Childhood and education John Howard Lawson was born on September 25, 1894 in New York City to affluent
Jewish parents, Simeon Levy and Belle Hart. In the 1880s, Simeon had lived in Mexico City, where he started the
Mexican Financier newspaper. After he met Belle, he moved to New York City and became an executive with
Reuters. Before his first child was born, Simeon changed the family name from Levy to Lawson, later saying half-jokingly that he did it so he could "obtain reservations at expensive resort hotels", many of which refused to accommodate Jews. When John was five, his mother died of
breast cancer, which was a profound loss that scarred him. Belle had named her three children after people she admired: Wendell Holmes Lawson was named for the American jurist
Oliver Wendell Holmes; Lawson's sister Adelaide Jaffery Lawson was named for a friend of Belle's who was active in social causes; John Howard Lawson was named for prison reformer
John Howard. As a successful businessman, Simeon was able to send his children to private schools. At age seven, John attended the experimental school, The Playhouse, run by
Elizabeth and Alexis Ferm. Later, he and his siblings went to Halstead School in
Yonkers, New York and then to
Cutler School in
New Rochelle, New York. In 1906, Simeon sent his three children on a tour of Europe where they saw many theatrical productions. John took notes on the set designs, actors, and plays. In 1909, the children toured the United States and Canada.
Early plays Lawson wrote his first play,
A Hindoo Love Drama, while at Williams. Mary Kirkpatrick, faculty leader of the Williams College Drama Club, was impressed by this effort and became his first agent. She was a volunteer nurse's aide, and would later become a film actress and costume designer. In spring of 1919, they returned home to New York due to a lack of money and the wishes of their families. Their son Alan was born in July 1919. In early 1920, the Lawsons moved back to Europe and found residence in Paris, where he completed
Roger Bloomer. It would be his first play to reach Broadway when it opened on March 1, 1923. It was put on by the Equity Players and ran for fifty performances. His marriage to Kate did not last; they were divorced in 1923. Lawson finally succeeded in that task, and the SWG became a viable union that could bargain on behalf of screenwriters. However, the success came at a cost. He was soon fired by MGM, an action he attributed to his union organizing. He said his middle-class upbringing had prevented him from fully understanding working-class people. He acknowledged that his prosperity and Hollywood connections were suspect in the fight for workers' rights. Partly due to the criticism he received from the Left, Lawson decided in 1934 to join the
Communist Party (CPUSA). He sought to educate himself about the
proletarian cause. He traveled throughout poverty-stricken areas of Alabama and Georgia where workers were trying to unionize, and facing violent resistance. While in the South, he submitted articles to the
Daily Worker. He himself was arrested numerous times. These experiences inspired his next play,
Marching Song. Produced by the radical Theatre Union,
Marching Song opened in New York on February 17, 1937 and ran for sixty-one performances. In February 1943,
Francis Biddle added the
League of American Writers to the
Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations. In response, the Hollywood branch, spearheaded by Lawson, renamed itself the Hollywood Writers Mobilization. In 1946, Lawson organized and led a critical attack on
Albert Maltz after the latter penned a
New Masses article, "What Shall We Ask of Writers?". In the article, Maltz challenged the didacticism of the CPUSA's censorship of writers. Surprised by the ferocity of attack from his colleagues—including Lawson,
Howard Fast,
Alvah Bessie,
Ring Lardner Jr., and
Samuel Sillen—Maltz publicly recanted.
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) " stand with their attorneys outside district court in
Washington, D.C. before arraignment on
contempt of Congress charges. The ten were charged for refusing to cooperate with the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
(Front row, L-R): Herbert Biberman, attorney Martin Popper, attorney
Robert W. Kenny,
Albert Maltz and
Lester Cole.
(Second row, L-R): Dalton Trumbo,
John Howard Lawson,
Alvah Bessie and
Samuel Ornitz.
