Wed Sep 18, 2019 Lloyd Billingsley 20
Debra Messing and Eric McCormack, billed as “co-stars” of something called Will & Grace, have called for the “blacklisting” of those attending fundraisers for President Trump. As the Washington Examiner put it, this was “so that Hollywood Democrats could refuse to work with them in the future.” As RT.com had it, this drew “natural comparisons to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy’s efforts in the 1950s to rid Hollywood of ‘Communist sympathizers.’” These efforts might pack more clout if they had the history right.
The primary investigator of Communism in Hollywood was a House committee that started with a probe of fascism during the 1930s, and as William F. Buckley said, should have been called the Committee to Investigate Fascism and Communism. It wound up being called the House Committee on Un-American Activities and after World War II, congressional sleuths were after Communist International (Comintern) agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns Eisler was a composer in Hollywood.
When HCUA reps showed up there, that caught the attention of many in the dream factories. As Budd Schulberg noted, the Communist Party was the only game in town during the 1930s and 1940s. The CPUSA controlled unions that read incoming scripts and trashed the work of conservative writers. The Party also smeared and blacklisted actors they didn’t like and attacked them directly during the violent studio strikes and jurisdictional disputes following World War II. The chief anti-Communists were liberal Democrat union leaders such as Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild and Roy Brewer of IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. ...........To Read More....
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