“Stars Face Blacklist” screams the headline. Most people who’ve heard of the blacklist will immediately think of Joe McCarthy in 1954, of witch hunts and ruthless right wing inquisitors. But look again: the headline is from 1945, the earliest known use of the term in Hollywood. It’s the Hollywood Left threatening to boycott non-striking actors—in other words, it’s the opposite of what you’d think. A lot of what people know about that period just isn’t so. Communist writer Lillian Hellman later called it “Scoundrel Time”. But a far better writer, Mary McCarthy, famously said of Hellman, “Every word she ever wrote is a lie, including “and” and “the””.

This is the second half of the story begun in Hollywood Communists 3. In The Road to the Blacklist, we described how Party-backed union leadership tried to push out workers from other unions, and how those bloody labor wars turned most of Hollywood against them. It was a genuine case of revolt, led by the actors, and it caused a generation of liberals to break with the Reds who presented themselves as friends and allies before and during the war. By 1947 the mutual process of kicking out the infidels was in full swing on both sides of the Red line. Mere lily-livered socialists not up to backing tough new Party policies were expelled. On the anti-Communist side, union members who’d proven themselves faithless to IATSE had some explaining to do. It was not always a gentle process but it was overdue.