J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War 9780801464218

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J. EDGAR HOOVER GOES TO THE MOVIES

J. EDGAR HOOVER GOES TO THE MOVIES The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War John Sbardellati

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For my mother and father

Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sbardellati, John, 1973– J. Edgar Hoover goes to the movies : the FBI and the origins of Hollywood’s Cold War / John Sbardellati. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5008-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Political aspects—United States—History. 2. Cold War in motion pictures. 3. Communism and motion pictures—United States. 4. Cold War—Social aspects—United States. 5. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. I. Title. PN1995.9.P6S26 2012 384'.8097309045—dc23 2011038590 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Hollywood’s Red Scare

vii 1

1.

A Movie Problem

2.

The FBI’s Search for Communist Propaganda during the Second World War

41

3.

Producing Hollywood’s Cold War

69

4.

The Coalescence of a Countersubversive Network

106

5.

The 1947 HUAC Trials

131

6.

Rollback

159

Conclusion: Three Perspectives on the Death of the Social Problem Film Appendix: Analysis of Motion Pictures Containing Propaganda: An FBI Filmography of Suspect Movies Notes Index

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197 209 247

Acknowledgments

This book began at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the guidance of Fredrik Logevall, along with Nelson Lichtenstein, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and Charles Wolfe. I thank each of them for their enthusiastic support and always helpful advice. In my career as both teacher and scholar, I am constantly striving to heed the excellent example they set for me. I am also indebted to the UCSB Center for Cold War Studies for both material and intellectual support. My predecessors in the Cold War History Group (COWHIG, as CCWS was first known) certainly helped guide the way, and I am grateful in this regard to Andy Johns, Ken Osgood, Kimber Quinney, and Kathryn Statler. I am equally grateful to my CCWS cohorts Toshi Aono and Jessica Chapman, as well as to many other friends from those Santa Barbara days who contributed to this work, including Joe Campo, Maeve Devoy, Jason Kelly, David Schuster, Travis Smith, Matthew Sutton, and David Torres-Rouff. The NYU Center for the United States and the Cold War provided a welcome research community and fellowship support, and I appreciate in particular the center’s codirectors, Michael Nash and Marilyn Young. A faculty fellowship with the departments of History and Film & Media Studies at UCSB not only provided valuable teaching experience but also further supported my writing and research. The history department at the University of Waterloo has provided generous support through travel grants for research and conference meetings. I consider myself extremely lucky to have colleagues who are such excellent scholars and wonderful people. I especially thank Gary Bruce, Dan Gorman, Andrew Hunt, Lynne Taylor, Ryan Touhey, and Jim Walker for their good counsel and assistance. I also thank the numerous archivists and staff members at the archives I consulted, including Kevyne Baar at the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU; Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; and Charles E. Schamel at the National Archives, Washington, D.C. Portions of this work have been previously published. Chapter 2 first appeared in a slightly different form as John Sbardellati, “Brassbound G-Men and Celluloid Reds: The FBI’s Search for Communist Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood,” Film History 20, no. 4 (2008): 412–36. Part of chapter 3 appeared as John

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sbardellati, “ ‘The Maltz Affair’ Revisited: How the American Communist Party Relinquished Its Cultural Influence at the Dawn of the Cold War,” Cold War History 9, no. 4 (2009): 489–500. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of these journals for allowing the use of this material here. I am proud to publish this work with Cornell University Press. I especially thank Michael McGandy and Ange Romeo-Hall for their patience and support throughout this process, as well as Katy Meigs for her thorough copyediting. I am particularly grateful to Lary May and Hugh Wilford for reviewing the manuscript; their comments have improved this work immeasurably, and I am honored to have received the close scrutiny of two scholars whose work I hold in the highest esteem. Several other scholars have contributed to this work in myriad ways. In particular, I thank Daniel J. Leab, Tony Shaw, and Athan Theoharis for their invaluable assistance. In closing I thank my family. My wife, Leandra, has been a loving companion, worthwhile critic, and an unwavering source of encouragement. Aldo is our pride and joy. My sisters, Maria and Gina, and their families remain close as ever even though they are miles away. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents, John and Judy Sbardellati, for their constant love and support.

Introduction

HOLLYWOOD’S RED SCARE

Henry F. Potter is the resident scrooge of Bedford Falls. A greedy slumlord, Mr. Potter is a powerful shareholder in Bailey Bros. Building & Loan Association. When the Depression of 1929 reaches Bedford Falls, Potter selfishly schemes to entrap more townspeople in his sties. But the Building & Loan is run by George Bailey, a man who sacrifices individual success for the sake of the community. Unwilling to profit from the misery of others, George stifles Potter’s plot by launching Bailey Park, an affordable alternative to Potter’s slums. George’s concern for his working-class neighbors—the town “rabble” in Potter’s eyes—is nothing but “sentimental hogwash” to the old miser. “Are you afraid of success?” Potter asks with incredulous scorn. Meanwhile, Potter’s avaricious pursuit of the bottom line leads George to dub his nemesis an “old moneygrubbing buzzard.” But when ill fortune is met with Potter’s sinister machinations, the Building & Loan faces ruin. On the verge of suicide, George is rescued by his guardian angel, Clarence, who shows him what life would be like had he never been born. Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, a shanty town blighted by bars, billiard halls, pawn shops, and striptease joints. Clarence gives George Bailey a new lease on life, and the dystopian horror of Pottersville threatens Bedford Falls no more. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (RKO, 1946) pivots on the clash of values between the populism of George Bailey, played of course by James Stewart, and the bottom-line ethics of Henry Potter, played so memorably by Lionel Barrymore. The film is now a perennial holiday classic, and has earned distinction with its inclusion, in 1998, on the American Film Institute’s list of the top one hundred American films (ranking number eleven). But modern-day viewers might 1

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be surprised to learn that at the time of its release, It’s a Wonderful Life appeared on another, secret, list of films maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Such distinction was earned not because of popularity or artistic merit, but rather because of the bureau’s suspicion that Capra’s movie contained Communist propaganda. According to FBI informants—their names still blacked out after more than six decades—It’s a Wonderful Life subverted unwitting audiences by encouraging class consciousness. For instance, the Potter character “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers,” and therefore, as the FBI reported, “this picture deliberately maligned the upper class attempting to show that people who had money were mean and despicable characters.” Furthermore, through the sympathetic portrayal of the everyman, George Bailey, FBI agents warned their superiors, “a subtle attempt was made to magnify the problems of the so-called ‘common man’ in society.” The bureau attributed this supposed propaganda to the influence of the film’s creators. Capra himself was suspected for “Left-wing” associations, and the bureau also reported that his 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, also starring James Stewart, “was decidedly Socialist in nature.” Meanwhile, Wonderful Life screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, though not known to be Communists, were nevertheless considered guilty by association, since both were “observed eating lunch daily with such Communists as Lester Cole, screen writer.” Ironically, the bureau failed in this report to uncover that Communist Party–member screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and Michael Wilson had all performed uncredited work on the script.1 FBI surveillance of It’s a Wonderful Life was no isolated incident. Rather, the bureau’s misgivings about Capra’s latest movie were part of its much broader investigation of Hollywood that lasted from 1942 to 1958. This was a very thorough operation, even if at times FBI reports were incomplete and contained inaccuracies. For instance, though the bureau failed in this case to connect the known Communist screenwriters to It’s a Wonderful Life, Trumbo, Maltz, and Cole would soon find themselves members of the so-called Hollywood Ten, while Wilson would find his spot on the blacklist later in the 1950s. Why did the FBI set its sights on the film industry, and why is this story, as yet untold, significant? Historians and public alike have long been familiar with the dark period in Hollywood history when suspected Communist artists and entertainers, with careers hanging in the balance, faced the inquisitorial House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Most commentators have interpreted this red scare in Hollywood merely as an attempt to grab the spotlight on the part of a burgeoning anti-Communist movement demanding ideological conformity during the early Cold War years.2 This interpretation is not so much wrong as incomplete. For, behind the scenes, the FBI played a significant role

INTRODUCTION

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in ushering in Hollywood’s red scare, yet FBI surveillance of the motion picture industry did not merely represent an opportunistic attempt to capture the headlines. Rather, a sincerely held, if ill-founded, fear of Communist propaganda motivated its investigation. A closer look at the record of FBI activity in Hollywood is valuable in itself.3 It also pushes us to reconsider what motivated the anti-Communist film crusade. In its internal records, the FBI consistently listed the threat of Communist propaganda as the prime justification for its investigation. It turns out that the red scare in Hollywood was about the movies after all. That the FBI could spot a national security threat emanating from the silver screen might seem preposterous. But in an age before television reached the masses, cinema was widely regarded not merely as a medium for popular entertainment but also as the most powerful mode of spreading ideas. Indeed, this was a time when more people went to the movies each week than to school and church combined.4 Given cinema’s popularity among the masses and its potential for politicization, anti-Communist organizations, most notably the FBI, HUAC, and their Hollywood allies in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), sought to induce the motion picture industry to spread “American” ideas while simultaneously pressuring it to contain suspect ideas. In this effort, the anti-Communists were reacting against the growing influence of the Left on American art and culture, an influence that had penetrated, though surely not conquered, Hollywood. Gaining steam in the mid-1930s, the Popular Front—a political coalition that brought together Communists, liberals, and other leftists—spawned a cultural project that aimed to present mass audiences with socially relevant, politically progressive works of art. This artistic movement, or “cultural front,” as it was often called, envisioned itself addressing a vast workingclass audience that would be simultaneously entertained, informed, and mobilized. Politically, this movement was progressive, a terminology that in its day connoted the Popular Front platform, but it was also traditional to the extent that it drew on deeply rooted American populist values. Aesthetically, this movement favored social realism, not as an attack on modernism, but as a way of democratizing it.5 How did this “cultural front” affect filmmaking in Hollywood? Films influenced by this ethos tended toward realism, often dealt with topical subject matter, and typically featured working-class heroes and heroines. These protagonists also represented a more pluralist vision of society as increasingly on-screen characters came from white ethnic backgrounds. Though roles for African Americans remained sparse, the Popular Front mobilized against racist portrayals, and thematically more than a few of these films featured antiracist messages. Most important, these films were antifascist, and they usually defined fascism as a threat both internationally and domestically. Frequently, such movies favored

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a documentary style, and eventually shooting on location became a preferred method of delivering a realistic-looking film. Was this all evidence of a radical Hollywood?6 It is a stretch to say these films set forth fundamentally radical ideas, but they did mirror the broad leftist sentiments of the Popular Front. This also meant that when the U.S. Communist Party favored this coalition strategy, these films often advanced ideas supported by Communists, but this was hardly akin to Communist propaganda. Furthermore, the period of alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War witnessed a small number of pro-Soviet films. Such films, most notably the 1943 film from Warner Bros., Mission to Moscow, presented audiences with a distorted image of America’s ally. Hollywood Communists and their so-called fellow travelers participated in the making of these films and defended their claims. But so did many liberals and other non-Communists. During World War II, and especially during the time prior to the opening of the second front when the Russians were doing the bulk of the fighting against the Nazis, one could be both patriotic and pro-Russian. Moreover, Hollywood also presented distorted images of America’s other allies, most notably the British. Hollywood films whitewashed British imperialism just as much as they whitewashed Stalin’s purges. The impetus for such propaganda stemmed not from Communist partisans or imperialist advocates but from the U.S. government’s Office of War Information (OWI), and the chief purpose was building support for the war by presenting it as a Manichaean struggle between the forces of good and evil.7 Indeed, World War II looms as a pivotal moment in this story. Whereas the containment of Communism in the international arena began in earnest after the Second World War, the ideological containment of (suspected) Communist ideas within the United States started much earlier. Hollywood had first aroused suspicions of political radicalism in the early 1920s; World War II, however, served as the main catalyst for the intensive FBI surveillance program. The grand alliance against Hitler’s Germany stirred fears among American anti-Communists that cooperating with the Soviet Union would contaminate the “American way of life.” These early cold warriors, as evinced by one FBI report, feared that domestic Communists would seize the opportunity to pose as “ardent patriots” and infiltrate America’s vital institutions, among the most important being Hollywood.8 During the war, Hollywood Communists found more opportunities to bring some of their ideals to the screen. Antifascism was now fully welcome of course, but Communist Party members and their liberal allies also sought to use film to critique society, promote reform, and provide a moral justification for the war in keeping with a left/liberal vision of progress. Through film they projected images of a postwar world deeply at odds with the beliefs and attitudes of conservatives such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his Hollywood collaborators in the Motion

INTRODUCTION

5

Picture Alliance. This ideological tension, to some degree submerged during the war, erupted in the postwar conservative backlash. Truly fearing what they regarded as Communist propaganda, countersubversives recognized Hollywood as a central arena in the ideological struggle that became known as the Cold War. In spotlighting the importance of this wartime context, I highlight the prehistory of the red scare, thereby contributing to our broader understanding of the forces that brought about McCarthyism and the culture of the Cold War.9 The focus in these pages on the bureau builds on the insights of FBI scholars, who have made a compelling case for its leading (if behind-the-scenes) role in the postwar anti-Communist drive.10 In the late 1990s, one historian summed up the legacy of this FBI scholarship: “Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the bureau’s files, ‘McCarthyism’ would probably be called ‘Hooverism.’ ”11 “Hooverism,” that is, a spirit of fanatical anti-Communism, served as the lodestar for the FBI’s investigation of Hollywood. Hoover mobilized his agents, or G-men as they were popularly known, to conduct a zealous search for Reds in the motion picture industry and traces of their influence in the movies themselves. Well before the start of the Cold War, indeed before HUAC made its sojourn into Hollywood, Hoover directed his G-men in Los Angeles to probe the film industry for any signs of Communist subversion. Hoover may have been obsessed with Communism, but he was equally protective of his FBI’s image. And while he believed his investigation bore fruit, he was wary of the potential backlash against the bureau should its investigation become public knowledge, since evidence of Communist propaganda in the movies might be ignored amid charges of FBI censorship and thought control. The pages of this book reveal a gloomy FBI director who feared that Hollywood Reds threatened his country and who grappled for a solution to this problem. Only belatedly and somewhat reluctantly did Hoover turn to the House Un-American Activities Committee to help expose his enemies. In doing so, Hoover and his allies aimed not merely to harass their political foes but to reshape American culture by fostering a Cold War consensus particularly attuned to the red peril at home. This book begins by considering efforts at political censorship in Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. Hoover’s FBI, then known simply as the Bureau of Investigation, turned its sights momentarily to the film industry in the wake of the first red scare. Federal surveillance of filmmakers all but ceased, however, in the aftermath of the red scare and the Teapot Dome scandals. Yet concerns about the political content of motion pictures remained. In the 1930s Hollywood formed the Production Code Administration (PCA), an internal censorship body devoted largely to monitoring sex and violence content. Yet in more subtle ways,

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as chapter 1 shows, the PCA endeavored to eviscerate radical political content from the screen. Despite these efforts, Hollywood films remained surprisingly fertile ground for at least a mild dose of left-of-center discourse. As chapter 2 illustrates, the unique circumstances of World War II triggered FBI surveillance of Hollywood. The grand alliance with the Soviet Union led Hoover and his G-men to fear that domestic Communists could take advantage of international conditions, pose as patriots, and thereby infiltrate vital national institutions, Hollywood being among the most important. The FBI believed that motion pictures influenced the masses more than any other medium. Films such as Mission to Moscow convinced the bureau that Hollywood had already fallen prey to the “red menace,” and it was during the war—and hence well before the so-called McCarthy era—when the FBI institutionalized its massive surveillance program of the motion picture industry. In this endeavor, the FBI cast itself as defender of American democracy. Yet its investigation would soon have a disastrous impact on the careers of many left-wing film artists and, more broadly speaking, on the freedom of the screen. Chapter 3 details the relationship between the FBI and the Hollywood antiCommunist pressure group, the Motion Picture Alliance. Formed in early 1944, the MPA shared with the FBI two fundamental assumptions: first, that insidious red propaganda already pervaded the screen; and second, that the studio heads were responsible for this dangerous situation. This is not to say that these antiCommunists believed the producers were themselves Communists, but rather that the moguls were not awake to the menace that had (supposedly) been seeping into their industry. The MPA’s guiding lights included Sam Wood, the famed Hollywood director of several Marx brothers classics; Walt Disney, whose rabid anti-Communism had been fueled by labor struggles at his studio in 1941; Lela Rogers, mother of the actress Ginger Rogers; and Ayn Rand, the screenwriter, novelist, and pseudo-philosopher who penned the Screen Guide for Americans, which the FBI adopted as its manual for detecting subversion in the movies. Following Rand’s lead, the FBI listed as Communist propaganda several of the most acclaimed Hollywood films of this era, including The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, and Body and Soul. These films, and many others, did put forward leftleaning political and ideological themes and messages. Yet, whereas these motion pictures appeared in the realm of public discourse, the explicit criticisms of these films existed largely in the secret files of the national security state. The bureau and its collaborators in the Motion Picture Alliance effectively turned this cultural battle into a question of domestic security. Readers familiar with the standard narrative of Hollywood’s red scare may be surprised to find the House Un-American Activities Committee receiving little sustained analysis until chapter 4. Indeed, this is intentional. For it is my contention that HUAC was more follower than leader, at least in the period leading

INTRODUCTION

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up to the infamous 1947 Hollywood Ten trials. HUAC had shown sporadic interest in Hollywood since its inception in 1938, but the committee did not set its sights on the film industry until postwar labor unrest in Hollywood drew national attention and red-baiting became quite prevalent. Thus, whereas film content motivated the FBI and MPA, these cultural concerns eluded HUAC. This would be only one factor causing friction between the FBI and HUAC. Kindred spirits ideologically, the bureau and the committee had long been divided on matters of tactics as well as turf. But, as chapter 4 reveals, the rising Cold War finally spurred a partnership of sorts. The FBI’s intelligence would prove to be vital for HUAC’s success. Chapter 5 is concerned with the fruits of this partnership, focusing especially on the 1947 trials. Whereas many accounts cast this narrative as a morality play between “friendly” and “unfriendly” witnesses, or collaborators and resisters, I argue that these stark categories obscure the difference between those in Hollywood who conspired with the FBI and HUAC to bring about these investigations (all of them members of the MPA) and those industry leaders who were cooperative witnesses but who nevertheless denied the claim that their industry had become a hotbed of subversion, especially refuting the charge that Hollywood’s films contained even an iota of Communist propaganda. Those who inhabited this middle ground included moguls like Jack Warner, who coupled his vehement anti-Communist rhetoric with a strident defense of the content of his films; former suspects like Emmet Lavery, president of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), whose surprising contempt for Communists was matched by his criticism of HUAC’s investigation; and, perhaps most shocking, Ronald Reagan, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) president who certainly loathed Communism but did not (at this point at least) find too much of it in his surroundings. HUAC’s official probes into the question of screen content proved short-lived. Particularly embarrassing was Ayn Rand’s testimony on the allegedly subversive qualities of the MGM wartime movie Song of Russia, a film that turns life in the Soviet Union into a happy musical. Rand’s fervent insistence that nobody in Russia ever smiled proved far too ridiculous, however, and the committee thereafter shied away from a return to such content analysis. And yet, as I conclude, through these public hearings, HUAC, the MPA, and the FBI (however covertly) did in fact achieve a transformation in the types of films Hollywood produced. For instance, HUAC, and particularly committee member Richard Nixon, browbeat the studios into pledging to produce anti-Communist propaganda films. Yet, even more important, the emerging blacklist served not just to purge radical individuals from employment but also their suspect ideas from the screen. Although HUAC’s move away from investigating film content initially angered J. Edgar Hoover, his FBI and its allies in the Motion Picture Alliance soon came to appreciate the blacklist as the most effective means of altering film content. As

