Imagine if one of America's foremost writers had once been privy to a shadowy plot by Hitler's Germany to take control of the motion picture industry through its labor organizations and force writers to clear scripts with Nazi censors, and then he courageously stepped forward to blow the whistle on the whole operation.
Wouldn't it be bizarre if, when this man died, instead of being celebrated for such heroism, he was criticized and even attacked by colleagues for revealing the identities of those who were behind the intrigue?
This strange scenario isn't far from what unfolded in the media last week when novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg died. The only difference is that Schulberg, once a communist, blew the whistle on Stalin's murderous Soviet regime and the Communist Party it controlled in America.
In obituaries and remembrances, Schulberg was praised for his talent, but his taking the witness chair in a congressional investigation of communism during the height of the Korean War was another matter entirely. This was almost universally characterized as a dark, shameful part of Schulberg's life: He "named names," telling Congress of people he knew who were party members, and supposedly betrayed friends. Many who wrote about Schulberg seem mystified about how an artist who proudly embraced liberalism all his life could at the same time participate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, now regarded as a government-sponsored witch hunt.
Perhaps this take on Schulberg and others who similarly rebuked the party shouldn't be all that surprising. Stories of "heroes" who refused to testify and of the horrors of the Hollywood blacklist pervade the culture. But there's another side to the story. The Communist Party was in fact a real threat and a real force damaging American institutions. The profound contribution beyond literature and film that Schulberg made by testifying to that has been almost completely lost to history.
"Naming names" was the least significant aspect of what Schulberg said at the witness table on that spring day in 1951. Going after individuals was not the point or the focus of his testimony, nor was it what dominated the news reports at the time. (In fact, those who were named as party members in the course of his testimony were for the most part already known.)
Instead, the key message from the vivid story he told was how aggressively communism was at war with individual creativity -- and how the last thing a true writer, liberal or labor man would want to be is a communist.
