The Citizen Writer, a collection of seven “essays in defense of American culture” by Albert Maltz, was released on Feb. 1, 1950, five months before the legal appeals of the Hollywood Ten ended in defeat. The 48-page pamphlet was the last thing Maltz published before reporting to the D.C. jail that June. It sold for 25 cents. I bought my copy years ago at a used bookstore for four bucks. The little paperback is now falling apart, but the fiery sentiments it contains have held up well and are newly urgent as we brace for the atrocities of Trump 2.0.
The chronologically ordered essays span 1943 to 1949, a six-year period during which Albert Maltz fell from grace and went from prodigy to pariah. He had been an A-list writer since 1938, when “The Happiest Man on Earth” won the O. Henry Award as the year’s best short story (Richard Wright and John Steinbeck got second and third place). His 1944 novel about anti-Nazi resistance, The Cross and the Arrow, was reissued in an Armed Forces edition of 140,000 and handed out to GIs fighting in Europe. Everybody loved Maltz’s morale-building World War II screenplays, Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines. His short film of 1945, The House I Live In, based on the Earl Robinson-Lewis Allan [Abel Meeropol] song of the same name, won a special Academy Award for its contribution to racial tolerance, after which its star, Frank Sinatra, wrote a congratulatory letter: “Albert, just for the record, I know that you’re the best goddam writer around.”
All of this meant nothing to the House Un-American Activities Committee and its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, who came calling in 1947, armed with subpoenas. With the weapons of censorship and blacklisting also in his arsenal, Thomas was hellbent on destroying Hollywood progressives—and he succeeded.
Maltz’s favorite essay in The Citizen Writer was “Books Are on Trial in America,” an address delivered at a 1949 Civil Rights Congress rally. It opens with this:
“On Oct. 27, 1553, a man was burned at the stake in the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His name was Michael Servetus, he was a mathematician, a physician, and a student of theology. He was burned because he had written a small book on Christian doctrine called On the Errors of the Trinity. It was a book that expressed for the first time the creed now known as Unitarianism. And when Servetus was tied to the stake, the book he had written was chained to his body; book and man burned together. We Americans have reason to ponder this today.
“It is always so easy to reject the thought control of yesterday…. There is no humane American writer who does not recall the Nazi book burnings with scorn and loathing.”
But as Maltz spoke these words, The Nation was banned in New York schools, Communist Party leaders were under indictment for charges including “conspiracy to circulate Marxist literature,” and Truman’s Loyalty Order for federal workers was being applied to teachers. HUAC had recently demanded a list of books used in colleges, resulting in seven professors being dismissed. “The blacklist of ten Hollywood writers has taught universities how to blacklist,” Maltz warned. Tied up with Maltz’s own pending appeal to the Supreme Court was the issue of censorship in education, science, and the press.
“What a loathsome spectacle in our national life, when individuals who are the political scum of our nation are seated in Congress and are given the power to intimidate!” Maltz wrote in his 1947 essay, “The Writer as the Conscience of the People.” This piece extolled a pantheon of “author-warriors” like Émile Zola, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman—literary men and women who’d been “guerrilla fighters for unpopular causes” and whose names therefore “once stank” in bourgeois society.
Maltz singled out his friend Howard Fast, who “more than any other writer in the history of our nation, has sung a hymn to democracy in his novels” but was nevertheless convicted by “those who would reduce America to one vast concentration camp.” He then challenged his audience: “What shall we say when the prison gates close on him?” Freedom of thought will quickly cease to exist, Maltz predicted, “if we are complacent or confused or too easily intimidated.”
In “The Verdict of History,” a speech from February 1949, Maltz acknowledged that the naïve patriotism of his youth had been replaced by “an American shame”:
“. . .If we are decent citizens of our country and of the world, we have no reason to feel anything but shame in the spectacle of newspapers, cabinet officers, senators, who daily threaten the rest of the world with the atom bomb and who insist that all other peoples must conduct their affairs as we say—or we will murder them.”
This was the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of a decade later. But Ike, who burned the Rosenbergs, never had the courage to face history with Maltz’s level of honesty:
“We have murdered generations of youth and piled skulls as high as mountains; we have obscured the sun with the ash of cities and buried alive the private loves and hopes of countless multitudes; we have all too often sacrificed the very sanctity of life upon the bloody, stinking altar of some men’s greed and power.”
To leave room for hope, Maltz noted that there were still examples worth cherishing: Dr. Joseph Goldberger, who ate pellets of dung in order to demonstrate that pellagra is a disease of malnutrition and not of infection; the conservative jurist Charles Evans Hughes, who condemned the Palmer Raids as an “outrage against the American people”; the millions who signed petitions and gave pennies to save Sacco and Vanzetti. “We are part of this, each one of us,” wrote Maltz the optimist.
On May 25, 1949, a public meeting was held in Hollywood to protest the decision of Twentieth Century Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck to drop Maltz’s The Journey of Simon McKeever from its production schedule. Zanuck had purchased film rights to the novel and committed to making it, but he quickly caved to the bigots when the reactionary storm hit. With 35 prominent writers and film personalities standing behind him on stage, Maltz told “the full story of the book banning” in his address, “The Anti-American Conspiracy”:
“We are meeting here tonight in protest at the censorship of my novel by the film industry. That is not enough to meet about if it is all that concerns us. American culture, the American film industry, and the civil liberties of our nation would all survive easily the censorship of one novel by me. If that were all that were involved!”
