Screen Writers Guild President Runs For Congress

Thornton Delehanty interviewed Emmet Lavery, president of the Screen Writers Guild, who was running for Congress in the Democratic primary in California. Lavery had written “The Magnificent Yankee,” currently playing on Broadway. His screenplays included “Hitler's Children.”

Lavery actually had political credentials. As a young man, he served four years as president of the Board of Aldermen in his hometown, Poughkeepsie, NY, where both his father and uncle had been involved in city politics. He had practiced law after his graduation from Fordham Law. Lavery said he had forbidden the union from endorsing his campaign, although a number of prominent screenwriters were on his campaign committee.

He was running as a progressive. While he supported freedom from censorship and stronger copyright protection, he insisted he was not making show business concerns a focus of his campaign. He supported civilian control of atomic research. He also supported the United Nations, extension of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, old age security and a win the peace program.

Lavery considered himself a devout Catholic from the Social Justice wing of the church. This did not make him immune from the virulent red-baiting going on at this time in California, which had its own Un-American Activities Committee in 1946. He lost the election in which he had the support of much of the prominent figures of the Hollywood activist left. Two years later both the Communists and the Rabid Right vilified him for disassociating himself and the Guild from the Party on one hand, while opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee on the other.