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The FBI had screenwriter John Howard Lawson in its crosshairs in the 1940s. Spies read his letters, particularly those he sent to Europe where Lawson had worked as an ambulance driver during WWI and served with suspected Soviet sympathizer Ernest Hemingway.

In 1947, the US jailed Lawson for contempt of Congress after he refused to tell The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) which political party he supported. The committee was investigating alleged disloyalty, rebel activities, and suspected communists.

It was legal to join the Communist Party at the time, however, so while some Americans felt Lawson's punishment was justified others spoke out against what they saw as the abuses of the Red Scare era.

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The Hollywood Ten imprisoned‍

Lawson was one of ten Hollywood entertainers - mainly script writers - who were jailed for up to a year for refusing to reveal their political affiliations. Ironically, ex-Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, who presided over the committee that cited the so-called 'Hollywood Ten' for contempt, found himself also behind bars for padding his congressional payroll and pocketing the proceeds. He served time with two of the men he helped imprison - Ring Lardner and Lester Cole.

The FBI took a special interest in the Hollywood Ten. “Bureau files are replete with memos about them as a group, about the industry response to them, and about efforts to defend and to assist them, including detailed reports on their conversations with their lawyers in 1947,” according to history professor Daniel J. Leab. “Moreover, the bureau kept a wary eye on individual members of the Hollywood Ten both before and after their incarceration.”

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Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter and novelist (1905-76)

After Dalton Trumbo published his 1940 anti-war novel The Reluctant Andrew, he received letters from anti-semites and people who believed that the US should negotiate with Germany. He turned the letters over to the FBI, which he later called ‘foolish’, the implication being that he should not have put himself on the FBI’s radar. Trumbo was open about his membership in the Communist Party and when HUAC turned its attention to Hollywood in 1947, Trumbo was questioned. He refused to name colleagues with communist sympathies and was imprisoned for 11 months.

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John Howard Lawson, screenwriter and journalist (1894-1977)

The FBI routinely opened John Howard Lawson’s mail. Lawson, founder of Hollywood’s Screen Writers Guild, was also the focus of a series of FBI reports from Hollywood informants about communist activity, according to US government archives released in 2017. He was tracked internationally after his release from prison. A 1961 letter from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the FBI's liaison at the US Embassy in Ottawa reports Lawson and his wife boarding a passenger ship in Montreal heading to Poland. His mail was still being read in 1965.

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Edward Dmytryk, director (1908-99)

Edward Dmytryk, imprisoned for more than four months, decided to cooperate with the FBI, according to a Bureau memo. He provided the names of more than 20 industry colleagues. In light of Dmytryk’s help, the FBI recommended canceling his ‘Security Index’ card which was a Bureau system used to track US citizens before the adoption of computerized databases. In his autobiography, Dmytryk said he did not feel guilty about cooperating with the FBI: “I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust.''
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Alvah Bessie, screenwriter (c. 1904-85)

Alvah Bessie fought as a Spanish Civil War volunteer and published a book about his experiences, Men in Battle, with the help of Ernest Hemingway. He later joined the American Communist Party and worked as the film reviewer. Many of the Spanish Civil War vets were denounced as ‘Reds’ - communist sympathizers - although the war had many facets and has been viewed as a class struggle, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, and a war between fascism and communism.

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Ring Lardner, Jr. , screenwriter (1915-2000)

Ring Lardner Jr., who earned an Oscar for his screenplay M*A*S*H (1970) about the Korean War, had strong left-wing views and helped raise funds during the Spanish Civil War for the Popular Front government, an alliance of left-wing groups. As a screenwriter, however, he’d also written Cloak and Dagger, about the heroic work of the US Office of Strategic Services. Lardner moved to Mexico City after prison, joined by Trumbo and others. On Saturday mornings, the expats had picnic lunches and played baseball. The FBI spied on the games, according to declassified reports, believing the picnics were a cover for ‘Communist meetings’.

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Herbert Biberman, producer, director, and screenwriter (1900-71)

In 1928, Herbert Biberman joined the Theater Guild as an assistant stage manager and the following year directed the Soviet play, Red Rust. Although Biberman was pro-war after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, his opposition to the US Lend-Lease to the UK was so intense the FBI suspected Biberman (who was Jewish) of being a Nazi, according to The Moguls and the Dictators. As a result, Biberman was on the Bureau’s radar in 1947 when the Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating Hollywood.

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Lester Cole, screenwriter (c. 1904-85)

Lester Cole joined with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to establish the Writers Guild of America in 1933 and a year later reportedly joined the American Communist Party. In his autobiography, Hollywood Red, Cole said he obtained FBI documents decades after his imprisonment that showed an unnamed FBI informant stating he “never heard Cole teach or advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence”. The FBI concluded in 1972 that Lester Cole, who served time in prison for contempt of Congress, was not a security threat.

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Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter (1890-1957) 

Writer Samuel Ornitz, whose films include Little Orphan Annie (1938) and They Live in Fear (1944) about Nazi Germany, also collaborate with left-leaning writers on the report of the Dreiser Committee. The report investigated a miners' strike in Kentucky that was violently suppressed by private police hired by mine owners. An FBI file described him as a ‘communist writer of many years’. Ornitz refused to cooperation with the congressional committee: "You do raise a serious question of conscience for me when you ask me to act in concert with you to override the Constitution."
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Robert Adrian Scott, screenwriter and producer (1912-73)

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Robert Scott produced dark thrillers including an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Murder, My Sweet. His FBI file was created in 1944, long before The House Committee on Un-American Activities turned its focus on Hollywood. His political affiliations were meticulously tracked.

A list of delegates to the Los Angeles Communist Party Country Convention, held in 1943, was supplied to the FBI and notes: “Adrian Scott was listed as a delegate from Branch A, Writer’s Branch of Northwest Section. Photostatic copies of the credential blanks filed by each delegate were obtained by agents of this office from Source B.”

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Albert Maltz, playwright and screenwriter (1908-1985)

Yale graduate Albert Maltz specialized in writing political drama and officially joined the Communist Party in 1935. Warner Bros hired him as a writer and he lent his hand (unaccredited) to the screenplay for Casablanca and adapted Graham Greene’s This Gun For Hire. He also wrote for the communist cultural magazine, New Masses, bringing him to the attention of the authorities. In April 1950, Maltz was unrepentant, addressing a rally: “I was not born in a land in which informers and professional perjurers wrote the Constitution, dictated the substance of debate in Congress, or decided who might lead a trade union, teach in a school, or write a book.”