Clay Risen
speaker
88 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Clay Risen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He was. He was. And that's why, well, I mean, I think he stood on principle, but everyone knew what the answer was. He wasn't a secret communist. Everyone knew that he was in charge of the Communist Party in Hollywood, but he refused to answer on principled grounds.
No, not at all.
No, no.
Yeah, and they should have listened to the warning. So they also met with one of the leading, one of the most outspoken liberal members of Congress, Manny Seller from New York, who in the past had gone after HUAC and had stood up against anti-communism. But they met with him and he said, look, I'm not going to say anything about this.
I wouldn't touch this issue with a 10-foot pole now because, you know, it's taking over. And then sure enough, you know, within months, Eric Johnson helped lead the creation of the Blacklist.
Yeah, they largely stood aside. Now, the Screen Actors Guild was run by Ronald Reagan, who by then had begun his transition from being what he called a hemophiliac liberal. Yeah. All the way to, you know, the conservative that he became. He testified in those hearings. He actually came before the unfriendly witnesses, the writers, and he actually struck a note of caution.
You know, he had said, look, there is communism in Hollywood, and we don't want it there, but... But we can't go after people for speaking their minds. Other people were less guarded. But Reagan actually at the time was fairly measured. But what was striking was that the Screenwriters Guild, which had been a fairly progressive group, started to give away very quickly.
And certainly by the early 50s was a handmaiden of the Red Scare and the Blacklist.
Yeah, it was hard to find a lawyer because any lawyer was faced with you pick this client and you will never have another client in this town. But even more, bar associations were increasingly willing to censure or even to strip a license from somebody who took on an alleged communist or a subversive as a client. And so there were very few people—
And even groups that we think of today like the ACLU, they did not drape themselves in glory during this period. They also were largely quiescent or even supportive of the Red Scare.
Yeah. I mean, one of the, you know, one of the quotes, one of the many quotes that comes out of this era, you know, comes from Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice. And, you know, he was a very ardent opponent of all of this, a very strong civil libertarian. But in one of his dissents, he essentially said, you know, we just have to accept that this is how things are.
And hopefully, as a court, we can come back in calmer times and offer redress to what's going on. But at the moment, there's very little that even we as the Supreme Court can do.
Yeah, so this is a fascinating sort of turn of events because it's a group of former FBI agents who did have experience hunting communists and with this kind of incipient blacklist. They were also entrepreneurs. And they understood that there was a thirst out there in the public for information on potential subversives. You know, that there wasn't enough to have –
attorney general's list of subversive organizations. They wanted, you know, the next step, which was tell me who in this case in Hollywood is suspect. And so the book had, you know, it's like it's just a directory. And you would go through and say, okay, well, Kirk Douglas, okay, what is his, you know, here, here and here, Aaron Copland. Oh, Aaron Copland was
was in the greeting committee for Dmitry Shostakovich when he came and toured the United States. Well, Shostakovich is a Soviet composer. That makes Copland suspect. And this then was sold. Anybody could buy it. I know people, I need to find a copy myself. I mean, I've seen one, but I know people who have copies. It's kind of a cool little thing.
But that would then be used by local radio stations. It would be used by the American Legion. If there was someone in red channels, then they would be protested if they came through in a performance or appeared in a movie. And there was never really an investigation. People weren't curious about, well, how good is this information?
Or what does it mean to be on the welcoming committee for Shostakovich? It was just taken. Well, therefore, Copeland is suspect. And it was an important part. It became, as you said, sort of the de facto blacklist. What I found was interesting was then there were all these knockoff red channels that were purported to tell the true story, that red channels didn't go far enough.
And so you had these sort of, you know, second, third tier, you know, red hunters for hire.
And it was like doxing, you know, I mean, and because sometimes now red channels didn't have addresses, but then people would take it upon themselves to draw up a list of addresses and say, okay, well, you know, here is where all of the, you know, subversives listed in red channels lives in your neighborhood, right? And people would get protested.
Dalton Trumbo, who was famous enough, no one needed to tell anyone where he lived, but he found dead animals and a bag of feces floating in his pool. You know, people had windows shattered. There was, you know, there was violence running through the Red Scare at the very grassroots level.
Showing 41–60 of 88 · page 3 of 5
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