(Top row, L-R): Ring Lardner Jr.,
Edward Dmytryk and
Adrian Scott. Following
World War II, American fears of communist power were heightened after the Soviet Union established communist governments in Eastern Europe. The
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), chaired by Congressman
J. Parnell Thomas (
R-
NJ), began an investigation into communist influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Lawson testified before the HUAC on October 29, 1947. Like
Alvah Bessie,
Herbert Biberman,
Albert Maltz,
Adrian Scott,
Dalton Trumbo,
Lester Cole,
Edward Dmytryk,
Samuel Ornitz and
Ring Lardner Jr., he refused to answer almost all questions and would not give names of other people he knew in communist circles. These ten screenwriters and directors came to be known as the
Hollywood Ten or "Unfriendly Ten". Lawson's appearance before the committee was marked by shouting, interruptions, and sharp exchanges with Chairman Thomas. From the outset, tensions flared between the two men because, unlike prior HUAC witnesses, Lawson was not permitted to read his opening statement into the
Congressional Record: The first sentence which Thomas objected to was: "For a week, this committee has conducted an illegal and indecent trial of American citizens, whom the Committee has selected to be publicly pilloried and smeared." Lawson was sentenced to twelve months in
Ashland Prison and fined $1,000. The Hollywood Ten were immediately blacklisted from working for any of the studios. For the most part, the ten men stayed united in their resistance to HUAC, but there was a notable exception. In late 1950, Edward Dmytryk cut short his prison term so that he could appear before the committee again as a friendly witness. He testified that Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Adrian Scott "had put him under pressure to make sure his films expressed the views of the American Communist Party. This was particularly damaging as several members of the original Hollywood Ten were at that time involved in court cases with their previous employers." Dmytryk went on to name twenty-six current or former left-wing film artists and was thereby able to resume his directorial career. In his book
Naming Names,
Victor Navasky writes that Lawson regarded the Hollywood blacklist "as only one part of the
McCarthyite program, which he saw as aiming to control America's mass communications through a new and total censorship. He believed that the cultural blacklist involved a basic struggle concerning control of mass media—a struggle that began with the first sound picture and is still going on."
Later years '', April 1951 While banned from working in Hollywood, Lawson continued to explore, from a Marxist perspective, the theoretical foundations of drama and cinema. He expanded his 1936
Theory and Technique of Playwriting into
Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (1949), and revised it again for a 1960 edition. The book has been described as "one of the better articulations of the fundaments of dramatic construction." He researched and wrote a lengthy historical work on cultural tradition entitled
The Hidden Heritage: A Rediscovery of the Ideas and Forces that Link the Thought of Our Time with the Culture of the Past (1950). He analyzed the politics of mid-20th century Hollywood offerings in
Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953). He expounded on "the principles, technique, and aesthetics of film-making" in
Film: The Creative Process (1964). He also co-authored, using a pseudonym, the screenplay for one of the first anti-
apartheid movies,
Cry, the Beloved Country (1951). Despite the film industry's blacklist, Lawson was able to earn money by teaching at several California universities, including
Stanford,
Loyola Marymount University, and the
University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He alleged that Hollywood "has always falsified the life of American workers" and its "unwritten law decrees that only the middle and upper classes provide themes suitable for film presentation, and that workers appear on the screen only in subordinate or comic roles." According to Lawson, "The consistent presentation on the nation's screens of the views that working-class life is to be despised and that workers who seek to protect their class interests are stupid, malicious, or even treasonable, has its effect on every strike and every labor struggle." He added, "Workers and their families see films which urge them to despise the values by which they live, and to emulate the corrupt values of their enemies." He also condemned the screen portrayals of Negroes at that time in the early 1950s. And he argued that Hollywood promoted degrading images of women, treating "'glamour' and sex appeal as the sum-total of woman's personality". He wrote that in most American movies, "when a woman succeeds in the world of competition, Hollywood holds that her success is achieved by trickery, deceit, and the amoral use of sexual appeal." Lawson died in San Francisco on August 11, 1977. He was 82. Unlike other members of the Hollywood Ten, such as
Dalton Trumbo and
Ring Lardner Jr., who were eventually "forgiven" for their youthful political radicalism and allowed to work openly again in the film industry, Lawson was never forgiven. He was
persona non grata all the way up until his death. That's why Gerald Horne called him "The Final Victim of the Blacklist".
The New York Times obituary for Lawson quoted him as saying: The manuscript of his unpublished autobiography is held, along with his other papers, at
Southern Illinois University Carbondale in
Carbondale, Illinois. ==Works==