The Morrison Case
A short play by Albert Maltz, 1952
Introduction by Patrick Chura, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Akron
Cast:
Peter Morrison – Tom Kastle
Captain – Alex Hancock
Mr. Butler – Daniel Graupner
Mr. Hodges & Mr. Burkey – David Simmons
Recorded October 11. 2023 at Audio for the Arts
Albert Maltz: A Brief Biography
Patrick Chura, University of Akron
Leftist playwright, novelist, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Albert Maltz (1908-1985) was a gifted artist who proved himself in multiple genres. He was also famous as one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film industry figures who challenged the constitutional legitimacy of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. For refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into alleged communist subversion, Maltz was blacklisted, fined, jailed for ten months, and thwarted as a writer for twenty years.
Both of Maltz’s parents were Jewish immigrants, his father from Lithuania and his mother from Poland. Albert was the youngest of three brothers, all born in Brooklyn. At the age of three, he witnessed antisemitic violence when his father borrowed $1,000 to move the family out of a Williamsburg slum into the middle-class Flatbush neighborhood. As his father and siblings unloaded belongings, they were attacked by a gang of boys shouting epithets and throwing stones, one of which broke out a window and cut Albert’s lip. Maltz never forgot the episode and claimed that it made him “sensitive to the whole question of injustice.”
In childhood Albert was inspired by real and imaginary family stories about courageous outsiders who fought back against prejudice and intolerance. In adolescence he became passionate about boxing because of his father’s advice that “A Jew must learn to fight.” Maltz’s parents also introduced him to the New York Yiddish theatre, a vibrant drama subculture featuring plays about serious issues like Zionism, socialism, and modern Jewish identity.
A conscientious student, Maltz showed enough promise at Brooklyn’s Erasmus High School to be admitted to Columbia University, where he majored in philosophy while also taking courses in literature and regularly attending plays. By the time he graduated he was fixated on the idea of a literary career that would apply his theoretical learning about ethics and existential issues as a tool for analyzing the human search for meaning through moral action.
In 1930 Maltz enrolled at Yale Drama School. His goal was to learn the craft of playwriting from the renowned professor George Pierce Baker, whose workshops had for decades been a training ground for major dramatists. One of Albert’s classmates was George Sklar, a working-class radical who stoked Maltz’s anti-capitalist leanings.
It was Sklar who introduced Maltz to Marxist politics and to the proletarian art of New Masses, a magazine then known for its firebrand socialism. The two collaborated on ground-breaking plays beginning in 1931 with Merry Go Round, a controversial melodrama that exposed urban corruption so effectively that New York City politicians tried to shut it down.
A second collaboration, the anti-war play Peace on Earth, opened in 1933 and was named that year’s “outstanding American work of art contributing most to the cause of peace.” The central character is a detached psychology professor who is drawn into a conflict between striking longshoreman and their war-profiteering bosses. Peace on Earth was probably the first American play to present modern war as the inevitable result of capitalism. Maltz was 24 when he co-wrote it.
A year later Maltz struck out on his own. After making a research trip to the coal country of West Virginia, he wrote Black Pit, a full-length play set in an Appalachian coal camp. This psychologically complex example of social drama focuses on the dilemma of an immigrant miner, blacklisted for taking part in a strike, who later becomes a company informer in order to keep his family from starving and to provide medical care for his pregnant wife.
With his proletarian journey still fresh in mind, Maltz also wrote a series of short stories in the muckraking tradition, drawing attention to dangerous working conditions in mines and mills and factories. One of his best stories, “Man on a Road,” earned several awards and resulted in a congressional investigation into the effects of silicosis, a deadly lung disease.
In 1938, Maltz’s “The Happiest Man on Earth,” won the O. Henry Memorial Award as the year’s best short story. The central character is Jesse Fulton, a destitute father who has spent six years during the Great Depression in a futile search for employment in Kansas City. When Jesse hears that his brother-in-law is running a trucking company in Tulsa, he walks 250-miles to beg for a job, only to learn that the sole opening is for a driver of dangerously high-explosive “nitroglycerine soup” used in drilling oil wells. “Sooner or later you get killed,” the brother-in-law explains, denying Jesse the well-paying work. But Jesse won’t be put off; thinking of his starving family, he talks himself into the job. Aware that he will likely die behind the wheel, he is nevertheless elated to regain work and dignity. He tearfully declares himself “the happiest man on the whole earth.”
While some critics view “The Happiest Man on Earth” as Maltz’s single most impressive piece of fiction, that judgment is debatable in light of the five well-crafted novels Maltz published between 1940 and 1967. In the first of these, The Underground Stream, a fundamental clash between communism and fascism is embodied in the characters Fred Prince, a leftist organizer, and Jeffrey Grebb, a proto-fascist personnel director in the auto industry of Detroit, the epicenter of a national struggle for industrial labor unions. Prince is defeated but dies a martyr to the collectivist cause, and in doing so he expresses one of Albert Maltz’s core artistic ideals:
A man must hold to his purpose. This–nothing less–is the underground stream of his life. Without it he is nothing. I cannot yield. A man is nothing who yields his purpose. (341)
Maltz’s second novel, The Cross and the Arrow (1944), portrays a struggle to retain personal morality in defiance of state-sponsored brutality. Set in Nazi Germany, the narrative explores the psychology of Willi Wegler, a seemingly loyal factory worker whose wife and son have been killed in Hitler’s war.
Though Wegler is decorated with a German service cross, he is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocide and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich atrocities. Wracked with guilt, Wegler suddenly betrays his country in a gesture of protest and self-sacrifice: While an air raid is going on, he fashions an enormous arrow out of hay in an open field, then ignites it as a flaming signal to direct British bombers to the site of the factory where he works. Critics universally praised this richly dramatic novel, citing Wegler’s complex heroism as evidence of man’s capacity for good. The book was issued in a special Armed Services Edition of 140,000 for distribution to U.S. soldiers serving overseas.
The Cross and the Arrow was written in Los Angeles, where the author and his wife, the accomplished writer and musician Margaret Larkin, had relocated in 1941 and where Maltz found immediate success as a screenwriter. It is ironic that Maltz was later deemed “un-American” because some of his early credits were for patriotic films. His screenplay for Pride of the Marines premiered in 28 cities under the auspices of the U.S. Marine Corps. Another project, Destination Tokyo in 1943, was first shown aboard a U.S. submarine and was adopted by the Navy as an official training film.
The peak of Maltz’s pre-blacklist fame was his screenplay for The House I Live In, a short feature starring Frank Sinatra. The purpose of this inspiring film was to strike a blow against antisemitism and foster religious tolerance and inclusion. For its pro-democracy messages, it won a special Academy Award in 1946.
Four years later, the Oscar-winning author was in prison. Two events in quick succession brought about Maltz’s rapid descent from the Hollywood pinnacle to the federal penitentiary.
First, Maltz took a bold stand on a long-debated intraparty issue as U.S. communists determined their post-World War II political course. In early 1946, Maltz published in New Masses a now famous essay, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” asserting that leftist authors were producing inferior work because they were forced to place political concerns above artistic ones. Much left-wing literature, Maltz noted, was narrowed and sterilized by the Party doctrine that art must function as a weapon in the class war. Essentially, Maltz asked that writers be judged by the quality of their work, not the Party committees they join. He reminded fellow Marxists that “where art is a weapon, it is only so when it is art” (22).
A handful of veteran leftist critics including Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson harshly and publicly rejected Maltz’s argument. Under withering attack, Maltz recanted his views and exculpated himself by writing a rebuttal to his own “mistaken” article. He was accepted back into the Party fold, but the painful controversy stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Less than a year later, Maltz was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Under the chairmanship of aggressively anti-Communist Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, HUAC was hunting for leftists who had supposedly infiltrated the entertainment industry to brainwash the American people with Marxist messages.
What the committee wanted from the Hollywood Ten was for the accused to admit their ties with the Soviet Union, apologize for their political views, praise the Thomas committee, and “name names” by identifying other communist sympathizers.
What the committee actually got from the Ten was defiance. Instead of taking the Fifth Amendment when asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,” the Ten challenged HUAC’s right to ask the question, or any question about personal beliefs. Citing the free speech protections of the First Amendment, they effectively argued that HUAC had no right to exist.
Maltz’s formulation of the issue was among the best and bravest: “The American people are going to have to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Thomas committee. They cannot have both. One or the other must be abolished in the immediate future.”
Within weeks the film industry blacklist was instituted, ordering studio executives to fire the famously insubordinate screenwriters and producers. Maltz was cited for Contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and received the maximum sentence of a year in prison. Beginning in September 1950 he was incarcerated at the Mill Point Prison Camp in West Virginia.
Maltz served ten months in Mill Point, but the effects of the blacklist would be permanent. The film credit he earned in 1948 for The Naked City, his most famous screenplay, was the last he would receive for 22 years.
There had been, however, a revealing moment in 1960 when his scriptwriting work seemed about to resume. That year Frank Sinatra, who more than once called Albert Maltz “the best goddamned writer around,” took out a full-page ad in Variety to announce that Maltz would write the screenplay for his next film. The outcry from the conservative press and the American Legion was deafening, causing even Sinatra, a powerful megastar, to cave to the red-baiters. Two weeks later Sinatra took out another ad stating that he’d accept the “majority opinion” and discharge the writer he still believed was “the best man for the job” (Salzman 92, 131).