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a political process, then, the blacklist was merely the means to an end. The real struggle remained cultural, and, for the FBI and its allies, victory in the cultural cold war—however ephemeral it proved to be—was at hand. The final chapter analyzes the effect of this anti-Communist campaign on the screen. Here I examine the anti-Communist films of this era, arguing that there were two strains of anti-Communist films. The first followed the insights of Ayn Rand and is represented most notably by the film version of her novel, The Fountainhead. The film was a paean to individualism, materialism, and capitalism, and the screenplay, written by Rand, bore all the marks of the ideology set out in her Screen Guide for Americans, discussed in chapter 3. Despite the FBI adopting Rand’s Screen Guide as its interpretive tool for identifying Communist propaganda in film, J. Edgar Hoover’s brand of anti-Communism differed from Rand’s, especially in its reverence for religion and downplaying of materialism. Rather than genuflecting to the principle of heroic individualism, Hoover consistently preached about the role of American institutions—the government, the church, and the traditional, patriarchal nuclear family—as bulwarks against Communist subversion. “Hooverism” therefore shaped the anti-Communist films far more than “Randism.” Hoover’s mark was especially prevalent in the rash of anti-Communist “B” films, such as The Red Menace, I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., My Son John, and Big Jim McLain, but it was also discernable in such artistic achievements as On the Waterfront. Perhaps not surprisingly, The FBI Story, a film that the bureau had a direct influence on during production, not only presented audiences with the FBI’s history from its own point of view, but also epitomized the ideology of Hooverism, with its emphasis on upright American institutions guarding against subversion. In the conclusion I consider the effect of the FBI-led campaign against the film industry. The casualties of Hollywood’s red scare were not limited solely to the screen credits; the anti-Communist movement finally took its toll on the screen. The purging of left-wing artists brought an end to a brief, though vibrant, period of filmmaking in which liberal reform and social criticism from the left found its way onto America’s screens. This was a purposeful result. The anti-Communist drive represented an attempt to reshape American culture through the development of a cold war consensus that would supplant the cultural sway of the Popular Front. Not only was this cultural struggle inherently political, but in the case of Hollywood this culture war was transformed into a matter of domestic security by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. More than just a symbol, Hollywood served as one of the first ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War.

1 A MOVIE PROBLEM

As soon as the Jews gained control of the “movies,” we had a movie problem. —Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, 1921

The idea that Hollywood could be subversive is as old as the industry itself. The culture wars at the turn of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of mass amusements as a challenge to a Victorian America grounded in distinct class and gender divisions, especially in the realm of entertainment. This Protestant culture faced the challenge of new immigrants, many of them Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe. As the forces of urbanization and industrialization transformed the nation, a mass society emerged and, along with it, a mass culture. Starting with nickelodeons in ethnic communities and spreading to movie houses across the nation, cinema quickly became the leading form of mass culture.1 As middle-class defenders of the Victorian way struggled to maintain social control, they turned their attention to the screen. To their dismay, they found that control of the film industry rested in the hands of the very groups they sought to maintain in a position of subordination. As one historian notes, the movie moguls—predominantly eastern European Jews—were seen by the public as “part splendid emperors, part barbarian invaders.”2 The Hollywood Jews soon became the target of vicious anti-Semitic diatribes. For instance, in 1921 Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent branded Hollywood as Jew-controlled, not in spots only, not 50 per cent merely, but entirely; with the natural consequence that now the world is in arms against the trivializing and demoralizing influences of that form of entertainment as presently managed. . . . As soon as the Jews gained 9

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control of the “movies,” we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority.3 The image of a Jewish-controlled medium, therefore, was deeply intertwined with the image of a morally subversive Hollywood.4 For some, film became synonymous with licentiousness. The theaters themselves were seen as dens of iniquity, where illicit activities could take place beneath the cover of darkness. In an era marked by steep concern over urban vice and “white slavery,” moral guardians believed that the exhibition of movies threatened a sexual revolution. What appeared on the screen did little to set their minds at ease. Genteel-minded critics fretted over the vulgar antics of Charlie Chaplin, whose penchant for bawdy humor enthralled many. Film critic James Agee recalled his mother’s objections to the comedian: “That horrid little man! . . . He’s so nasty! . . . So vulgar! With his nasty little cane; hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty little walk!” Others were outraged by Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), which tantalized audiences with a brief glimpse of Gloria Swanson’s bare breasts. Fearing the effect on society and especially on children, middle-class reformers, Catholic leaders, and activists in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union pushed for control of the screen. Censorship boards sprang up at local and state levels, leading finally to the industry’s adoption of a code for self-regulation in the early 1930s. The motion picture industry, as historian Francis Couvares notes, took shape not only as a result of economic imperatives, but cultural ones as well.5 Hollywood, therefore, served as a leading locale for early twentieth-century culture wars, a moral and ethnic challenge to the established order. Often seen as subversive in this broader sense, the motion picture also acquired a reputation for political subversion as well. Political struggles over film content focused largely on class issues until the late 1930s, when fighting fascism consumed much of Hollywood’s political focus. During this earlier period, filmmakers on the left sought to use film to promote the betterment of the working classes, their messages ranging from calls for sympathy to demands for revolution. Their enemies on the right detected a grave danger in all of this, fearing a Communist propaganda conspiracy that could induce the masses to overturn the social order in the name of Bolshevism. In this cultural struggle lay the roots, though not yet the beginning, of Hollywood’s cold war. This chapter traces the “movie problem” during the 1920s and 1930s, when political battles for control of the screen focused first on issues of labor and class, and then, as fascism threatened Europe beginning with the Spanish Civil War, on

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issues of foreign policy. In the early 1920s, government officials, led by J. Edgar Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation began monitoring filmmakers, fearing the production of films they considered Communist propaganda. In the wake of the first red scare, however, the bureau’s powers were stripped, and federal surveillance of filmmaking all but ceased. Concerns over Communist propaganda remained, however. During the 1930s, Hollywood’s internal censors in the Production Code Administration sought to prohibit the production of radical films. By many standard accounts they succeeded in this endeavor, but film can be a tricky medium. In the past decade historians have chronicled the ways in which some 1930s Hollywood films managed to convey left-of-center ideas despite this censorship.6 Indeed, as I argue in this chapter, even in some cases where the censors believed they had scored a victory, alternative (even radical) readings of the film in question remained possible. Despite the efforts of these officials, 1930s culture remained open to cinematic critiques from the left. America’s “movie problem” had only just begun.

The First Red Scare and the Movies It seems fitting that the Bureau of Investigation was founded by a Bonaparte. In 1908 Theodore Roosevelt’s attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, grandnephew of Napoleon I, created the agency as the investigative arm of the Justice Department, which had previously relied on Pinkertons or the Secret Service Division of the Treasury Department. The act went against Congressional desires to preclude “a Federal secret police,” but it was nonetheless part of Teddy Roosevelt’s “new federalism,” which initiated one of the greatest political trends in twentieth-century America, the increasing centralization of power under the executive branch. Indeed, this trend was evident within the Bureau of Investigation itself (which would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935), for its power and jurisdiction would eventually grow well beyond the role initially defined by Bonaparte.7 However, the man who would preside over most of the bureau’s growth and wield much of its power did not descend from European rulers but from American bureaucrats. John Edgar Hoover joined the bureau as a clerk in 1917. The job paid poorly, but it did provide an indefinite deferment from military service. Having mastered the filing system at the Library of Congress before joining the bureau, Hoover used his bureaucratic skills to assist his meteoric rise in the agency. His xenophobia and antiradicalism also suited him well, for his rise within the bureau mirrored that agency’s expansion, largely a result of wartime legislation (the Immigration Act, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act). The

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postwar biennio rosso, or “red years,” witnessed further repression from the newly formed Radical Division,8 headed by Hoover under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer and Hoover soon started a deportation drive that, according to Richard Gid Powers, had as its real aim “a permanent alteration in American political culture by the setting of strict legal limits to allowable political dissent.” Known perhaps misleadingly as the “Palmer raids,” the Justice Department’s roundup of thousands in 1919 and 1920 was secretly orchestrated by Hoover. Palmer sought political capital for his planned presidential campaign, but his predictions of radical violence on May Day came to naught, and Senate hearings soon exposed the Palmer raids for what they were. Palmer was out as soon as the Harding administration was in. Hoover managed to survive.9 Warren Gamaliel Harding won election to the presidency on a “return to normalcy” campaign engineered by Will H. Hays. Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, named William J. Burns as the new director of the bureau in 1921. There was a new assistant director too—J. Edgar Hoover. Burns and Hoover continued the antiradicalism of the Palmer days, but with much less publicity. Bureau surveillance extended beyond radicals to such groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Communists, leftist college students and faculty members, even members of Congress who had been critical of the Palmer raids or who advocated recognition of the Soviet Union were monitored by bureau agents.10 Hoover managed to strongly influence the bureau, even in this early period, and he would shape the agency’s ideological mold over the course of his half-century tenure as “the boss.” In many ways, Hoover’s fears were America’s fears. As historian Anders Stephanson argues, America’s cold war ideology evolved from a deeply rooted tradition in which the polar extremes of “freedom” and its opposite (tyranny, slavery, totalitarianism) are in constant tension. Indeed, the “first principle” of this peculiarly American mindset “is the dynamic notion that freedom is always already under threat, internally as well as externally, and that it must be defended by those so called upon.”11 Thus, the American worldview proclaims a messianic national mission (city on a hill, white man’s burden, containment) while revealing a fundamental insecurity. And yet Hooverism greatly intensified this traditional American insecurity.12 Hoover, after all, subscribed to what some historians term a “countersubversive” tradition, an ideology marked by intense anxieties regarding the danger of foreign and radical subversion. Countersubversives were those patriotic zealots who despised the radical Left with a fury. Their anti-Communism was irresponsible, their devotion to the cause often fanatic and at times irrational. They were spurred on by nightmares of conspiracy, by their endless lists of spies and

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subversives (some real, some imagined), and by the intense feeling that radicalism was akin to a contagious germ that would spread unless quarantined. Over the years Hoover would often compare Communism to a disease, insisting that “the Communist hopes to implant his Red virus and to secure a deadly culture which will spread to others.”13 Whether this disease discourse truly represented Hoover’s fears, or whether he employed this language merely for public consumption, Hoover was quite effective in mobilizing a countersubversive network consisting of government, civic, business, labor, and religious institutions. His bureau was soon at the center of this network.14 Hoover was by no means all powerful or unique, but his position of power— he was named director of the bureau in 1924, a position he held until his death nearly half a century later—meant that his ideology and his idiosyncrasies could be transmitted into policy, sometimes with disastrous effects. Hoover’s personality loomed large over his subordinates. To a great degree he was able to institutionalize his own worldview within the bureau. His biographers describe the FBI as a “tightly centralized bureaucracy” in which “a virtual cult of personality” reigned. Perhaps unable to control each of his agents as strictly as he wished, “the boss” nevertheless ran a tight ship. He formulated stringent guidelines for his men, moral as well as professional. He insisted that agents undergo extensive legal training, and also that their personal lives comport with his conservative values. Bureau agents were expected to abide by a dress code and remain faithful to their wives, and they were subject to a rigorous merit-based system for employee evaluations. Furthermore, recruits consisted mainly of young men from the South and West, whom Hoover believed were more easily molded to his conservative worldview. Hoover’s agents were a tightly disciplined bunch, monitored for their performance, professionalism, sobriety, and even marital status.15 Despite his traditionalism, and even despite his quirks, Hoover was no simpleton. He quickly gained a reputation as an excellent administrator, an expert at scientific management. At the time he took the top spot in the bureau, Hoover was described as a youthful, no-nonsense leader dedicated to professionalizing the agency by discharging the “gumshoe sleuths” and putting a high premium on agents’ legal training. His administrative reforms successfully centralized the bureau’s files and operations. Under Hoover, the bureau pioneered advanced techniques in criminal identification. One arm of the FBI, the Crime Records Division, operated simultaneously as a tool for public information and bureau publicity. The director transformed the bureau into an efficient, yet authoritarian, outfit molded closely to his own ideological predispositions and personal idiosyncrasies.16 A supremely talented bureaucrat and manager, Hoover was also an odd man. His biographers describe him as “probably totally repressed.” He was a moralist

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who lived with his domineering Calvinist mother. He was a loner whose few companions were always men. He was parochial, xenophobic, and power hungry. A sickly youngster, he maintained a phobia of germs. He even “had his toilet in northwest Washington built on a platform to protect him from the menace of micro-organic invasion.” And Communists, to Hoover, were much like germs, for “he identified political radicalism with filth and licentiousness, neither of which ever failed to arouse in him almost hysterical loathing.”17 Hoover’s bureau evinced this hysteria in its acute fears of Communist propaganda in the motion pictures. Independent left-wing filmmakers, not Hollywood artists, were the first to raise the bureau’s fears concerning film propaganda. In November 1920, the director of Connecticut’s Department of Americanization, Robert Deming, alarmed the Justice Department to the threat mounted by the Labor Film Service (LFS), a New York–based company that has been described by one historian as the most ambitious of the left independents in the 1920s. Deming received his information from Guy Hedlund, a protégé of D. W. Griffith and director of The Contrast (1921) for LFS. Deming forwarded the Labor Film Service’s literature, noting “a peculiar flavor about it that is not pleasant.” To this Connecticut official, the existence of the Labor Film Service “indicate[d] that Lenine [sic] and Trotsky are not short of agents in this country.” This information quickly made its way to Hoover, who soon had his own agents monitoring LFS. Hoover promptly shared bureau reports with the director of Military Intelligence. In short time, the Labor Film Service aroused deep concern on the part of many government officials.18 Given their politics, the countersubversives were right to fear the Labor Film Service. Headed by Joseph D. Cannon, a fiery union radical who was New York’s Socialist candidate for governor in 1920, LFS had very lofty goals.19 The company recognized its task as propagandistic, yet asserted that its films would be made “always on the basis of truth and fact.” Cannon proclaimed that the masses would flock to LFS’s quality-made motion pictures; not only would these films be popular, they would “serve as the most potent force for good in the country.” Such may have been the typical hyperbole of a fund-raiser, but, nonetheless, Cannon and his colleagues in LFS were idealistic, even romantic radicals who believed their films could serve as a vanguard leading the masses to a better society.20 The Labor Film Service operated on two basic premises. First, it recognized film as the most powerful medium for education in modern society. “All the questions and problems of the day are finding their forums in the motion picture,” declared an LFS brochure. “From day to day, from every standpoint of life, the possibilities of the motion picture are widening, and its scope appears limitless.” Proclaiming that fifty million Americans attended the movies every week, LFS optimistically believed in film’s potential to spread its message to the masses.

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If LFS’s first premise was inherently optimistic, its second was decidedly pessimistic. For these fifty million fell victim each week to the “predatory” capitalists who controlled the film industry, putting the nation’s screen to “perverted and prostituted uses.” That labor’s enemies controlled such a powerful tool did not thwart the LFS, however, for Cannon and his colleagues believed they could win the competition for audiences since their films would not be antagonistic to the very working classes who constituted the vast majority of filmgoers. Curiously, the way to beat the capitalists was to join them. The Labor Film Service incorporated itself, capitalizing at $50,000 with plans to increase to $250,000. Shares were $10 each. LFS sought a broad-based ownership, limiting shareholders to one hundred shares and stipulating that 51 percent of the shares were to be held by labor unions. Cannon hunted for investors in labor unions, promising a safe investment that would not only pay dividends but would also provide “a fair deal to labor in the moving pictures.” Cannon’s evangelicalism was not limited to investors, for men and women could join the cause by promoting LFS films as well. Cannon made assurances of Labor Film Service’s dedication to a broad distribution of quality films. If need be, LFS would even lease theaters “in the ‘best’ theatre districts.”21 The Labor Film Service recognized the motion picture as the greatest tool for building a mass movement, especially at a time when postal censorship threatened the ability of the Left to promote its programs via pamphlets and periodicals.22 LFS planned to produce three types of films. Its “Industrial” films would promote unions; these documentaries would play in theaters, colleges, union halls, and churches across the country. Its “Animated Short Subjects” would portray American working-class life, from the mines and railroads to the slums and farmlands. Finally, its “Labor and Reconstruction” film series aimed to present featurelength dramas “based upon the writings of iconoclasts and aiming to stimulate interest along sociological, literary and artistic lines, thus laying the foundation for a great cultural work.” The group also aimed to supplement the films with a lecture series. Thus, the Labor Film Service sought to use culture to build a broad movement that would cut across gender lines to include liberals, radicals, and working-class men and women. LFS would unite the people under its wide umbrella and serve as “a crusading legion in the army of Human Betterment.” As its model, LFS looked to Soviet Russia. “In their campaign to win and hold the masses of Russian people to their program,” trumpeted an LFS brochure, “they are successfully using the motion picture to the utmost.” Such reverence for the Bolsheviks surely caught the eyes of Hoover and his fellow countersubversives.23 The Labor Film Service produced its first feature-length film, The Contrast, in 1921. Written by Cannon’s friend and fellow Socialist John W. Slayton, The Contrast explored the struggles between coal miners and mine owners in Mingo County,

