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“There’s no shortage of comparisons with the second Trump administration to the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany,” the Guardian reports, “but perhaps the more apt comparison is to the Red Scare in postwar America.” The reference is to Blacklisted: An American Story, at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, which proclaims:

This timely exhibition explores the intersections of politics, antisemitism, freedom of speech, and national security during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. With the rise of the Cold War and global communism, anxiety over Soviet infiltration fanned fears in the United States.

Numerous industries, including Hollywood and the federal government, purged those accused or suspected of being Communists—many of whom were Jews.

And so on, but the real story is quite different. Jews played a major role in the rise of the American movie industry and groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The league flourished until August 23, 1939, when Stalin and Hitler signed their Pact to divide up Europe. The next month, both totalitarian dictators invaded Poland, effectively starting World War II.

During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists and other disapproved groups directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. Margarete Buber-Neumann described the handover in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. The author survived the Soviet gulag and the Nazis’ Ravensbrück, but millions of others perished. During the Pact many Communists, Jewish and otherwise, left the Communist Party, never to return. That was not true of Stalinists like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, featured in the “blacklist” exhibit.

During the Pact, Trumbo (pictured above) wrote The Remarkable Andrew, in which the ghost of Gen. Andrew Jackson argues against military aid to England because it is “already licked.” During the Pact, the Communist Party picketed the White House and fomented strikes at American defense industries. Trumbo also wrote Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel the Communist Party serialized in the Daily Worker. That changed after Hitler attacked the USSR in June of 1941.

Trumbo withdrew Johnny Got His Gun from publication and even gave the FBI the names of readers who might be “anti-war.” After Pearl Harbor, the Communist Party supported the wartime alliance to defeat Hitler. That changed in April, 1945, with Stalin’s declaration, issued through French Communist Jacques Duclos, that the wartime alliance was over. In the USSR and its captive territories, Stalin revived traditional anti-Semitism, dubbing Jews “rootless cosmopolitans” and such. The 1952 Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia came to the attention of former Communist Robert Rossen, director of All the King’s Men.

The victims were “all hung, in my opinion, for being Jews, and nothing else – I don’t think they were traitors to the Soviet Union,” Rossen told a government committee. “The Soviet Union knew that by raising the word ‘Jew’ and raising the word ‘traitor’ it was specifically inciting the people of these various countries, which had been hotbeds of anti-Semitism for hundreds of years.” Nothing like that from Dalton Trumbo and other Hollywood Stalinists.

The Communist Party cast writers as “artists in uniform,” writing only to support Party policy.

When Albert Maltz deviated from that line, the Party subjected him to an inquisition and forced Maltz to write a groveling retraction, which he defended to the end of his days.

After the war, a search for Communist International (Comintern) agent Gerhart Eisler brought the House Committee on Un-American Activities to Hollywood, and that led to hearings in 1947. Nineteen “unfriendly witnesses” were pared down to ten, including Maltz and Trumbo.

Before the hearings, studio bosses said they would not fire Communists. The bellicose performances of the Ten changed their mind. Revisionists of the left portrayed the screen Stalinists as defenders of free speech, which was never true.

Trumbo (2015) does not show the screenwriter’s service for Stalin during the Pact, when the Soviets handed Jews to the Nazis. Films such as Guilty by Suspicion perpetuated the “Red Scare” myth now on display in the “blacklisted” show. A better guide is the late great Elia Kazan.

Unlike Albert Maltz, Kazan defied control of his work, left the Communist party, and testified against the Stalinists as dangerous enemies of freedom. In Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) testifies against waterfront boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), who bumped off Terry’s brother and other dissident workers.

“I’m glad what I done to you!” shouts Terry in the showdown scene, “and I’m gonna keep on doin’ it!”

In his 1997 autobiography, Kazan said On the Waterfront was his own story and “every day I worked on that film I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves.” The screen Stalinists were some of the most loathsome people in American history. Former Communists like Kazan were glad what they did to them, and they kept on doing it.

The film won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director for Kazan, and best supporting actress for Eva Marie Saint, at this writing the oldest living Academy Award winner. On July 4, Saint turns 102 and America turns 250. Let freedom ring, and there’s another Washington event to remember.

In 1987, Radical Son David Horowitz staged the Second Thoughts Conference, a gathering of former leftists. Joshua Muravchik told everybody to “be fraternal, promote democracy, off the commies, power to the people.” So keep on doing it.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.