The Un-American Activities of Zero Mostel

Just another Casualty of the Blacklist

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Larger than life and with a personality to match, Zero Mostel always thought of himself, not as a comic actor, but as a painter. Best known for creating the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (before Topol made the character his own), and for his performances in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Producers, Mostel always said that he acted to fund himself as a painter.

Shortly after his birth in 1915, Zero Mostel’s family moved first to the Lower East Side and then to a farm in Connecticut where his father opened a winery and supervised a kosher slaughterhouse. Their rural sojourn did not last long, his father could not make the farm pay and after a few years they returned to the Lower East Side. In those days he was still known as Samuel, or Sam, Mostel. It was only when he went onto the stage that he took the name Zero, reputedly because his mother had told him that if he didn’t work harder at school he would end up as a nobody, ‘a zero’.

He must have listened to his mother’s advice because he did well enough at school to be admitted to City College of New York where he took a degree in English and Fine Arts, followed by a part time Master’s course in Art at New York University. He funded himself by picking up odd jobs wherever he could. By this time the country was deeply immersed in the Depression, work was scarce and Sammy and his brother Aaron considered themselves lucky when they were given jobs as longshoremen, or dockers, at the Conover Street docks in Brooklyn.

After being beaten up twice on the docks, for joining a campaign to reform the longshoremen’s union, Zero left to work at a government-funded arts project. When the government threatened to withdraw the project’s funding he travelled to Washington with his fellow artists to register a protest. Sitting in the Senate gallery watching politicians at work, gave him an idea. His work on the art project had involved him giving talks at museums and galleries, lectures that he had peppered with comedy routines, building a reputation for himself as a knowledgeable museum guide who was fun to listen to. After his visit to the Senate he began including imitations of pompous politicians in his talks.

The social clubs run by the labour unions in New York were looking for entertainers to offer light relief to their down-and-out unemployed members. They wanted people with a left wing outlook who could both make their audiences laugh and stir them up politically, by raising awareness of the injustices they faced and how to combat them. Sam Mostel took his politician-mocking routine into the social clubs, gave himself the stage name Zero and became an instant hit.

He was given a slot at the new Café Society Uptown where the highlight of his routine was a skit based on an imaginary, racist southern senator he named Polltax T. Pellegra. Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, America had entered the war and Mostel’s imaginary senator insisted that it was all a leftist plot. The closing line of the rant that Mostel put into Senator Pellagra’s mouth became a catch phrase in New York: “Ah’d like to ask: What the hell was Hawaii doing in the Pacific Ocean anyway?”

Mostel’s scathingly political routine attracted attention from the wrong sort of people. Newspaper columnists criticised his lack of respect for the country’s governing institutions and insinuated there was something  dangerously subversive about him. The FBI took note and opened a file on him. Zero Mostel’s name joined the growing list of actors and performers whose allegedly subversive activities were closely monitored by the federal government.

A disproportionate number of the names in the FBI files were of Jews, mainly those who had grown up on the Lower East Side. The poverty and hardship they suffered was no worse than that of their Italian and Irish neighbours, but as immigrants they had been influenced in different ways. The Jewish experience was moulded primarily in the Pale of Settlement, the area that extended southwards from the Baltic to the Black Seas, through present day Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the west of Russia. Beginning in the late 19^th century many Jews became active in socialist workers’ unions, or Bunds. Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe to America, even if they had not been Bundists themselves, were politically aware; they brought their socialist views to America with them, and passed them on to their children and grandchildren.

In his book, World of Our Fathers, about Jewish immigration to America, Irving Howe wrote that

“the first shock of encountering America brought a shattering disappointment, especially to the earlier immigrants. Frustration paved the way for new political faiths, as it already had in the old country. The Jewish socialist milieu gave people a sense of home and of mission. Spurred by the example of their parents or by the eloquence of orators . . . young sons and daughters of the immigrants would turn “naturally” to the idea of socialism; it became their initiation into the world.”