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West Virginia, where laborers were tormented by the company’s armed industrial police. The film took its title from the dramatic contrast between the destitute lives of the workers and the opulent lives of the owners. Director Guy Hedlund used cross-cutting techniques learned from D. W. Griffith to convey the disparity between rich and poor, stirring contempt for the former and sympathy for the latter. One segment flashes from a scene of a young girl digging for food in a trash can to the wealthy estate of an owner where even his dog feasts on a scrumptious chicken dinner. Reviewing this film, a bureau agent warned Hoover of seditious propaganda made “to stir up antagonism and hatred between workmen and their employers.” Hoover quickly dispatched more agents to investigate the Labor Film Service and other left-wing independent film production companies.24 The bureau was not the only government agency then concerned with Communist propaganda in the motion pictures. The Los Angeles Police Department’s infamous Radical Squad regularly monitored Southern California communities, keeping tabs on members of the Industrial Workers of the World; Italian anarchists; Mexican Obreros Libres (Free Workers); ACLU members; pacifists; radical intellectuals; the local branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; radical churches and women’s clubs; and a veritable host of trade and labor union locals, including carpenters, painters, butchers, and bakers. The LAPD also paid close attention to any instances of “Red Propaganda with Moving Pictures.” William F. Hynes, then secretary (and later captain) of the LAPD Radical Squad, was particularly concerned about the activities of the International Workers’ Aid (IWA), formerly known as the Friends of Soviet Russia. The IWA started as a relief organization for famine victims in Soviet Russia in 1921, but soon it set out to counter anti-Communist portrayals of the Bolsheviks in the popular culture. To this end, the IWA hired William F. Kruse, known as the “Camera man of the American Communists” according to historian Steven Ross. Kruse, who was monitored by both the Bureau of Investigation and the LAPD, produced several documentaries for the company, including one that truly agitated Hynes, entitled Russia and Germany: A Tale of Two Republics (1924).25 According to Hynes, Russia and Germany was “purely Communist propaganda.”26 Hynes was well aware of the film before its premier in Southern California on October 24, 1924. He reported that the Friday evening screening at the Philharmonic Auditorium drew an audience of 1,200 and that the Saturday afternoon showing played to 250, mostly children. Hynes described the film as hyping Soviet “industrial prosperity” against images of “Germany filled with extreme misery and poverty.” The several close-ups of Lenin and images of “Russian children in fairy gardens and German children eating out of garbage cans” indicated clearly which path the filmmakers were advocating for Germany and, by extension, the rest of the world. Attendees at the screening also listened to an IWA speaker rail against the

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Dawes plan as an imperialist tool of foreign capitalists.27 Evidence suggests that in Los Angeles and elsewhere local authorities did not merely monitor screenings of radical films, but at times they took heavy-handed steps to prevent their viewing. One owner of a Pennsylvania movie house complained of an armed raid by the local police during a showing of Russia and Germany. Hynes himself later admitted to pressuring local theater owners to not show radical films.28 Faced with such pressure, it is no wonder that several left filmmakers simply gave up on using film to promote their goals. Hynes reported that the City Central Committee of the Socialist Party of Los Angeles turned its back on using film as propaganda, believing that obvious attempts would be crushed, whereas “if the proposed propaganda was so subtle as to get by the Censor Board and the Capitalist Press . . . it would be sure to go over the heads of the picture-going public.”29 Other left independents struggled on, only to meet with greater hardship. Cannon’s Labor Film Service encountered many difficulties in trying to raise capital and folded by the mid-1920s. Kruse’s International Workers’ Aid pressed on longer, producing cheap documentaries and exhibiting Russian films, but even with stronger Communist support the IWA had trouble raising funds, and it lost its key leader when Kruse was expelled from the Communist Party for supporting Jay Lovestone, the American Communist leader who had himself been ousted from the Party for backing Stalin’s rivals. The left independent film movement of the 1920s suffered from too little funds and too much attention from the state. New left independents, most notably Frontier Films and the Workers Film and Photo League (a descendent of IWA through the Workers International Relief), would arise in the 1930s and 1940s to arouse the fears of government officials. These groups would encounter their own successes and failures; however, as Steven Ross argues, left independent filmmakers were always disadvantaged against the “growing power of the Hollywood studio system.”30 But what if Hollywood itself proved subversive? Indeed, in 1922 the bureau detected a new and more serious threat when special agent A. A. Hopkins sent Hoover a report about the “Parlor Bolsheviki” groups in Los Angeles. Hopkins alerted his superiors that the radicals had made inroads into the motion picture industry when Charlie Chaplin hosted a reception for Communist leader William Z. Foster, a hardliner who would later supplant Lovestone as head of the CPUSA. “At this reception,” warned Hopkins, “the great importance of moving pictures with their educational and propagandist appeal for the cause of the labor movement and the revolution was discussed, and several instances cited where radical ideas have been or are going to be embodied into moving pictures as well as legitimate plays.”31 The bureau now worried about the potential that Hollywood itself—with its most popular star taking the lead—could be used to indoctrinate mass audiences with radical messages.

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Chaplin was no accidental target. Through his tramp character, Chaplin created sympathy for the have-nots while often thumbing his nose at upper-class pretensions, as in The Idle Class (1921), or giving the boot to thuggish public authorities, as in The Immigrant (1917). This latter short feature challenged the prevalent atmosphere of wartime xenophobia, evidenced by the birth of the campaign for “100% Americanism” and the harsh nativism of vigilantes in the American Protective League. The picture opens at sea, with the huddled, starving masses, a hodgepodge of rogues and innocents, making their way across turbulent waters for “the land of liberty” (as one title card announces). As the ship approaches the United States, the Statue of Liberty draws its passengers’ reverent gaze, but Chaplin’s invocation of freedom is ironic, for the new immigrants encounter their first taste of liberty when immigration officers rope them off like cattle. Casting his lot with the foreign born did little to ingratiate Chaplin with the anti-Communists of the first red scare, especially given their tendency to suspect immigrants of radicalism.32 This is not to say that Chaplin’s transgressions were limited to the ideological content of his films. To be sure, the Hopkins report, which circulated to bureau offices in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, as well as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., highlighted fears of the red menace other than those related to propaganda. Hollywood would henceforth be suspected for its financial contributions, and Hopkins notified superiors that Chaplin had allegedly given money to a representative of the Garment Workers Union, known only to the bureau by his notorious-sounding surname, Plotkin.33 Furthermore, in early 1921 a bureau agent interviewed Mildred Harris, Chaplin’s former wife, seeking evidence of Chaplin’s radical activities. According to the agent, Harris “gladly volunteered any and all information” pertaining to Chaplin’s leftist politics, yet she “was unable to provide agent with any definite information except as to her positive knowledge that Mr. Chaplin entertained socialist beliefs.” Despite giving little in terms of concrete evidence, Harris confirmed the bureau’s suspicions of Chaplin’s radical politics and propensity to contribute to left-wing causes.34 Yet the bureau worried most over any possibility of such political activity finding representation on the screen. Agent Hopkins warned that the threat of leftist propaganda included others besides Chaplin. For example, Hopkins singled out one “scenario writer by the name of Hochstetter (or some such name),” who supposedly would “for a rather large sum of money . . . put some radical Communist propaganda into scenarios in a manner that would do the greatest possible good to the cause” (italics added). Apparently “Hochstetter” went about his subversive activities as any good capitalist would, though Hopkins seems to have missed this irony. His report also differed from bureau reports of the 1940s by

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its greater emphasis on the possibilities “of radical propaganda finding its way into the stage.” As an example Hopkins pointed to The Fool, which played at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles and starred Richard Bennett as a clergyman who mediates a strike on behalf of weavers in Silesia. Hopkins asserted that in the play the minister, “being said to have the traits of Jesus as well as Dostoevsky’s Idiot,” succeeds in making “the Company accept the strikers’ terms (which results in a loss of millions of dollars to the concern) and does all kinds of other impossible things in defiance of the existing social system, in an attempt to bring about the millenium [sic].” Perhaps most alarming to these self-assigned defenders of “the existing social system” in the bureau, The Fool was, in Hopkins’s estimation, “a decided success here.”35 Yet, whereas Hopkins emphasized the “threat” to both stage and screen, his superiors were interested solely in the latter. Director Burns soon sent instructions to Leon Bone, SAC Los Angeles: “In view of the seriousness of this situation, I desire that Agent Hopkins immediately prepare a resume report upon all information contained in his files covering the radical activities of the movie stars, particularly their efforts to circulate Communist propaganda in this country via the movies.” Even at this early stage, bureau policy was driven by a fear of propaganda in a medium that reached the masses. “This Communist propaganda in the movie industry should be followed very closely,” warned Burns, “in view of the effect which such pictures will have upon the minds of the people of this country.”36 Burns soon sent a telling memo to Assistant Director Hoover. The bureau planned to share its information with Will Hays. In 1922 Hays, who after working for the Harding campaign served briefly as Postmaster General, left government to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Through this so-called Hays Office the industry attempted to better its image and to ward off government censorship through self-regulation.37 If Hays was ultimately on the filmmakers’ side, not everyone saw the advantage. The Hopkins report had highlighted Chaplin’s distaste for the Hays Office, quoting the actor’s flippant remark that he and his fellows in the film community “are against any kind of censorship, and particularly against Presbyterian censorship.” Chaplin mocked the censor with a pennant he hung on the men’s toilet door in his studio: “Welcome Will Hays.”38 The bureau was not amused. The higher-ups fretted that in light of “the contents of Mr. Hopkins’ report, it would appear that numerous stars have very little respect for Mr. Hays.”39 From the bureau’s perspective, the situation was dire, for stars as big as Chaplin were unwilling to submit themselves to the righteous control of the Hays Office, yet were seemingly open to the “subversive” control of the Communists.

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The bureau in fact moved immediately to warn Will Hays of the rebellious Chaplin. Hays was grateful for the information, and he informed the bureau that Chaplin was the only one in Hollywood who was “against everything” when it came to censorship. Hays remarked that he had found Chaplin to be “a little odd in his mental processes, to say the least” but that he was nevertheless surprised to learn of Chaplin’s alleged radical connections. Hays indicated his interest in receiving further reports from the bureau and offered his future services as well. “I want to have a talk sometime,” wrote Hays, “about ways and means of making certain that there is no seditious propaganda allowed to get into anything.”40 It is unclear whether such a meeting ever took place. However, it is likely that the bureau’s activities in Hollywood either ceased or were strictly limited for the next twenty years. As Hoover would in the years ahead, William J. Burns allowed the bureau to serve the whims of his political superiors, but unlike Hoover, Burns did not survive the consequences. The bureau became embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal, and when the dust settled Burns was gone and Hoover, having convinced new attorney general Harlan F. Stone of his professional and moral uprightness, managed to secure for himself the top spot of director.41 Stone placed strict guidelines on the bureau, but Hoover devised ways of circumventing these. Stone’s reforms basically instructed the bureau to stay within its jurisdiction as a “fact-finding agency” with the duty of collecting information for Justice Department prosecutions. But Hoover instructed his agents to disguise themselves as “confidential informants” in their reports, thus allowing the bureau to claim that it had ceased investigating radicals and that it was merely the recipient of such information.42 Nevertheless, the bureau remained a somewhat small and anonymous agency until Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded its powers in the 1930s. Yet its brief foray into the motion picture industry during the early 1920s, and the concomitant fear of Communist propaganda, foreshadowed the larger campaign in years ahead. The bureau was guided by a firm belief that radical images on America’s screens could brainwash the masses. But after its excesses during the first red scare era, the newly restrained bureau was left with little ability to patrol the national cinema. For the time being, such policing would have to be left to others. The industry itself determined to be the keeper of its own house, yet in the decade ahead, Hollywood seemed to become more radical, as even its new internal censors feared.

Hollywood’s Self-Regulation The Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the motion picture industry during the 1920s foundered almost as quickly as it began, but concerns over the political

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content of films remained a potent, if still nascent, force. Though public struggles for film censorship during the 1920s and early 1930s usually focused on the cinema’s supposed moral transgressions, the leaders of an ultimately successful movement to control Hollywood’s output at the preproduction stage were quite sensitive to what they regarded as Communist propaganda intruding on the nation’s screens. The Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s selfregulating censorship board, embodied these concerns as it labored to excise radical themes from scripts before filming began. Though led by a staunch anti-Communist, the PCA’s business was to approve, not ban, films. Successful at meddling with plot lines and dialogue, the PCA did not succeed in ridding all potentially subversive images from the screen. Though the PCA has often been criticized by historians for effectively deradicalizing Hollywood productions, contemporary anti-Communists by no means believed that the battle had been won. Calls for film censorship erupted in the earliest days of the motion picture industry. Moral reformers pressed for regulation, often demanding federal control. To ward off such efforts, the industry attempted to appease these forces by adopting internal censorship. The first effort along these lines was the creation of the National Board of Review in 1909. The board, though, was quickly rejected as far too lenient, and soon state and municipal censorship boards surfaced in places like Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. By the early 1920s the National Board of Review came under heavy attack, and Hollywood’s image as the capital of subversion solidified even more after a series of sex scandals, the most notorious being Fatty Arbuckle’s trial for murder after an actress died at one of his allegedly orgiastic parties. To improve public relations, the moguls created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1922, turning to Will Hays as their chief spokesman. Hays eventually created the Studio Relations Committee in an effort to blunt further calls for censorship. The forerunner to the PCA, the SRC sought to implement the mandate of its founding document, the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” which ruled out profanity and nudity and called for the sensitive treatment of adult themes. But the transformation to sound stirred a new round of criticism of America’s seemingly licentious art form. Soon a group of well-organized Catholic leaders and laymen secured the adoption of a more extensive code in 1930 and a mechanism for its enforcement in 1934, transforming the SRC into the Production Code Administration.43 Three of the leading conspirators were Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Herald; Father Daniel Lord, S.J., a professor of dramatics at St. Louis University; and Joseph I. Breen, the man who would head the PCA for twenty years. At Quigley’s behest, Lord penned the new production code, a

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document that not only prohibited the risqué but also demanded that films reinforce traditional values by punishing their criminals and redeeming their sinners. The idea was not to expunge every seedy character from the screen, but rather to transform movies into morality plays presenting the stark contrast between good and evil. Quigley pushed Will Hays to arrange for the code’s adoption. A resident of Chicago, Quigley saw firsthand the inadequacy of government censorship. With its reputation for strictness, Chicago’s censorship board frequently banned objectionable films; such pictures made their way to Chicago’s screens nonetheless, for the film industry found ways to influence those officials who were tasked with upholding the ban. To Quigley the lesson was clear: if censorship was to be effective, it would have to be practiced at the level of production rather than exhibition. Quigley thus pushed for self-regulation by the film industry. To Hays such criticism was a welcome departure from the calls for federal censorship put forth by scores of Protestant reformers. Moreover, Hays recognized that implementing the new code would be the province of his office, thereby enhancing his power vis-à-vis the studios. Hays sought to work with these Catholic reformers to persuade the industry to adopt the new code. Their efforts succeeded in 1930, but the producers insisted on a concession that hampered the code’s enforcement. Whenever disagreement arose on interpreting the code, a jury of producers, rather than officials of the Hays Office, would make the ultimate decisions.44 Indeed, the adoption of the code in 1930 did not quell further demands for stricter censorship. In the coming years a constellation of forces piqued a crisis in filmdom, ultimately leading to the creation of the Production Code Administration to enforce the code. Although at first Hollywood appeared to be immune to the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, eventually the industry suffered a serious drop in weekly attendance. Box office revenue plummeted from $730 million in 1930 to $527 million by 1932. In an effort to win back their audiences, studios turned against the code’s provisions and released sensational films like Scarface, starring Paul Muni as the violent gangster, and She Done Him Wrong, starring Mae West as a singer in a bawdy saloon, belting out the virtues of “A Guy What Takes His Time.”45 Catholic crusaders like Quigley and Breen believed that their efforts to secure the production code had come to naught and that the reason was clear. “Hays is not strong in qualities of leadership,” wrote Breen, then working for Hays in Los Angeles. “He does, as you have frequently suggested, pull his punches,” Breen confided to Quigley. “He raves and rants at us but seems to be in abject fear of certain of the executives of our member companies. Howard Hughes [Scarface producer] and Joe Schenck, for instance, have just given him the trimming of his life on the advertising and exploitation of ‘Scarface’. Boy, but Hays backed down.” The film industry, according to Breen, sorely lacked a vigilant watchman.46

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Something had to be done. Breen’s intense anti-Semitism informed his view of the problem. In 1932 he confided to Quigley, I hate like hell to admit it, but really the Code, to which you and I have given so much, is of no consequence whatever. Much of the talk you hear about it from Hays, or [Jason] Joy [director of the Studio Relations Committee], is bunk. Joy means well. So does the boss, for that matter. But the fact is that these dam [sic] Jews are a dirty, filthy lot. Their only standard is the standard of the box-office. To attempt to talk ethical values to them is time worse than wasted.47 Breen’s racist views would eventually guide his strategy of using economic pressure to subdue the moguls, a group that in his estimation valued only the bottom line. He worked with Los Angeles bishop John Cantwell, Cincinnati bishop John T. McNicholas, and other Catholic leaders to drum up a boycott movement against Hollywood. Hays, fearing the organized Catholic Legion of Decency far more than the multidenominational Protestants, sought to take the steam out of this effort by naming Breen his chief censor in December 1933. Breen, however, still needed to shore up his power. Over the next several months Breen and Quigley used the Legion of Decency to press for the termination of the producer jury system and the creation of a new internal censoring body, the Production Code Administration, with Breen as director. In the summer of 1934, the PCA was empowered by the agreement that studios had to submit scripts for approval before production and that completed films would require the PCA seal of approval before the MPPDA would distribute them. Breen and Quigley had scored a coup.48 In his new position of power, Breen intended to implement a concept he labeled “compensating moral values.” This concept expanded on Daniel Lord’s code, which called on filmmakers to not only cut offending scenes but to reinforce traditional values in their films. Breen now declared that movies must counterbalance evil with good. An accompanying moral message needed to denounce any depiction of sin and crime. Breen also developed the notion of “industry policy” to refer to problems not specified by the code itself but nevertheless taboo. Often “industry policy” was the catchword for troublesome social and political content. Together these two notions hampered the production of radical films, for Breen’s conservative moral agenda encompassed far more than just banning sex and violence. His adjudication of the code would allow for limited social criticism but was intended to forbid any indictment of the broader social system. Though the moral guardians who pushed for censorship in the early 1930s evinced few political concerns, Breen and Hays quite consciously envisioned such a task as entirely within their purview. “Communist propaganda,” Breen bluntly declared, was now “banned from the screen.”49

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Breen’s words to the contrary, the Production Code Administration was never in the business of banning films. (To be sure, the studios had no interest in delivering Communist propaganda anyway.) Rather, the PCA became an integrated part of the studio system—a necessary component of a corporate art form—functioning as a service to the industry. Through the PCA, Hollywood adopted a stricter form of self-regulation in order to head off outside censorship that would dampen profits by either forcing films from distribution or demanding costly cuts. The best model for understanding the PCA’s function in Hollywood is not one that posits direct control in an antagonistic relationship but rather one that sees the PCA’s exchanges with the studios as negotiations over permissible boundaries. The code, according to historian Richard Maltby, acted “as an enabling mechanism at the same time that it was a repressive one.” Rather than banning all illicit material from the screen, the code demanded that such material be treated ambiguously rather than explicitly and, as Breen’s notion of “compensating moral values” declared, that evil be condemned and good upheld.50 As historian Lea Jacobs has noted, this formula still allowed Hollywood films a tantalizing suggestiveness. As an example, she relates a scene in Camille (MGM, 1937) wherein unwed lovers dash off for a tryst in the countryside. Viewers watch our hero carry the young maiden across the threshold, but when the film cuts quickly to the next morning the audience learns that she has slept alone and that he has arranged for a separate room. What the film suggests in one scene it denies in the next. Such conventions encouraged imaginative audiences to revel in lewd interpretations, however momentarily. Thus, as Jacobs contends, “offensive ideas could survive at the price of an instability of meaning.”51 As the following case study will show, her insight to the PCA’s regulation of sex in film can be applied to its political regulation as well.

