[Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960
film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its
arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt
in Hollywood and publishing.]
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HOW STANLEY KUBRICK’S SPARTACUS BROKE THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLISTS  
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Taylor Dorrell
September 14, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film
Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival
in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in
Hollywood and publishing. _

Woody Strode (L) and Kirk Douglas (R) in gladiatorial battle in a
publicity still issued for the 1960 film Spartacus., Silver Screen
Collection / Getty Images

 

May 1, 1946 was an unparalleled May Day for the Left in America.
Recently discharged veterans joined with teachers, writers, artists,
lawyers, and other workers to march triumphantly through Manhattan.
“The number of paraders, as we counted them, was over 150,000, and
when they packed Union Square, cheering left-wing and Communist
leaders and speakers,” the Communist writer Howard Fast wrote in his
memoir, _Being Red
[[link removed]]_,
“one would have said that the future of the left in America was
extremely bright and of course they would have been wrong.”

By May Day of 1948, the same Communists who were celebrated only two
years earlier became the targets of violent reactionary crowds
chanting “Kill a commie for Christ!” Fast was leading the
Communist Party’s “culture block” made up of thousands of
academics, artists, and writers who quickly found themselves in a
street fight with anti-communist students from a nearby parochial
school.

The second parade was a bad omen. With the advent of the Second Red
Scare and Cold War, Communists soon became the national enemy, seen
not as freedom-fighting progressives, as they had been by many on the
broad left, but instead as anti-American authoritarians and dangerous
subversives. Fast himself was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) and was imprisoned when he refused to name
names.

Fast was blacklisted from the publishing industry. He was only one of
a generation of artists who were purged from America’s mainstream,
the blacklist ruining their careers, consigning them to obscurity and
often poverty. Many books from that time still remain unpublished and
screenplays unmade; cultural figures, once famous, have been largely
erased from America’s history.

But within the unwavering terror of the McCarthyist period are stories
of resistance. Fast’s experience in prison, for example, led him to
write the novel _Spartacus_, which was later adapted into a
screenplay by the Communist writer Dalton Trumbo. When the movie was
screened in 1960, after a decade of remaining underground, two
Communists’ names illuminated the beginning of the film, a giant
middle finger to the reactionaries of the era. This is the story
of _Spartacus_, or how Communists first broke through the blacklists.

“Today’s Prisons Will Be Tomorrow’s Victory”

Howard Fast is one of those forgotten figures in the spotty memory of
America’s literary canon. He published his first novel at age
eighteen, and spent several decades building his career in publishing,
emerging as a popular novelist. He was also an active member of the
Communist Party. Before being blacklisted, he was passionately
involved with supporting Spanish Republican fighters; in 1945 he
joined the executive board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee
Committee. The group was hardly subversive, bringing in donations from
the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Lehman, the wife of New York
governor Herbert Lehman. But political currents shifted, and in 1946
Fast was issued a subpoena to appear before HUAC to give over the
donor list.

Fast refused to name names, assured by lawyers that contempt of
Congress wouldn’t result in any jail time. But later that same year
he was subpoenaed again, this time for a book he’d written on the
Yugoslav revolutionary, _The Incredible Tito_, and his future became
uncertain. In 1947, he and ten others from the Refugee Committee were
sentenced to prison.

Fast and his comrades had faith in their appeal, but there was little
to be done for his reputation and career. “My new book, _The
American_” — a portrait of John Atgeld, the progressive governor
of Illinois — “was being trashed mercilessly,” Fast recalled. He
was also now under constant surveillance. “My telephone was tapped.
Featherbrained FBI agents were slipping into my apartment [during
fundraisers] . . . and other agents were following me through the
streets,” he remembered.

J. Edgar Hoover sent agents ordering New York Public Library
librarians to destroy Fast’s books. The FBI blocked publishers from
printing his new works.

In 1949, New York schools were instructed to remove any copies of his
historical-fiction book, _Citizen Tom Paine_, from their shelves. J.
Edgar Hoover sent agents ordering New York Public Library librarians
to destroy Fast’s books. The FBI blocked publishers from printing
new works of Fast’s, even some he had written under the supposed
anonymity of a pen name.

By 1950, anti-communism had spread, and Fast’s hopes for a reversal
of his prison sentence were lost. Fast was booked in a district
prison, an experience he recalled as distinctly dehumanizing:

There on long benches sat about a hundred men, black men and white
men, all of them naked. They sat despondently, hunched over, heads
bent, evoking pictures of the extermination camps of World War Two. .
. . The dignity we had clung to so desperately was now taken from us.

He was put in a five-by-seven foot cell with a frightened eighteen
year old who’d been in and out of prison since he was twelve and,
according to Fast, had been raped by other prisoners over a hundred
times. Fortunately for Fast, he was transferred to Mill Point, a
minimum security prison in West Virginia.

To those outside the United States, Fast and his imprisoned comrades
were martyrs. Rallies and fundraisers were held in support of the
imprisoned as international solidarity poured in. The Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda wrote the poem “To Howard Fast,” praising Fast’s
writing about “black heroes, of captains and highways, of the poor
and of the cities,” and lamenting the tyranny of the Second Red
Scare, what Neruda called the “gestapo reborn.”

Fast’s imprisonment was a calamity for free speech, but there were
also silver linings. He spent much of the end of his term with the
Communist novelist Albert Maltz and found solace in his daily work
building structures for the prison — his masterpiece was a
functioning replica of the famous Manneken Pis statue. The warden of
the prison was oddly kind, offering up a typewriter for Fast to write
after his daily prison duties.

 

Fast, himself hoping to use the time to write, was unable to bring
himself to commit any words to paper. Instead, he took to researching.
He was particularly interested in a 1914 German movement founded by
Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg that later merged
with the Communist Party of Germany. The name of the group was
the Spartacus Group
[[link removed]].
It was his experience in Mill Point, with all the anxieties and fears
that being in prison often invokes, that inspired him to write his
novel, _Spartacus_.

“I never regret the past,” he wrote, “and if my ordeal helped to
write _Spartacus_, I think it was well worth it.” It was in prison,
after all, where he “began more deeply than ever to comprehend the
full agony and hopelessness of the underclass.” As Neruda wrote in
his poem dedicated to Fast, “Today’s prisons will be tomorrow’s
victory.”

It was in prison where Fast ‘began more deeply than ever to
comprehend the full agony and hopelessness of the underclass.’

After his months in prison, he was released into a world where the
Second Red Scare was in full swing. “The country was as close to a
police state as it had ever been,” he wrote in his 1996 introduction
to _Spartacus_. “J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI, took on the
role of a petty dictator. The fear of Hoover and his file on thousands
of liberals permeated the country.” In this environment, Fast began
the journey of writing a manuscript chronicling Spartacus, the slave
who was trained as a gladiator and led a fictionalized slave revolt in
ancient Rome.

But with the writing of a book also comes the finding of a publisher.
And publishers, in the case of blacklisted writers, were as accessible
to them as yachts are to the poor — which is to say, not at all.
Fast’s longtime publisher, Angus Cameron at Little, Brown and
Company, loved _Spartacus_ and agreed to publish it swiftly and with
pride. But then Hoover sent a federal agent to Boston, where he met
with the president of the publishing house and delivered direct
instructions from Hoover to not publish another book by Fast. The
publishing company abandoned the book, causing Cameron to resign in
protest.

After several failed attempts at securing other mainstream publishers,
Fast resorted to self-publishing. His name and notoriety were enough
to spark interest even without a publisher. The book sold well enough.
His family shipped forty thousand hardcover copies of the book out of
their home.

It would be years before the book would be picked up by mainstream
publishers. Eventually it would sell millions of copies and go through
over a hundred editions in over fifty-six languages. It would also be
turned into a famous film of the same name. But first, Fast and his
collaborators would need to break the grip of anti-communism on
Hollywood.

Time of the Toad

By 1947, Hollywood was increasingly divided into two polarizing
factions: Communist Party members and their sympathizers, and
anti-communists who were devoted to rooting them out of the industry.
It was the reactionary Motion Picture Alliance that pushed the
industry into these opposing camps, with scarcely any room remaining
for neutrality.