 Zero Mostel was one of those who turned naturally to socialism during his formative teenage years. And, like many other Jewish youngsters on the Lower East Side, as he grew older, he instinctively allied himself to left wing causes. Although some of his friends denied it, it seems that during the 1940s he joined the Communist Party.

The army was certain that he had. In June 1943, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department stated that Zero Mostel was reliably reported to have been a Communist. The activities they cited in evidence included his performances on behalf of communist magazines, exhibitions of his paintings at a radical conference, his campaigning for Russian War Relief and his appearances at a venue which the army regarded as Communist-owned.

In 1938 the House of Representatives created the Committee on Un-American Activities. Its role was to investigate allegedly subversive activities carried out by people with an affiliation to the Communist party or other left-wing movements. They investigated journalists, teachers, religious leaders and paid particular attention to those working in the performing and creative arts.

In 1947 they launched an investigation into the influence of Communism on the movies. They summoned people they believed to be subversives to appear before them as witnesses. When a group of writers and directors, the ‘Hollywood Ten’, used their appearance before the Committee to abuse and revile its members, there was an outcry in the country. The public was shocked. The Committee charged the Hollywood Ten with contempt, and the movie industry, realising their reputation was at stake, removed their earlier objections to the Committee’s work. They declared that they were establishing a blacklist, that they would not ‘knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.’

And so the Blacklist was born. Over the years, hundreds of people working in the creative industries found themselves blacklisted and unable to work. Sometimes it was because they had not satisfied the House Un-American Activities Committee of their bona fides, but more frequently it was because they were merely suspected of having left wing views. No employer would run the risk of giving them a job. Because there was no official document called ‘the Blacklist’ it became impossible for people who had been blacklisted to appeal. If an individual was fingered by the newspapers or by an informer, as being a communist sympathiser, it could take years before they were able to work again.

Although there was no official blacklist, there was a publication entitled Red Channels, The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. It appeared in June 1950 and contained the names of 151 alleged subversives, together with a list of their supposed activities. Zero Mostel’s name was in it, along with many of his friends. From that moment on Zero Mostel was blacklisted. None of the major movie studios or Broadway theatres would offer him work, frightened of associating with someone whose name had been tarnished.

For the next five years the story of Zero Mostel’s life was one of misery and poverty, of having no money and scratching around for work. Unlike many, he had a second string to his bow - he could continue to paint but his art failed to provide him with an income. His wife Kate tried to find work but it was as tough for her as it was for him. Fortunately, not every employer succumbed to the blacklisting mania;  there were some out of town clubs and off-Broadway theatres that actively and proudly supported the ostracised artists. They didn’t pay much, but it was better than nothing. From time to time Zero managed to pick up a bit of work at one of these places.

In October 1955, five years after he had been blacklisted, Zero Mostel was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He mocked them saying that he had not worked for Twentieth Century Fox, his employer had been Eighteenth Century Fox, or maybe Nineteenth Century. He told them he had obtained his name Zero because he had no money. When it was time to get serious he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to disclose whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He told the Committee that he would not answer questions due to his constitutional liberties ‘which I hear are granted to every individual in the land.’  When the Counsel for the Committee started to lecture him on patriotism he stood his ground, asserted his belief in freedom of speech, forced the Committee to assert that they too believed in it, and offered them no reason to censure him. He left the hearing still blacklisted, but he was feted as a hero for his performance.

It took another couple of years before the blacklist finally crumbled. Law suits, and a change in public opinion brought it to an end. The House Un-American Activities Committee fell into disrepute and in 1959 President Truman denounced it as “the most Un-American thing in the country today.” Zero Mostel’s career recovered, his greatest roles, those for which he is best remembered, were still  ahead of him.

The blacklist made people suffer, reputationally and financially, simply because someone had denounced them, often untruthfully, as subversives or communists. Zero Mostel’s story is not unusual. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of tales similar to his. Some have been told, many have not.