Some Final Thoughts on the Gender Wars and the Left

The year 2022 is about to be behind us, and 2023 rises in the near distance. The future always begs some questions. Will it be more of the old wine in new bottles? Will I find the lovers best suited to me? And will the left - inasmuch as it still exists to be called such - get its shit together?

One area that guarantees to cause dumpster fires on social media that I wish we could have left in 2021 is the so-called gender debate.

Even though the only hope I see of that ending is a scourge of Republican takeovers showing utterly and finally the irrelevancy of the gender debates loudest performers to the struggles of the working class. I know that was an incendiary mouthful. But as I see no hope that the moderate left has any capacity to resolve this extraordinary debate, what else can I hope for other than a nuclear detonation

You will have already assumed my position on this, and that is to be forgiven given the lines drawn by those performers who claim to carry the cause of trans rights.

I cannot call them organizers.

But you just might be wrong in where you think my thoughts on this struggle lay.

A Pew Poll from mid 2022 sums up best where the vast majorities of Americans are on this issue. I say vast majorities, because being the reputable and thorough poll it is, Pew takes a broad look as well as dives into different ideological and age groups.

Unfortunately, if anything disqualifies the woke scolds, as someone called them, from being called organizers it is that public opinion such as Pew's has absolutely no effect on them.

The poll resonates with me personally, since it jives completely with my anecdotal experience in the workplace, where this issue has come up as official policy is rolled out from upper management, among family, and friends.

An organizer harnesses and mobilizes. They don't scold. They don't put dissenters into "baskets of deplorables." This is the rhetoric of elites and academics who hate the working class anywhere it exists outside their conferences and cohorts.

Pew's headline deck [that blurb following a headline] succinctly summarizes its extensive findings [for those who do not want to get extensive]:

"Most favor protecting trans people from discrimination, but fewer support policies related to medical care for gender transitions; many are uneasy with the pace of change on trans issues."

An organizer would take this information and mobilize the people, the constituency, the workforce, whomever, to securing that those anti-discrimination policies are stopped and that the trans community itself reap the benefit.

"Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces," reads the Pew report.

You should see opportunity here for transgender people. I do.

"But" the Pew report goes on "60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, up from 56% in 2021 and 54% in 2017."

This is the cue for the woke scolds to come out with their horses and hounds for the blood sport of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist [TERF] hunting. It is with this rising 60% they see their opportunities to malign and castigate anyone who will not conform.

What's gained by this tactic, and what is lost, is the question for the organizer? But, as I noted, these are not organizers.

One prominent social media influencer with a large social media following declared JK Rowling "the world's biggest transphobe." Tens of thousands of "likes" were generated. I found an article in The Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review titled "America’s War on Black Trans Women."

This is beyond hysterical nonsense, and not outliers as far as framing for these advocates. This is how full of themselves some people have become.

The violence inflicted on trans women, and Black trans women in particular, has so many known associative factors - as journalist Katie Herzog has amply recorded. Sex work/prostitution being the main cofactor. Drug abuse and the drug trade being another. But "America's War on Prostitutes" doesn't have the right ring for GLAAD.

Besides this social media influencer's account, I also follow Rowling on social media. Rowling's opinions are literally indistinguishable from the majority in that Pew Poll. But you'd never know that if you only read the Tweets and screeds of her TERF-hunting detractors.

As a union organizer myself, their haranguing approach has always baffled me. I wouldn't last a minute interacting with my coworkers like this on a campaign. We would have won nothing as a union local against our management were I to delineate 60% of my coworkers as trash and called them such because they weren't, say, communists, like me.

The Pew poll goes on with some encouraging news that shouldn't be dismissed. "Nearly half of adults (47%) say it’s extremely or very important that if a person who transitions to a gender that’s different from their sex assigned at birth changes their name, others refer to them by their new name."

But this is of no matter to the woke scolds if that same 47% say something like former Olympiad Caitlyn Jenner is a man because she was born a male. Too bad: the cup is still half empty, so they're branded TERFs. That has become their red line and their "safe space."

Clearly, the goals and vision of these advocates are different than mine. The winning of broad civil rights for trans people is a minimum requirement. The significant goal is, for them, for us to all "see" and become enlightened to their "new facts" that females and males are interchangeable, that sex is a state of mind more than a determinant of birth.

That is a galaxy beyond our understanding. Some argue it harms women. Some would say it's just bullshit pseudoscience.

Regardless, I return to exploiting what seems like a huge leap forward in this area, where a majority of polled Americans support policies that protect trans people. Unlike other movements, like Black or First Nation civil rights, the significance of trans rights has risen and become acceptable to broad sectors of this largely white country - which might be a topic for another essay, exploring how the swelling "LGBTQIA+" "community" has outpaced significantly the Black struggle.

I am sorry this sentiment has not been effectively exploited as the advancement it is. Instead, it has become bonfires of vanities, egos, and posers. This as a loss. I see these performers as I view some current labor leaders, disconnected from their rank-and-file workers. A disconnect I would say bred from hatred of working-class people.

Those union workers are rebelling. The forces that want to gain tangible rights for trans people should too and purge these clowns. I would argue these so-called trans advocates, to crisscross my allusions, hate the working class too. That's their problem. They're dripping with contempt for working-class people. They're snobs. That's why they haven't an organizer cell in their bodies and are shrews.

As much as I hope they disappear in 2023, I am pessimistic. The people who tired of them are also tiring of the Democrats. Your average moderate Democrat conforms to the Pew poll, too, but gives oxygen to the clownery in a balancing act. In our two-party system, the GOP is the likely alternative, and in its current form, when it replaces the Democrat, it will not give oxygen to any aspect of this fight. The circus will be driven from town, but with it the civil rights most Americans will support will have less legislative support too. And that's a shame.

The Roots of US Anticommunism can be found in White Racism

The deep roots of anticommunism in the US are integral to white racism. They are not tangential, nor are they coincidental. They are connected in logical flow, one to another.

Anticommunism in the US has less to do with the 1917 Russian Revolution and much more to do with the so-called "freeing of the slaves" after the US Civil War and the white panic this unleashed.

Prof. Gerald Horne recently pointed out how the product of anti-slavery activism leading up to abolition set the groundwork for anticommunism in the US - an anticommunism, I would add, that is the most paranoid and ferocious in the Western world.

Freeing the slaves certainly had a more visceral, ferocious effect on US society than the Bolshevik Revolution.

That a whole white, Southern planter aristocracy lost its capital [African slaves] without compensation haunts the American political psyche to its core, and this haunting pervades both sides of the proverbial chamber, left and right. This is what a Black Bolshevik-style revolution threatens both white left and white right.

This is why the US police state, from the days after the Bolshevik Revolution to the murder of Fred Hampton to the framing of many Black radicals, was particularly paranoid about Black communists. Suspected and actual Black communists were targeted. And they weren't only targeted in the US. 

FOIA records show that after Cuban Communist Party Blas Roca opened the doors of the Cuban Party to Black Cubans in 1940, made anti-racism a priority, and elaborated its own version of the "Black Belt Theory," and Black Cubans joined in droves. The US responded with anxiety. It got more anxious and produced more files on any prominent Black Cuban whom they suspected of joining Cuba's communist party, renamed the Popular Socialist Party. Young Black Cuban singer, Celia Cruz, being an example of this target for her mere association, and possible membership.

In the US, the most popular Black man was also a communist. Paul Robeson. And he had to be the object of a well-orchestrated, prolonged takedown by the state.

But this is also why Black voices - militants and otherwise - have always been corralled by the gatekeepers of the left. "Don't be so angry." "Don't come off too strong." "Cool it." Or a variation of "that's not a working-class issue" or "that's not our issue." I've heard them all firsthand.

Worse, from time immemorial it is a matter of record we keep being asked to set aside our needs for some greater working-class ambition. I argue there is a larger, strategic motive behind this.

The view of the Black man and Black woman in the US is a national view, regardless of political leanings. We were raised with it. It's in our public institutions. It is the white left that does not understand the implications of this on themselves.

So, we have a credible explanation now as to why our white leftist friends, and their formations, groups, marginal political parties continue to fail the Black community - and thereby fail the mission of neither bettering the Black condition in this white settler-colonial state, nor producing a socialist society.

Our white left's fear of a new slave revolt, even if that slave revolt is necessary to bring us the liberation of a socialist society to build, remains a deterrent over a century after the 13th amendment.

Like the US police agencies, these white leftists have an institutional paranoia of Black radicalism. They've acculturated just enough where their propaganda shows the Black faces, they know we must be included in the list of marginalized, oppressed groups, and they will celebrate the voices of Black radicals - who are dead. They must be dead.

This savvy can no longer be allowed to give these people a pass.

Malcolm is quoted, put on memes, and brandished conspicuously today by the white left, but in his life, the white communists lambasted him as "an adventurer." He was far from promoted; he was ridiculed. A Black communist like Harry Haywood, who joined the Communists when his Black Marxist formation, African Blood Brotherhood, merged with them. As soon as the white communists dropped Black interests - this barely lasted a decade - many of those Black ABB communists quit. Haywood stayed in and was eventually expelled for lack of conformity.

These are provocative thoughts, and they are meant to be. As the working class further degrades under capitalism's neoliberal phase leading to fascism, the hubris and kinship ties of many white leftists needs confrontation. They need to reflect. I have as much hope they will as I have in a Democrat changing his/her spots.

But they must change, and its formations must change. I repeat that socialism will only come to the US when it is Black, even though the implied revolution that this demands is as scary to any white leftists as it was to their Southern Confederate kin. This is a problem. But this is the rite of passage communists and socialists will have to undergo if we are to have any hope for the broader working class.

For communism - or socialism, if you will - to take hold and have any success in the broad US society, it must reach the Black population first. Anything short of this is sham socialism and more liberalism.

But for socialism - or communism if you will - to succeed in the Black population a shift equally radical as abolition will have to occur in this country, and this makes even white leftists uneasy.

And this shift will never occur. It is not intended to occur. Neither the left nor right, for specific historical reasons, want this shift to occur, and this fact should make us question the quality of allies we have among the Black radical left.

Prof. Horne's illumination definitely helped open my eyes to a phenomenon I have, for very personal and very political reasons, been wrestling with for over a year. But also, the new flourish of attacks on Black intellectual bodies - and the way these attacks are played out, in the frenzy of an old lynch mob they perform. In this climate, even white leftists who know otherwise how to say the right things and stand on the right stages, join the mob in shutting down Black voices in ways you would never see used against white racists in this country.

The takeaway is white racists aren't a threat to them; Black people who dare to think outside the box are.

Are white leftists a hopeless cause? Well, they cannot be, and I do not believe they have to be. For one, they outnumber the Black as well as the indigenous as well as the Chicano. We need solidarity to begin the urgent steps to stopping, reversing, and building a socialist society on the ashes of this capitalist one.

But there are also ample examples of real race traitors who endured the enmity of their white leftist brethren. John Brown is the easy example of this.

So, as we head towards a juncture where our establishment promises more suffering, not less, in order to "save" the economy, where millions are anticipated to be thrown out of work, joining the already filled pipelines to housing insecurity, homelessness, prison, where it becomes clearer by the hour that this economy worth saving can only be saved when it serves fewer and fewer lucky lottery winners - we need socialism, so white people need to be slapped wake. 

A brief note on British democracy

A brief note on British democracy on the day Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigns but doesn't leave.

From 1935-1945, Britain had a "National" government consisting of a coalition. No elections were held in Britain for those 10 years. The king chose the PM and with the PM, they both chose the cabinet. According to biographers, the king chose the PM based on his class and chose the aristocrat Churchill over the working-class alternative.

By the early 1960's, sentiment had shifted. When a Tory PM resigned with a Tory majority, it was up to the queen, as it had been before with her father and his father and his mother and so forth and so on, to select the "top man" for the job. The British Tories weren't electing leaders in those days. She had two leading Tory members to ask to form a new government, and, like her father, she chose the aristocrat - Lord Home, who was incompetent and lasted ONE YEAR, exposing the queen to a flurry of criticism.

So, when PM and Labour leader Tony Blair announced he would resign, and to avoid any appearance of the queen's involvement and earlier backlash, Blair, still PM with a majority, coordinated a hat trick with his party and the palace. He formerly stepped down only as leader of the Labour Party. His successor, Gordon Brown, was then elected as leader of the Labour Party, at which time Blair tendered his resignation to the queen as PM. Then she called for Gordon Brown, the leader of the party. 

Otherwise, it would have appeared that she herself had filled the office.

The last monarch to bring a government down for political reasons was William IV, after he refused to endorse the democratizing Reform Bill of 1832. The last monarch to bring down a government at all was his successor, Victoria, because she refused the incoming PM his demand that her personal staff be mixed and not all of his opposing party.

Both maneuvers would have succeeded a generation earlier, but both failed even in the 1800's. William had to recall the fallen government and sign a bill that weakened his powers and the powers of the aristocracy. Victoria, too, had to recall the fallen government and change the composition of her staff.

To my knowledge, no monarch since has dared do this. Popular sentiment, whatever you think of it, scares these people.

Unlike all of his successors, Boris Johnson's resignation this morning made absolutely no reference to the queen. This was always a formality, just as upon taking office, a PM would say "I have just come from seeing the queen, and she has asked me to form a government .... blah blah blah." Equally, upon resigning of a loss of a Parliamentary majority after an election, a defeated PM would say, "I have gone to see the queen to offer my resignation ... blah blah blah."

Boris said none of this.

What's happening here may not be at all on the scale of an October Revolution or a march from the Sierra Maestra on January 1959, and it may be overlooked. But it is the force of democracy, and our work has yielded this - going back to those radicals after Charles was executed and Republic England unleashed democratic demands, continuing with the Shay's Rebellion, the emanations of the women's movements, and the first and enduring abolitionists: those Africans who refused to submit.

The supernatural powers of the aristocracies of the world are collapsing. I know this is a strange lesson to draw from this morning's resignation, but as one guy said, "Them's the breaks.

Like they say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't forget the long view of things. 

The First Shots in the Next Civil War?

June 24, 2022, at 4:30AM HST [10:30AM EDT], the rightwing of this settler-colonial experiment called the United States made a seismic win for its side comparable only to the seismic shift it gained on March 6, 1857. 

On that earlier date, the US Supreme Court's chief justice, the proslavery Roger Taney, issued the court's ruling that not only failed Dred Scott but all Black people. Tanney's ghost has never left this land, and it has reincarnated itself in the bodies of some of these justices - most particularly and ironically, that of Clarence Thomas.

Thomas strides ahead of his companion on the court, Alito, in his debasement of any progress and evolution in this country. Just like Roger Taney's wife, Thomas' is active in the furthest reaches of the fascist movement. Anne Key Taney, sister of Francis Scott Key, was the daughter of slaveowners and a slaveowner in her own right.

But this decision to reverse two generations of precedence and hard-won civil rights for women is not a stand-alone event, as bad as it truly is.

As some justices on the high court loosely encourage, they have the rights of lesbians, gays, and trans people on their radars next.

The left must really keep its eye on this ball and be cognizant of what exactly is happening here.

This isn't a fight for the lives of babies. These fascists starve and kill babies as sacrifices to capitalism.

This isn't a fight against lesbians, gays, and trans people. There are and always have been those people among the fascists as easily as they've been among the left.

What this is as critical a cultural fight between two visions of civilization as any fight in other epochs, and old one civilization and a new, emerging one.

The right wing of this country has loathed not only every step of progress made since the overturning of Dred Scott with the 13th amendment, but also every piece of progressive legislation enacted since the Franklin Roosevelt administration. They hate the laws, and they despise the movements that organized to bring about these laws.

The right wing in this country wants those laws reversed, which goes without saying; but it has been equally intent on gutting these movements. If you doubt the extremist lengths the right wing will go to in its battle for its civilization, you need only ask a Communist. If not a Communist, ask a Black or white militant.

Communists, and Black and white militants faced spying, framing, false imprisonment, assassination, and deportation, among other things. These acts were done by local, state, and federal authorities - state-sanctioned mob violence.

The left, in my opinion, will never peacefully gain ground in this battle without deep democratic reforms in this country. And what might I mean by that?

I mean how gerrymandering has allowed the most extreme rightwing candidates to hold office. 

I mean the hold corporate money has on both parties. 

I mean the monopoly of power both parties hold as well.

I mean how huge swathes of the center part of this country have been de-populated to greater and greater extents yet their powers in the US Senate are not diminished one iota.

Where have we seen the consequences of such cronyism before in history?

Mass movements in Britain coalesced to produce the Great Reform Act of 1832. The king at the time, William IV, was the last British monarch we know of to bring a government down because he refused to pass this bill authored by said government. That government resigned, but the mass movements had grown too strong, and in order for the king to get any laws passed, he had to recall the former government and assent to the reform bill. 

The Reform Act did several things, but one thing in particular should be of interest to us and this matter of US senators representing states with virtually no one in them.

Since Henry VIII's reign, British monarchs could "stack" Parliament with representatives who had no constituencies but who were favorable to the king and the British Establishment. An empty hill. A swamp. An abandoned farm. These were among the sites "represented" by men in Parliament. The masses had grown sick of this cronyism. 

The Reform Act of 1832 abolished this practice and set standards for representatives of Parliament - called "ministers of Parliament, or MPs." The British Establishment began to lose its grip. In less that 100 years, a newly rejuvenated lower House took aim at the House of Lords and weakened its powers too.

These US senators from virtually emptied states are just like the cronies placed on empty hills to control Parliament. And they have guided, aided, and abetted the construction of a reactionary judiciary.

Of course, back in the US, keen students of history know what Taney wrought, and what radical abolitionist John Brown wrought too. Theirs were the first shots in the unfolding US Civil War. Let's be mindful there is worse to come. 

Let us also be mindful that part of the antislavery forces - the Republican Party - ultimately turned on its civil rights project and abandoned the freed population.

We in the US need such a mass movement that can confront and sustain itself, or we will never - or never easily - gain the ground in this critical fight, which we are presently losing. 

P.S. And the Democratic Party will not save us.

Lucy and the Communists

Recently, Turner Classic Movies embarked on a podcast series delving into Hollywood history. The inaugural launch of the series, which can be heard on iTunes or watched on YouTube began with the life of actress/comedian Lucille Ball. This was soon followed by Aaron Sorkin's treatment, "Being the Ricardos." The TCM multi-part series on Ball begins with her birthplace of Jamestown, NY, through to her early successful television programs, and her relationship with husband and business partner, Desi Arnaz.

"Being the Ricardos" takes artistic license in condensing into one week a pivotal moment in Lucy's life when she confronts her philandering husband and is exposed as having registered to vote as a member of the Communist Party USA.

Part seven of the TCM podcast is titled “Red Scare.” It explores this controversial, and infinitely interesting, chapter in the comedian’s life. Infinitely interesting because showing how these otherwise one-dimensional public figures live complex, personal and political lives makes those lives richer and more believable - and more relatable.

Controversial because Hollywood in general and Ball in particular had every motivation, given the extent of the Red Scare, to put this chapter behind them and move on for the sake of their careers, profit, and salvaging the film industry.

In James Baldwin's last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is about the child murders in Atlanta in the 80's. Baldwin's thoughts return again and again to an indictment that this particular mobilization around these deaths was about saving commerce in Atlanta.

Commerce, not Christianity, is this nation's religion.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the TCM podcast contributes to this white washing in the name of commerce. Not surprisingly, so does Sorkin.

According to sworn testimonies before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, from Ball, her mother, and her brother, they had all registered to vote in California as Communist Party USA members in 1936.

Lucy's registration is about the only fact TCM almost gets correct. The podcast does not include Ball’s mother or her brother, and neither does Sorkin.

Though impossible to tell whether intentional or not, much of the podcast, despite the sworn testimony in HUAC transcripts, obscures the known facts of Ball’s alleged connections with the Party, and it seems to become another PR revision.

This we know from the testimony:

* Lucille Ball not only registered as a member of the Communist Party USA [CPUSA], but also so did her brother, Fred Ball, and mother Désirée E. Ball (all were subpoenaed by HUAC)

* Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, is described in the podcast as a "socialist" who held CPUSA meetings, which seems to leave in question whether the man was a Party member or a sympathizer. Hunt was in fact a CPUSA member and organizer in NY state [before a series of strokes]. He conducted those weekly meetings. 

*The Party meetings referenced in the podcast were in Lucille Ball's Los Angeles home. 

* Ball was named to the Party’s California state central committee, a fact omitted by the podcast and the film.

* Ball signed an affidavit at the time she registered to vote to sponsor a fellow CPUSA member to run for the 57th Assembly District of California, also omitted by the podcast and the film.

On Friday, September 4, 1953, Lucille Désirée Ball presented herself for questioning to HUAC in Hollywood. Between 1947 and into the 1950's, HUAC roamed the country and as far away as the Hawaii Territory [not yet a state] to ferret out Communists. 

This September testimony was actually her second time testifying, the first behind closed doors, a year earlier, and which testimony is still classified. 

As the podcast suggests, Ball thought her initial closed-door testimony settled the matter. It did not.

Part of the transcript, titled “Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area,” reads:

William A. Wheeler: "Would you go into detail and explain the background, the reason you voted or registered to vote as a Communist, or as a person who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party?"

Lucille Ball: "It was our grandfather, Fred Hunt. He just wanted us to, as we just did something to please him. I didn't intend to vote that way. As I recall I didn't.

"My grandfather started years ago - he was a Socialist as long as I can remember. He was the only father we ever knew, my grandfather. My father died when I was tiny, before my brother was born. He was my brother's only father.

"All through his life he had been a socialist, as far back as Eugene V. Debs, and he was in sympathy with the workingman as long as I have known, and he took the Daily Worker.”

Ball denies throughout the testimony ever being a member of the CPUSA or a communist, and that “I thought things were fine just the way they were.”

Yet, the same year she registered to vote as a CPUSA member, she, her grandfather, and a third person, Emile Freed, are appointed to the Communist Party’s California central committee. 

The HUAC investigator, Wheeler, reads from an alleged Party announcement of this appointment and passes it to Ball for a response.

Asked how she thinks her name was listed, Ball replied “Possibly my grandfather, Fred Hunt.”

After she confirms her signature on the nominating affidavit, the HUAC investigator asks for an explanation. Once again, “… Doing what I could to appease grandpa … “

At other points, in this same vein, she suggests to HUAC being duped into making a radio announcement on behalf of the Okies - the migrant, destitute farmers described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or being mentioned in a Daily Worker article. Again and again, she pivots to her grandfather Fred Hunt. She asks the investigator at one point if a certain allegation was during “Being nice to Daddy week”?

Whatever the actual depth of her Party membership, the performance reads through the transcript. She’s playing them, and, it turns out, they may be getting willingly played. Records suggest after Ball's first, behind-closed doors testimony, the panel was satisfied, save one politician who alerted a radio journalist.

It was the radio journalist's subsequent broadcast that triggered this more public testimony.

We learn some other interesting biographical notes from her testimony, like that she attended but never graduated high school. And that her father died when she was very young and her brother not yet born, making the grandfather the only father they really knew [and she says as much in testimony].

We learn that her grandfather’s advocacy for a living wage extended to maids Ball employed in the house. She recounts to HUAC: 

“We were never able to keep a maid, although we paid the highest prices we could afford, or they were getting at the time. My grandfather would walk out into the kitchen and see a maid and would say ‘Well, what is your name? How much are you getting?’

‘Oh, $20 or $25 a week,’ or whatever they were being paid.

“And he would say ‘That is not a working wage. What are you doing here?’

“And after a few times like that, you know, they would leave.”

But none of these things are brought up in the TCM podcast or the Sorkin film, and this is disappointing. Since the presumption is left against the Communist Party as a bad thing. 

The producers seem to do their level best to continue the performance Ball gave HUAC in 1953.

Instead of being ashamed of people's membership in the CPUSA and keeping up this revisionist nonsense, like "my grandfather made me do it," let's remember why tens of thousands like Lucille Ball joined the Party, why many more joined in the 30's at the height of the labor movement, why her grandfather was a Party organizer. As Ball herself explains her grandfather’s involvement: the Communist Party USA was the party of working people. 

The CPUSA was also the party for Black people, an anti-lynching party, and anti-Jim Crow party. It was the Party that staffed the CIO and its unions. That's why so many joined, and we should say this explicitly.

Unlike many other artists, teachers, government workers, and laborers who were so accused and subpoenaed, Ball’s Red Scare storm lasts but about two weeks and blows over. In my opinion, this is for two reasons. She attributes her actions to her grandfather, which I doubt a male actor or worker would get away with [Ball’s brother, Fred, faced a life of employment problems after his subpoena].

The second reason is that Desilu, the film company Ball and Arnaz founded and ran, had become a huge moneymaker for an industry that by the early 50’s was facing an identity crisis as the age of the major film studios was waning rapidly and the studio system in disarray. Desilu was infusing life [read: cash profits] into a dying corpse and taking down Lucille Ball would destroy their cash cow.

That’s why, as the podcast reveals, tobacco giant, Philip Morris, the main sponsor of the "I Love Lucy" show, stood by Ball and its sponsorship of her TV series.

The pivots and deflections aside, Ball’s HUAC testimony is in parts a touching acknowledgment of her grandfather's work. Even in the Sorkin film, she is shown as someone who wants to maintain loyalty to the "only Daddy we knew" and who raised her.

She says at one point to the panel:

"[The politics] never meant much to us, because he was so radical on the subject that he pressed his point a little too much, actually, probably, during our childhood, because he finally got over our heads, and we didn't do anything but consider it a nuisance, but as a dad, and he got into his 70's, and it became so vital to him that the world must be right 24 hours a day, all over it, and he was trying his damnedest to do the best he could for everybody and especially the workingman; that is, for the garbageman, the maid in the kitchen, the studio worker, the factory worker. He never lost a chance doing what he considered bettering their positions."

Rather than continuing to portray these "Hollywood legends" as naive dupes, how about we flip the script and consider they were the advanced ones, and elite society the albatross around our necks? We will not progress if we keep telling these Red Scare stories like this.

Click here to read a full version of the HUAC testimony and here, which is followed by Ball's mother, then brother.

Lucy and Desi hold an informal press conference
at their LA Valley ranch

[Note: this article originally appeared in People's World on December 7, 2021, but for reasons unknown to me it was taken down. It can be read here via web archive]