Hollywood Communists were open in their opposition to antisemitism,
fascism, racism, and labor exploitation, contributing under their real
names to “dangerous” publications like _People’s World_, _New
Masses_, and the _Daily Worker_. “They saw the danger — real
danger — to the people in the industry posed by the labor practices
of the period,” the liberal California lawyer Carey McWilliams,
later editor at the_ Nation_, said in an interview with Trumbo
biographer Bruce Cook. “And they knew the Nazis were not playing
make-believe.”

After HUAC subpoenaed Hollywood’s “unfriendly nineteen,” more
than seven thousand people gathered for a rally at Los Angeles’s
Shrine Auditorium before the group’s departure to the capital. They
made the most of their trip to Washington, holding rallies in Chicago
and New York before arriving at the hearings. Of the original
nineteen, the eleven individuals who refused to cooperate with the
committee came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. (The eleventh was
German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht
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who was living in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany and
then, after his hearing, fled the United States for East Germany.)

Among them was the group’s highest-paid screenwriter and also the
committee’s most unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo. “[Y]our
job,” Trumbo told chief investigator Robert E. Stripling after he
instructed Trumbo to answer “Yes” or “No,” “is to ask
questions and mine is to answer them. . . . I shall answer in my own
words. Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only
by a moron or a slave.” On his way out, he yelled, “This is the
beginning of an American concentration camp!” That late October of
1947, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress. All were
sentenced to prison, Trumbo to a year.

Trumbo directed his moral outrage at not only the conservatives, but
also the liberal collaborators with the anti-communist witch hunt, and
those who sat by passively.

HUAC and the 1947 Waldorf Agreement, the studio-executive pact that
enforced the blacklists, devastated many in the entertainment
industry. “People would be stunned at the suicides from the period,
and incredible things that happened then,” McWilliams recalled.
“The use of freedom,” Trumbo wrote in _The Time of the
Toad _(1949), “the actual invocation of the Bill of Rights, is an
exceedingly dangerous procedure.” Trumbo directed his moral outrage
at not only the conservatives, but also the liberal collaborators with
the anti-communist witch hunt, and those who sat by passively.

But far from completely purging the industry of Communists, the
blacklists forced them into the shadows. The blacklists created a new
market in Hollywood: the black market. Screenplays by blacklistees
were sold under false names or under the names of other writers. While
waiting for his appeal to go through, Trumbo made a modest living
writing pulpy screenplays for the King brothers, a B-movie production
house. Between the hearing in 1947 and his entrance into America’s
penal system in 1950, Trumbo, under fake names, pumped out eighteen
screenplays. “None,” he insisted, “was very good.”

The Ashland Federal Correctional Institute in Kentucky was, for
Trumbo, similar to Fast’s experience at Mill Point — that is,
fortunately uneventful. Trumbo was not completely on his own in
prison. In fact he was only a short distance, twenty-four inches to be
exact, from another Hollywood Ten member, John Howard Lawson. They
were later joined by Adrian Scott.

Exhausted from the constant rallies and screenplays, Trumbo almost
welcomed certain aspects of prison life. In prison he met moonshiners,
bootleggers, and counterfeiters, many of whom were illiterate. He read
and wrote letters for one moonshiner named Cecil, whose wife was
caring for five sick children on her own, struggling to keep them warm
and fed. Those eleven months in Ashland changed Trumbo in many ways.
Once a night writer, he now only wrote in the day. Once unaffected by
the sound of a whistle, he now stopped instantly to fall in line. But
he never abandoned his principles.

By 1956, Trumbo was back in Hollywood and had mastered the art of the
black market.

After serving their time, John Wexley, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Ian
Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and many other blacklistees lived in exile in
Mexico City, seeking work and refuge from the persistent harassment of
the FBI. One day, the Canadian-born blacklisted screenwriter Hugo
Butler dragged Dalton and Cleo Trumbo out to watch some bullfighting.
One bullfight ended in an _indulto_, or pardoning of the bull, which
is given after the crowd waves handkerchiefs in support of a bull’s
showcase of bravery. The event inspired Trumbo’s film, _The Brave
One [[link removed]] _(1956), a drama
following a boy and his bull. The film went on to win an Oscar under
Trumbo’s pseudonym, Robert Rich. It was the first fracture in the
wall that was the blacklists.

