Communist infiltration of Hollywood motion-picture industry : hearing before the Committee on Un-American activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-second Congress, first session (1951)

3492 COMMUNISM IN HOLLYWOOD MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY a reception dinner not only for the Reverend Reissig but also Mr. Leland Stowe, the distinguished war correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune. I think that under normal circumstances I well might have put my name on this as a sponsor, with no sense that the Reverend Reissig was or is a Communist. I don't know him very well. I doubt if I saw him now if I would recognize him. I have actually no recollection of this, but this would be my explanation of it. Mr. Tavenner. You are aware of the fact, are you not, that the Attorney General has classified both the American League Against War and Fascism and the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy as Communist organizations? Mr. Odets. Well, my judgment of that would be that if it were so classified it would be long after the fact. If that is 1937, I don't remember when it Mr. Tavenner. It is true that the citation as a Communist organ- ization was not made until a date subsequent to that, but the cita- tion means that the organization was a Communist organization from the date of its inception. In fact, both of these organizations were out of existence at the time that the Attorney General cited them. Mr. Odets. I frankly don't know about that. Mr. Tavenner. The November 1937 issue of Soviet Russia Today published facsimiles of signatures to greetings sent to the Soviet Union on the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Soviet Union. ' This is generally referred to as the Golden Book of Ameri- can Friendship with the Soviet Union. Will you examine the exhibit and state whether or not your name appears in the second column ? Mr. Odets. Yes, sir, it does. Mr. Tavenner. Will you tell the committee the circumstances under which your signature was obtained to that statement? Mr. Odets. Well, with no real memory of this document, I would say that someone sent me a telegram, or I might have received a cable from Europe, and I lent my signature to the document. It is obviously my signature. I have no real memory of it, but I must have received some communication and I answered. I did not at that time, I must say, and I would like to say generally—I had no sense of the Soviet Union as a country opposed to our interests; it never occurred to me to think of the Soviet Union that way. I thought of the Soviet Union then as a country of extraordinary theater, of extraordinary literary figures, and any greeting or relationship that I might in those days have made with that large country would be in relation to my par- ticular field of theater, the theater, and theater literature. But I must point out that in those days not only myself but no one had a sense, or very few people had a sense, of the Soviet Union as a country opposed to our interests anyway. I think it was during that time that we began to recognize the Soviet Union, began to move into a kind of amnesty with that country, in terms of trade, for instance. Mr. Tavenner. The Daily Worker of April 6, 1937, at page 9, carries an article regarding the formation of a new film company called Frontier Films. According to this article some of the staff mem- bers were John Howard Lawson, Philip Stephenson, Albert Maltz, Elia Kazan, and Kyle Crichton. While members of the advisory board included Bruce Bliven, Josephine Herbst, Edwin Rolph, and Clifford Odets.