Senator Joseph McCarthy. Photo Credit, United Press – Library of Congress, Public Domain

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Bogie Versus the Committee

by Norman B. Schwartz

There is a common misconception that it was the malevolent Senator Joseph McCarthy who was responsible for destroying the careers and lives of many an actor, writer and director during the inglorious days of Hollywood blacklisting. No, he was not. The junior senator from Wisconsin, ever eager to gain the public’s attention and increase his chances of rising to higher office, was too ambitious to bother with West Coast small fry; he set his eyes instead on a higher enemy: the United States State Department and the Department of Defense, whose quarters were in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. Los Angeles was too far away to be worthy of his bile.

McCarthy understood Hollywood had always been the special province of the less ambitious publicity seekers in the lower chamber of Congress. He, after all, was in the Senate. In theory, the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee formed to investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and organizations suspected of having Nazi and Communist ties. But in reality, it was a perfect vehicle for drawing attention to itself.

The committee had been on the attack against Hollywood as early as 1938, three years before America entered the Second World War. Back then, Texas’s Martin Dies, the committee chairman, reported the entire film industry as tainted. In 1940, a former Communist Party official in Los Angeles appeared before his committee and named forty-two substantial and hitherto impeccable members of the film community, including actors Fredric March, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn.

Most ridiculous of all, he accused little Shirley Temple, then ten years old and America’s sweetheart, of sending greetings to the newspaper, Ce Soir, an organ of the French Communist Party. The Hollywood grownups protested and agreed willingly to testify behind closed doors but insisted they leave the adorable moppet alone. All denied being supporters of the then legal CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States). In August of that year, Chairman Dies, a fan of all of them, released a statement absolving the actors of any ties to the party. So far so good.

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But after the war, the national atmosphere had changed. The Republican Party, long out of power during the imperial reign of Franklin Roosevelt, four-term President of the United States, discovered they had only to accuse the Democrat Party of losing China to the communists and coddling the left to win national approval. It was in such a paranoid atmosphere as this that the committee met again.

In 1947, in May, two years after the war, the committee, whose chairman was now J. Parnell Thomas Jr, the son of Jersey City’s police commissioner, held hearings in Hollywood. (One of its committee members was a recent war veteran, former naval officer, now congressman, Richard Nixon of California.) With some justification, Thomas claimed that Roosevelt and the White House had pressured the studio heads to produce “flagrant Communist propaganda films.” As Russia has been FDR’s ally during the war, the charge had some basis in fact. Thomas had a long list of big studio films like Song of Russia, The North Star, and Mission to Moscow, which he claimed favored Russia’s “ideologies, institutions and way of life over the same things in America.”

The House committee then subpoenaed eighteen men, mostly writers and mostly Jewish, and ordered them to appear in Washington.

Back in Hollywood, many liberal Democrats felt outraged. John Huston, screenwriter Philip Dunne, and director William Wyler, winner of that year’s Oscar for The Best Years of Our Lives, formed the Committee for the First Amendment and invited Katharine Hepburn and Fredric March (who had been accused by the committee years before) to join Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, her husband Orson Welles, Groucho Marx, Paulette Goddard, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and writers George S. Kaufman and Archibald MacLeish. These celebrities, before and behind the camera, gathered in a studio on 26 October 1947, to broadcast a nationwide radio program entitled Hollywood Fights Back.

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In Washington, the less celebrated writer victims of this witch hunt, once indicted for refusing to state their political affiliations, claimed their First Amendment rights, and asked for emotional support from their more famous colleagues on the western coast.

Huston, remembering those days, wrote: “We got the feeling that the country was with us, that the national temper resembled ours – indignant and disapproving of what was going on.” He got a call from Howard Hughes, playboy film producer and the head of TWA. Hughes said: “John, I understand you are planning a trip to Washington, and I just want you to know that you can use one of my airplanes. Not for nothing, because, by law, I have to charge you something, but you can have it for the minimum rate allowable…and it will be all to yourselves.”

Lauren Bacall also remembered those days in her autobiography. “I became very emotional about it. I was up in arms – fervent. ‘We must go.’ […] So it was decided that a group of us would fly to Washington – John Huston, Phil Dunne, Ira Gershwin, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Paul Henreid, John Garfield, June Havoc, Evelyn Keyes…. God, it was exciting. I couldn’t wait to get to Washington. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we really could effect a change – if we could make that Committee stop?”