Black Fury and PCA Political Regulation No film better illustrates a political “instability of meaning” than Black Fury (Warner Bros., 1935). Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Paul Muni, this movie was part of a “labor-capital” genre of films exploring workplace struggles between male workers and authorities.52 Based on the real-life “cold-blooded murder” of a Pennsylvania miner by coal and iron police, Black Fury is the story of coalminer Joe Radek (played by Muni).53 Radek is a popular fellow in the mines, but apparently not between the sheets. His gal Anna runs off with a company cop, which sends Radek on a drinking spree. Sloshed, Radek is now susceptible to radical ideas. As it turns out,

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his union is the target of labor agitators—racketeers who seek to foment labor unrest in order to stir up business for their services, providing scab labor and industrial police. Croner, the racketeers’ mole, provokes worker discontent by pointing out dangerous laboring conditions and unfair pay. At a union meeting Croner delivers a boisterous speech condemning the union leaders as “dirty rotten crooks” who have sold out the workers: “We sweat blood to give them their fat salaries, their fancy offices and high-priced cars to ride around in! That makes us their bosses, don’t it? That gives us the right to fire them!” Farrell, the union leader, tries to placate the workers, declaring “half a loaf is better than none.” Farrell reminds the men of the so-called Shalerville agreement by which the company granted higher wages and better working conditions in exchange for a no-strike pledge. But Croner is able to split the workers by hoodwinking the drunk but popular Radek into leading the strike. The racketeers exploit the unrest and provide the company with scab labor and a full force of thuggish coal and iron police. Workers are evicted from the company town, and though the owner makes clear he wants no violence to occur, the new hooligans in charge terrorize the “hunkies” and end up killing Radek’s friend. Facing bleak conditions, the workers are ready to capitulate even though this means losing what their union had won at Shalerville. Realizing he has been duped, Joe Radek takes action by seizing the mine, barricading himself inside by blowing up the entrances and threatening to explode the whole mine if the original labor agreement is not restored. In the end, the feds expose the racketeers, and Radek’s one-man siege restores the harmony between labor and capital. Of course our hero wins back the girl as well. First titled Black Hell, the original script for this film whipped up PCA concerns for its depiction of labor unrest in the coal industry. As fate would have it, Breen himself was quite familiar with the coal mining industry, having previously been public relations director for the Illinois Peabody Coal Corporation.54 Breen, a devout Catholic and militant anti-Communist—after World War I he had been arrested by Reds in Hungary and faced a death sentence before being released—feared that leftist screenwriters endeavored to “capture the screen of the United States for Communistic propaganda purposes.”55 In its original version Black Hell must have frightened Breen, and he quickly set out to alter this film. Breen advised Jack Warner that his filmmakers “strengthen and play up even more so the fact that Croner (the labor agitator) is promoting strife among the miners as the agent of a firm of professional strike-breakers masquerading as coal and iron police. In many instances that I know of, these people . . . are little more than professional strike-breakers who are paid handsomely for every man turned loose in the field where labor disorder is rampant.”56 In fact Breen’s intervention significantly altered the original story line, which had put the owners

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and agitators in cahoots.57 Shifting the blame from the owners to the racketeers was in keeping with “industry policy,” for this move was an attempt to shield the coal industry from blame and, in the broader sense, block a potential smear of the capitalist system. Breen clearly sought to ensure that the coal industry was not portrayed in a negative light, and in fact both he and Hays received pressure from J. D. Battle, executive secretary of the National Coal Association in Washington, D.C. Battle wrote to Hays while the film was in production, alarmed after receiving information (from sources he did not disclose) that Warner Bros. was then making a film “very unfavorable to the coal mining industry and calculated to do a lot of harm if shown.” Battle asserted that the coal industry had been making great progress in labor relations to the extent that it “has today a very pleasant relationship with those who work in the mine.” The film, he feared, would tear apart this alleged harmony.58 Breen, of course, had already been doing Battle’s bidding, but now Breen had to work on two fronts. He had to ensure that the Warner Bros. picture conformed to “industry policy” and also that it did not ignite the coal industry, whose standards appeared to be even stricter. He first tackled the studio side. Writing to Jack Warner, Breen indicated that the script was acceptable with certain changes. He wanted less violence, fearing images of “vicious brutality” by the company’s hired guns. Bearing in mind “the organized forces of the bituminous coal industry,” Breen asked that the studio “insert a line . . . to the effect that while the miners may not have ideal working conditions, nevertheless, working conditions of the coal industry have vastly improved and are getting better all the time. The point here is to get a line or two that may establish the fact that the miners have little to complain against, and that Croner is unjust in his criticism of the employing company.” Breen also called for other scenes that would show the coal company in a better light. This included having one labor leader argue against the strike, pleading that such action would be in breach of a previous deal and therefore the company would be justified in “employing other workers to do the work.” Breen lobbied strongly for a very sympathetic portrayal of the president of the company. He requested the scene added wherein the company boss expresses his deep regret for having to employ strikebreakers and orders the hired police to do all they can to avoid mistreating his workers. “This point is very important,” argued Breen. “From a general policy standpoint, it will be a serious mistake, in our judgment, if we definitely show the employing company as countenancing, or approving, the brutal treatment” of its workers. Finally, Breen asked that the film not show Radek inflicting damage to company property. “This is particularly important at the present time,” the censor asserted, “with so much industrial unrest throughout the country.” Breen, therefore, sought to transform this film into a conservative, procapital production.59

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And yet Breen’s work was only beginning. In depicting Radek’s use of violence to win his demands, the filmmakers went against Breen’s wishes. Ironically, Breen was soon defending this scene to Hays, Battle, and the New York Board of Censors. Breen soon convinced Hays that Black Fury was acceptable. Realizing Hays’s concern about the dynamite scene, Breen allowed that this was “technically a criminal act.” But, he argued, the character was himself no criminal, only “an infuriated, stupid fellow gone temporarily mad because of his high emotionalism.” Breen believed that audiences would sympathize with Joe Radek but not with his actual crime. (He conveniently skipped over the fact that Radek is not punished for his crime.) Breen even proclaimed that Warner Bros. had produced “a fine social document.”60 Having convinced Hays that Black Fury deserved its PCA certificate of approval, Breen now had to convince some state and local censors not to ban the film that his agency considered acceptable. Breen’s line of defense essentially stated that the labor hero was stupid (Breen seemed to relish this interpretation) while the “heavies” were the racketeers, not the officials of the employing company, for as the PCA chief put it, the Muni character is “a pretty decent fellow, who is victimized in his stupidity and ignorance by clever criminals.” Breen was now firmly backing Black Fury, even using his credentials in the coal industry to support his position. “You know that I have some familiarity with what goes on in coal mines,” Breen asserted. New York passed the film.61 Had Breen succeeded in transforming Black Fury into a politically conservative film? Several commentators, then and since, have lent credence to this view. Hearst columnist Louella Parsons applauded the film for making racketeers the bad guys. Bewildered at Chicago censors who refused to pass the picture, Parsons claimed that Black Fury was inoffensive to both Left and Right: “The labor unions are shown in a favorable light, and Communism is not even mentioned.”62 That the Hearst press labeled this “labor-capital” film essentially harmless lends support to the view that Breen had successfully defanged Black Fury. Some, however, emphatically disagreed that Black Fury was harmless. Those on the opposite end of the political spectrum impugned this Warner Bros. film as vile “anti-labor propaganda.” So charged Albert Maltz, a Communist and future member of the Hollywood Ten. Maltz, the author of Black Pit, a radical play about coal miners staged by the leftist troupe known as Theatre Union, blasted Black Fury for containing “the following propaganda: Militant workers are stoolpigeons; there is no real basis for strikes; miners are stupid sheep who spend their time drinking or being led by the nose; and mine operators are fair-play boy scouts who council their hired thugs not to use violence.”63 This critique from the left has been echoed by several historians commenting on this film as well.64 Considering Breen’s heavy-handed attempts to transpose Black Fury’s political message, such interpretations are hardly surprising. Yet, despite the PCA’s efforts,

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a more radical reading of this film remained plausible. Variety, for instance, considered the picture “possibly left wing radical by innuendo.”65 Censor boards in Maryland and Chicago banned the film, the latter deeming it “inflammatory and conducive to social unrest.”66 Abroad, the film was often considered “Communistic.”67 Moreover, labor supporters such as Senator Robert Wagner of New York and John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, praised this film for its portrayal of labor issues.68 What explains this seeming contradiction? Two thoughtful reviewers delineated a rationale for a more radical interpretation of this film. Writing in the New Republic, Otis Ferguson did not interpret Black Fury as a conservative film, calling it instead “the most powerful strike picture that has yet been made.” Clearly Ferguson recognized the narrative ploys that on the surface would seem to blunt any radical message, but he claimed that the film’s realistic mise-en-scène, its “hard-hitting action,” and its charismatic performance by Paul Muni gave it a power beyond its narrative confines so that it outmatched even the more direct Soviet films in terms of its power “to sway its audiences.” To put it another way, Ferguson, without reference to the censor, essentially asks us to reconsider the effectiveness of Breen’s political tinkering. His strategy of injecting lines and scenes—the so-called compensating moral values—did not prevent audiences from relishing Black Fury’s glimpses of “real life.” Ferguson believed that this film derived its power from the characterization of the Muni character. The actors who spout Breen’s “compensating” lines lack Muni’s power of charisma. Hence, their interpretation of the events chronicled in this film cannot match his, “because this central figure is made dominant and real, laying a strong hand on his audience, including it in his humiliations and rough and tumble victories, all these incidents will be seen through his eyes and taken at his valuation.”69 And Joe Radek, recall, is a worker who wins his victory over the bosses by laying siege to the mine, threatening to blow up company property if his demands are not met. Whereas Ferguson highlighted Muni’s performance as the film’s path to a more radical text, Andre Sennwald of the New York Times reached a similar conclusion despite essentially confining his interpretation to an analysis of dialogue. At one level, Sennwald echoed Maltz’s complaint of the film as antilabor propaganda, designating it “a rousing defense of the conservative viewpoint in labor-employer relations.” Despite this, Sennwald detected an underlying commonality between Black Fury and Maltz’s Black Pit, claiming that both productions leave one “with the feeling that, however earnest the mine operator may be in his desire to do the right thing, there are conditions among his workers which definitely need to be remedied.” To arrive at this conclusion, Sennwald undertook a discursive analysis of the text. As if detecting Breen’s hand, Sennwald noted that what is remarkable “about the photoplay is that it could be converted, by rewriting only two or three

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brief scenes, into a bitter attack on the coal bosses.” Suggesting that audiences were sophisticated enough to perform this rewriting in their heads while watching the movie, Sennwald intimated that the visual power of the film—its depiction of “the crushing realities of Coaltown during the turbulent strike times” and “the great pictorial effectiveness” and “sickening impact” of the scene in which Radek’s friend is brutally murdered by the coal police—subtly lent credence to the radical words spoken by the agitator Croner, though he is ostensibly the heavy. At the same time, the words spoken by Farrell, the conservative labor leader who implores his workers to take notice of the good conditions surrounding them, ring shallow. Sennwald, in fact, conducted a fascinating comparison of Black Fury and Waiting for Lefty, the overtly radical play by Clifford Odets. Noting their parallel scenes wherein a union leader endeavors to stop the workers from striking, Sennwald pointed out that the two speeches could be switched “without jarring the intention of either the play or the film, despite the fact that both speakers are intended by their authors for dramatic uses which are diametrically opposed.” In Waiting for Lefty the audience is meant to feel indignant, whereas in Black Fury it is meant to be swayed, and yet it is practically the same speech. Thus, Sennwald suggests, audiences could interpret passages to their liking and could see past narrative structures to reach conclusions not intended by the authors.70 The fate of Black Fury suggests both the power and limitations of Joe Breen’s Production Code Administration. Breen clearly altered the film from its original form, imputing a conservative defense of labor-capital relations in the process. This action should not be understood as iron-fisted censorship, however, for, although Breen sought to influence this film along the lines of his conservative ideology, he was likewise performing a service, much appreciated by the studio, in rendering the film acceptable to a broader market. Moreover, the PCA’s methods more clearly represented negotiations rather than strict censorship, as evidenced by Breen’s losing battle to prevent Joe Radek’s destruction of company property. Making clear where his loyalties lay, Breen soon defended this scene even though it likely offended him personally. Breen’s ardent labor on this film surely produced results. Black Fury was hardly the story it started out to be. Everyone recognized that its overt message was explicitly antiradical. Yet Breen’s method of script tinkering, his injection of what we might label compensating political values, did not entirely defang the radical implications of this film, as evidenced by the insights of critics Ferguson and Sennwald, and by the actions of censorship boards that banned the film in the United States and abroad. Though Breen reveled in the film’s portrayal of the laborer as an ignorant “Hunky,” this character’s first shrewd move occurs when he barricades the mines with dynamite. Breen dismissed this as the action of “an infuriated, stupid fellow gone temporarily mad,” but the film shows clearly that this is Joe Radek’s heroic moment. Thus,

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what Breen and others have chalked up as a great victory for PCA regulation— and by extension conservative patrolling of the cinema—must instead be seen as a compromise with shades of gray. By no means unequivocally radical, Black Fury nevertheless provided audiences with glimpses of radicalism in its portrayal of working conditions and through its charismatic labor hero. These qualities could entice viewers to see past the scenes Breen injected. As one self-designated “Old-Timer” wrote the New York Times screen editor, Black Fury “was a thrilling film but the attempt to save the faces of the greedy and unsocial mine owners, charging strikes to labor racketeers, was too thin for those spectators who know Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Allegheny County, Pa.” Thus, for those who hoped the PCA would put the kibosh on all traces of radical filmmaking, Hollywood’s “movie problem” remained.

Entertainment and Propaganda For Hollywood’s moguls the problem of radicalism surfaced not on the screen but in the movement to organize the film industry’s creative workers during the 1930s. Studio executives themselves had precipitated the crisis in March 1933 when, fearing that they could not sustain their payrolls and wary of federal intrusion, especially after President Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association announced a 50 percent wage cut. Already disgruntled by the lack of job security and artistic control, as well as an arbitrary system of allocating screen credits, writers moved to form the Screen Writers Guild in April. At this time actors also organized the Screen Actors Guild, but the producers fretted that the writers posed the real threat. In fact, the aggressive attempts by the producers to curtail the SWG served only to radicalize its membership further.71 Communists, or more accurately, future Communists, served as the most militant organizers in the SWG’s struggle to unionize. John Bright, one of the founders of the SWG, described the political orientation of the guild’s early stalwarts: “There was no real Communist Party in Hollywood at that time, but several of us had working-class backgrounds or left-wing origins that we hadn’t forgotten. Hell, we’d all come out of the Depression. We were all New Deal Progressives.” Bright soon became one of the first Hollywood writers to join the Communist Party. Disillusioned after the failure of the left-wing author Upton Sinclair in his bid for the governorship on an End Poverty in California platform in 1934—a campaign much maligned by Hollywood executives—Bright was receptive to the appeals of Stanley Lawrence and V. J. Jerome, party functionaries sent to Hollywood to build a Communist presence in the industry. Others quickly followed in Bright’s footsteps. John Howard Lawson, elected the first president of the Screen

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Writers Guild in 1933, joined the party only after leaving Hollywood to work as a playwright in New York. After Lawson’s plays for the left-wing Group Theatre were criticized as ideologically driftless by Communist critic Mike Gold, Lawson became a full convert to the Communist cause. Jack Lawson would later return to Hollywood to serve as the party’s leader in the film industry, where he became known for his commitment to activism as well as his rigid adherence to the Communist line.72 The existence of Communists in the Screen Writers Guild provided enemies, both internal and external, with an effective mode of attack: red-baiting. A conservative faction of writers within the SWG were incensed by the Left’s proposal to assess dues on the basis of a writer’s salary, and especially by the effort, championed by Lawson, to amalgamate the guild with other authors’ guilds across the nation. Conservatives, led by Howard Emmett Rogers, James K. McGuinness, Morrie Ryskind, and Rupert Hughes (uncle of Howard), feared these proposals smacked of collectivism. Cooperating or, as their enemies charged, conspiring with Hollywood executives, these writers—all prominent industry anti-Communists who would help fuel Hollywood’s cold war in the 1940s—formed an alternative guild, the Screen Playwrights (SP). Together with the producers, the Screen Playwrights sought to red-bait the SWG into oblivion. Membership in the Screen Writers Guild quickly shrank, and those remaining members, convinced that there was a blacklist, went underground. Yet the SP, despite actually winning some concessions from the producers in terms of standardized contracts and a minimum wage, never shed its image as a company union. Its cozy relationship with Hollywood execs turned off rankand-file members. The SWG, emboldened after the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in 1937, petitioned for arbitration from the National Labor Relations Board, which called for an election by secret ballot. The Screen Writers Guild won in a landslide, and the NLRB, in August 1938, declared it the sole bargaining agent for screenwriters.73 The Screen Writers Guild emerged victorious, though the stigma of being red lingered. For the time being, however, anti-Communism could not sunder the Left. In August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), fearing the rise of fascism in Europe, directed Communist parties around the world to abandon hostilities toward the non-Communist Left and to seek broad liberal/left alliances. In the United States, this Popular Front strategy had its strongest impact in the industrial unionism movement, as Communists took the lead in building up the Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO). In Hollywood, the Popular Front seemed to be urgently needed after the Spanish Civil War started in 1936. Hollywood now served as a vanguard for antifascism, both through fund-raising as well as filmmaking, until the Popular Front was torn asunder by the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.74