Maltz’s fiction writing career during the blacklist phase was equally complicated and mortifying. At first it was unclear whether the government-imposed banishment from film work applied to the publishing industry, and Maltz was therefore able to place his third novel, The Journey of Simon McKeever, with his usual publisher in 1949. A captivating story of the road, the novel recounts the odyssey of a 73- year-old runaway from a shabby state-run home for the elderly who hitchhikes from Sacramento to Los Angeles seeking a cure for his arthritis.
Ultimately McKeever, a representative working-class American, finds something more precious than a medical miracle. He achieves an epiphany that will enable him to bequeath to humankind his hard-won personal truth and thereby “move the world one inch forward.” With this sublime and technically flawless novel, Maltz elevated literature of the common man to high art.
The film version of Simon McKeever was enthusiastically purchased by 20th Century Fox but abruptly canceled under pressure from right-wing organizations, and the film was never produced.
From 1952 to 1962 Maltz lived in self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he completed a riveting one-act play, “The Morrison Case,” and his fourth novel, A Long Day in a Short Life. The novel, an important indictment of the inequities of American justice system, was rejected by eighteen commercial presses before the author resorted to a small communist-affiliated press in 1957. “The Morrison Case,” an exposé about Cold War era violations of civil liberties, has yet to be published in the United States.
After his very public hiring and firing by Sinatra, Maltz admitted feeling “more profoundly blacklisted than ever” (Salzman 132). Realizing he could not possibly get a fair shake in the literary marketplace, he found outlets for several magazine stories under the assumed name Julian Silva in 1960-61. Only after one of Maltz’s stories won an award did he discover that there was already an active writer of that name.
Rather than establish a new pseudonym, Maltz and his agent decided to send his next novel, A Tale of One January, to his British publisher in 1966. The starkly realistic narrative, set in 1945, chronicles the escape from Auschwitz of two women whose souls have been numbed by Nazi cruelty. In their traumatic flight the friends nurture each other, regaining human feeling and a sense of selfhood while rediscovering life’s healing rituals. The novel was enthusiastically embraced by British critics, one of whom declared, “If Albert Maltz were not already known as a remarkable writer, the first two and a half pages of A Tale of One January would immediately establish him as one” (Salzman 138).
While his final novel was being praised in England, the period of blacklisting came to an end. By 1970 there was again work for Maltz in Hollywood; that year he earned a screenwriting credit for Two Mules for Sister Sara and another the following year for The Beguiled, both of which starred Clint Eastwood.
In 1971 Liveright collected and published nine short stories by Maltz, including two strong new works, under the title Afternoon in the Jungle. But the re-establishment of his fiction writing career was only a brief, largely symbolic hint of what Albert Maltz might have accomplished. On this crucial hypothetical question, Bernard Dick concluded that “The blacklist reduced Maltz to a writer of occasional fiction, and the frustration of being a nonperson took such a toll that even when he was no longer blacklisted, he could not regain his former drive” (102).
Albert Maltz died in Los Angeles in 1985. Despite the brutal treatment he endured at the hands of McCarthy era demagogues, he maintained a hopeful vision of an ideally egalitarian society and a faith in human potential to resist tyranny.
Works Cited or Consulted
Dick, Bernard. “Albert Maltz: Asking of Writers” in Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten. University of Kentucky Press, 1989, pp. 82-103.
Maltz, Albert. The Way Things Are. International Publishers, 1938.
_____. The Underground Stream. Little, Brown and Co., 1940.
_____. The Cross and the Arrow. Little, Brown and Co., 1944.
_____. The House I Live In (screenplay). RKO, 1945.
_____. “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” New Masses, 12 April 1946, pp. 19-22.
_____. The Journey of Simon McKeever. Little, Brown and Co., 1949.
_____. A Long Day in a Short Life. International Publishers, 1957.
_____. A Tale of One January. Calder and Boyars, 1967.
_____. Afternoon in a Jungle. Liveright, 1971.
_____. The Citizen Writer in Retrospect. Transcript of a 36-hour interview with Albert Maltz, completed under the auspices of the UCLA Oral History Program. Joel Gardner, interviewer, 1983.
Miller, Gabriel. “Albert Maltz” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume D: Modern Period, ed. Paul Lauter, 2010, pp. 2007-2009.
Salzman, Jack. Albert Maltz. (Twayne’s United States authors series; 311) G. K. Hall & Co., 1978.
Wald, Alan. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Patrick Chura is the author of Damned Agitator: A Michael Gold Reader, forthcoming in 2023 from SUNY Press:
Funding for this project came from Patrick Chura and the University of Akron, the Madison Arts Commission, the Wisconsin Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts
