About the Blacklist
I added this section to my webpage because the blacklist is an old tragedy that we need, especially now, to remember. The Hollywood blacklist, one of the products of the Red Scare of the 1950s, shattered careers. Friends were asked to inform on friends. Anyone who was even suspected of Communist sympathies could have their life ruined on the whim of the House Un-American Activities Committeee.
My parents were screenwriters. They were never, so far as they knew, blacklisted. There were times when they just didn't get work. It might have been the usual inconvenience of a freelance career. It might have been something else. Maybe someone had mentioned them, maybe their names were similar to someone's, maybe anything. Then they got work again, and didn't ask, because you couldn't ask.
Michael Wilson was a family friend. In 1951 he appeared as an "unfriendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was subsequently blacklisted. In 1976 he gave this speech to the Writers Guild of America, West. It seems to me extremely prescient and I am grateful to the Writers Guild and the late Zelma Wilson for permission to quote it.
"I don't want to dwell on the past, but for a few moments to speak of the future. And I address my remarks particularly to you younger men and women who had perhaps not established yourselves in this industry at the time of the great witch hunt. I feel that unless you remember this dark epoch and understand it, you maybe doomed to replay it. Not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues. But I see a day perhaps coming in your lifetime, if not in mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this republic; when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty; and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time, whatever they may be. If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks, and protect their right to work. The Guild will have the use and need of rebels if it is to survive as a union of free writers. This nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society."
Mike died in 1978. In 1986 he was given posthumous screen credit for The Bridge on the River Kwai and other films, and his wife and daughters were presented with his Oscar.
For readers interested in the history and legacy of the Hollywood blacklist, and the lasting damage it did, there are excellent books on the subject, including Naming Names by Victor Navasky, The Inquisition in Hollywood by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, and Tender Comrades by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, among many others. They are worth reading right now.