When Manny Fried passed away at 97 in 2011, the Buffalo theater community lost a giant. But not just the theater community. Buffalo labor lost a giant, too. So did Buffalo academia, Buffalo social justice… and Buffalo as a whole. Because Fried did something many others did not have the courage to do: at the height of the Red Scare, he stood up to HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), refused to name names… and dared to tell his accusers they were the un-American ones.
Emanuel Fried told the story of his life in his 2010 autobiography, “Most Dangerous Man: A Personal Memoir”. He was born in Brooklyn in 1913 to Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and moved with his family to Buffalo’s East Side as a boy. He attended School 37, School 47, and Technical High School, and worked as a hotel bellhop and as a concessions hawker at Offerman Stadium, with side gigs as a theater usher, shoe salesman, and newsboy. At 14, he wrote his first play, about the prostitutes he met while working at the Ford Hotel at Delaware and Chippewa.
Fried spent a year at the University of Iowa on a football scholarship, but was more interested in studying theater. He went to New York, studied acting at the Group Theatre (where he befriended Elia Kazan, who would go on to a storied career as a director), and appeared in several Broadway shows and national touring productions. At some point, he learned of a directing job at a Buffalo theater and returned home in 1939. But the theater soon folded, and Fried went to work at the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft factory.
Like many young people of the era who identified with working people, Fried became interested in communism. At Curtiss, he helped organize the workers, which drew the company's ire. They eventually fired Fried, labeling him a “subversive”. But he went on to become a union organizer at other Buffalo wartime factories, including Wurlitzer, Spaulding Fibre, Buffalo Bolt, Columbus McKinnon, Wales-Strippit, Pratt & Letchworth, Otis Elevator, and Blaw-Knox. In 1944, he entered the Army and served in the Pacific Theater, rising to the rank of first lieutenant.
After the war, Kazan offered him a role in a movie, “Boomerang”, but Fried, who missed his wife and daughter, turned it down. He returned to Buffalo and union organizing. The part in the film went to a young actor named Karl Malden.
In 1954, during the height of anticommunist hysteria, Fried---already called “the most dangerous man in Western New York” because of his “rabble-rousing”---was called before HUAC. Grilled by the committee to give up the names of other suspected communists, he steadfastly refused, unlike his friend Elia Kazan. Instead, Fried told the committee: “My answer will be, I will not answer. In other words, it’s none of your business.”
Fried was blacklisted after this. But he found a job with a Canadian firm, Canada Life, selling insurance. In the meantime, he continued to work as an actor, director, playwright, and theater executive in Buffalo. His plays, including “The Dodo Bird”, “Drop Hammer”, and “Elegy for Stanley Gorski”, won acclaim and were produced around the world.
He continued to speak out in favor of labor rights and other progressive causes, which earned him a second subpoena to appear before HUAC in 1964. Again, he told them what he’d told them 10 years earlier: “It’s none of your business”.
No one could ever claim that Manny Fried didn’t have guts.
Fried taught literature at Buffalo State from 1972 until 2008. He acted on the Buffalo stage until 2009. Even over the last two years of his life, he held a weekly event called “Mondays With Manny” at his Kenmore nursing home, loosely based on the play “Tuesdays With Morrie,” which he starred in at the Studio Arena in 2005. When he died, the next performance, scheduled for three days later, had to be canceled.
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Cast (in order of appearance):
HUAC questioner: Keith Elkins
Manny Fried: Philip Knoerzer
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound editing: Micheal Peters’
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer