John Howard Lawson

John Howard Lawson is not the most famous member of the Hollywood 10, those filmmakers who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities' inquiry into alleged "Communist subversion" in the Hollywood movie industry in 1947, but he was the central figure of the group--the mind if not the heart and soul of the Communist community in Hollywood. One of the founders and the first president of the Screenwriters Guild (now called the Writers' Guild of America), the first and most aggressive of the Hollywood guilds, he was the Communist Party's de facto cultural commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers. Technically, New York-based American Communist Party (CPUSA) cultural commissar V.J. Jerome was his superior but in the Hollywood hierarchy, Lawson arguably was second only to Gerhart Eisler in authority. Eisler was the "boss" in his role as an agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, and thus outranked Lawson, who was not a member of the secret quasi-military organization. Like Eisler, he was unquestionably under the discipline of Moscow, and thus, in essence, answerable to Joseph Stalin, the spider at the center of the web. When the party wanted a member to come to heel, Lawson enforced the ukase. (Eisler's brother, film composer Hanns Eisler -- a good friend of "Hollywood 19" member Bertolt Brecht, was deported from the United States after his own 1947 HUAC testimony. On his part, Brecht willingly testified before HUAC, told them nonsense, then decamped for East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact.) Like the rest of the Hollywood 10, Lawson would be blacklisted by the film and television industries during the late 1940s and through the 1950s. Lawson was born into a wealthy family in New York City on September 25, 1894, the son of Simeon Levy and the former Belle Hart Lawson,who were Jews. He was named after the 19th century British prison reformer John Howard. With a strong desire to assimilate, Simeon changed the family name to Lawson so that his children would not experience anti-Semitism and had them join a Christian Church. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life. He matriculated at at Williams College, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1914. (Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, whom Lawson would deride as a "stool pigeon" for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also an alumnus of that small, prestigious private college located in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains.) He contributed to the school's literary magazine, served as editor of the year book and wrote his first play, "A Hindoo Love Drama," which attracted the attention of Mary Kirkpatrick, who would become his first agent. After graduation, Lawson moved to New York and worked for Reuters while dedicating himself to drama. In 1914 he began a play he called "Atmosphere" that was entitled "Souls: "A Psychic Fantasy" when the 69-page-long typewritten manuscript was copyrighted on May 21, 1915. An innovative though talky melodrama, this effort was discounted by Kirkpatrick as non-commercial. It was never produced or published. In "Souls", Lawson had experimented with using asides to the audience by his characters, which precedes the same use of the device by O'Neil in his 1926 play "Strange Interlude". (O'Neill got the credit for "reviving" the device, which had been used in venerable dramas; however, at the time of "Souls", O'Neil was studying dramatic writing at Harvard). In the period of 1915-16, he wrote three more plays, "Standards", "The Spice of Life", and "Servant-Master-Lover". "Standards" and "Servant-Master-Lover" were optioned, the first by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris and the latter by Olivier Morosco, but both plays closed out of town due to bad reviews. He became involved with the avant-garde dramatists and actors of Greenwich Village's Playwrights' Theater that would produce Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff" (and their first production) in November 1916. Before Lawson could become a Broadway playwright, World War I intervened. After the United States entered the war, Lawson volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, where he befriended another driver, John Dos Passos, who would establish himself as a proletarian writer before veering sharply rightward later in his career. After the cessation of hostilities, Lawson moved to Rome, where he edited a newspaper. When he repatriated himself to the United States, he once again took up the career of the Broadway dramatist. As a playwright, Lawson was committed to the avant-garde, and he began using non-realistic play-writing techniques. His plays were subtle though unfocused attacks on the bourgeoisie. He was deeply affected by the protests surrounding the case of the imprisoned--and later executed--anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who served as the basis for Maxwell Anderson's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Winterset (1936)"), which stimulated the development of his left-wing politics and radicalism. Tutored in Marxism by the great critic Edmund Wilson, Lawson imbued his plays with Marxist ideas, including his Broadway debut, 1923's "Roger Bloomer". There were ten productions of Lawson's plays on Broadway from 1923-37, all originals, and a revival of his second Broadway play, 1925's "Processional". Though his plays have not been revived since 1937, he did exert an influence on Eugene O'Neill, whose play "Dynamo" is indebted to Lawson. With the dawn of talking pictures, there was a demand for dramatists and in 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood, where he established himself as a screenwriter. He helped establish the Writers' Guild of America in 1933 with fellow future "Hollywood 10" members Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz, and served as the union's first president from 1933-34. It was in 1934 that Lawson joined the Communist Party. It would come to dominate his life as he became an important member of the small CPUSA community in Hollywood, then eventually its cultural czar. It's ironic that Lawson would become an enforcer of party ukases, in that with the writing of his last plays produced on Broadway in the late 1930s, he had undergone a struggle between his own aesthetic choices and his commitment to communist ideology. In the 1940s, however, it fell to Lawson as a senior party apparatchik to enforce party discipline among screenwriters who were CPUSA members, making sure that they toed the party line and that their work adhere to the CPUSA's ideology, no matter how impractical that was in the Hollywood studio system, which was based on a collaborative factory paradigm in which individuals contributions were subsumed and muted by the mass nature of the constructed product. As a screenwriter, Lawson was able to inject politics into several movies, including his most important film, Blockade (1938), a story about the Spanish Civil War. For his screenplay, Lawson was nominated for a Best Story Oscar. Seven years later, the Lawson-scribed movie _Counter-Attack (1945)_ (qv, paid tribute to the US-USSR anti-fascist alliance of World War Two. However, as befits a Hollywood screenwriter who is but one writer of many assigned to a film, his credited work typically ran to more innocuous fare, such as the hit Algiers (1938). For his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was cited for contempt of Congress. After exhausting his appeals (his legal strategy dictated by party lawyers), he was sentenced to one year in prison and fined, resulting in his "official" blacklisting in Hollywood. (In fact, he had been blacklisted immediately after refusing to testify.) Not long afterwards, Lawson went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he began writing books on drama and film making. During his exile, he wrote a screenplay for the early anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym. His last screenplay, also written under a pseudonym, was The Careless Years (1957), in which a high school couple in love takes it on the lam for Mexico. He also became a lecturer in American universities, where he taught drama and film. John Howard Lawson died in San Francisco on August 14, 1977, at the age of 82.