John Howard Lawson

John Howard Lawson
Born	(1894-09-25)September 25, 1894 New York, New York, U.S.
Died	August 11, 1977(1977-08-11) (aged 82) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Pen name	Edward Lewis
Occupation	Playwright, screenwriter
Period	Modernism
Spouse	Kathryn Drain (1918–1923) Susan Edmond (1925–)
Children	3
Signature

John Howard Lawson (September 25, 1894 – August 11, 1977) was an American playwright, screenwriter, arts critic, and cultural historian. After enjoying a relatively successful career writing plays that were staged on and off Broadway in the 1920s and '30s, Lawson relocated to Hollywood and began working in the motion picture industry. In 1933, he helped to organize the Screen Writers Guild and became its first president. In the ensuing years, he was credited with a number of notable screenplays including Blockade (1938), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), and Counter-Attack (1945).

In 1947, Lawson was one of the Hollywood Ten, the initial group of American film industry professionals to appear before Congress as part of an investigation into communist influence in Hollywood. Because he and the other nine screenwriters and directors refused to answer questions about their alleged Communist Party affiliation, they were cited for contempt of Congress. In 1948, Lawson was sentenced to a year in prison; he began serving in 1950. When he got out, he like the others found himself blacklisted by the studios. He wrote, uncredited, the screenplay for Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), an adaptation of Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel about South Africa. With his Hollywood livelihood largely cut off, Lawson turned his attention to scholarship. He taught at several California universities. He authored books about drama, film-making, and cultural history. Unlike most other members of the Hollywood Ten, Lawson was never "un-blacklisted". He remained a pariah in the film industry until his death in 1977.

Life and career

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; John'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, John 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.

John entered Williams College in 1910. He contributed to The Williams College Monthly literary magazine. He also edited the senior yearbook and was a member of the varsity debating team. He was known to other students as a good-natured iconoclast and a frequent speaker at undergraduate meetings. His older brother Wendell was meanwhile studying music and art in Germany. On a trip back to the U.S. in 1913, Wendell brought a copy of Karl Kautsky's The Class Struggle. According to one biographer, "This book gave [John Howard] Lawson his first knowledge of Marx and Marxism, with which he first disagreed, though he brought Kautsky's book to Socialist Club meetings and, to the faculty sponsor's annoyance, quoted from it as a basis for discussion." After graduating from Williams in 1914 with a B.A., John worked as a cable editor for Reuters from 1914 to 1915.

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. Lawson was inspired to write three plays in 1915-16: Standards, The Spice of Life, and Servant-Master-Lover. Standards was bought by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris, and was given a tryout in Albany and Syracuse in 1915. It never made it to Broadway. Oliver Morosco produced Servant-Master-Lover in a run in Los Angeles, but received bad reviews.

World War I

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Lawson was opposed to enlisting. His father helped him get a position in the Norton-Harjes Volunteer Ambulance Corps. In June 1917, he left for Europe. Aboard the ship, he met John Dos Passos, also as aspiring writer. In November, when Norton-Haryes was folded into the American Red Cross's Ambulance Service, Dos Passos and Lawson decided to become drivers; they went to Italy. At this time, Dos Passos was working on One Man's Initiation: 1917 and Lawson had begun his play Roger Bloomer. While serving, they were outfitted to Paris. Lawson attended performances of the Comédie-Française and Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In January 1918, Dos Passos wrote a letter that was critical of the ambulance company. It somehow reached Red Cross officials, and they forced Dos Passos to resign. Lawson was under suspicion for his attitudes as well, but he managed to stay in Italy and do public relations work for the Red Cross.

Post-war

While living in Rome in autumn of 1918, Lawson met and married Kathryn (Kate) Drain. She was a volunteer nurse's aide, and would later become a film actress and costume designer. In spring of 1919, they returned 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. He had meanwhile met Susan Edmond, whom he would marry two years later, and they remained married till the end of his life.

