Lampell, Millard

LAMPELL, MILLARD (1919-1999). A multi-talented writer, Millard Lampell offers an example of the fluidity of the 1940s scene in which much could be done through the framework of the fight against fascism. He also illustrates the ways the victims of the blacklist struggled afterward to regain their place.

Raised in Paterson, New Jersey, eager to become active in the anti-fascist cause, Lampell moved to New York and joined the Almanac Singers in 1940, with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Traveling widely, singing on picket lines and at CIO events, he joined the Communist Party (until he entered the service) and met members of the Hollywood left, from film producer Lewis Milestone to celebrity playwright Berthold Brecht.

Well connected if still inexperienced in radio scripting, Lampell wrote, most notably, “Lonesome Train” in 1942. A wartime “ballad opera” to the music composed by Earl Robinson, himself already famous for “Ballad for Americans,” the classic adapted by radio producer Norman Corwin and sung by Paul Robeson in 1939. Lampell provided the lyrics for a similar progressive-patriotic story line about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train traveling across the United States. “Lonesome Train” premiered under Corwin’s direction on the prestigious radio show Columbia Presents on Mar. 21,1944, with Burl Ives accompanied on the banjo by Pete Seeger. On the death of FDR, the following year, a replay heard across the radio dial, also sold widely on vinyl.

Lampell, meanwhile drafted into the Army, scripted programs on assignment for popular radio shows. He treated American folk heroes and other patriotic-democratic subjects, most successfully for programs preparing veterans returning from war. Mustered out in 1945, he became a radio writer for the United Nations, including “Something Before Morning,” a drama about Count Folke Bernadette, the Swedish diplomat assassinated by the Stern Gang, with Henry Fonda in the lead role and young Studs Terkel in support.

As the Cold War closed in, Lampell collaborated in 1947 with Norman Corwin in producing the radio spectacular “Hollywood Strikes Back.” Against the emerging blacklist, a long line of film stars gave personal statements on behalf of the Committee for the First Amendment against the coming repression. Not yet blacklisted, Lampell also wrote the script for Saturday’s Hero, a political film about the mistreatment of college athletes. As his career wound down, he wrote Chance Meeting (1959), directed by fellow blacklist Joseph Losey, in British exile. Awarded an Emmy for his work on Eagle in a Cage, about Napolean in exile, Lampell accepted the award in 1965 with the announcement, “I think I ought to mention that I was blacklisted for ten years,” He went on write television drama, including several episodes of The Adams Chronicles for PBS, and worked on The Orphan Train, a three hour special on abandoned children in the mid-nineteenth century, that won him a Writers’ Guild Award.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: a History of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martins, 1997.

Millard Lampell Papers, 1936-1966. Descriptive Finding Aid. Archival Resources in Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin Digital Collection. Madison.