Gary DeMar | July 1, 2019
(American Vision) – “Hasta la victoria, siempre.” The current mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, said this to striking workers at Miami International Airport. “The phrase — which translates roughly to ‘Ever on to victory!’ — was a mantra for Guevara, who became one of Fidel Castro’s top lieutenants. Raúl Castro uttered the quote on Cuban television in 2016 when he announced to the world that his older brother had died.”
Here’s the problem. The airport workers are familiar with the phrase. Many of them left Cuba because of it:
Guevara, though hated by Miami’s Cuban exile community, has been treated by some leftists as a martyr and to some extent became a pop culture figure following his execution in Bolivia. De Blasio took an interest in the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the late ’80s and honeymooned in Cuba, according to The New York Times.
DeBlasio said he didn’t know the phrase was used by Che Guevara and Raul Castro. The Left always pleads ignorance when it comes to committing a political faux pas. De Blasio and his fellow-Democrats are Leftists like Che Guevara and the Castro brothers. They have always been on the wrong side of history when it comes to Communism. The Hollywood Left is similarly brain dead when it comes to their political support for Leftists.
They are Communism’s “useful idiots.” The people who make their living off the free market and freedom of expression support an ideology that is contrary to their own profession. Under the communist regimes and ideologies they support, their work would be censored and their lives would be in jeopardy.
There’s nothing new in any of this.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood producers, directors, and actors were being scrutinized for their political beliefs. The period of “red hysteria” put people’s jobs in the film industry in jeopardy. “Artists were barred from work on the basis of their alleged membership in or sympathy toward the American Communist Party, involvement in liberal or humanitarian political causes that enforcers of the blacklist associated with communism, and/or refusal to assist federal investigations into Communist Party activities; some were blacklisted merely because their names came up at the wrong place and time.”
Writers and directors testified before Congress and the specially called House Committee on Un-American Activities. When a group of 10 writers and directors — the so-called Hollywood Ten — refused to testify before the committee, a Hollywood “blacklist” was instituted on November 25, 1947. On June 22, 1950, the journal Counterattack published Red Channels, a report on the “Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The booklet identified 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others it believed were using the entertainment industry to spread Communist ideals. Even before publication, some on the list were already being denied employment because of their political beliefs. Beginning in May of 1947, the Counterattack newsletter published weekly information on the political views of entertainment figures.
On November 25, 1947 (the day after the House of Representatives approved citations of contempt for the Hollywood Ten because of their refusal to testify), Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued a two-page press release that represented the views of the heads of the major studios. The “Waldorf Statement,” as it came to be called, announced the firing of the Hollywood Ten and stated:
“We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist. . . . We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States.”
Most people today would not recognize the names of the Hollywood Ten. The Oscar-winning Dalton Trumbo (1905 –1976) might be the exception. He started as one of the highest paid writers in Hollywood making $4000 per week and worked on a number of noted films: Kitty Foyle (1940), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Spartacus (1960), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes(1945), starring Edward G. Robinson whose name was published in the Red Channels book (you can read the entire 157-page book here), although Robinson was never “officially” blacklisted. Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun,1won an American Book Sellers Award that year.2
It didn’t help Trumbo that the novel was serialized in the Communist periodical The Daily Worker in March 1940 and “became ‘a rallying point for the left’ which had opposed involvement in World War II during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.” This and a visit from the FBI3 made Trumbo persona non grata among many in Hollywood, especially since, politics aside, bad publicity could doom a film that was written by a pacifist during a time of war and Soviet expansion. How do you sell a movie to a patriotic public when the screenplay was written by a “Commie”? Hollywood was then and is now more about money than ideology.
As Paul Buhle and David Wagner conclude in their book Hide in Plain Sight: “Hollywood was always about money. It still is.” Left-leaning actors, writers, directors, and producers knew this, that’s why the movies they worked on did not espouse too much of their radical ideology. Their ideology was expressed in more subtle ways, mostly in television where many migrated to make a living. They made their money from the system of government and economics that they hoped to reshape based on what would prove to be a failed political system. Little has changed in our day. Leftists extol the virtues of Che, Fidel, described as “Hollywood’s favorite tyrant,”4 and Hugo [Chavez] while failing to comprehend that their profession would be taken over and used for propaganda purposes if their radical political dreams were realized and something like Hugo Chavez’s form of government ever gained a foothold in this country. Trumbo was still able to make a living while blacklisted since producers could get his services at bargain-basement prices if his work went uncredited or was acknowledged under an assumed name. In fact, he had more work than he could handle.5
The film blacklist ended in 1960 when Kirk Douglas, the star and executive producer of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, credited blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, of the Hollywood Ten, as the movie’s writer, using Trumbo’s real name. Ever since his blacklisting in 1947, Trumbo had been submitting scripts under the pseudonym Sam Jackson. President-elect John Kennedy crossed American Legion picket lines to view Spartacus, thereby lending the credibility of the nation’s highest office to the effort to end blacklisting. . . . Also in 1960, director Otto Preminger publicly announced that Trumbo had written his blockbuster film, Exodus.6
The Hollywood blacklist era has outraged liberals for more than 70 years, but this hasn’t stopped modern-day liberals from creating their own version of a blacklist of conservatives. This is especially true of up and coming actors who are trying to make it in Hollywood. More established actors are a bit more free to express their conservative views since they are box-office draws. This was especially true for someone like Charlton Heston who continued to work even though he was perceived to be far to the right politically. “Though often portrayed as an ultra-conservative, Heston wrote in his 1995 autobiography ‘In the Arena’ that he was opposed to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, was against the Vietnam War and thought President Richard Nixon was bad for America.” He also participated in the March on Washington in 1963, along with liberal icons Burt Lancaster, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte (see images here and here). It didn’t matter since he was pro-Second Amendment.
