - the imperialist government in Washington, Britton said.
As an example, he pointed to the Socialist Workers Party's response to the 1943 film Mission to Moscow. The Hollywood movie was a piece of pro-war propaganda, produced with substantial backing from the Roosevelt administration. It was a whitewash of the Moscow frame-up trials carried out by the regime of Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky and other central leaders of the Russian Revolution.
The SWP organized picket lines outside the movie showings, handing out fliers exposing the lies contained in it. The party didn't call for a boycott, but warned people of what they would see and offered the facts. "That's the way to expose Stalinism and its crimes, not going to the state like Kazan did," Britton said.
Kazan award is about today
Both Britton and Castle made the point that the lifetime
achievement award to Kazan is not primarily about the past.
"It's about today, and it's about the future," they emphasized.
Britton told of the recent conviction of Puerto Rican independence activist José Solís Jordán based on the testimony of an FBI snitch and provocateur. On March 12, Solís became the 17th Puerto Rican independence fighter held today in U.S. jails.
"I urge everyone to be involved in protesting this," Britton said. "The length of the sentence of José Solís will partly depend on the Oscar protest. If they can give an award to a fink, a snitch, an informer like Kazan without resistance, then it will be tougher on Solís," he added.
Castle said, "Look back at the witch-hunt and the witch- hunters and you'll see the face of Patrick Buchanan," one of whose heroes is McCarthy. "And you'll know what some would like to have in store for the future. Kazan was not a fascist. But his example opens the door for supporters of the new demagogues that would head our world toward fascism and war. Workers and their allies, because of protests like this, will learn from the past and not allow a rerun, a sequel to the tragedies of the blacklist era."
There was substantial discussion following the presentations at both forums. Among the 45 people in attendance at the Los Angeles forum were several members of the International Associations of Machinists union who work at Los Angeles International Airport, members of the Young Socialists, and activists organizing the protests against the award for Kazan that took place at the Academy awards ceremony two days after the forum.
In the discussion period at the San Francisco forum, one person noted the recent firing of Wen Ho Lee, who worked at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear research center, for allegedly passing bomb secrets to Beijing. "This is the political atmosphere they are trying to create today, designed to rehabilitate Kazan and push us back."
Another participant in the program explained that her family was sent to the internment camps for Japanese-Americans in California during World War II. Her father, a member of the Communist Party, had gone to a party meeting and was urged to comply with the relocation order. CP leaders explained that the best way to defend the Soviet Union and the war effort was to go to the camps without protest. The rationalization was that in the Soviet Union, German workers were also being interned.
She also recounted the terrorizing effect of the post-World War II witch-hunt on her father who was pressured repeatedly into signing loyalty oaths to keep his job. Britton noted that the CP newspaper supported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Britton made the connection between the protests against the award to Kazan and "the rise of working-class resistance, with thousands who are drawing far-reaching conclusions, some anticapitalist conclusions," as they are drawn into struggle against the employers, against police brutality, against the death penalty, for immigrant rights, and against attacks by the government on our social wage.
Britton pointed to the example of the locked out Crown Petroleum workers in Texas. Some of these workers are facing a lawsuit for allegedly sabotaging the plant. "The FBI approached workers one by one, offering them $10,000 to name names" in their attempt to crush their fighting spirit and weave a conspiracy. "No one finked. Then the FBI raised the sum to $20,000, and up to $60,000 before they gave up."
"This shows how deep it is in the working class, that naming names, informing, ratting out is not acceptable."
"The fight of the Socialist Workers campaign in Seattle to be exempt from disclosing names of our contributors should be seen in this light," Britton said. "We've been able to maintain that right through a continued fight."
The U.S. military war games held in the Bay Area and Monterey called Operation Urban Warrior is an anticipatory move, Britton explained, designed to prepare for the heightened class combat coming. Other examples he mentioned included the almost daily bombing of Iraq, the coming NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and the star wars military buildup that is designed for first strike capacity, not defense against "rogue states."
Castle addressed the objections of those that say, "forgive and forget; let's take the politics out of the award ceremony."
"To those people who want to forgive and forget, I would simply ask the question, who has the ethical right to forgive? Certainly not the Academy. The Academy was initially set up by the capitalist film producers to keep the unions out of the industry," said Castle.
"And forgiveness is usually based on some kind of recognition of sorrow. Something that is not forthcoming from Kazan. It seems that on the issue of separating politics and art, that line was crossed by Kazan himself with his cowardly act of betrayal."
In closing, Britton asked, "What kind of lifetime achievement do we want to honor? Generations in the future will respect fighters like José Solís for not trying to cut a deal."