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The intellectual migration of New Yorkers and Europeans to Hollywood during the 1930s set the stage for the molding of a strong antifascist community. The Popular Front in Hollywood formed several organizations to advance its causes, such as the Motion Picture Artists Committee for Loyalist Spain, the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, and, most notably, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL).75 German refugees Prince Hubertus zu Lowenstein and Otto Katz gave impetus to the league’s founding in 1936. Prince Lowenstein had resisted Nazism as the leader of the Catholic Center Party in Germany. He fled to Austria in 1933, where he continued anti-Nazi activities until he was expelled two years later. In Paris he met up with Willi Munzenberg, the Comintern’s chief exponent of propaganda and front organizing. The two decided that Hollywood held great promise for building a strong antifascist community in the United States. Lowenstein and Otto Katz, Munzenberg’s agent in the United States, soon set up a meeting with such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Fritz Lang, Frederic March, Oscar Hammerstein, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Katz, who also went by the names Rudolph Breda and Andre Simone, was particularly skilled at mobilizing broad political coalitions, and the HANL was certainly no exception. Its membership included Communists such as Stewart, Herbert Biberman, Robert Rossen, Francis Faragogh, John Bright, and Ring Lardner Jr.; liberals such as Philip Dunne, Julius and Philip Epstein, and Jo Swerling; and even conservatives such as Herman Mankiewicz and Rupert Hughes. Moguls such as Carl Laemmle, Jack Warner, Walter Wanger, and Samuel Goldwyn lent HANL varying degrees of support.76 Chaired by Donald Ogden Stewart, the HANL claimed five thousand members in the Los Angeles area, including filmmakers and other artists, but also scientists, businessmen, professionals, and even factory workers. The league stood “firmly behind the militant peace policy of President Roosevelt,” endorsing efforts at collective security through a quarantine of fascist aggression. However, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League also identified antifascism as a domestic struggle, and it fought to “expose the spies, the bunds, the Nazi military ‘summer camps,’ the Brown Houses in our cities, the poisonous propaganda of obscene circulars, the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Labor, anti-Negro campaigns.” The HANL had sections in Wilshire, Silverlake, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and several other areas of Los Angeles. Its branches included a research committee for fact-finding, a youth commission to further antifascist activities on campuses, a junior commission to raise awareness among high school students, and a women’s commission especially dedicated to promote the boycott of German goods. The HANL’s chief mouthpieces included a radio show dramatizing the fight against fascism through the services of many Hollywood celebrities and a weekly newspaper, Hollywood Now, to provide its readers with extensive world and local news dealing with the antifascist struggle. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was a vibrant and powerful

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organization until the Nazi-Soviet pact, when its Communist members steered its direction away from militant antifascism.77 The HANL further aimed to encourage the production of antifascist films in Hollywood. Independent producer Walter Wanger, who released his films through United Artists, soon obliged with Blockade (1938), a politically mellow yet still controversial film about the Spanish Civil War. The film also occasioned John Howard Lawson’s return to Hollywood to overhaul an early script conceived by Lewis Milestone and Clifford Odets. Lawson was at first excited at the opportunity to imbue a film with his radical values. However, he regarded the Odets/Milestone treatment “an inept melodrama” in which the potential for a powerful story of the peoples’ resistance against Franco’s armies in Spain was reduced to a standard spy formula narrative. Lawson proposed to Wanger that they “deal honestly with the actual conflict in Spain.” Lawson envisioned the scenario of a Loyalist seaport town cut off by Franco’s forces on land and blockaded by German and Italian submarines at sea. The film would be a powerful drama; its depiction of starving masses would sway public opinion against the West’s neutrality policy. Joseph Breen, of the Production Code Administration, insisted on doing everything possible to depoliticize the film, however. He required that all references to the actual warring parties be eliminated. Hence, neither side would be identified by name, uniform, insignia, or even battle hymn. Nevertheless, according to Jack Lawson, Breen’s meddling did not present the largest obstacle to the socially significant film he envisioned: “Compromises of this sort were less troublesome than the problems of structure and content which arose from the attempt to combine a realistic portrayal of mass activity with an artificial spy story.” Lawson blamed Blockade’s shortcomings on his own failings as screenwriter, as well as the inability of lead actress Madeleine Carroll to deliver an emotionally powerful performance. Nevertheless, years after its making, Lawson fondly recalled the significance of this early antifascist drama. The power of the mass scenes in Blockade is largely the work of the director, William Dieterle, who consciously followed Soviet examples in his portrayal of the crowd, cutting to give a constant sense of movement and rhythm, achieving painful intimacy in close-ups, building from despair to jubilation as the ship arrives. The hero [Henry Fonda] becomes a fully realized character only in the final moment, when he turns directly to the audience to ask: “Where is the conscience of the world?” Hence, as in the case of Black Fury, Breen’s attempts to finesse the story line in order to whitewash all traces of left politics were not completely effective.

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Blockade still offered glimpses of radicalism, and even while stripped of all references to the actual combatants, it still communicated an antifascist plea.78 The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League greeted Blockade with adulation. Its publication, Hollywood Now, though recognizing that the film was limited by its narrative structure of “the traditional romantic spy melodrama,” nevertheless praised Wanger’s production for its “emotionally stirring” quality. The reviewer thought that the financially successful Blockade would encourage the public to adopt the antifascist cause, adding that “if only a collection box could be taken, after every performance, enough money would be handed in for us to buy up Franco outright and send him as a present to Hitler.” Most important, as historian Saverio Giovacchini maintains, Blockade represented a step toward fulfilling the HANL’s wider push “for Hollywood to expand its narrow conception of film as entertainment into a broader one in which Hollywood films would become active participants in the political sphere.” Indeed, Hollywood’s antifascist community viewed the movement for social realism in cinema as part of its political action.79 To the Catholic Legion of Decency, however, Blockade reeked of Communist propaganda. Many Catholics saw the Spanish Civil War, not as a battle between fascism and democracy, but between Christianity and Communism. Breen had helped stir the controversy over Blockade when he secretly sent an early draft of the script to Legion leader Father John McClafferty. The mere fact that wellknown radical Jack Lawson had penned the screenplay set off concerns. The completed film, despite Breen’s efforts, still presented “a passionate polemic for the humble Spaniards fighting for Republican Spain,” as Life magazine observed. McClafferty quickly met with Will Hays, who conceded that Breen should not have approved Blockade. Hays informed the Legion leader that he was mindful of Communist propaganda, especially after Pope Pius XI had confided to Hays his fear that Stalin had ordered Communists to infiltrate the film industry. Meanwhile, Legion ally and Motion Picture Herald publisher Martin Quigley met with Wanger to express his concerns over Blockade. Wanger refused to acknowledge any propagandistic qualities in Blockade but agreed to add a foreword, written by Quigley, to the film’s opening titles, which said: “This story of love and adventure is not intended to treat with or take sides in the conflict of ideas involved in the present Spanish crisis.” This last-ditch effort did little to quell Catholic concerns, however, and the film met with widespread picketing by the Knights of Columbus and other Catholic organizations across the country. Amid this controversy, Quigley detected a threat more dire than the production of one film. Quigley feared that the movement for social realism, embraced by the Hollywood AntiNazi League and others who sought to politicize the screen, threatened the very function of Hollywood, which he believed consisted of providing entertainment and nothing more.80

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Martin Quigley now geared up for a battle he deemed larger than the original struggle for decency. The preamble to his proposal to enact the Production Code, written with Daniel Lord, stated: “Theatrical motion pictures, that is, pictures intended for the theatre as distinct from pictures intended for churches, schools, lecture halls, educational movements, social reform movements, etc., are primarily to be regarded as Entertainment.” In pressuring the industry to accept the code, these Catholic reformers were motivated by their stern belief that they were warriors in a battle over the type of entertainment Hollywood would produce. In their estimation, “correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation,” whereas “wrong entertainment lowers the whole living conditions and moral ideals of a race.”81 Now, however, the threat was not “wrong” entertainment. Instead, Quigley and his allies feared that powerful left-wing forces seeking to use the screen for propagandistic, rather than entertainment, purposes would subvert the screen’s cultural function. Martin Quigley remained proud of his role in cleaning up the movies. He regarded the establishment of the Production Code Administration as a great moral service to the nation. Yet because of Hays’s timid leadership, his “sidestepping and pussyfooting” around the issue of political subversion, Quigley feared that even with his ally Breen in charge of the PCA, it was “highly likely that the bar against Communist propaganda on the screen probably cannot be kept in place.” In early 1939, Quigley confided to Breen that the struggle was like nothing they had faced before: I am inclining toward the belief that within the next few months or, at least, the next couple of years, the subject of Red propaganda on the screen is going to represent, in threat or in actuality, a greater problem than even decency. In other words, I suspect that the original struggle for decency, which at least at this point is practically won, will prove to be, in reality, only a skirmish alongside of the battle that is to come. Though Quigley fretted over the “growing acceptance . . . of radical propaganda on the screen” throughout much of the industry, and “especially amongst our Semetic [sic] brethren,” he was not cowed by the challenge. Believing his foes a combination of radicals and ignorant dupes, Quigley trusted that, should their propagandistic efforts reach American screens, a vigilant public would force the industry to “face the music.”82 The great task would be to preserve Hollywood’s cultural function of entertainment. Quigley took up the battle to preserve entertainment in public speeches and in the editorials of his Motion Picture Herald. In an address before the Williamstown Institute of Human Relations, Quigley deplored the movement to promote “social consciousness” in Hollywood films. Instead, he insisted that the industry,

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by virtue of its films’ “powerful emotional impact upon audiences,” had a moral duty to confine its product to the realm of entertainment. Quigley denounced those who sought to turn Hollywood productions into educational fare, asserting that the moguls’ only qualifications were as “showmen.” Should these entertainers allow propaganda to seep into their films, “it would make the theatres hotbeds of friction and controversy instead of places of refreshment and recreation.” The impetus for this propaganda—the existence of which he resisted identifying in more specific terms—Quigley attributed to the Left, specifically the Communist Party. Quigley charged that Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov proclaimed that “the cinema is the most desirable and effective means of promoting the Revolution.” Thus the movement for social realism in Hollywood, Quigley implied, was the manifestation of Soviet policy, a force determined to condemn and destroy Hollywood’s wholesome entertainment, just “as ‘the opium of religion’ is condemned.” Communists sought to radicalize the masses by sowing discontent, and, according to Quigley, they aimed to use the power of the screen to this effect: “These propagandists resent the happiness and contentment which the screen brings to the vast millions which are its audience. They want only realism, the more stark and shocking the better. Discontent is the necessary prerequisite in their philosophy to their long-range objective of revolution.”83 Although Communists in Hollywood certainly took part in the push for a more realistic cinema, Quigley was mistaken in attributing this movement solely to them. Indeed, liberals and non-Communist radicals were part of the Popular Front that championed this cause. Producer Walter Wanger called for the industry to embrace progressive filmmaking and loosen the restrictions of the Hays code. “Films should be free to mirror all the pulsing vitality of modern life,” Wanger demanded in early 1939. “When a free screen replaces our present set-up we will give proper service to democracy.” Though Wanger believed such a project to be in keeping with Americanism, Quigley took issue, asserting that these types of films would lead down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Quigley interpreted Wanger’s remarks as a “plea for propaganda on the screen,” through the production of more films like Blockade. This would be to the industry’s detriment for two reasons. First, Hollywood would abdicate its moral responsibility were it to place ideas in its films that were solely the province of the political arena. Quigley insisted that “the dramatic presentation of political argument would contribute not to clarify but to chaos in the public mind because the essential merits of the argument would be subordinated to the emotional appeal.” Quigley augmented this moral argument with a more practical, economic line of reasoning. For the Motion Picture Herald publisher also maintained that the production of controversial political films would be greeted with organized protest, as the case of Blockade attested, thereby splitting Hollywood’s universal audience “into

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many groups, each group withholding its patronage from all pictures except those which especially cater to its ideas.”84 Though Quigley would not achieve the results that subsequent anti-Communists in the 1940s would in regard to severely limiting the production of social problem films, his line of attack foreshadowed these later endeavors. Not only would Hollywood anti-Communists in the 1940s conceive of their mission as a defense of the industry’s cultural function to entertain, but, like Quigley, they would advance contradictory arguments on behalf of the cause. For Quigley’s argument that propaganda imperiled nonsuspecting theatergoers by virtue of film’s “emotional appeal,” contradicted his assertion that impassioned citizens would reject such controversial films through protest and boycott. Quigley’s analysis was flawed in positing a public at once vulnerable and docile and yet also testy and discerning. Hollywood anti-Communists in the 1940s, however, were not the first to take up Quigley’s line of attack. North Dakota senator Gerald P. Nye charged that “dangerous propaganda is . . . unloosed upon all the way from sixty to eighty million people a week who go into moving-picture theaters of this country to be entertained. Getting there, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss America sits, with guard completely down, mind open, ready and eager for entertainment.” Nye’s declaration before a Senate investigating committee was occasioned not by an inquiry into Communist propaganda, but rather by an examination of pro-war propaganda in September 1941. A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce had been tasked with the investigation after the adoption of a resolution presented by Nye and Missouri senator Bennett C. Clark claiming that the film industry had “been extensively used for propaganda purposes designed to influence the public mind in the direction of participation in the European war.” An ardent isolationist with ties to the America First Committee, Nye headed off the hearings with his testimony on September 9, 1941.85 Nye spent much of his lengthy testimony denying charges that his assertions were motivated by anti-Semitism. He claimed to deplore all forms of racism, yet he still found the fact of Jewish prominence in the motion picture industry unsettling, claiming that Jews were naturally disposed toward entering the war given their sympathies for the old country. In fact, Nye even blamed the rising tide of anti-Semitism on the Jews themselves: “Much of this growing spirit, I believe, traces to the quite natural Jewish sympathy for and support of such foreign policy conduct as appears to be unfriendly to such forces abroad as are oppressing and persecuting the people of their faith.” The problem, however, was not simply Jewish affinity for their people but rather, Nye contended, that Hollywood was a monopoly wherein the controlling moguls were predominantly Jewish. Nye did not explicitly attribute the problem to Communists, a charge that would have been difficult to mount considering the vast majority of the films

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he criticized were produced during the Nazi-Soviet pact years when the Communist Party halted its aggressive antifascism. He instead maintained that the Roosevelt administration had a hand in these productions and, playing on New Deal red-baiting, added, “It would follow, of course, that the films must portray the agents of foreign causes as vile souls engaged in sabotage, but I wonder if the orders were accepted as meaning the agents of all foreign causes, excepting perhaps certain causes of course.” The result, charged this Midwestern isolationist, was “the most vicious propaganda that has ever been unloosed upon a civilized people.” As examples, Nye fingered Convoy, Flight Command, Escape, I Married a Nazi, That Hamilton Woman, Man Hunt, The Great Dictator, and Sergeant York.86 Enraged by this investigation, the motion picture industry embarked on an aggressive defense of its product, engaging Wendell Willkie as legal counsel. Willkie mounted an affirmative defense. The film “industry desires to plead guilty to sharing, with their fellow citizens, a horror of Hitler’s Nazis, and to plead guilty to doing everything within its power to help the national defense program.” Willkie also met the charge of pro-war propaganda head-on: “Of the more than 1100 feature pictures produced since the outbreak of the present war, only some 50 have had anything to do with the ideological belief of the participants. Some of these 50, we are glad to admit, do portray Nazism for what it is—a cruel, lustful, ruthless and cynical force. We know that this is an accurate portrayal of Nazism.” Furthermore, Willkie contended, many of these films had scored at the box office, proving that Hollywood’s films were in line with public sentiment.87 Willkie was aided in his cause by one subcommittee member, Senator Ernest McFarland, Democrat from Arizona. Although Interstate Commerce Committee chairman Burton K. Wheeler, senator from Montana, had stacked the subcommittee with isolationists, including the subcommittee chair, D. Worth Clark of Idaho, McFarland served as a feisty ally to the studios, pressing Nye to be more specific in his charges. McFarland grilled Nye, who was forced to concede that he either had not seen many of the pictures he listed as subversive or failed to remember specifically what made them so offensive. Nye could only speak forcefully about one picture, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator: “Why, it was a portrayal by a great artist, not a citizen of our country, though he has resided here a long, long while, that could not do other than build within the mind and heart of those who watched it something of hatred, detestation of conditions and of leadership that existed abroad.” Subsequent to Nye’s embarrassing testimony, Hollywood moguls, such as Nicholas Schenck, Harry Warner, and Darryl Zanuck, testified along the lines Willkie had established: Hollywood’s films dealing with the European war were small in number, were factual and not propagandistic, and, in denouncing Hitler, were fully in keeping with American public opinion. After taking much

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criticism in the press, the hearings were suspended on September 26. Clark finally shut the door on the investigation the day after Pearl Harbor.88 Though short-lived and to little effect, the war propaganda investigation served to foreshadow a more pervasive attack on the industry that loomed in the years to come. For the first time a congressional committee assembled to expose what it deemed politically subversive film content. The twin themes that Hollywood’s moguls were irresponsible and that the industry should confine its output to pure entertainment would reappear with renewed vigor in the early Cold War period. Moreover, attentive assailants of film propaganda may have learned a valuable lesson through the failures of the Subcommittee on War Propaganda: the motion picture industry would vigorously defend its product. Indeed, Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, had prepared a massive report to deliver to the Senate subcommittee. Though the hearings collapsed before Hays could take the stand, the industry head stood ready to launch an aggressive attack, not merely on these specific hearings, but on the whole question of propaganda in Hollywood. Refuting the notion advanced by the likes of Martin Quigley and Gerald Nye that social problem films threatened the industry’s entertainment function, Hays instead insisted, “This dilemma is a false one. Entertainment cannot be divorced from significance any more than significance can become effective in a work of art except through the qualities which make it entertaining.” Moreover, Hays set to remind his critics that Hollywood films tended to reflect the national mood, rather than shape it, for the simple reason that “the motion picture must submit to the judgment of the box office.” The popularity of so many of the films under attack, especially box office smashes such as The Great Dictator and Sergeant York, denounced as war propaganda by Gerald Nye, and the critical and popular hit The Grapes of Wrath, savaged as “demagogic preachment” by Martin Quigley, suggested rather clearly that audiences could find social problem films entertaining. The stark division between entertainment and propaganda, therefore, did not hold with the moviegoing public.89 Being in the business of entertainment did not preclude Hollywood from commenting on serious social issues. Notions of a “radical Hollywood” remain something of an overstatement, especially considering the strictures of the studio system and, most notably, the regulation of the Production Code Administration.90 Yet, despite these seemingly rigid parameters, some Hollywood movies provided glimpses of radical thought, moments of social critique, and appeals for reform. Especially during the decade of the Great Depression, segments of the American cultural milieu remained open to left-leaning concepts.

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Historian Michael Denning highlights the centrality of labor and workingclass issues in his book about American culture during the 1930s. He regards this decade as a transforming period in U.S. history when mass culture took on the forms and symbols of the very working classes that both produced and consumed its products.91 This “laboring of American culture” had its cinematic expression in the films discussed in this chapter. In addition to these intense struggles in the motion picture industry over depictions of labor-capital issues, Hollywood served as a forum to debate the American role in world affairs prior to U.S. entry in World War II. For the time being, these charges of subversion of the domestic order and of foreign policy remained largely discrete; when conflated, however, they would prove a powerful combination. Though countersubversives viewed their opponents as mouthpieces for Communist propaganda, this period did not yet mark the beginning of Hollywood’s cold war. The reasons are threefold. For one, though alarmed conservatives detected the specter of Bolshevism, their concerns were not yet woven into the fabric of a broader global struggle against Communism. Without an atmosphere of intense ideological conflict and world tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the ruckus over Reds in Hollywood could not stir up national security fears. Moreover, though the period under consideration in this chapter traces the burgeoning alignment of counterposing forces in the battle over political content in film, these forces on the left and right were not yet fully mobilized against each other. Important organizations remained to be formed, and the political will to annihilate the opposing side had yet to fully register its impact. Finally, after the curtailment of the Bureau of Investigation’s political activities in the 1920s, and with the exception of the Senate’s ephemeral war propaganda investigation, the federal government remained on the sidelines in the battle over the political content of Hollywood films. Yet, in the years to come, the exertion of federal power—through both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Committee on Un-American Activities—would be the key factor in bringing the Cold War to Hollywood.

