Pro-Unit Is Pro-Group

Abstract

On April 10, 1952, Elia Kazan appeared in Executive Session before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had come to Washington at his own initiative “to amend the testimony” he had given about three months earlier when first subpoenaed by the Committee. The dignified Black man who had discretely delivered him the “pink slip” ordering him to Washington on January 14, 1952, had confided sotto voce: “This will be a secret session. You don’t tell anyone, we don’t tell anyone. We expect you to be a cooperative witness” (A Life, 443). That Executive Session was not made public, but shortly after, a gossip column in the Hollywood Reporter carried a lead story that Kazan had confessed to “Commie membership,” but that he had refused to talk about any of his “old pals from the Group Theatre days.” That was the position he had intended to take, Kazan recalled in A Life, the autobiography in which he revealed his version of these traumatic happenings—from a distance of 35 years.