“This is about people creating a Stalinist enclave in Hollywood, where non-Party members were not given the same chances as members.”
Slavus, that’s exactly why Elia Kazan named names. He was angry how the communists took over the Group Theater he helped establish and how their politics trumped art. For him it was personal. The event led him from being a member of the Communist Party to being a fierce anti-communist. He ended up naming names in part out of ideology but also because he felt no loyalty to them because of their actions.
From Richard Bernstein’s NYT review of Kazan’s autobiography:
“Mr. Kazan chose sides via a personal experience in 1935, when he was a young member of the Communist Party in the Group Theater in New York. He recalls how the party cell, which met secretly once a week, was ordered to take control of the Group Theater. Mr. Kazan demurred. As a result, a “ritual of submission” was organized in the form of a criticism session during which he was sternly rebuked for his ideological errors by a party emissary. Mr. Kazan resigned right afterward, saying the incident was designed “to stop the most dangerous thing the Party had to cope with: people thinking for themselves.”"