Lawson's next play, Processional, was produced by the Theatre Guild and opened on Broadway on January 12, 1925. Although the production ran for 96 performances, it failed financially, and the Theatre Guild told Lawson they would not stage any more of his plays written in the expressionistic style. In 1937, the Federal Theatre Project revived Processional and it garnered critical and popular acclaim.

In 1926, the New York International Theatrical Exposition showcased experimental European cubist, futurist, and constructivist plays. Lawson was fascinated by these avant-garde works, which he saw as revolutionary. Along with Dos Passos and Michael Gold, Lawson formed the Workers Drama League to produce revolutionary plays. One production and a few weeks later, however, the three men disbanded the league. They then joined with Em Jo Basshe to establish a radical theatrical group that came to be known as the "New Playwrights". The group lasted until 1929 and was largely funded by millionaire businessman Otto Hermann Kahn who was a devoted patron of the arts.

Lawson's play Nirvana premiered on March 3, 1926 at the Greenwich Village Theatre, but ran for only six performances. The play calls for a new religion to help people survive the swirling cyclone of jazz, the Machine Age, skyscrapers, science fiction, tabloids, and radio. Lawson's reputation after Processional, and the notable set designs by Mordecai Gorelik, are considered to have helped it gain the six showings.

In late 1926, Lawson, Dos Passos, and Gold were on the National Executive Committee. They attempted to establish the Proletarian Artists and Writers League. A similar Soviet Union organization offered some financial backing to them. The first play produced by the New Playwrights, Lawson's Loudspeaker, opened on March 7, 1927 at the 52nd Street Theatre and ran for forty-two performances. He had been intrigued by the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone at the new Theatre Guild playhouse in 1924, an event attended by both Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and Otto Kahn. In his play, Lawson explored the concept of Kahn as governor rather than Smith.

In August 1927, Lawson, Dos Passos, and Gold went to Boston to protest the executions of the Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Lawson would later write in his autobiography that during this time period in his life, he could "neither ignore the flaws in American politics and economics nor bring himself to become more deeply involved in the struggle." In his conflicted state of mind, he left New York for Hollywood, where the motion picture industry was clamoring for dramatists to write for the new talking pictures.

Hollywood and Broadway

While Lawson was working in Hollywood in 1928, the New Playwrights decided to produce his play, The International, with set design by John Dos Passos. It opened on January 12, and ran for twenty-seven performances.

In Hollywood, Lawson wrote scripts for films such as The Ship for Shanghai, Bachelor Apartment, and Goodbye Love. In the winter of 1930–1931, Lawson wrote a new play, Success Story. The Theatre Guild rejected it, but Harold Clurman, a reader for them, had recently formed the Group Theatre and needed new dramatic material. Clurman and Lawson reworked the play during the summer of 1932, and Success Story opened on September 26, 1932, for 121 performances. Lawson also adapted his play, Success at Any Price, for film, writing the screenplay for the 1934 work.

In 1933, Lawson, Lester Cole, and Samuel Ornitz helped to organize and become the first presidents of the new Screen Writers Guild (SWG). Lawson served in that role from 1933-34. He later recalled how he spent most of his presidential tenure in Washington, D.C., "trying to get recognition of the Guild under provisions of the newly enacted National Industrial Recovery Act." He finally succeeded in that task, and the SWG became a viable union that could bargain on behalf of screenwriters. However, the success came with a cost. He was soon fired by fired from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which he attributed to his union organizing.

Lawson continued to be a prolific playwright. In 1932, in addition to working on Success Story, he also wrote The Pure in Heart. While he was in D.C. lobbying for the Screen Writers Guild, The Pure in Heart and Gentlewoman were being produced in New York. The Theatre Guild agreed to produce the play, but closed it when the out-of-town tryout in Baltimore failed. After the Group Theatre also rejected the play, The Pure in Heart was produced by Richard Aldrich and Alfred De Liagre. It opened on March 20, 1933 and had a run of only seven performances. Lawson's play Gentlewoman, completed in association with D. A. Doran Jr., was produced by the Group Theatre and opened on March 22, 1934. It ran for twelve performances.

During the 1930s, leftists accused Lawson of lacking ideological and political commitment. In April 1934, his longtime associate Mike Gold sharply criticized him in New Masses magazine, describing Lawson as "A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time" who wrote adolescent works that lacked moral fiber or clear ideas. Lawson responded a week later in the same magazine. In an essay entitled "'Inner Conflict' and Proletarian Art", he said his middle-class childhood 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. Due to the criticism, Lawson joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1934 and began to educate himself about the proletarian cause. He soon traveled throughout the poverty-stricken South to study violent labor conflicts in Alabama and Georgia, where workers were trying to unionize.

While in the South, Lawson submitted articles to the Daily Worker; he 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.

Lawson wrote the screenplay for several political films during the 1930s and '40s, including Blockade (1938), which starred Henry Fonda. This film about the Spanish Civil War earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story. Lawson also wrote Counter-Attack (1945), a tribute to the Soviet-USA alliance during the late stages of the Second World War. He also wrote the critically acclaimed Algiers (1938), and the Humphrey Bogart vehicles Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic in 1943.

In 1941, Lawson ordered Budd Schulberg to make changes to his novel What Makes Sammy Run? to better fit the Communist message; Schulberg refused and quit the CPUSA in protest. Lawson organized and led a critical attack in 1946 on Albert Maltz after he published an article, "What Shall We Ask of Writers", in The New Masses, challenging the didacticism of the American Communist Party's censorship of writers. Surprised by the ferocity of attack from his fellow writers, including Lawson, Howard Fast, Alvah Bessie, Ring Lardner Jr., Samuel Sillen, and others, Maltz publicly recanted.

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 renamed itself the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, led by Lawson.

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

After World War II, American fears of communist power increased after the Soviet Union established communist governments in Eastern Europe. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began an investigation into communist and socialist influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Lawson appeared 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. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The HUAC and U.S. appeals courts, however, disagreed and all ten men were found guilty of contempt of Congress. Lawson was sentenced to twelve months in Ashland Prison and fined $1,000. They were known as the Hollywood Ten and were blacklisted from writing for Hollywood.

In 1951, Edward Dmytryk testified before HUAC that Lawson, among others, had pressured him to insert communist propaganda into his films.

Later years

Blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, Lawson began writing Marxist interpretations of drama and cinema. He expanded his 1936 Theory and Technique of Playwriting book into the Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (1949). He researched and wrote a lengthy historical work on our cultural traditions 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 in Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953). He explored "the principles, technique, and aesthetics of film-making" in Film: The Creative Process (1964). He also wrote, using a pseudonym, one of the first anti-apartheid movies, Cry, the Beloved Country (1951). Despite the film industry blacklist, Lawson was able to earn money teaching at several California universities, including Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Los Angeles University of Judaism.

In Film in the Battle of Ideas, Lawson wrote that "the rulers of the United States take the film very seriously as an instrument of propaganda", and said they believed that the influence of Hollywood movies was used to "poison the minds of U.S. working-class people". He believed that was inaccurate about U.S. working-class life. Lawson wrote 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."

Lawson argued that mid-20th century Hollywood films promoted degrading images of women, treating "'glamour' and sex appeal as the sum-total of woman's personality". He wrote:

Portraits of women in Hollywood films fall into three general categories: the woman as a criminal or the instigator of crimes; the woman as man's enemy, fighting and losing—for she must always lose—in the battle of the sexes; the woman as a `primitive' child, fulfilling the male dream of a totally submissive vehicle of physical pleasure.

Lawson also argued 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."

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 continued to be banned 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 quotes him as saying, "I'm much more completely blacklisted than the others. I'm much more notorious and I'm very proud of that. It had much to do with the fact that I helped to organize the [Screen Writers] Guild and played a leading role in progressive activities until 1947."

Lawson died in San Francisco on August 11, 1977. The manuscript of his unpublished autobiography is held, along with his other papers, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in Carbondale, Illinois.

Religion

Lawson was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His father had changed their surname from Levy to one of English style. As a boy, Lawson went to the house of a Christian schoolmate, where he mentioned his father's real name was Levy. He was not invited to the house again. He claimed he faced social discrimination.

His father then insisted that the family join a Christian church. They joined the First Church at 96th Street and Central Park West. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life.

While at Williams College, during his sophomore year Lawson was denied election to the editorial board of The Williams College Monthly because some students raised questions about his Jewish background. He would later say that it was a good experience because it forced him "to begin his struggle to come to terms with his Jewish identity".

Works

Theatre

• A Hindoo Love Drama (1915)
• The Spice of Life (1915)
• Servant-Master-Lover (1916)
• Standards (1916)
• Roger Bloomer (1923)
• Processional (1925)
• Nirvana (1926)
• Loudspeaker (1927)
• The International (1928)
• Success Story (1932)
• The Pure in Heart (1934)
• Gentlewoman (1934)
• Marching Song (1937)
• Parlor Magic (1963)

Film

• Dream of Love (1928), with Dorothy Farnum, Marion Ainslee, and Ruth Cummings
• The Pagan (1929), with Dorothy Farnum
• Dynamite (1929), with Jeanie MacPherson
• The Sea Bat (1930), with Dorothy Yost and Bess Meredyth
• Our Blushing Brides (1930), with Bess Meredyth and Helen Mainard
• The Ship From Shanghai (1930)
• Bachelor Apartment (1931), with J. Walter Rubin
• Good-bye Love (1933)
• Success at Any Price (1934), with others
• Treasure Island (1934), with John Lee Mahin and Leonard Praskins
• Party Wire (1935), with Ethel Hill
• Adventure in Manhattan (1936), adaption uncredited
• Blockade (1938)
• Algiers (1938), with James M. Cain
• They Shall Have Music (1939), with Irma von Cube
• Earthbound (1940), with Samuel C. Engel
• Four Sons (1940), with Milton Sperling
• Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
• Sahara (1943 American film) (1943)
• Counter-Attack (1945)
• Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947)
• Cry, the Beloved Country (1952), with Alan Paton
• The Careless Years (1957), with Mitch Lindemann

Writings

• Theory and Technique of Playwrighting, Putnam, 1936; enlarged edition published as Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting, Putnam, 1949.
• The Hidden Heritage: A Rediscovery of the Ideas and Forces That Link the Thought of Our Time with the Culture of the Past, Citadel, 1950, 1st revised edition, 1968.
• Film in the Battle of Ideas, Masses & Mainstream, 1953.
• Film, The Creative Process: The Search for an Audio-Visual Language and Structure, Hill and Wang, 1964, 2nd revised edition, 1967.

Introductions

• Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed, New York, International Publishers, 1967.
• People's Theatre in Amerika by Karen M. Taylor, New York: Drama Books, 1972.

See also

• List of ambulance drivers during World War I

References

• O'Hara, Michael M. (2000), Twentieth-Century American Dramatists: Second Series, Detroit, Michigan: Gale, ISBN 978-0-7876-3137-6.

Further reading

• Denning, Michael (2010). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso. ISBN 978-1844674640.
• Navasky, Victor S. (1986). Naming Names. Penguin Books. ASIN B0014XW99C.
• Wald, Alan M. (1994). Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. Verso. ISBN 978-1859840016.

External links

• John Howard Lawson at IMDb
• John Howard Lawson at the Internet Broadway Database
• John Howard Lawson Papers, 1905-1969 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center
• Various books by John Howard Lawson online