As the new DCJCC celebrates the victims of the blacklist, it is worth remembering that their experience of injustice still doesn't justify them

By Evan Gahr

The newly-renovated District of Columbia Jewish Community Center boasts a state-of-the-art health club and shiny new facilities.

Nevertheless, the DCJCC, in at least one key respect, remains firmly rooted in the past. Its Hollywood blacklist exhibit seems straight from the 1960s and 1970s -- when folks still depicted Stalinist playwright Lillian Hellman as a civil libertarian and Communist Party USA members were routinely portrayed as simply naive do-gooders.

That line should be a mighty tough sell now that the recently-released VENONA intercepts (Soviet wartime cables) establish the American Communist Party's role as the linchpin of a Russian spy network here. That revelation, of course, directly contradicts the notion that Communist Party members were simply idealists or "liberals in a hurry."

Who could peddle such stuff today? Sadly, the DCJCC -- with a little financial help, ironically enough, from Uncle Sam. The exhibt, which blows one huge kiss to the 10 writers, producers and directors named as Communists by "friendly witnesses'' before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, is funded by the NEA-subsidized DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Senators weighing the recently-announced nomination of William Ivey to head the NEA might want to inquire if he thinks that glorifying communists and essentially re-writing the historical record is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars.

Moreover, the exhibit is just part of the DCJCC's multi-media celebration of the Hollywood 10 and other blacklisted writers that continues through February 12. In tribute to Hollywood 10 member Paul Jarrico, a longtime communist, the DCJCC on January 28 will screen his notorious 1954 film Salt of the Earth. Although you wouldn't know it from the DCJCC's official program, a Stalinist trade union financed the film. Details, details.

In an exhibit with placards that abound with references to the Red Scare, the Communist Party membership of the Hollywood 10 is virtually ignored, meriting just one brief mention out of approximately 3,400 words devoted to the blacklist's "history." That's too bad: it's one thing to argue that calling the Hollywood 10 before HUAC to answer questions regarding political beliefs and affiliations raised serious constitutional questions. But there's no reason why this bunch of scoundrels should be elevated to the ranks of bona fide Jewish heroes.

As Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund write in The Inquisition in Hollywood almost all the Hollywood Communists "defended the Stalinist regime, accepted the Comintern's policies and about-faces and criticized enemies and allies alike with infuriating self-righteousness."

Yet folks who visit the exhibit get a different portrait: noble idealists, victimized by Red Scare, defend First Amendment before HUAC, their lives ruined.

They were swept up in the "suspicions, paranoia and national fear of Communism" and "eventually called before HUAC." The "confrontation between the Committee and the Hollywood Ten resulted in one of the most dramatic struggles over free speech and patriotism that this country has ever witnessed."

Who was struggling on behalf of free speech? The exhibit notes that the Hollywood 10 refused to answer questions on First Amendment grounds and quotes extensively their odes to civil liberties. But their Communist Party activities and loyalties get short shrift: "each of the Hollywood Ten was a member of the Communist Party at some point or another, with varying degrees of participation.'' That's it.

There's plenty of space to cite director Herbert Biberman's warning that HUAC threatened the American "constitutional way of life'' But no explanation that, far from an ACLUnik who had simply dabbled in Communist causes during his youth, he remained an unrepentant Communist long after the hearings. And director John Howard Lawson is mentioned only in the context of his refusal to answer questions on First Amendment grounds. A regular Nat Hentoff? Not exactly: Lawson functioned as a virtual Communist Party commisar in Hollywood --"reaming out" members for transgressions, domestic communism expert Harvey Klehr said in a telephone interview.

By failing to give detailed information regarding their Communist Party activities, the exhibit plays into the Hollywood 10's faux civil-libertarian pose.

As historian Ronald Radosh notes in the December 1997 New Criterion, the Hollywood 10 insisted "upon hiding their true political beliefs before HUAC." Instead they offered the spurious claim that "their main goal was simply to defend the right of any American to his private political views."

None of this is new, of course. But it doesn't seem to have made its way to the DCJCC's exhibit. Perhaps the kid glove treatment accorded the Hollywood 10, as well as other blacklisted writers, most of whom were also communists, shouldn't surprise. Consider the hard-left luminaries who worked on the exhibit. They include Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing group which regarded America as the evil empire during the Cold War. Raskin and a fellow IPSer, Richard Barnet, have even argued in their book An American Manifesto that "there is a chance for peace and social justice in America only if her people are liberated from the dead hand of authoritarianism.''

Another contributor: Nation publisher Victor Navasky, author of Naming Names, an affectionate account of the blacklisted artists. Navasky says he consulted with the exhibit's curator Alison Clarick Gottsegen but hasn't seen the exhibit. He would undoubtedly be pleased.

Moreoever, the context for the Red Scare, namely the Soviet Union's crimes and expansionist policies is omitted. Why? "We had limited space,'' explains curator Alison Clarick Gottsegen. "We're just telling the basic story. Just the basics.''

Ultimately, however the exhibit seems mired in another era. Moreover, the idea that the DCJCC would mount such an exhibit today seems quite remarkable. It's 1997, not 1977.

If you believe the exhibit's facile line, visitors are given a glimpse into the nation's past: the 1950s when a Red Scare gripped Washington, and yada, yada yada. The real glimpse into the past that the exhibit provides, however, is the 1970s -- when rank ignorance combined with willful and self-serving distortions passed for conventional wisdom among the media and cultural elite regarding communism.

Ultimately, however, an exhibit that purports to educate simply rehabilitates tired canards. Scoundrels are treated as heroes; the historical record re- written and the Soviet Union's record expunged. The end result is a profound disservice to the community the DCJCC is meant to serve.

The DCJCC, of course, re-opened January 1997 in the same building it had moved from nearly 30 years ago. And here in Washington, aging lefties who haven't been inside the DCJCC since before it closed in 1968 will be delighted to find that very little has changed.