The Life And Death Of A Hollywood Blacklist

Sometimes Censorship Is A Public-private Partnership.
 

- Jesse Walker

Ayn Rand WAS a blacklist truther. The novelist and screenwriter had been a friendly witness during the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ 1947 hearings on Hollywood subversion—the probe that prompted the studios to announce that they would not hire Communists. But when she was asked about her testimony two decades later, she claimed that the blacklist was a myth.

“I do not know of any red blacklisted in Hollywood,” Rand told a Boston audience in 1967. “I do know, if the newspaper stories can be trusted, that many of those ‘blacklisted’ people...were working in Hollywood thereafter under assumed names.” The real victims, she insisted, were the hearings’ friendly witnesses. “You talk about the blacklisting of reds. I don’t know of one leftist who has suffered for his views, and conversely, I don’t know of one procapitalist who in one form or another did not have to suffer for his views.”

This was misleading, to put it mildly. The blacklist really did exist. It was an organized effort to remove people from the movie industry for their political opinions, and the federal government played a major role in launching it. Anyone who cares about free expression should object to that sort of censorship by proxy, both as it manifested itself in the early days of the Cold War and as it threatens to re-emerge in social media today.