2 THE FBI’S SEARCH FOR COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

You should direct your investigation particularly toward determining the extent of the Communist Party’s influence and participation in the production of [propagandistic] motion pictures. —J. Edgar Hoover to his Los Angeles agents, 1943

Historian Eric Hobsbawm envisions the grand alliance of the Second World War as “a moment of historical paradox in the relations of capitalism and communism, placed, for most of the century—except for the brief period of antifascism—in a posture of irreconcilable antagonism.”1 It is no surprise, therefore, that despite a dramatic increase in American goodwill toward the Soviets, largely a product of the valiant efforts of the Russians against the Nazi foe, roughly a third of all Americans continued to distrust the Soviet ally.2 The Roosevelt administration sought to promote goodwill, but within the administration fears and doubts persisted. Theoretically under the control of the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its leader J. Edgar Hoover, secretly harbored deep concerns about the president’s policy, believing that the grand alliance entailed dangerous ramifications. Their focus, as ever, was on the home front; their fear was that American Communists would use their newfound standing to infiltrate important national institutions. To a significant degree these fears were directed at Hollywood. FBI concerns regarding the entertainment industry dated back to the years following the first red scare, but during World War II the bureau began a systematic investigation of the motion picture industry. Just as the FBI feared Communist “infiltration” of various labor and government posts, so too did it worry that Hollywood Reds were securing new positions of power within the film industry. But Hollywood was unique, for bureau policy operated on the assumption that “the motion picture industry is beginning to be recognized as one of the greatest, if not the very

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greatest, influence upon the minds and culture, not only of the people of the United States, but of the entire world.”3 From the bureau’s point of view, the American way of life was at stake. Even as the grand alliance cooperated to defeat fascism, the G-men secretly began waging a cold war. These FBI files reveal that fears of propaganda motivated its massive investigation of the film industry during World War II. In this period, the FBI began an intense formulation of a body of “knowledge” that demands critical attention if one is to understand the origins of the postwar hearings.4 Insecurity was at the heart of bureau policy. As they surveyed the domestic scene, and particularly as they gazed upon Hollywood, the FBI fretted over the peril of “a gigantic worldwide conspiracy of control which has its origin and direction in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” After the 1943 release of Mission to Moscow by Warner Bros, J. Edgar Hoover exclaimed that “recent events in the motion picture industry have caused me much concern regarding the spread of Communism.”5 In the context of a grand alliance he heavily suspected, and especially after the premiere of Mission to Moscow, a film that seemed an ominous indicator of the Communist grip on movieland, Hoover feared the production of more “films having a propaganda effect favorable to the Communist ideology.” In order to combat this dire cultural and political threat, Hoover sent his men on a mission of messianic proportions.6 Though its activities may be justly criticized, the bureau was by no means mistaken in recognizing the vital role that film plays in shaping and reflecting national identity. Indeed, historians and film theorists alike have utilized Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an “imagined community” to argue that the “national cinema” plays a vital role in the process of constructing national identity.7 We may say that the FBI grasped this truth years before most scholars, but in doing so the bureau was by no means unique, for this historical moment witnessed a plethora of actors—including filmmakers, film commentators, and other agencies of the federal government, most notably the Office of War Information—who recognized the power of film in modern society. This pronounced acclaim for cinema’s social importance, so acute during the war years, provided the environment that gave birth to the FBI’s investigation. But the bureau departed from its contemporaries in labeling the motion picture as a possible national security threat. Even if the G-men correctly identified Communist propaganda in Hollywood’s World War II output (a debatable point), they failed to develop a methodology that would support the assumption underlying their investigation—that such activity imperiled the nation. Doing so would have required them to investigate audience reception. However, according to film theorist Janet Staiger, audiences have the ability to accept, mediate, or resist what they see on the screen. They do

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not check their class, ethnic, and gender identities at the door as they would a winter overcoat. Nevertheless, the FBI tended to operate by what Staiger calls “a ‘hypodermic needle’ theory of cultural production,” whereby “ideology is simply ‘injected’ into individuals.”8 As this chapter will show, the FBI only belatedly questioned its assumptions regarding the effects of these supposedly subversive films, after years of accumulating reports. Such questioning, however, led not to a reexamination of the merits of their investigation but, rather, served to heighten their need for secrecy lest critics expose the bureau’s operation in Hollywood. Secrecy, of course, is vital to intelligence gathering, but secrecy entails a major drawback when it serves to shield knowledge from critical attention.9 In order to better understand the consequences of FBI secrecy in its investigation of Hollywood, let us return once again to the concept of the “national cinema.” Film theorist Susan Hayward argues that the discourse surrounding films constitutes one of the modes by which “the national” is enunciated. She moves beyond the simplified notion that film and its surrounding discourse serves either to shape or reflect national identity and toward a more complex understanding of filmic discourse as part of a negotiated national identity. Such discourse, therefore, has not only the power to canonize artistic productions but also the ability to mobilize or submerge certain national myths.10 During World War II, the FBI participated in cinematic discourse, but in a secretive fashion, thereby effectively closing itself off from the wider discourse by selectively collecting only that information from informants and the press that matched its own ideological presumptions. By hoarding its information, by keeping its knowledge base immune from public scrutiny, and by keeping its superiors in the dark regarding the extent and nature of the Hollywood investigation, the FBI formulated a body of knowledge that was marked by ideological rigidity and a lack of theoretical sophistication. Such methods could go unchallenged only within the bureaucratic context of what one critic referred to as America’s “culture of secrecy.”11 With the disintegration of the grand alliance at the onset of the Cold War, the FBI data collected and formulated during the war would surface in the early postwar years, contributing to what might be termed a repressive canonization of the nation’s cinema.

The Search for Red To be sure, the FBI had cast its gaze on the screen before World War II. Yet the war years—when the grand alliance granted American Communists greater legitimacy, and, importantly, when the film Mission to Moscow reached theaters— witnessed the bureau’s first intensive examination of the motion picture industry.

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As one of its first tasks, the FBI wrote its own history of Communism in Hollywood. Two reports from the summer and fall of 1943 depicted the bureau’s version of events, thereby setting the context and internal justification for its investigation. The reports are quite similar, though the latter was more detailed and more overtly xenophobic. These reports explain why FBI concerns skyrocketed during the war, and why propaganda, and not simply political and social activity, ranked as the chief concern of the G-men. The 1943 reports attempted to analyze the motion picture industry from the early teens, “that period when it first began to be recognized as a stable institution in American life,” to its present. Here the Los Angeles office alerted superiors in Washington that over the course of its history, cinema “has undergone a definite change in its relations with the national life of the United States.” The October 1943 report divided the history of the motion picture industry into two periods, with the advent and proliferation of sound around 1930 serving as the dividing line. Ironically, the report showed that the bureau was ignorant even of its own history. The FBI maintained that during the silent era motion pictures were for entertainment purposes only. Propaganda of any serious type had no place in picture production; in fact, had there been occasion for such propaganda of a subtle political nature it would have been ineffective in the silent picture, a fact which is obvious. . . . As a consequence the motion picture industry and those individuals prominent therein were not involved, or even concerned, with political matters or with any attempt to influence the public mind along those lines.12 This “fact” had not been so obvious to Hoover, Burns, and others in the bureau when they investigated filmmakers in the early 1920s. Having created a vision of a harmless, romantic past of “an American institution, reflecting American ways of life,” the October report then described a fall from grace. The culprit was technology itself, for the “revolutionary innovation” of sound “paved the way for the use of the motion picture as a propaganda instrument.” The bureau saw the film industry as perhaps the greatest “influence upon the minds and culture” of people the world over, agreeing with banker A. P. Giannini, who allegedly said, “The nation which controls the cinema can control the thought of the world.”13 The August 1943 report detailed the efforts of the Soviet Union to do just that. Moscow was the first to realize the propaganda potential of film, claimed Source A, and it “seized the lead” in this endeavor by sending its best crews to Hollywood for training. Source A asserted that “Russia and the Russians had become the leaders in all forms of motion picture and theatrical entertainment.” Taking its orders from the Communist International, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)

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issued a directive in 1935 calling for infiltration of Hollywood labor unions and “the so-called cultural and creative fields” in order to “determine the type of propaganda to be injected into the motion pictures.”14 The October report added a more xenophobic view. After the advent of sound, “a different type of individual filtered into the industry and began taking it over.” The threat was not only foreigners but their children as well. Such persons harbored “ideas and culture” alien to “the ideals and traditions of America.” Those tinged by alien ways did not even have to be intentionally disloyal, for they naturally carried with them an “instinctive racial affinity inherited from European social life” that, revolutionary or not, was deemed un-American.15 Future FBI correspondence continued to stress this theme of foreign infiltration. For example, in a memo listing approximately 150 individuals believed to have connections with the Communist Party, Richard B. Hood, special agent in charge (SAC) of the Los Angeles office, emphasized the national affiliations of those suspected. Hood, for instance, stressed that composer Hanns Eisler was a German refugee, Charlie Chaplin hailed from Great Britain, director Elia Kazan “claims to be a citizen but it cannot be verified,” director Lewis Milestone was born in Russia, though he “claims that he was naturalized.” And so on.16 No one of foreign extraction was above suspicion, their “claims” notwithstanding. The xenophobia so prevalent during the first red scare had by no means disappeared. Certainly the FBI reports were not suggesting that the sole threat to the screen stemmed from inherent, yet innocent, cultural connections between immigrants and their native land. Rather, danger emanated from the Soviet Union, which consciously sought to spread its “foreign ‘ideology.’ ” The Central Committee of the CPUSA formulated a plan of action and in 1938 sent its representative, Victor J. Jerome, to promote the party in Hollywood. Jerome, according to the FBI, spearheaded the tactic of setting up “front” groups in order to mask the activities of Communists.17 And in fact during the Popular Front era (1935–39), Hollywood Communists did endeavor to set up left-liberal coalitions. The most important of these were the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Motion Picture Artists’ Committee, both focused on international events (MPAC specifically worked to aid the Loyalist cause in Spain), and the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, which concentrated on domestic politics. Hollywood Communists who worked enthusiastically to forge the Popular Front were sincerely dedicated to these causes, but they were also abiding by the orders of the Comintern, for in 1935, at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, Comintern chairman Georgi Dimitrov directed Communists in all countries to unite with their former leftist foes against fascism. The failure to do so two years earlier had been instrumental in Hitler’s rise, and the Comintern was now putting the revolution on hold.

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But whereas countersubversives like J. Edgar Hoover and HUAC chairman Martin Dies would use the term “front” to mean “facade,” it was used by its practitioners to mean “coalition.” Hollywood’s non-Communist liberals, such as Philip Dunne, who worked closely with Communists in the Popular Front, did not view these coalitions as dangerous. Chief among the myths about the Cold War is the idea that Communists insidiously used front organizations to spread their control. In reality they had moved to the right in the service of liberal, not radical, goals. Dunne put it best: “It was not a question of liberals ‘fellowtraveling’ with Communists, but Communists ‘fellow-traveling’ with liberals, which is quite a different proposition.”18 In August 1939 the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. Communists were now ordered to abandon coalitions with the non-Communist Left, and in Hollywood this is exactly what many did. The new party line was undoubtedly harder to swallow than the old, but though some left, others remained loyal to the cause. Hollywood Communists such as Allen Boretz, Paul Jarrico, and Robert Lees believed the pact to be a sound maneuver on Stalin’s part, especially after the failure of the Soviet Union’s push for collective security. Nevertheless, for these the pact period was a “terrible time” when former liberal comrades cried out, “Where are you, the great anti-Fascists now?”19 If some Hollywood party members were deeply troubled, others, such as Herbert Biberman, took leading roles in new organizations, including the American Peace Mobilization (APM), which during the pact period smeared Roosevelt and characterized aid to Britain as support for imperialism. “This is not a war to wipe out the evils of Hitlerism and tyranny,” APM leaders pronounced. “It is not a war to defend democracy. It is a war to line the pockets of corporate interests at the expense of the peoples of the World.”20 However, in June 1941 the party line made another serious shift when Hitler launched an invasion of the Soviet Union that caught an inept Stalin by surprise. Communists were now instructed to dump the peace platform. The West would no longer be denounced for imperialism but heralded as a potential democratic partner. The American Peace Mobilization quickly became the American People’s Mobilization for Victory over Fascism, proclaiming “APM stands for: All aid to those fighting fascism; maintain and extend our democracy; for a just, democratic peace.”21 Such adherence to a changing party line indicates an almost slavish subservience to Moscow on the part of U.S. Communists. Party leaders William Z. Foster and Robert Minor, however, argued that the new policy was necessary because of changing world conditions, adding that U.S. Communists needed to continue supporting the Soviet Union, “the greatest bulwark of peace and freedom.”22

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Hollywood Communists who followed this logic were tragically misguided, but hardly the threat that they were made out to be. As Paul Jarrico relates, “I thought the Soviet Union was a vanguard country fighting for a better future for the entire world, including the United States. This was an illusion, I discovered. But the illusion didn’t make me disloyal; it made me a fool.”23 Nevertheless, the FBI considered those who followed the party line to be dangerous operatives. The bureau also erroneously believed that the period of the pact, though pushing the Communist Party underground and into isolation, did little to hurt the prestige and influence of the party. In fact the Popular Front lay in ruins. Most liberals would never fully trust their former comrades again.24

Patriotic Subterfuge It was no coincidence that the FBI initiated its massive investigation of Communists in Hollywood during the war years. The bureau feared that the grand alliance created a situation that left the nation vulnerable to Communist subversion. The Communists could now pose as “ardent patriots,” merging their organizations “with all legitimate efforts” in Hollywood and across the nation. Thus, “by deception and patriotic subterfuge,” the Communists were, according to the FBI, exploiting the war effort. Contact with Communists could not go untainted. The G-men believed that the Reds used insidious methods in “hiding the communist apparatus in the regular activities of the country [so] that it is extremely difficult for the unsuspecting citizen to distinguish them.” Unmistakably, World War II served as the catalyst for a massive expansion of FBI activity in Hollywood, waged in secret and in isolation until international conditions changed and information could be effectively laundered through the House Committee on Un-American Activities.25 FBI suspicions aside, Hollywood Communists were dedicated to the war effort.26 Indeed, some in Hollywood bemoaned the party’s new stance. John Bright and Lionel Stander, for instance, believed that the party collaborated too closely with the Roosevelt administration during the war and failed to support trade unionists and to protest against racial discrimination by backing A. Philip Randolph or criticizing Japanese internment.27 In Hollywood the program was also conciliatory, as one party document makes clear.28 Whereas the FBI believed that Hollywood Communists intended to exploit wartime conditions and infiltrate the industry, the party instead actually instructed: “Victory does not require any radical adjustments of our economic system which are not compatible with the prevailing capitalist organization of production, and therefore, it would be harmful to call for such basic

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changes.” Insisting that Hollywood films would continue to reflect “the American way of life, which is capitalistic,” the party did not seek to revolutionize the motion picture industry. “Just as we do not ask for radical changes in the form of the industry itself,” this party directive maintained, “we should not look for radical changes in the familiar forms and patterns of motion pictures.” Progress would still be possible, especially through closer labor-management cooperation, but as this document suggests, the party had no illusions about who controlled the industry, for “all fundamental decisions as to content of pictures and planning of over-all propaganda service of the industry as a whole will be made . . . by the producers. Any suggestion to the contrary would imply a change in the capitalist structure of the industry, which would be totally unacceptable to the producers.” The essential fact of producer control was no obstacle, however, for the producers would be influenced by their own patriotism, by the government (through the Office of War Information), and “by the growing understanding and consciousness of audiences.” For their part, party members were to encourage these trends by “taking leadership in developing the organized awareness of the motion picture public” and by refraining from any challenges to producer control that might push “the producers into the defeatist camp.”29 The FBI obtained this Communist Party document through one of its confidential sources. Yet this did not lead the bureau to reassess its assumptions about the Communist wartime program in Hollywood. Thus, the FBI failed to adequately assess its own intelligence, and instead its investigation proceeded under the assumption that Communists were seeking to capture the motion picture industry in order to spread their propaganda.30 For the G-men, everything connected to a vast propaganda campaign. The Communists, the August 1943 report proclaimed, launched “two lines of attack” in Hollywood, one focused on labor groups, the other on creative artists. But the goal of propaganda was supreme, and the twin campaigns were intended to serve this single purpose. As Source A contended, “the Communists must try to capture the labor unions for, if this could be done, they could exert much influence in the nature and type of pictures produced, and thus save the Soviet cause.”31 Here the bureau correctly identified the party’s analysis of the relationship between industry form and motion picture content, yet it neglected its cooperative goals vis-à-vis the producers. The October report went into more detail, specifying an eight-pronged attack, which in addition to labor unions and creative fields, encompassed front organizations, mass meetings, political support of candidates secretly fond of Communism, and efforts to infiltrate the studios and government agencies, most important the Office of War Information, which itself exerted control over the content of films. Thus the FBI asserted that

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“production of a type of motion picture favorable to Communism and the Soviet Union” was the Communists’ first and foremost goal.32 For the G-men it was always about the movies.