The convictions of the Ten for contempt of Congress, Maltz said, “sent a message” to twenty thousand others in the film industry, and to the citizens of United States: “Watch your step; watch what you say and think; be careful, suspiciously careful, of the organizations that you join; for yours is no longer a full citizenship—your rights are limited; from now on your right to work depends on how you think and act.”
Too many Americans capitulated to this ominous threat, “and it is a sorrowful thing because nothing [was] gained by it, not even personal security.” For every one that is destroyed, a thousand are silenced: “Through fear and hysteria Americans are induced to give up their rights as free citizens.”
I haven’t yet touched on the most famous part of The Citizen Writer, the transcript of Maltz’s “Testament” before the Thomas committee on Oct. 28, 1947 (which happened to be Maltz’s 39th birthday). It’s a miracle that Maltz was even allowed to read a statement—the rest of the Ten were denied that right—but the birthday boy was on fire:
“I am an American and I believe there is no more proud word in the vocabulary of man.
“. . . Now, at the age of thirty-nine, I am commanded to appear before the House Committee on Un-American activities.
“. . . I maintain that this is an evil and vicious procedure, that it is legally unjust and morally indecent—and that it places in danger every other American.
“. . . I assert that not only the conduct of this Committee, but its very existence, are a subversion of the Bill of Rights. If I were a spokesman for General Franco, I would not be here today. I would rather be here. I would rather die than be a shabby American, groveling before men whose names are Thomas and Rankin, but who now carry out activities in America like those in Germany by Goebbels and Himmler.
“The American people are going to have to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Thomas Committee. They cannot have both. One or the other must be abolished in the immediate future.”
* * *
I enjoy The Citizen Writer and find it moving, but if I could update the book, I’d add some speeches and articles written by Maltz’s wife Margaret during the same period. Margaret Maltz (née Larkin) was a poet, singer, songwriter, and author. Her body of work included two non-fiction books, an award-winning play, and a major study of American folk music. A union activist and labor reporter as well, she placed important articles in a handful of journals including The Nation and New Masses. In 1934, she joined the Executive Board of the influential leftist Theater Union, where she met Albert.
Married in 1937, Albert and Margaret were the parents of two children adopted in infancy—Peter, born 1937, and Kathy, born 1942. A selfless, compassionate mother and the supportive wife of a man nine years her junior, Margaret was certainly Albert’s equal in courage and resilience. Raised in New Mexico and educated at the University of Kansas, she came from a rugged Western family known for its daringly progressive women. Her grandmother on her father’s side was one of the first female physicians in the United States; her mother was elected to the New Mexico State Legislature. Looking at Margaret’s emergence as a cultural figure alongside the story of her husband’s persecution provides context for the essays in The Citizen Writer, balancing Albert’s public battle with his wife’s more personal, family-centered struggle.
At a “Women Fight Back” rally at Manhattan Center in 1948, Margaret shared what the blacklist era was like for her: “Among the extraordinary experiences of a contemptee’s wife,” she wrote, “is the response of the plain, liberty-loving American people. The women at the PTA meetings who slip a dollar in my hand; the department store clerks who recognize the name on the charge and make a quick, shy political comment; the tailor on the corner; the vacuum cleaner salesman at the door—a veteran, four years in the army—who says, ‘Tell those men they’re fighting for all of us.’”
About the pressures and challenges of managing her family during one of the hottest periods in the Cold War, Margaret Maltz had interesting things to say:
“When my husband and I came back from the Washington hearings a year ago, we looked for a way to help our children understand what had happened there. We were deeply concerned for our ten-year-old boy, especially. Had newspaper headlines or neighborhood talk frightened or confused him? . . . How to tell a ten-year-old boy and his little sister that chance had selected their father to help a little in the long struggle for their liberties?”
While Albert was away on a last-ditch tour to raise funds for his legal defense, Margaret gave a speech for California trade unionists that shared a poignant domestic scene:
“This morning my little daughter, longing for her father, asked me to put on a record which we have, of his testimony before the Thomas committee, two and a half years ago. When his deep voice began, she ran to her room for his picture, and propped it up on the radio. “Now, it’s television,” she said.
Margaret Maltz had a life-long interest in education. She was aghast when she read a National Education Association report that assumed the Cold War would long continue and would therefore require propaganda efforts to inculcate in children “national loyalties” against a “potential enemy country.” In a Mother’s Day speech for the Unitarian Fellowship in May 1950, she scolded the NEA for suggesting that “healthy young people” be trained in schools to wear uniforms and man machines: “If the schools are going to abandon the children to war, I am not.”
Twenty-eight days before Albert’s incarceration, Margaret wrote in a Los Angeles daily:
“When their father and the nine other fathers are in jail, I shall let my children know that writers in other times have taken part in the struggles of their people. . . . My children must, and I believe all children should, learn that progress in human affairs has been achieved only at a cost—a personal cost to men and women. Yes, and to the children, too.”
* * *
On the morning of Nov. 5, 2024, I was in Sharon, Pa., canvassing the blue vote door-to-door. I passed a residence with a home-made yard sign that read, “Please, for the Children, No More Trump.” I didn’t think about this message until that evening—when the shock of the election results hit. Yes, the world our kids live in is contaminated by a monster.
The Maltzes, their marriage, and their children, did not survive fascism and kakistocracy unharmed. But they inspire and instruct. Albert fought hard for all of us, and Margaret, whom Trump would have called a “nasty woman,” did her forebears proud.
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