George Clooney and the cast of “Good Night, and Good Luck” spring to mind. Is that all that there is? I don’t dispute that Ryskind is right that there are many literate Hollywood liberals who do regard the 1940s as a period of “cultural holocaust” for their industry, in the words of movie writer Patrick McGilligan. For proof of Hollywood’s obsessive liberal forgiveness for Communist crimes he mentions one sympathetic gala at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1997, one movie featuring Woody Allen, and one movie starring Jim Carrey. “Hollywood cannot get enough,” he asserts, “of celebrating the ‘victims’ of those 1947 hearings in movies, plays, books, documentaries, skits, oral histories, and public events.” These words are found in Chapter 1, and they are the first warning sign that Ryskind’s book goes too far. What troubles his conscience is the fact that the Hollywood Ten were eventually forgiven by their industry and their crimes forgotten. Ryskind-the son of screenwriter and socialist-turned-anticommunist Morrie Ryskind, who did cooperate with HUAC-regards everything that happened to these people as just desserts. They were blacklisted from working in Hollywood, along with many other entertainment professionals who were considered fellow travelers. The Ten were charged with contempt of Congress, found guilty, and sentenced to prison. They had all at some time or other been members of the Communist Party. Ten writers and directors appeared before the committee but refused to answer its questions, citing their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) called witnesses on the subject of Red subversion in the movie industry. At the center of that popular liberal narrative is the fate of the Hollywood Ten. For decades, they say, a line has been spun that McCarthyism was a hysterical rage against nothing at all-that there were few-to-no Communists active in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s and that the “witch hunt” against the radical left was nothing less than American-style fascism. Ryskind’s writing has the obsessive quality of a man out to “correct the record,” and the American right has waited a long time for this. Unfortunately, it also lacks objectivity.

This is a book that conservatives will love and which answers a lot of questions. Of course, the harder the work then the greater the rewards. It felt like I’d spent several hours flicking through the telephone directory. For 500 pages Allan Ryskind lists the names, occupations, and crimes of almost every man or woman ever tainted with support for the USSR in the movie industry. H ollywood Traitors reads like a Who’s Who of American Communists.

Hollywood Traitors by Allan H. Ryskind