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After the long trip by propeller plane with many stops, the Californians presented themselves in the committee room before the klieg lights and the newsreel cameras. Chairman Thomas, ever eager for publicity, understood their presence would be as beneficial to his career and reserved a row of seats at the back of the committee room – far enough away not to upstage the politicians but close enough to be picked up by the cameras.

What Huston and his pals had hoped to be a legitimate protest turned out to be a circus. John Howard Lawson, first president of the Screen Writers Guild, was one of the first called. He had made no secret of his ideological views. As early as 1934, he proudly announced he had joined the Communist Party, adding, “I do not hesitate to say that it is my aim to present the Communist position.”

Seated under the klieg lights at a table near the committee’s dais, Lawson, like the actors he had so often written for, savored his shining moment in the spotlight; he rose to the occasion and announced that he wanted to read a statement, which he handed to the chairman. Thomas read it silently—

“For a week, this Committee has conducted an illegal and indecent trial of American citizens, whom the Committee has selected to be publicly pilloried and smeared. I am not here to defend myself, or to answer the agglomeration of falsehoods that has been heaped upon me….”

Thomas stopped. “I don’t care to read any more of the statement.” He pronounced: “The statement will not be read.”

Lawson responded: “You have spent one week vilifying me before the American public. And you refuse to allow me to make a statement on my rights as an American citizen.”

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The best record of this memorable rhetorical confrontation is the official transcript and the footage the newsreel cameras shot. To the constant banging of the gavel, the overlapping of voices, both men began shouting at each other, soon joined by Congressman Stripling and others of the committee; no man letting the other finish what he was saying—

LAWSON I am glad you have made it perfectly clear that you are going to threaten and intimidate the witnesses, Mr Chairman. [The chairman pounds gavel.] I am an American and I am not at all easy to intimidate, and don’t think I am. [The chairman pounds gavel.]

STRIPLING Mr Lawson, I repeat the question—

THOMAS [pounding gavel] We are going to get the answer to that question if we have to stay here for a week. Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

LAWSON It is unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of American—

THOMAS [pounds gavel] That is not the question. That is not the question. The question is: Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

LAWSON I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, affiliations and everything else to the American public, and they will know where I stand.

THOMAS [pounds gavel] Excuse the witness—

LAWSON As they do from what I have written.

THOMAS [pounding gavel] Stand away from the stand—

LAWSON I shall continue to fight for the Bill of Rights, which you are trying to destroy.

THOMAS Officers, take this man away from the stand.

Applause and boos.

What they instantly recognized as hyperbole and overacting appalled the movie stars seated in the back row who knew from their years on soundstages that what was being photographed before them was too big for the camera. OTT. Over the top.

Each summoned writer who was called imitated Lawson’s and Thomas’s rhetoric. Each man tried to outdo the other in bluster and outrage. The spectators hated them all.

John Huston said: “It was a sorry performance. You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I disapproved of what was being done…but I also disapproved of their response. They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle…. Before this spectacle, the attitude of the press had been extremely sympathetic. Now it changed….”

At eleven o’clock that evening, Huston summoned his Hollywood contingency to a meeting at his hotel suite in Washington.

“I think our mission here is finished,” he said. “You all have your return tickets, and you can get back any way you want.” Lauren Bacall remembered the moment well. Someone suggested that Bogie issue a statement saying he wasn’t a communist and that he had no sympathy for the unfriendly witnesses. “This he refused to do….” Paul Henreid, who had played Bogie’s rival for Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, recalled the encounter differently. “Bogart gave an interview to the press in which he attempted to retract what he had said and done. ‘I didn’t know the people I was with were fellow-travelers,’ he told the reporters…. I felt Bogart’s statement was a form of betrayal, and it was the end of our friendship.”

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When the Hollywood celebrities returned home to Hollywood, they held another meeting.

According to one screenwriter who attended, “Bogart was furious. He was shouting at Danny Kaye, ‘You fuckers sold me out,’ and he left.”

A few months later, the fan magazine Photoplay published an article under Bogart’s byline, which smacked not of his tough guy voice but that of the publicity machine hired to defend him. Bogart’s explanation in the article, “I’m No Communist,” was simply that he’d been a “dope.”

Thus, did he and the once courageous liberals of Hollywood retreat. The year was 1948. They stood by, as did so many terrified men and women then, while ten men, the now famous Hollywood Ten, went to jail.

But, as the studio heads knew, once their house was cleaned, the movie business would go on. And did.

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / post-production dialogue director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz’s essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of Ars Notoria Magazine. In October of 2025, a paperback edition of the complete collection of his essays titled: HOLLYOOD  Actors & Politicos/ a Shared Profession will  be available for purchase from Centre House Press.