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Daughters of the blacklist: Why Trumbo hits home

As Canadians head to the big screens this holiday season, Trumbo, about the late Oscar-winning, blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, will hit home for a number of locals who were directly affected by the 1950s Red Scare in the U.S. 

Alice Bartels was 13 when she accompanied her mother, Grace Lorch, from their home in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Memphis, Tennessee. The teacher and civil rights activist had been subpoenaed to appear before a southern sitting of the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee. 

Lorch, who was involved with the Little Rock branch of the NAACP, had garnered international fame for escorting a 15-year-old African-American girl, Elizabeth Eckford, through a screaming white mob at the start of the school integration crisis of 1957. Before that, she had fought the Boston school system’s ban on women teaching after marriage.

“It was just like that Arthur Miller play [The Crucible],” Bartels recalls of the subcommittee hearing. “A bunch of white men sitting up on high, treating everyone else down below with contempt.” 

A series of witnesses were mistreated by the subcommittee, including an elderly man who was cited for contempt because he did not answer questions he could not hear. Bartels says her mother, who was there under protest, told the subcommittee she had a statement to read, but members of the committee would start yelling at her. “They threatened to indict her for contempt of the Senate, and that was held over her head for a year.”

According to a newspaper account published in the Washington Afro-American, a gavel-pounding Senator William Jenner thundered at Lorch: “You’re a troublemaker, aren’t you…?” 

Although Lorch was able to proclaim for the record that the only subversive activities of which she was aware were the subcommittee’s hearings, she was not allowed to read her statement declaring that conceding their right to ask questions concerning associations and beliefs “would only strengthen the hands of segregationists in their South-wide efforts to force disclosure of names of members of anti-segregation organizations for purposes of intimidation and persecution.”

Bartels says she was “worried my mother would get sent to jail, which was a nightmare to me. Somehow my father’s going to jail seemed more normal, though I was pretty worried about him, too.” Such fears were a constant, as her parents’ refusal to abide by segregation cost them jobs, made them the target of hateful threats and forced frequent moves to find work. 

Indeed, Alice’s father, Lee Lorch, had previously been compelled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) immediately after the family attempted to enroll the then 10-year-old Alice in their neighbourhood school, a segregated African-American institution attended by many of Alice’s friends. The principal accepted their application in light of the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision, but it was turned down by the Nashville school board.

“I felt kind of guilty because I had been pushing to go to that school, and then all hell broke loose,” says Bartels, who acknowledges that even with the frequent firings and relocations, her family was relatively lucky compared to many. 

Her parents were branded “subversives” by Arkansas’s governor, her mother denounced as a “Communist functionary” on the floor of the House of Representatives. Blacklisted, the family moved to Canada in 1959 after job offers came from Alberta and Saskatchewan. Grace died in 1974 Lee had a distinguished career as a mathematician at York University and died an unrepentant radical at 98 in 2014.

For Bartels, growing up in such a hostile environment was “quite an education. The trouble is, there is not much you can do with it, because most people didn’t want to hear anything about it.”

It’s an experience Johanna Faulk can relate to as the daughter of Texas humorist John Henry Faulk, a prominent broadcaster on CBS Radio in New York City until 1957, when he found himself blacklisted for opposing the blacklist. He filed a libel suit against the for-profit corporation AWARE, which sold its “clearance” service to major advertisers and broadcast networks and whose mission, inspired by McCarthy, was to fight the alleged “Communist conspiracy in entertainment communications.”

Before being blacklisted, the Faulk family were at the centre of New York City celebrity, their apartment the go-to party destination for anyone appearing on the Ed Sullivan show. As well, they befriended artists accused of subversive tendencies, including Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and Leadbelly. Johanna was even set up for a date with Arlo Guthrie when they were 16.

As the McCarthy era roared on, a growing sense of dread underscored those gatherings. 

“One of my strongest memories is of everyone sitting around watching the McCarthy hearings and screaming at the TV, horrified, because they knew what was coming,” Faulk recalls.

John Henry Faulk went from being the toast of the town to someone who couldn’t get a job driving a cab, and the family was forced to move back to Austin, Texas, which for his daughter was “like turning the clock back 200 years.” She spent Grades 4 to 8 completely isolated and ostracized “because we were seen as Yankees, Commies and Jews. [Her mother, Lynne Gordon, was Jewish.] So I didn’t have a single friend down there in this segregated school system.” 

She couldn’t talk about any of the people who used to visit her family in New York City, because many of them had been similarly blacklisted for being alleged Communists.

“It was really, really difficult because I didn’t know how to fight that. It didn’t make sense to me why anyone would not like those nice people who came to our house. It felt like we were living on another planet.”

The family eventually moved back to New York after the lawsuit against AWARE was settled in Faulk’s favour in 1962. That suit helped bring the blacklist to an end, but his career never fully recovered. He was broke. Divorce followed, and Johanna moved to Canada with her mother. 

After university, she worked in adult education and became a particularly popular literacy teacher at Stony Mountain Penitentiary when inmates learned that her father had had a cameo in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Her mother, Lynne, was honoured by Toronto city council for her lengthy career as a feminist broadcaster and consumer advocate when she died in 2012.

Looking back on the Red Scare, both daughters of the blacklist learned lifelong lessons.

“A lot of people don’t know how bad the bad people can be,” says Bartels.

For Faulk, challenging the secretive world of investigations and whispered allegations ultimately made a difference. 

“The fear is what gets us. They still carry that around in the U.S.”

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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