Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Persecution of communists in hollywood, or of patriots?

By RM
wednesday, july 10, 2024 at 8:24:00 p.m. edt

Here’s a list of celebrities appearing on a democratic fundraising telethon exactly 50 years ago, at the height of Watergate:

Bette Davis, Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Dick Cavett, Milton Berle, Helen Reddy, Edie Adams, Robert Goulet, Kris Kristofferson, Lorne Greene, Ralph Bellamy, Cliff Robertson, Robert Vaughn, Cass Elliott, Jason Robards, Frank Gifford, Don McLean, Trini Lopez (not Trini Lopez! Say it ain’t so!), Jackie Cooper, Will Geer, Connie Stevens, Della Reese, Tony Randall.

You might suspect that by that time, the entertainment industry was 99.9% “liberal” (John Wayne perhaps being the other .01%).

An actor named Robert Hutton said in an interview, regarding the supposed “persecution” of communists, that in the 1950s there were so many commies in hollywood that you were ostracized if you WEREN’T one. And he was certainly marginalized as an actor.

-RM

N.S.: While members of the communist party/usa were blacklisted, countless hollywood reds were crypto-communists—reds who never joined the party. They were prudent that way. The blacklistees had joined the party while FDR was president, and must have been confident that the political winds would never change course against them. Over-confident. Two prominent crypto-communists were actor Robert Ryan (1909-1973) and screenwriter-director-producer Richard Brooks (1912-1992).



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

At least there were stars back then.Pretty amazing,the mindset of those people,a mass anti-American delusion,festering in their brains.We are the hoi polloi,they are better than us--by virtue of being movie,tv stars or singers.The guilt of making millions must be the problem,living in mansions,driving the best cars,going on vacations around the world,bedding the best looking actors and actresses,so their minds turn to thinking they can "change the world" for the better--to equalize the guilt.

But,over the course of time, they ruined it.

--GRA


Anonymous said...

Robert Vaughn was close friends with Robert Kennedy, and had political aspirations of his own. When Kennedy was bumped off, Mr. Vaughn prudently decided to stick to acting.
-RM

Anonymous said...

Trini Lopez must have spoken to the Spanish speakers.

AbolishTenure said...

A lesson to be learned from the enduring Johnny Carson, who stayed sort of middleish on-air, and he's still in 24x7 reruns in streaming. Fallon, Colbert, Kimmel will be meaningless nobodies when 2050 rolls around.

Check this out - where we were a generation ago -

Johnny Carson, May 16, 1991

just one minute, link starts at 01:20, and at 2:01, he says "What the hell's the world coming to? Two men got married on daytime television... where are our standards?"