March 21 - 22, 2026 What a touching standing ovation Amy Madigan received when she won the best supporting actress award at last week’s Oscars while husband Ed Harris beamed with pride. Some folks on social media, however, were quick to point out that when director Elia Kazan received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999, both Madigan and Harris refused to stand. Kazan, a fierce anticommunist, had named names, which many in Hollywood found unforgivable. Of course many on the blacklist were, in fact, Communists, while others were, shall we say, amenable to change. Such details seem to be overlooked in the “Blacklisted: An American Story“ exhibit at the Capital Jewish Museum. Ronald Radosh lays it all out in his review. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7m2n!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F098d1a9c-35e5-49f2-8200-6e5d71a24f25_609x491.jpeg A section called ‘Unfriendly Witness’ ... turns to the plight of the Communist screenwriter Albert Maltz, who, showing a streak of independence, wrote an article for the Communist cultural magazine, New Masses. Therein he posited in 1946 that the ‘accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straightjacket.’ His viewpoint challenged the entire CP view of art. The immediate response from his comrades was to condemn him for abandoning Marxism, for holding ‘bourgeois concepts,’ for holding a ‘discredited humanist tradition,’ for ignoring the ‘class struggle.’ Finally, CP chairman Eugene Dennis said that what Maltz wrote was ‘a bourgeois-intellectual and semi-Trotskyite article.’ “Maltz is presented as a hero. The exhibit fails to tell viewers that he immediately capitulated to his comrade’s demands to repudiate what he had written and obviously believed. Apologizing that his article was nothing less than ‘a non-dialectical treatment of complex issues,’ Maltz agreed that, if listened to, ‘would lead to the dissolution of the left-wing cultural movement.’ Having refused to cooperate with HUAC and name names of those he knew in Hollywood to be fellow Communists, he revealed it was harder to stand against one’s own group and milieu than it was to tell HUAC to go to hell. To oppose HUAC was to gain the approval and support of his Communist movie community; to write something he believed and that was opposite to the tenants of Marxism-Leninism meant complete ostracization that only succumbing to the party’s demands made on him would restore him to good standing.” “Then one must pay attention to the most famous of all the blacklisted Hollywood writers, the talented and brilliant screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Trumbo had published his novel Johnny Got His Gun, a searing antiwar novel ... about a World War I vet who lost his sight and all his limbs. It was meant to increase antiwar sentiment when the FDR administration was beginning to provide aid to Great Britain. It won the National Book Award for Best Original Novel in 1939. “When Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher suspended printing of Johnny Got His Gun, and Trumbo appealed to readers who had bought it to return or destroy the book. He also did one other little-known action: In 1944, he asked the FBI to come to his house to look at letters he had received from people who wanted to know how they could get a copy of Johnny Got His Gun. Charging that the writers were clearly still antiwar, still isolationist, and some were as well pro-Hitler and opposed fiercely to the president, he gave their names to the bureau. His view, he wrote the FBI, was that his book ‘shouldn’t be reprinted until the war was at an end.’ He was afraid, however, that the letter-writers ‘could adversely affect the war effort’ if the book was made available. In 1970, he acknowledged that ‘I foolishly reported their activities to the FBI.’ Yet he still thought he was right to oppose getting into the war in 1939 because it would be a ‘disastrous course’ to move away from isolationism, which is also why he spoke up against Lend-Lease aid to Britain, arguing that would be like handing a gun to a ‘hot-headed man.’”