The 2008 Franken-Coleman election in Minnesota was a testimony to the fact that conservatives fear liberal blacklisting. A lot of liberal money came in to support of Franken by noted liberals like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Steve Martin. Because the FCC database is open to the media, those who donate are available to the Hollywood left. A conservative who donated to Coleman would be “outed” in periodicals like Variety and Politico and might find it difficult getting steady work in the entertainment industry (see the interview here).
A similar tactic is being used to punish those who supported Proposition 8. A Los Angeles Times article reports that many “in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban. Already out is Scott Eckern, director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, who resigned after a flurry of complaints from prominent theater artists, including ‘Hairspray’ composer Marc Shaiman, when word of his contribution to the Yes on [Prop] 8 campaign surfaced.”
A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle who supported Prop 8 was intimidated when Internet search engines were used “to find the letter writer’s small business, his Web site (which included the names of his children and dog), his phone number and his clients. And they posted that information in the ‘Comments’ section of SFGate.com—urging, in ugly language, retribution against the author’s business and its identified clients.”
Now, is this to say that conservatives can’t work in Hollywood today? Not at all. Is there a fear factor that keeps conservatives from speaking out? I don’t doubt it. Those who are touted as conservatives usually have no stated public opinion on abortion and homosexuality. Patricia Heaton and Angie Harmon are notable exceptions. Kurt Russell is listed as a conservative, actually, a libertarian, which might explain why he’s living with Goldie Hawn and not married to her, although I must say that he’s stayed with her longer than Brad Pitt did with Jennifer Aniston. Many (most?) are economic conservatives like Kelsey Grammar and Drew Carey. And there are more who are being encouraged to make their conservative beliefs public.
Jon Voight is an outspoken conservative. He has taken on Communist sympathizer Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez (D-NY) and Hollywood Leftist Alyssa Milano. “I have sympathy for people that are in ignorance. It doesn’t scare me. Ignorance doesn’t scare me. I was like that myself. I just root for everybody to come to the truth,” he said. He called socialism a “disaster” and lamented “that young people are being ‘indoctrinated’ in schools and don’t fully understand the perils of socialist policies.”
Like so many in the Democrat Party, liberals are hypocritical. They decry the blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s but don’t seem to mind if the “right” people are being blacklisted today who defy their pet causes. So what’s the solution? Beat them at their own game. Write and produce better films that make money, make people laugh, cry, think, and imagine! The following makes a good non-whining point:
[I]n entertainment, people want escapism, not spinach or propaganda. It’s why (as conservatives note) few went to see last year’s group of movies critical of the War on Terror (In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, etc.) or this year’s W., but it’s also why few went to see American Carol, either. (It’s not a liberal conspiracy that both Carol and W. are being roundly ignored in favor of talking chihuahuas.) Explicitly partisan movies, left or right, don’t seem to do as well as those that give both sides a voice or whose ideology takes a backseat to plot and character development.
Amen! Beat the Left at their own game with a superior product.
Notes:
- The title comes from the line “Johnny get your gun” from the George M. Cohan song “Over There” (1917) that was used for recruitment for WW I and II. For the lyrics, go here. Watch the scene from Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) starring James Cagney is shown singing the song along with soldiers marching in front of the White House.
- In 1971, the novel was turned into a film of the same name and a low-budget Live On-Stage production in 2008.
- Trumbo tells the circumstances surrounding the FBI visit in the Introduction to the 1959 edition of Johnny Got Your Gun (see here).
- Humberto Fontova, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2005). “The book criticizes American celebrities, particularly Hollywood actors, who support Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba and often travel to meet with Castro personally. Among those singled out are Jack Nicholson, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Chevy Chase, Steven Spielberg, Ted Turner, and Dan Rather.”
- Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 208.
- Richard A. Schwartz, “How the Film and Television Blacklists Worked.”