ABSTRACT
In 1941 Leo Rosten, a social scientist funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, published an exhaustive study of the movie industry during the years of its greatest success. Writers were the mainstay of Hollywood leftism in the 1930s and ’40s. Some had become political in New York earlier. Others were drawn in during the fierce struggle to organize. Arthur Miller’s book was so inadequate that the Ford Foundation later sponsored another study of the blacklist, in movies this time as well as in radio and television. Though the blacklist is long gone, and many of the blacklistees also, the meaning of it is still debated. In 1976 Hilton Kramer, art critic for The New York Times, wrote an essay inspired by three creations: a movie, The Front, dealing with the television blacklist; Lillian Hellman’s book Scoundrel Time, a blacklistee’s memoir; and a documentary film, Hollywood on Trial, about the movie blacklist.