Mission The typical view of Hollywood during World War II, both by contemporaries and in the public memory, is not one of subversion. Rather the entertainment industry is often remembered for its contributions to the war effort, Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series for the U.S. Signal Corps being perhaps the most noteworthy of these. Also, stars such as James Stewart and Clark Gable joined the armed forces, and sex-symbols such as Hedy Lamarr and Betty Grable could be found at the Hollywood Canteen serving GIs before they shoved off for duty in the Pacific.33 Even the so-called escapist films played a positive role, for as New York Times critic Bosley Crowther pointed out, “Joe wants to be entertained.” And entertained he was. The movies, wrote Crowther, were “almost as essential to Joe as dry clothes or a chance to grouse.” Hollywood movies elevated troop morale, providing a “vicarious bond” with life in America. As one soldier put it, a good film was “like a two-hour furlough home.”34 Far from being seen as subversive, Hollywood garnered wide praise for its wartime offerings. Nevertheless, the G-men were not the only ones to view Hollywood with suspicion during the war years. As noted in the previous chapter, on the eve of U.S. entry into the war, isolationist senators led by Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and Gerald P. Nye (R-ND) launched an investigation of the motion picture industry through the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee. They charged that Hollywood, through such films as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, had produced interventionist propaganda. The investigation died after Pearl Harbor, but, for some, Hollywood remained a source of controversy during the war. For example, the industry met with charges of wartime profiteering, though a congressional investigation under Senator Harry S. Truman uncovered administrative sloppiness but no scandal.35 Some conservatives did voice concerns during the war that Hollywood exposed American audiences to propaganda. Yet Congressional Republicans such as Missouri representative Walter C. Ploeser attached the “propaganda” label to films largely for partisan reasons. Dubbed an “aggressive isolationist” by the New York Times, Ploeser echoed the Wheeler line that the motion picture industry produced films and newsreels that were biased in favor of the Roosevelt administration and its policy of internationalism. He considered Mission to Moscow to be “purely New Deal propaganda” and expressed reservations regarding the

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film industry’s plans to make a picture about Woodrow Wilson. Ploeser criticized Hollywood for “trying to perpetuate the New Deal, or . . . trying to bend the country to extreme internationalism, in which our sovereignty would be surrendered to a super-State.” His proposed investigation was called off after Will Hays, in a talk with several Republicans, said that he would ask the industry to set up a voluntary propaganda code to preclude partisanship.36 But whereas Ploeser and others feared the effects of “New Deal propaganda,” for Hoover and his G-men the real threat emanated from the Reds.37 And nothing did more to exacerbate their fears than Warner Bros. 1943 film Mission to Moscow. This film seemed to confirm their belief that Communists were taking control of the industry, a prospect that threatened the American way of life and triggered a more in-depth investigation of Hollywood (and specifically of Hollywood films) than had heretofore taken place. Mission to Moscow presented audiences with a movie version of the popular book by Joseph E. Davies, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union. In fact, the Roosevelt administration, through both the Office of War Information and Davies himself, had a hand in the production of this film. Satisfied with the results, the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures considered the film a magnificent contribution to the Government’s War Information Program, as well as proof of the potency of the motion picture as a means of communicating historical and political material in a dramatic way. . . . The presentation of the Moscow trials is a high point in the picture and should do much to bring understanding of Soviet international policy in the past years and dispel the fears which many honest persons have felt with regard to our alliance with Russia. . . . Mission to Moscow pulls no punches; it answers the propaganda lies of the Axis and its sympathizers with the most powerful propaganda of all: the truth. The possibility for the friendly alliance of the Capitalist United States and the Socialist Russia is shown to be firmly rooted in the mutual desire for peace of two great countries.38 The OWI’s comments notwithstanding, Mission to Moscow hardly represented the best example of truth in historical filmmaking. Indeed, the film’s depiction of a “firmly rooted” alliance between Russia and the United States belied one of the major impetuses behind its making. Historian Todd Bennett illustrates how Mission to Moscow was intended as an expression of goodwill at a time when Stalin feared—especially in the absence of a “second front”—the possibility of a separate peace. Domestically, the film was intended to combat the suspicions of the Soviet ally. In fact, the perceived need to make a film such as this suggested the fragility of the grand alliance and hardly its firm rooting. The result was

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FIGURE 1. Mission to Moscow (1943) depicted an avuncular Joseph Stalin and a friendly image of his Soviet Union. Pictured here are Manart Kippen as Stalin and Dudley Field Malone as Winston Churchill. Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest.

a feature film that not only criticized appeasement and isolationism but also justified the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet invasion of Finland, and even Stalin’s purges (the latter by telescoping the series of purges into one trial wherein the defendants are depicted as operatives of a dangerous Nazi fifth column). This shining portrait sought to overcome traditional American prejudices by convincing audiences that life in the Soviet Union was none too different from that in the United States. This was a nation moving forward, its economy

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industrializing, its citizens eager to partake in consumerism. Even in terms of gender roles, the film depicted the Soviet Union as not all that different. In contrast to the hardened image of Soviet women in other Hollywood films, such as Ninotchka (MGM, 1939), Mission to Moscow showed Russian women concerned with beauty by portraying a vibrant Soviet cosmetics industry. As Mrs. Davies, the ambassador’s wife, remarks, “I guess women are no different the world over . . . primarily they want to please their men!”39 Mission to Moscow clearly aimed to better the American public’s image of its Soviet ally. Given the bureau’s assumptions about the intentions of Communists in the film industry, the G-men were bound to feel threatened by such a film. Soon after the picture opened, the Los Angeles office sent its own review of the film to Hoover: This picture will no doubt lend support to the activities of the Communist Party at present time. Its membership is increasing and its undercover activities are increasing. It is conceded that the motion picture is a very powerful propaganda instrument and its ability to reach a very large percentage of the people makes it a most potent factor in molding opinion. There can be little doubt that this picture will have an effect on some classes of the American people, which will not be in the interest of the American form of Democracy, for the reason that all through the picture the Governmental processes of the United States and Britain are made to suffer by contrast with the political philosophy of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Unions [sic], which is made to appear as the finest ever conceived by man.40 This notion that public opinion could be so easily molded—indeed that “some classes” were particularly vulnerable—revealed the insecurity of FBI officials. And yet in time this belief in a malleable public would encourage the bureau to undertake widespread efforts at swaying public opinion. The G-men recognized the biggest battles in this ideological war would be over the control of information, but in 1943 a film like Mission to Moscow seemed to indicate that the Communists were winning that struggle.41 By July the Los Angeles office had assembled a sixty-six page report under the heading “Propaganda Pictures.” Clearly, Mission to Moscow, “a propaganda motion picture favoring the Soviet System of government and economy and thereby indirectly favoring Communism in the United States,” ranked as the most dreaded film to date. The report claimed that the film had been “completely controlled by the Soviet Embassy at Washington,” especially since it had one scene showing “Trotsky plotting with German agents” (thereby substantiating Stalin’s claim that Trotsky was an infidel). More often, however, the bureau operated on

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the assumption that if a film’s cast and crew had connections with the party, the film itself was a piece of propaganda. Hence, most of its intelligence consisted of attempts to prove such connections. If an individual belonged to organizations that the bureau considered Communist fronts—during the war the most important was the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization (HWM), which the FBI erroneously labeled a descendent of the League of American Writers (LAW)—then the connection was established and the film, apparently, contaminated. Though screenwriter Howard Koch would later be an “unfriendly” witness before HUAC, in 1943 the bureau had little information on him and instead reported the real culprit to be Erskine Caldwell, who had adapted the book to a play. As a LAW member, the bureau believed Caldwell had party connections. Caldwell served as a more convenient target, and so the bureau’s report incorrectly insisted “the fact is that ‘Mission to Moscow’ was written by Erskine Caldwell.”42 The July report went to similar lengths to prove that Mission to Moscow’s “real” director was also not the man credited. The bureau claimed that Michael Curtiz was only “listed as director,” but the real director was Jay Leyda, another LAW member. According to the bureau, Leyda, the film’s technical adviser, had been recruited to the project by the producer, Robert Buckner, a man revealed by “private and confidential sources” as one “sympathetic to Soviet philosophy.” Curtiz, according to the report, was only a front man with little experience, selected because “he goes along with the Communist line.” Of course, the bureau’s intelligence here could not have been more wrong. Curtiz had a long history as a Hollywood director, most recently of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the American classic, Casablanca, which Koch cowrote. Nevertheless, the July report suggested that the Communists were so insidious that even the screen credits could not be trusted.43 Subversives filled the cast as well. To the bureau, leading man Walter Huston had registered himself a suspect on November 8, 1942, when he appeared at a “salute to our Russian Ally” rally at the Shrine Auditorium. He was also a leader of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, which the bureau considered a front group. The report listed Oscar Homolka, who played Russian ambassador Maxim Litvinov, as a “well known fellow traveler.” The bureau also made a point of documenting that Homolka was himself a Russian, as if that in itself was evidence of subversion. The tactic employed by the bureau to prove that Mission to Moscow was Communist propaganda ultimately relied on assumptions of guilt by association. This method quickly became the dominant pattern in the bureau files.44 During the war public opinion on the Russian ally was mixed. Though American opinion regarding the Soviets fluctuated during the war years, a Fortune poll in February 1942 showed that well over 80 percent of the public believed that the country would be well served by working along with the Soviet Union. In 1942,

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Time selected Joseph Stalin as its man of the year. The magazine praised Stalin and his countrymen for their brave efforts against the Nazis. No longer deeming the Soviet Union a rogue state, Time even credited Stalin’s prewar accomplishments: “Within Russia’s immense disorderliness, Stalin faced the fundamental problems of providing enough food for the people and improving their lot through 20thCentury industrial methods. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia’s world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin’s methods were tough, but they paid off.” Stalin’s terrible brutality hardly seemed relevant to a nation that welcomed his contribution to the war effort, for Time recognized one of the war’s essential truths: “As Allies fighting the common enemy, the Russians have fought the best so far.” Moreover, as historian Ralph Levering contends, criticizing Russia during the war “was like criticizing one’s son when he is struggling to recover from a crippling paralysis, and almost nobody except the ultraconservative Hearst-McCormick-Patterson newspaper axis was doing it.” Indeed, according to Levering, U.S. goodwill toward the Russians peaked in 1943, especially among informed, cosmopolitan Americans.45 Yet, in that very year, the bureau, alarmed by Mission to Moscow, registered its private misgivings about the grand alliance. A controversial film if ever there were one, Mission to Moscow sparked a national dialogue and occasioned an arena for debate. The film received wide attention by America’s leading newspapers and periodicals, including Life, The Nation, The New Republic, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time. The FBI obsessively focused on one simple question regarding Mission to Moscow: Was it Communist propaganda? Yet other commentators asked different, and perhaps more interesting, questions. What responsibility did film have to truth? What duties were incumbent on the motion picture industry with the country at war? Such perspectives led to more mixed feelings about the film that the G-men considered dangerous propaganda. Some enjoyed the controversy it created. David Lardner, in The New Yorker, asserted that to “the degree that ‘Mission to Moscow’ causes a stir, it is a good picture.” He believed that misgivings about the Russian ally were widespread and needed allaying. Thus Mission to Moscow, whatever its historical inaccuracies, might still perform a vital service, though Lardner fretted “that because it is a very top-heavy, clumsy affair, the film will fail to achieve the important ends it should.”46 Newsweek also gave the film a somewhat mixed review, declaring that though “shy on pure objectivity” it succeeded “as a good-will offering and as a sincere plea for closer cooperation between the United States and Soviet Governments.”47 Indeed, those who applauded this film did so out of the conviction that cementing ties between the allies was a noble wartime goal.

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Yet others were uneasy about the film and more pessimistic about its ability to foster better relations with the Soviets. “Whitewash,” opined an editorial in The Nation, “makes a poor cement for the United Nations.”48 Dwight McDonald, Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, A. Philip Randolph, Norman Thomas, Edmund Wilson, and other intellectuals soon initiated a letter campaign against the film, decrying its falsification of history, its glorification of Stalin’s dictatorship, and its equation of Soviet and American political methods and values.49 The most vociferous critics of the film were John Dewey and Suzanne La Follette. Dewey, a distinguished philosopher, had chaired the International Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow trials of 1937–38. La Follette had served as secretary to the commission, which had exposed the great injustices committed by Stalin. Now the two expressed their sense of alarm over Mission to Moscow in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, strongly denouncing it as “the first instance in our country of totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption.” They criticized its many historical inaccuracies, especially “the impression that Stalin is killing off not potential political opponents but traitors in the service of foreign powers.” Mission to Moscow was “anti-British, anti-Congress, antidemocratic and anti-truth.” Dewey and La Follette expressed contempt for such “propaganda” pictures that “have helped to create a certain moral callousness in our public mind which is profoundly un-American.”50 Dewey and La Follette were often dismissed as Trotskyites or, as one official of the Veterans of Foreign Wars put it, as “renegade Communists” whose criticism amounted to “a subversive influence” at a time of war.51 The National Council of American-Soviet Friendship also deplored any criticism of the film as “a distinct disservice to the cause of American-Soviet unity during the war and afterward.”52 And, in a reply to the Dewey/La Follette letter to The New York Times, Arthur Upham Pope cited Soviet contributions to the war effort as the reason why attacks on the film were unwarranted. “The major fact now as far as Russia is concerned,” Pope opined, “is her stupendous effort and immeasurable sacrifice for the common welfare of the nations and her will to a collective peace. The fact of her ten million dead—nearly twenty times that of her Allies—the unfathomable suffering, the vast destruction that she has endured, ought to stay reckless and venomous speech.”53 During the war years, the popular image of Russia was up for grabs, as the discourse sparked by Mission to Moscow revealed. America’s most prominent film critics expressed their misgivings as well. After seeing the picture, New Republic film critic Manny Farber exclaimed, “Now I’m ready to vote for the booby prize.” Farber endorsed the main Dewey/La Follette charge that the film played loose with historical facts, most significantly by telescoping the series of trials into one, thereby creating the illusion “that the bloodiest purge in the history of man consisted of one trial at which sixteen

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men were convicted.” To Farber the film was a vast disappointment. As entertainment it was “the dullest imaginable.” Even worse, Mission to Moscow dashed the hopes of Farber and his contemporaries who desired more realism in film. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, “Finally a big picture company, which is chiefly in the entertainment trade, has made a film which is frankly a political argument.” Yet, while approving of the film’s contribution to Allied relations, he deplored the film’s lack of integrity. “For there are certain essential responsibilities which go with the blessings of free speech,” Crowther insisted, and in his view, Mission to Moscow evaded such responsibilities. Farber concurred, fretting that the film in no way added to public knowledge. “This is a peculiar picture,” Farber noted, “because it makes no effort to have you understand the things it talks about. Its two revelations about Russian communism are that Soviet women use cosmetics and that Soviet workers get paid extra for extra work—hurrah for the Revolution!” Farber and Crowther expressed powerful frustrations. They hoped that the film industry verged on entering a new era in which it would tackle serious social issues, but, as Farber wryly commented, the result in this case was “mishmash . . . directly and firmly in the tradition of Hollywood politics.”54 The very controversy that surrounded Mission to Moscow demonstrated that the content of this motion picture hardly controlled the political and cultural discourse it sparked. Unlike the bureau, few of the film’s public commentators fretted over the possibility of Communist “infiltration” of the motion picture industry. Instead, the most pressing concerns were the responsibility of film and the development of an artistic medium that could enlighten the public. To see Mission to Moscow as a product of Communist infiltration necessitated a rather primitive understanding of Hollywood filmmaking. Indeed, even Dewey and La Follette did not make such charges. Yet, at the FBI, Mission to Moscow set off warning signals and sparked a more intense investigation of Hollywood. For the time being, wiser voices prevailed. These public commentators attributed Mission to Moscow’s making not to Communist control but to rather varied impulses. For, as the astute James Agee remarked, Mission to Moscow was a mixture of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like—a great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping.55 Had the G-men explored the wider discourse on this film, they might have learned that the investigation itself was groundless, for not only did a film like Mission to Moscow reflect a hodgepodge of viewpoints, as Agee contends, but the mere facts

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of its controversial reception and lackluster performance at the box office should have suggested to the bureau that American viewers were highly capable of resisting messages that they found at odds with their view of the world.56

Injecting Propaganda Throughout the war years the G-men blamed “the present war situation” for allowing Communists the opportunity to “insert sequences and episodes into a picture in a most clever manner.” Bureau officials held that Hollywood Communists sought to “inject propaganda into writings and pictures to build a case for Communism in the United States by making it appear by the use of their ideology that Stalin and the Soviet Union are waging a glorious fight against Hitler.” Indeed, so deeply ingrained was the G-men’s fear that the war opened vast opportunities for Communist propaganda in film that even evidence to the contrary (such as a marked shift away from Mission to Moscow–type propaganda) was employed as proof of the FBI’s position. The G-men claimed that Mission to Moscow had been the Hollywood Reds’ “crowning achievement,” but in the wake of the national controversy over that film Communist methods became more subtle, and therefore more insidious. Now the goal was to “insert a line, a scene or situation carrying the Communist Party line into an otherwise nonpolitical picture.” Such tactics were considered dangerous because they were hard to identify. “Unless one is familiar with the past activities of the individual Communist,” claimed one report, “it is very difficult to detect those who are projecting and carrying on the work of propaganda in pictures.”57 Such a statement of course begs the question: If propaganda is so hard to detect, how could it be threatening? Such circular thinking was not unique during the war years. As John Morton Blum has argued, the prejudice against Japanese that resulted in their internment was so entrenched that “the very absence of sabotage came to be regarded as evidence that some terrible Japanese plot was brewing.”58 Bureau assumptions regarding Communist activity in Hollywood were marked by a similar obtuseness; even contrary evidence did little to dampen the FBI’s assuredness. Predisposed to the idea that any project that included Communists likely contained some form of propaganda, the bureau went to great lengths to prove that Hollywood was under siege. Often, as with Hangmen Also Die and Edge of Darkness, the bureau categorized films as propaganda without reference to film content whatsoever, but solely on the basis of the political affiliations of some of the people involved in these productions. And when reports did discuss film content the films were usually reduced to blurbs in which the single “line, scene

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or situation carrying the Communist Party line” encapsulated the true meaning of the film. For example, Warner Bros. 1943 war picture Action in the North Atlantic, starring Humphrey Bogart, made the list of subversive films because “in the picture there is no Communist ideology expressed openly or directly; however, when the picture was being made, the writer, John Howard Lawson, who is a known Communist of long standing and fanatically active in that cause, took advantage of this opportunity to glorify the National Maritime Union, a Communist controlled seaman’s union.”59 There were, of course, more positive views on a film like Action in the North Atlantic. For example, Dorothy Jones, in Hollywood Quarterly, praised it for being among the few films that had “attempted to approximate the documentary form, striving for a realistic and dignified portrayal of the American serviceman.”60 Yet the bureau never even considered the notion that a film written by a Communist could be patriotic. Instead, the mere presence of Lawson, a man the bureau knew to be the leading Communist in Hollywood, contaminated the entire picture. And, according to the files, the contagion spread. Bogart and some of his fellow cast members were described as having “been followers of the Communist Party line to a limited degree.” Bogart was not a Communist, but evidently even a “limited degree” of Redness signified trouble.61 Not surprisingly, the bureau considered the next Lawson/Bogart war film, Sahara (Columbia, 1943), subversive as well. The Los Angeles office labeled Sahara a propaganda picture because it was “highly recommended by the Communist Press.” Little else was noted, except of course that Lawson was the red kingfish in Hollywood and Bogart was a “fellow traveler.”62 The film deserves a brief analysis here, for though it can hardly be described as Communist propaganda, it presented the rationale for the war through a particular vision of progress that was in keeping with Popular Front attitudes promoting racial equality and social cooperation. Sahara presents the story of a small group of Allied soldiers in North Africa who, by their heroics, divert a German battalion from reinforcing other Nazi forces at the battle of El Alamein. Though Bogey’s “Sergeant Joe” is the charismatic leader who loves his tank “like a dame,” the film avoids the “shining hero” stereotype used by many war films and instead focuses on the heroics of the group. Indeed, throughout the picture each character contributes to the victory, and when the small band of nine men decide to take on five hundred Germans through bluff tactics the decision is made as a group.63 The Office of War Information considered Sahara “a moving and convincing portrayal of the unity of the United Nations’ fighting men” and held out hope “that Sahara may point the way to a type of war picture which up to this time has rarely made an appearance,