Press caught onto rumors that Trumbo was Robert Rich. Instead of
confirming them, he exposed how extensive Hollywood’s black market
was by pointing the press to other blacklisted writers who might have
written it. By 1956, Trumbo was back in Hollywood and had mastered the
art of the black market. He had numerous pseudonyms and writers
volunteering their names to help them get into the industry. John
Abbott, Sam Jackson, C. F. Demaine, and Peter Finch were just some of
his alter egos. What he proved in his strategic elusiveness was that
any screenplay could be written by a Communist using a fake name or a
front writer. The blacklist was only as effective as the employers
willing to enforce it — and the tide was turning.

“I’m Spartacus”

The first draft of the screenplay for _Spartacus_ was written by
Fast, but he wasn’t quick enough to finish the job in time. Arthur
Koestler’s _The Gladiators_, a movie with a similar theme, was on
the way to production, and Kirk Douglas’s production company, Bryna
Productions, which was producing _Spartacus_, needed to beat it to
the screen. So Douglas turned to the fastest pen in the West, Dalton
Trumbo — signed under the pseudonym Sam Jackson.

They quickly began filming, but the original director, Anthony Mann,
butted heads with Douglas. Apparently forgetting that Douglas was not
only the star of the film but also the boss, Mann got himself fired.
Douglas replaced him with Stanley Kubrick, whom he referred to as a
“cocky kid from the Bronx.” Many problems ensued throughout the
filming of the movie. From the censors limiting any vaguely sexual or
homosexual content to the bribing of Spain’s Franco government to
use soldiers in a scene, the movie was a vast and complex undertaking.

It wasn’t clear at the time of filming whether Trumbo and Fast could
be credited on screen. The 1950s were coming to an end, and it was
unclear how effective the blacklists were at this point. The debate
heated up when Mann spread the news that it was Trumbo, not Sam
Jackson, who wrote the movie. Gossip columns picked up the news, and
for the first time in a decade Trumbo’s cover was blown.

Audiences flocked to see a movie whose title screen displayed the
names of two convicted Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton
Trumbo.

And then the January 19, 1960, edition off the _New York Times_ was
published, proclaiming on the cover that Trumbo would be credited as
the screenwriter of Otto Preminger’s upcoming production _Exodus
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toes in the tides of the blacklists. Would there be a crackdown in
response? If not, would that mean McCarthyism was over? Would
audiences boycott the film, or celebrate it? Upon _Spartacus_’s
release, theaters across the country displayed a giant middle finger
to the anti-communist repression of the era. Audiences flocked to see
a movie whose title screen displayed the names of two convicted
Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo.

Pickets ensued, but they were relatively reserved. A group called the
Catholic War Veterans were the most vocal. (They had been, however, in
full support of the English film that came out earlier that year
called _Conspiracy of Hearts
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protecting Jewish children from Nazis. The screenplay was credited to
Robert Presnell Jr, but was actually written by Dalton Trumbo.)

The blacklists were, for all intents and purposes, broken. In 1960,
Kennedy was elected president, and shortly thereafter, he made a trip
to a movie theater with his brother. With a number of films they
could’ve seen, the Catholic brothers chose no other
than _Spartacus_, crossing the Catholic War Veterans picket to deal a
final death blow to the blacklists. When Kennedy exited the theater
and was asked what he thought of the film, he responded simply: it was
a good film.

“The terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the
single condition that you identify the body or the living person of
the slave called Spartacus,” a Roman soldier yells out in a famous
concluding scene of _Spartacus_. Kirk Douglas rises, but is followed
in unison with his two neighbors who yell “I’m Spartacus,” as a
thousand other slaves rise behind them. Spartacus became a pseudonym
for resistance, for liberty.

The story of Spartacus is also the _story of the story_ of
Spartacus. Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were two of the thousands of
Communists in the United States who struggled to survive through the
Red Scare. It was a time when, as Trumbo put it, “devils persuad[ed]
us that freedom is best defended by surrendering it altogether.”

_TAYLOR DORRELL is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a
reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer._

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* Communists
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