Weekend Beacon: White-washing the Hollywood Blacklist

Also: Scalia's supremacy, a history of the titled class, and Nicholas Eberstadt on Paul Ehrlich

March 21 - 22, 2026

What a touching standing ovation Amy Madigan received when she won the best supporting actress award at last week’s Oscars while husband Ed Harris beamed with pride. Some folks on social media, however, were quick to point out that when director Elia Kazan received a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999, both Madigan and Harris refused to stand. Kazan, a fierce anticommunist, had named names, which many in Hollywood found unforgivable.

Of course many on the blacklist were, in fact, Communists, while others were, shall we say, amenable to change. Such details seem to be overlooked in the “Blacklisted: An American Story“ exhibit at the Capital Jewish Museum. Ronald Radosh lays it all out in his review.

“A section called ‘Unfriendly Witness’ ... turns to the plight of the Communist screenwriter Albert Maltz, who, showing a streak of independence, wrote an article for the Communist cultural magazine, New Masses. Therein he posited in 1946 that the ‘accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straightjacket.’ His viewpoint challenged the entire CP view of art. The immediate response from his comrades was to condemn him for abandoning Marxism, for holding ‘bourgeois concepts,’ for holding a ‘discredited humanist tradition,’ for ignoring the ‘class struggle.’ Finally, CP chairman Eugene Dennis said that what Maltz wrote was ‘a bourgeois-intellectual and semi-Trotskyite article.’

“Maltz is presented as a hero. The exhibit fails to tell viewers that he immediately capitulated to his comrade’s demands to repudiate what he had written and obviously believed. Apologizing that his article was nothing less than ‘a non-dialectical treatment of complex issues,’ Maltz agreed that, if listened to, ‘would lead to the dissolution of the left-wing cultural movement.’ Having refused to cooperate with HUAC and name names of those he knew in Hollywood to be fellow Communists, he revealed it was harder to stand against one’s own group and milieu than it was to tell HUAC to go to hell. To oppose HUAC was to gain the approval and support of his Communist movie community; to write something he believed and that was opposite to the tenants of Marxism-Leninism meant complete ostracization that only succumbing to the party’s demands made on him would restore him to good standing.”

“Then one must pay attention to the most famous of all the blacklisted Hollywood writers, the talented and brilliant screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Trumbo had published his novel Johnny Got His Gun, a searing antiwar novel ... about a World War I vet who lost his sight and all his limbs. It was meant to increase antiwar sentiment when the FDR administration was beginning to provide aid to Great Britain. It won the National Book Award for Best Original Novel in 1939.

“When Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher suspended printing of Johnny Got His Gun, and Trumbo appealed to readers who had bought it to return or destroy the book. He also did one other little-known action: In 1944, he asked the FBI to come to his house to look at letters he had received from people who wanted to know how they could get a copy of Johnny Got His Gun. Charging that the writers were clearly still antiwar, still isolationist, and some were as well pro-Hitler and opposed fiercely to the president, he gave their names to the bureau. His view, he wrote the FBI, was that his book ‘shouldn’t be reprinted until the war was at an end.’ He was afraid, however, that the letter-writers ‘could adversely affect the war effort’ if the book was made available. In 1970, he acknowledged that ‘I foolishly reported their activities to the FBI.’ Yet he still thought he was right to oppose getting into the war in 1939 because it would be a ‘disastrous course’ to move away from isolationism, which is also why he spoke up against Lend-Lease aid to Britain, arguing that would be like handing a gun to a ‘hot-headed man.’”

I wouldn’t call Antonin Scalia a hot-headed man. Passionate, for sure, but not hot-headed. The late Supreme Court justice would have turned 90 this month, which brings me to Ed Whelan, who reviews James Rosen’s Scalia: Supreme Court Years 1986-2001.

“On case after case—most notably, in its 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade—the Court has turned Scalia dissents into majority rulings. More broadly, it has adopted his principle of interpreting constitutional provisions according to the meaning they bore when they were enacted, and it has even more consistently abided by his twin textualist tenet for interpreting statutes.

