Politics & Power Quote by Elia Kazan

Kazan’s line is the kind of self-justification that tries to sound like confession while quietly tightening the screws on everyone else. The first clause performs humility: for years, he says, he remained “faithful,” implying he wasn’t some opportunistic turncoat who bolted at the first chill. That framing matters because Kazan’s reputation, especially after his HUAC testimony naming names, lives or dies on motive. He’s telling you: I didn’t leave because I stopped believing in the dream. I left because the people running the franchise in America made belief impossible.

The awkward, almost busted syntax of the second sentence (“But not in the American Communists”) is revealing. It lands like a clipped aside, a courtroom addendum, less polished memoir than defensive record. The subtext is a hard pivot from ideology to character indictment: Communism as an idea can stay romantic; “American Communists” become the problem, a category he can safely disparage without admitting his own complicity in the culture of loyalty tests.

Context does the rest. Kazan came up in the Group Theatre milieu where left politics and artistic identity were fused; to resign wasn’t just quitting a party, it was risking exile from a community. After the war, anti-Communism became a national performance, and Kazan’s testimony became a career-saving act with a moral price tag. This quote attempts to pay in installments: I kept the faith, just not in them. It’s an artist trying to rewrite betrayal as discernment.