IDEOLOGIES: Ring & the Proletariat

The late great American humorist, Ring Lardner, left four sons. They all became writers. Jim died in Spain, fighting as a member of the International Brigade—the last American to enlist, and the last to be killed. David served as a war correspondent for The New Yorker, was killed in Germany when his jeep ran into a minefield. John is a sports columnist for Newsweek. The fourth brother, Ring Jr., last week went to jail.

Tall, slender, bespectacled Ring Lardner, 34, grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, went to Andover and Princeton. At home Ring Sr. never discussed political issues, but the sardonic views that salted his writings also flavored his conversation. Or as his friend Heywood Broun put it, in the jargon of their set: “Under an insulation of isolation and indifference, Ring boiled with a passion against smugness and hypocrisy and the hard heart of the world.”

At Princeton, Ring Jr. began to boil too, and higher than his father ever did. He joined the Socialist Club, wangled a trip to Russia as an exchange student. A friend got him a job in Hollywood. Ring ground out B pictures, and busied himself with organizing the Screen Writers’ Guild.

Something Important. His career prospered and his salary increased. So did his political activities. Said a fellow writer: “You have a bunch of talented, sensitive writers who get no ego satisfaction out of their work. A story comes out on the screen a couple of years later bearing almost no relation to what they wrote. They only work about half a year, yet they want to feel that they’re doing something important. So they take up the cause of the proletariat.”

Ring wrote blasts denouncing Trotskyites, signed an open letter defending the Moscow purge trials, sponsored the American Youth for Democracy, opposed the “imperialist” war until Hitler turned it into “a people’s war” by invading Russia. Like a mouse in a maze, he followed every turn and twist of the party line.

In the summer of 1947, when an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee testified that Ring Lardner Jr. was the holder of “1944 Card No. 46806” in the Communist Party, Ring was making $2,000 a week and had won an Academy Award for Katharine Hepburn’s Woman of the Year. As one of the Hollywood Ten, he refused to tell the committee whether he was a Communist, was duly cited for contempt.

Page One. His first wife had divorced him; he married his brother David’s widow. In the three years since the hearings, Ring has been fired by his studio, and has had only one job—a script for a picture made in Switzerland. His wife earned money as a radio actress and by playing bit parts in the movies. Like the other Hollywood Ten, Ring seemed to enjoy his martyrdom. “They are annoyed if they don’t make Page One of the New York Times every day,” said a friend. In the Communist press, they were heroes.

In Manhattan last week, Ring Jr. was on hand to represent the Hollywood Ten at a mass meeting scheduled by the Communist-run Civil Rights Congress to protest the treatment of “political prisoners” (including the eleven Communist leaders). Then the Korean war started. With the flick of a handbill, the Civil Rights Congress switched the meeting to a “Hands Off Korea” rally. Nobody seemed to mind.

Ring sat on the platform as Paul Robeson denounced the U.S.’s “wicked and shameful policy” and Gus Hall, national secretary of the Communist Party, accused the U.S. of making “undeclared shooting war against all the peoples of Asia.” To the 9,000 “peace partisans,” Ring cried: “For a mere screenwriter to be imprisoned for his beliefs elevates him … to a fraternity which includes Socrates … St. Paul . . . John Donne . . . Thomas Paine.”

Next day, Ring journeyed to Washington. There, in Federal District Court, he was fined $1,000 and sentenced to one year in jail. He had become a member of a grubby fraternity which included not Socrates and St. Paul, but Eugene Dennis and Howard Fast.