“Amid such success, it’s easy to forget how distressing Scalia’s own years as a justice were. Among its many virtues, James Rosen’s excellent second volume of his monumental three-part biography of Scalia ought to remind the reader of how far the Court has come.”

“When Reagan elevated William H. Rehnquist to succeed Burger as chief justice, he appointed Scalia, 50 years young, to the associate justice position that Rehnquist had occupied. Scalia was aghast to discover the moribund intellectual culture of the Court. The justices were set in their ways: They asked very few questions at oral argument, they didn’t talk through issues at conference, they had little interest in the craft of opinion writing, and they largely kept to themselves.”

“Scalia’s dismay over how the Court operated was surpassed by his intense disagreement with so many of its major decisions in his early years. As one of his first clerks told Rosen, ‘I remember losing mostly everything that was important.’

“In just his second year on the Court, Scalia issued his booming solo dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988). Rehnquist’s majority opinion ruled that Congress permissibly authorized a panel of judges to appoint an ‘independent counsel’ to investigate and prosecute executive-branch officials. Scalia famously observed that separation-of-powers issues often ‘will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing. … But this wolf comes as a wolf.’”

From the Supreme Court to the supremely titled (and entitled), Philip Terzian reviews Heirs & Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty.

“Every society has an aristocracy, even those that deny or disparage the very idea, such as our own. The word derives from a Greek term roughly meaning ‘rule of the best’ which, it goes without saying, means different things to different people.

“In England this was usually defined as the families that accumulated vast swaths of land, served, counseled, and (at times) challenged the ruling monarchs, fought the battles that protected their country’s primacy and, as peers of the realm, transposed themselves into regional dynasties and feudal lords. In America we began with aristocrats who, as landed gentry and local governors, resembled their European equivalents. Now, four centuries later, we tend to think of them in different terms: The commercial aristocrats of the 19th century—the Morgans, Mellons, Rockefellers, and Schiffs—of varying origins, or the 20th-century political dynasties (Taft, Roosevelt, Bush, Kennedy) of varying quality. I once heard Tina Turner described as ‘rock aristocracy.’ Only in America, as it were.

“It’s different across the Atlantic, of course, and Eleanor Doughty, a British journalist who has made a career chronicling the ‘moneyed and titled classes’ of her native land, has produced a long, fair, detached, and (perhaps a little too) detailed account of the ‘modern British aristocracy,’ those hundreds of surviving remnants of the titled ruling classes who, for centuries after 1066, possessed colossal wealth, built great estates, and wielded decisive influence in Britain.

“That such a volume is now published here in America, and may find a substantial audience, should surprise no one. Whenever a member of the royal family visits the United States, attracting huge crowds and stopping by the White House for a black-tie dinner, we are invariably reproached and reminded that we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of kings, queens, lords, and ladies. True enough. But tell that to readers of Nancy Mitford’s novels or to the millions of our fellow countrymen who tuned in to both TV and movie dramatizations (1981, 2008) of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Not so long ago, millions of high-minded PBS viewers hung on to the weekly adventures—the dynastic crises, domestic dramas, and financial woes—of the fictional Crawley family of Downton Abbey, in Yorkshire, seat of the imaginary earls of Grantham.”

Weekend Beacon addenda: Be sure to check out the one and only Nicholas Eberstadt, who delivers a thorough takedown of the late doomsayer Paul Ehrlich:

“One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight.

“For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller.

“Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.”

And congratulations to Meir Y. Soloveichik on receiving this year's Bradley Prize awarded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Rabbi Soloveichik joins numerous contributors to the Weekend Beacon who have won this prestigious award, including Barry Strauss, James Piereson, Samuel Gregg, Allen C. Guelzo, Peter Berkowitz, Robert P. George, the aforementioned Nicholas Eberstadt, Lord Andrew Roberts, and the late Terry Teachout. It may soon be a prerequisite!

Happy Sunday.

Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon