Emanuel
Cohen (John Randolph), the son of Russian and Romanian immigrants,
was
born in New York on 1st June, 1915. He
attended City College of New York where he became involved in politics
and acting. After leaving college he studied with Stella
Adler at the Actors Studio.
Randolph
later joined the Group Theatre in New
York led by Lee Strasberg. Members
of the group tended to hold left-wing political views and wanted to
produce plays that dealt with important social issues. Those involved
Elia Kazan, Clifford
Odets, John
Garfield,
Howard Da Silva, Joseph
Bromberg and Lee J. Cobb.
Randolph
served with the United States Army Air Force
during the Second World War. After the war he
resumed his acting career and appeared in Command
Decision (1947), Naked City
(1948), Peer Gynt (1951), Paint
Your Wagon (1951), Seagulls Over
Sorrento (1952) and Room Service
(1953).
During
this period Randolph supported radical causes such as better housing
for war veterans, for striking miners in Harlan County, and against
the death penalty for Willie McGee, who was executed for raping a
white woman in Mississippi and for convicted spies, Ethel
Rosenberg and
Julius
Rosenberg.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s the House
of Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation into
the entertainment industry. In September 1947, the HUAC interviewed
41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily
and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews
they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views.
These people were then called to appear before the HUAC. Ten of them:
Herbert Biberman, Lester
Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz,, Dalton
Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson
and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any
questions. Known as the Hollywood Ten,
they claimed that the 1st
Amendment
of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this.
The House of Un-American Activities Committee
and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty
of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and
twelve months in prison.
Larry Parks was the only actor in the original
nineteen people named. Parks agreed to give evidence to the HUAC and
admitted that he had joined the Communist
Party in 1941 but left it four years later. When asked for the
names of fellow members, Parks replied: "I would prefer, if you
would allow me, not to mention other people's names. Don't present
me with the choice of either being in contempt of this Committee and
going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be
an informer."
The House of Un-American Activities Committee
insisted that Parks answered all the questions asked. The HUAC had
a private session and two days later it was leaked to the newspapers
that Parks had named names. Leo Townsend,
Isobel Lennart, Roy
Huggins, Richard Collins, Lee
J. Cobb, Budd Schulberg and Elia
Kazan, afraid they would go to prison, were willing to name people
who had been members of left-wing groups. If these people refused
to name names, they were added to a blacklist that had been drawn
up by the Hollywood film studios.
Randolph was one of those named as a member of the Communist
Party. He appeared in front of the House
of Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 but refused to name
names. At the time Randolph was appearing on Broadway in Wooden
Dish. Encouraged by right-wing politicians and certain
newspapers, people demonstrated outside the theatre calling for Randolph
to be sacked. Supported by other actors in the production and his
union, Randolph kept his job. However, Randolph was blacklisted and
could not appear in Hollywood or on television.
He
later recalled: "My picture appeared on the front pages of the
Herald Tribune and the New
York Times the day I testified... The phone stopped ringing,
except for hate calls. At three or four in the morning, you'd hear:
'Jew-Commie', 'Kike-bastard', 'Go back to Russia'. Suddenly your best
friends disappeared because they were too scared. Hysteria was all
around us."
Randolph
retained his radical political views and was an active member of the
Screen Actors Guild, Amnesty International,
