Jane Wyatt (1910-2006): Actress was Representative of American Liberalism

Jane Wyatt: R.I.P.
By Norman Markowitz


Jane Wyatt died a few days ago at the age of 96. The obituaries dealt with her Hollywood and television career, particularly her role in the 1950s as Margaret Anderson in the quintessential television sitcom celebrating middle class family life, "Father Knows Best."

No one mentioned though that Jane Wyatt had been a member of the Hollywood Committee for the First Amendment, which was organized in 1947 to support the Hollywood Ten, ten "unfriendly witnesses" who appeared before the House Committee Un-American Activities (known as HUAC). No one mentioned that she had been blacklisted in Hollywood before she got the "Father Knows Best" role in 1954, the year the Army McCarthy Hearings signaled Joe McCarthy's personal downfall, although by no means the end of McCarthyism.

There are upper class people who are on the side of the people, and Jane Wyatt was one of them. A narrow class analysis would be unable to explain her in any way.

Born in 1910, she was raised as the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street investment banker and an upper class convert to Catholicism who wrote theater reviews for the Catholic World. Her distant relatives included signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the last Federalist candidate for President (Rufus King in 1816), and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she knew from the 1920s on. Her decision to become an actress led to her removal from the Social Register. She met her husband, a stockbroker, whom she married in 1935, at a Roosevelt house party in Hyde Park in the 1920s. They were married for 65 years before he passed away in 2000.

Jane Wyatt worked on Broadway and in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, her beauty and sensitivity earning her a co-starring role in Frank Capra's classic Lost Horizons (1937) and roles in None But the Lonely Heart (1944) with Cary Grant.

She also played in Clifford Odet's Group Theater Production of Night Music in 1940 and William McLeary's largely forgotten social drama, Hope for the Best (1945) in which she plays a factory worker who turns a cynical journalist toward progressive causes. In the late 1940s, she had a supporting role in Gentleman's Agreement, the classic Hollywood film against anti-Semitism (1947) and Boomerang (1947), a powerful film concerning crime and corruption in which she co-starred with Dana Andrews. A major role in a war film Task Force (1949), followed but then offers stopped coming in.

Socially conscious films that Hollywood had produced in small but significant numbers (New Deal Social Dramas, I call them, in which alliances of Hollywood New Deal liberals and Communist leftists had played a central role), weren't being made through the 1950s, until the Civil Rights movement led to a limited revival of such films on Civil Rights issues.

Wyatt had been active in The Committee for the First Amendment which in 1947 had sent a delegation to Washington in solidarity with the Hollywood Ten and had held rallies, produced radio spots, and sought to publicize support for them against the red baiters and blacklisters. Unlike Humphrey Bogart, a leader of the Committee, Edward G. Robinson a prominent supporter, and other leading Hollywood liberals who broke ranks with the Hollywood Ten, Wyatt never issued any statements that she "was no Communist"(which, of course, she wasn’t) and never turned against anyone. The tabloid red baiters even made it a point to say she had hosted a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet during World War II, which Roosevelt had asked her to do. (Besides the fact that the U.S. was fighting a World War with the Soviet Union as its most important practical ally, the Bolshoi was hardly a center of what HUAC called Communist "agitation and propaganda" then or at any time.)

Her upper class background may explain why the political gangsters in Congress didn't really call her as a witness before congressional committees, but she stopped getting parts in movies and returned to the theater in 1951 in Lillian Hellman's "The Autumn Garden." Hellman of course was the lover of Dashiell Hammett and someone deeply and directly involved with the Communist movement whose testimony before HUAC in 1952, refusing to name names, has became one of the most famous moments in the sordid history of the Hollywood blacklist.

Jane Wyatt began her rise on TV the year Joe McCarthy began his fall. Ironically, McCarthy had helped to strengthen the power of the class that she had been born into, even though her social conscience led her to oppose it politically (a bit like Roosevelt himself, who was widely called "a traitor to his class" during his presidency).

McCarthy's fat jowling, bullying personality, on display for weeks on TV in the "Army-McCarthy" hearings, was everything that middle class suburban America was not about. Father Knows Best, with its large strong family, male executive breadwinner and female housekeeper, played by Jane Wyatt, a blacklisted popular front liberal who never turned her coat or lost her bearings, was.

Jane Wyatt went on to play Spock's mother in Star Trek in the 1960s and in the 1986 Star Trek movie, and she had a regular role on the 1980s hospital series, St Elsewhere. Her role in the Committee for the First Amendment is highlighted in the brilliant documentary, Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist (1987) narrated by Burt Lancaster, in which she along with surviving family members of the Hollywood Ten comment on the blacklist and its effects. That documentary ends with a warning that the blacklist must never be forgotten lest it be repeated.

Jane Wyatt's role in opposing the blacklist and suffering career damage for it deserves to be remembered along with an appreciation of her long and serious career as an actress in movies and television. She deserves to be remembered and honored for representing an honest and honorable tradition of American liberalism which fought seriously for labor's rights, civil rights, and civil liberties by allying itself with radicals in mass organizations and standing firm against reactionaries who used guilt by association, libel and slander to strike at labor's rights, civil rights, and civil liberties. That is a tradition which we needed then and very much need now.


--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters [at] politicalaffairs.net