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a story focused on the part played by individuals in the conflict, but with broader implications of the significance of their actions on the future of the world.”64 Critics also applauded Sahara’s presentation of the war as a cause necessitating united action. Dorothy Jones credited Sahara for being among the handful of war films that avoided the “swashbuckling American hero so deeply resented overseas.” Bosley Crowther concurred, adding that the film was very popular among troops who were “resistant to blatantly heroic war films.”65 Sahara also presented the view that in a war against Nazis conquering racism was part of the struggle. One character, Sergeant Major Tambul, is a black Sudanese soldier who joins up with Bogart’s group in the desert. At odds with black stereotypes, Tambul is a dignified character whose sacrifice and heroics contribute greatly to the Allied victory.66 Lawson and Zoltan Korda (director and coauthor of the screenplay) also use the Tambul character to illustrate that racism was something to equate with the enemy. In one scene Bogey tells Tambul to search a German prisoner who protests because he “doesn’t want to be touched by an inferior race.” Bogey’s reply ridicules Nazi racial beliefs. “Tell him not to worry about his being black,” Bogey says to an interpreter, “it won’t come off on his pretty uniform.” Sahara also suggests that just as the war would defeat the racist Nazis, so too would the experience of fighting together promote crosscultural tolerance and understanding (of course the filmmakers had to employ a plot device simply to have Tambul fighting along with white soldiers at a time when America’s armed forces were still segregated). In one scene an American soldier from Texas strikes up a conversation about marriage with Tambul. The Texan, called “Waco” by his comrades after the name of his hometown, speaks of his plans for marriage after the war, but supposes that Africans like Tambul “feel differently about marrying.” In his naïveté Waco figures that Africans have three hundred wives each, a comment which elicits a smile in Tambul. Tambul mockingly replies that “four wives make real happiness.” When asked why, he says that “two and two are company for each other, and the man, he has his rest.” Of course Tambul is only joking, and Waco learns that Africans are not so different after all. Waco, an ignorant but not cruel southerner, realizes “you sure learn things in the army.”67 Thus the film articulates a smooth vision of racial progress as one goal of the war. Did the bureau object to Sahara’s rather moderate call for progress in race relations? No evidence directly suggests so, but one may infer that this may have been the case given Hoover’s long-standing hostility to those who challenged the color line. Scholars of Hoover and the FBI have presented a wealth of material documenting bureau opposition to black civil rights leaders and organizations. Starting in the early 1920s the bureau monitored groups such as the NAACP

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and the United Negro Improvement Association. During World War II they bugged the March on Washington movement, and during the turbulent 1960s the bureau monitored and harassed leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. Moreover, Hoover’s biographers depict him as a racist. Having grown up in segregated Washington, D.C., he believed that blacks were an inferior people, best suited as servants to whites. Until pressure by the Kennedy administration forced a slight change, the bureau’s only black agents were in fact Hoover’s personal servants. Throughout his life he feared that black activists were uniquely susceptible to red radicalism.68 Such attitudes were evident in the bureau’s investigation of Hollywood.69 The FBI considered Communist propaganda techniques to include not only efforts to inject certain ideas into films, but also efforts to block ideas that the party disdained as well.70 According to informant B-31, a “Declaration of Principles” authored by Maxwell Anderson, Lillian Hellman, and Peter Lyon in 1944 repudiated film and other popular culture portrayals of stereotypical images of blacks as “happy-go-lucky, lazy illiterates, clowns, cowards, superstitious, ghost-ridden, liquor drinking, chicken-stealing, watermelon-eating, jazz-crazed Aunt Jemimas or Uncle Toms, who at their worst are villains and at their best slavish admirers of their white ‘superiors’. We wish these dangerous vilifications to stop forever.” B-31 considered the Declaration to be “in complete accord with the very latest of these Communist inspired Red creations.” The Declaration’s heavy backing (B-31 maintained that it garnered five hundred signatures from various artists) offered further proof of this informant’s conclusion that “Hollywood is full of Reds up to its eyebrows, and this is no joke.”71 Another report claimed that the party had prevented the production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. On hearing of the project, the “Communist Party immediately decided this would not be to its liking because the character of Uncle Tom, as portrayed in the book was too much of a servant and was too loyal to his ‘master,’ and therefore the picture would be contrary to the present line and efforts of the Communist Party to stir up the Negroes to assert themselves on the basis of equality.” The Communists, according to bureau files, launched a “campaign of intimidation” that succeeded in preventing the filming of “an American classic,” a sure sign of its subversive presence in Hollywood.72 Assistant FBI director D. Milton Ladd later claimed that the leftist Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, which had connections with the Office of War Information, made efforts to inject propaganda at every opportunity. “For example, it is reported that wherever possible it demanded a second front, freedom for India, independence for Puerto Rico, racial equality and similar material parallel to the Communist Party line.”73 Thus liberal (or in the terminology of the day, “progressive”) causes, including racial equality, were regarded as signs of subversion

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because the party happened to support them. Along such lines of reasoning, reform would be stifled, as would calls for reform in film.

Back in the Communist Fold In an effort to innovate policy to counteract the perceived propaganda activities of Hollywood Communists, Richard Hood, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office, proposed a plan for collaboration with the Hollywood office of the Office of War Information, Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). Hood couched his proposal in modest terms, suggesting that he might advise OWI and the Hays Office in order to ensure that the FBI’s “interests at times be better represented.” Under his plan, matters of policy would of course be set from above with Hood acting as liaison.74 Certainly the type of collaboration Hood had in mind could have given the FBI the opportunity to influence the very medium it feared was under attack. It would, from time to time, attempt to influence American culture by working with the motion picture industry, but only on films depicting the FBI. This more ambitious proposal gave Hoover pause. In fact Hoover’s reply to Hood indicated that he had no trust in the OWI. He shot down Hood’s idea partly because it would have allowed too much authority for an underling in Hoover’s tightly centralized bureau. Hoover insisted “all questions pertaining to motion pictures in which the bureau has a legitimate interest should be passed upon here at bureau headquarters before any action is taken.” But Hoover’s objection also reflected his vendetta against one OWI official, Ulric Bell, who headed the Overseas Branch of the OWI, the office that eventually had the most influence over films because it decided which ones were fit to be shown outside of the country. Bell was the object of Hoover’s fury, not because he was suspected of being a Communist, but because he had committed an even greater sin. According to Hoover, Bell had distributed a memorandum critical of the FBI to hundreds of “prominent individuals” in D.C. and around the country. This document characterized the bureau as ill-prepared to defend the nation against sabotage and espionage and called for the establishment of a new division within the FBI responsible only for internal security and headed not by Hoover but by its own divisional chief.75 That Bell was a top official in the OWI therefore raised a flag for Hoover. But soon his bureau came to suspect the entire Overseas Branch of the OWI of Communist infiltration. One year after the Bell episode, Hood’s Los Angeles office began reporting about the Communist subversion of OWI’s postliberation pictures. OWI’s cooperation with the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, which the FBI labeled “a completely Communist-dominated organization,” supplied the rationale for

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this charge. The HWM was a voluntary war organization consisting of 3,500 writers working in screen, radio, and music, whose contributions included hundreds of documentary and short subject films, radio scripts, Army and Navy camp sketches, war bond and blood bank speeches, war agency brochures, feature articles on war activities, songs, posters, and slogans. It also sponsored writing courses for rehabilitating veterans (an initiative led by Dalton Trumbo among others). Working with the University of California, the HWM was the driving force behind the 1943 Writers Congress, which sought to “evaluate the role of the writer in war time, to provide a clear recognition of the importance of that role, to strengthen solidarity in the ranks of the writers for the great task ahead of all civilized men and women—the smashing of armed fascism and the consolidation of the victory of democracy after the signing of the peace treaties.” In May 1945 the HWM began shifting its emphasis toward the postwar world, producing a radio series that dealt with the adjustments necessary for returning veterans and reconversion to a peace-time economy. Its postwar activities included encouraging the Hollywood production “of motion pictures distinguished both for their entertainment value and their integrity of idea content,” and collaborating with the University of California in sponsoring the Hollywood Quarterly, a professional journal dealing with creative and technical issues. The Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization was a Popular Front organization—that is, it enlisted Communists on behalf of a liberal agenda—but the bureau saw nothing but Red. One member, Philip Dunne, had ceased his activities with Communists after the Soviet attack on Finland, but now, with his country allied with the Soviets in the effort to defeat Hitler, Dunne resumed his collaboration with Hollywood Communists. Astute observers would have recognized that Dunne was no “Commie-stooge,” but according to the bureau he was “back in the Communist fold.”76 The HWM’s work for the OWI’s Overseas Branch especially aroused FBI concerns. Robert Riskin, chief of the OWI’s Overseas Film Bureau in New York City, placed members of the HWM in important positions within his agency.77 As production chief, Dunne ranked directly under Riskin. However, others on the editorial board—including John Howard Lawson, Sidney Buchman, Howard Koch, Meta Reis, Robert Rossen, and Allen Rivkin—had Communist affiliations.78 The FBI fretted that the films being made by the OWI “will be of a political nature, more or less, and deal with matters in which the Communist viewpoint could easily be injected.” Thus the FBI revealed its concern about the postwar world, and specifically about the Communist role in that world. It listed several films planned by the OWI, dealing with such subjects as postwar employment and inflation, returning soldiers, world trade, international relations, postwar relief/ rehabilitation, and America’s security branches (including the FBI).79

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In March 1945, the FBI reported that Riskin, now heading the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures in Hollywood, had plans to make more documentaries and to work in conjunction with the State Department in order to have the films shown “all over the world once the war is over.” Hood’s office reported that the HWM would continue as the “driving force” behind these films, and therefore “there is no doubt that ideology would play a large part in the content of any picture produced.”80 No longer suspecting only a group of radicals in Hollywood, the FBI enlarged its investigation to include an agency of the federal government. Because of the collaboration between the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the OWI, the FBI alarmingly reported, “Documentary motion pictures made in Hollywood by the Office of War Information and distributed abroad, are produced by persons subservient to the political line of the Communist Political Association.”81 Clearly, the war created opportunities for Communists to enter mainstream organizations, and even to affiliate themselves with the government. All this was anathema to Hoover and his G-men.

Hoover’s Dilemma What, then, was the FBI to do about the red menace in Hollywood? In October 1944 Hoover finally, albeit misleadingly, alerted his superiors of the perceived threat, notifying Attorney General Francis Biddle that reliable informants had passed alarming information to the bureau. Not only did Hoover seek to characterize the FBI’s role as passive, he also blatantly lied to Biddle, claiming that “no direct investigation has been conducted with reference to the Motion Picture Industry.”82 Yet, if the FBI director hoped that the Justice Department would initiate actions against Hollywood Communists, he was disappointed. With little direction from superiors in Washington, it was left to SAC Hood to innovate policy. In April 1945 Hood proposed a new program. Believing that Hoover might soon be called on to speak about Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry (in 1945 there was already some talk of a HUAC investigation), Hood argued that it would be necessary to point out specific instances of red propaganda. Tellingly, Hood recognized the weaknesses of the bureau’s assumptions when he asserted that “it will not be sufficient to state that a certain known Communist wrote, directed, or produced a particular motion picture which follows the Communist Party line.” This, of course, had been the tactic—and the key theoretical failing—of the FBI’s previous reports. Instead, Hood now proposed something quite ambitious: the G-men would themselves become film reviewers. Hood outlined a plan in which scripts would be obtained through bureau informants; the

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FBI would flag all suspect scripts, and when the final films were released to the public special agents would then secretly join the audience and construct their analyses. Thus Hood did not propose to actually interfere with the production of films, but rather to have his agents, whom he believed to be qualified experts in detecting propaganda, chronicle the subversive content of those pictures. In an effort to convince his superiors of the soundness of this plan, Hood forwarded three FBI reviews of the RKO picture The Master Race.83 Released in late 1944, The Master Race was written and directed by Herbert Biberman, a future member of the Hollywood Ten. Biberman’s film—a “B” picture if there ever was one—sought to inform the public of the need for postwar involvement in Europe to ensure that not only the war, but also the peace, would be won. In telling the story of the liberation and rehabilitation of a Belgian town, the film stressed the necessity of postwar recovery and especially of postwar unity between East and West. For though the Nazis would soon be defeated, they would still attempt to “sow the seed of disunity right in the very core of your victory” as the film’s evil Nazi proclaims. Biberman’s didactic film (based on his original story) aimed primarily at perpetuating the grand alliance after the war and building support for European reconstruction in order to forestall a breeding ground for fascism.84 Though the Office of War Information believed The Master Race to be in many ways a valuable contribution to understanding postwar problems, its Overseas Bureau considered it unsuitable for export due largely to its unrealistic portrayal of wartime devastation and its likelihood to irritate foreign audiences as a “film presentation by Americans of our own bounty to the enslaved peoples of Europe.”85 Whereas the OWI considered the film too U.S. centered, for the G-men film critics (three attended the film and two of the three read the script), The Master Race was a perfect example of “subtle and veiled Communist propaganda inserted by innuendo through the theme, settings, circumstances and characters.” The message of postwar unity, a “praiseworthy theme” according to one agent, was still an indication that Communists had influenced the content of this film, since maintaining good relations among the Allies was a key goal of U.S. Communists. Presenting a positive image of the Soviet Union, therefore, was crucial to sustaining American public support for continued international cooperation, and The Master Race propagandized this message by presenting the view that “the Russians are no freaks but are ordinary people, industrious, congenial, and intelligent, just like people in the United States.” The three reviews illustrated the G-men’s unsurprising consensus regarding the subversive credentials of The Master Race. Each pointed to the glowing depiction of the Russian, Lt. Andrei Krestov, a cheerful fellow who, despite being outranked by British and American officers, is frequently the one most capable of solving problems. The G-men were

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struck by Krestov’s physical appearance, which stood in contrast to the American major “with a rather large waist line for his age” and the British captain “with a very weak voice whose personality and character reflect virtually no strength or forcefulness whatsoever.” By contrast, Krestov, noted one agent, “is quite tall, possesses a very rugged physique, has very expressive eyes.” In short, as another agent wrote, “Krestov was a fine specimen of physical manhood.” Through the film’s masculine depiction of the Russian, the G-men feared that The Master Race would produce a virile image of the Soviet Union that would make Communism more appealing at home.86 One can certainly see the logic of Hood’s proposal. If the bureau’s premise was correct, and certain films were truly subversive, this would need to be demonstrated. Yet Hood’s superiors in Washington turned a cold shoulder on his project. Assistant Director D. M. Ladd presented Hoover three main objections that should have raised concerns, not simply about Hood’s proposal, but indeed about the bureau’s entire campaign in Hollywood. First, it dawned on Ladd (perhaps after reading the reviews of The Master Race) that the G-men were no film critics, and indeed that as nonexperts their opinions would be easily challenged. An institution as concerned about its public image as the FBI could never expose itself to the possibility of public ridicule. But Ladd’s concerns were not simply based on questions of public relations, for he also pointed out that “the present Communist ‘line’ is, at least on the surface, most harmonious with” American policy. This insight, however, did not lead Ladd to question whether in fact Communists in Hollywood had succeeded at inserting agitprop; instead, this assumption remained ingrained, and the only problem for Ladd was not a question of whether such propaganda existed but whether it could be readily demonstrated. Finally, and perhaps most interesting, Ladd recognized a major flaw in the bureau’s assumptions. Even if the bureau’s experts could convincingly demonstrate that Communist propaganda had been injected into a particular film, “this still would be no evaluation as to the actual or possible effect that the propaganda has on the public in general.” Ladd had successfully articulated the conceptual backwardness underpinning the FBI’s entire investigation of Hollywood. Yet, instead of leading to a shift in policy, Ladd’s points only served to restrain Hood’s proposal.87 Ladd’s remarks carried great weight with Hoover, and he quickly disapproved of Hood’s proposal in its full scope. But Hoover did not order Los Angeles to cease all investigation of film content. Instead, Hoover and Ladd approved a more limited program that allowed for agent analyses of motion pictures only when said films were “obviously of a Communist propaganda nature” or when “reliable informants” had already pointed out the films’ subversive qualities. Seeking to avoid an investigation of all “films of a social or political nature,” bureau officials nevertheless approved a more scaled-down version of Hood’s program, ensuring

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that, though there were no plans for dissemination, if need be these analyses could be attributed to outside experts instead of FBI agents.88 Hood’s proposal had spawned serious questions about the entire nature of the FBI’s investigation of Hollywood. For the first time bureau officials recognized some of the weaknesses of their assumptions. This should have been a moment when policy was halted, or at least reconsidered. Instead, stubbornly, secretly, the G-men plunged ahead on a course that would soon entail disastrous results for many in Hollywood.

Film and Democracy Amid the cataclysmic events of World War II, the FBI cast its gaze on Hollywood, fearing what it saw. The Great War, a generation earlier, had been fought to make the world “safe for democracy,” and perhaps the FBI now feared that this war would do no better. Yet the G-men envisioned the threat to the future as something far greater than ever faced before. Noted for its “political influence,” the motion picture industry seemed under siege. By the autumn of 1943 the FBI fretted that the Communists had already made great strides: “There can be no doubt that the national origins and inherited ‘ideologies’ of those now in control of the motion picture industry are determining these developments and bending them in a direction unfavorable to American ideals and customs—and it can be said, in the long run, democracy” (italics added).89 Democracy? For the FBI, Hollywood was dangerous because it could be used as a tool to promote the revolution and set up a totalitarian state. Yet the bureau was embarking on a program which, viewed from another perspective, would ultimately encroach on the very idea of a democratic screen. Enshrined in secrecy, the FBI formulated a body of knowledge within a vacuum. It did not seek to gather information on Hollywood in an “objective” fashion, but rather sealed itself off from a broader cultural discourse in order to build a case against Communists and “fellow travelers” in the film industry. It often relied on press sources, but in a very selective manner, ignoring a vast literature that was not useful to its anti-Communist campaign. Indeed, this outside discourse viewed Hollywood in a wartime context in which Communist subversion was not a major concern, thereby calling into question the very assumptions on which the FBI was basing its case. Bureau notions of the relationship between film and democracy differed sharply from the views of contemporary Hollywood commentators. For these, the pressing concerns were the freedom of the screen, on the one hand, and the screen’s responsibility to the peoples of the world, on the other.

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Writing for The Nation less than a year into the war, Hollywood commentator Ezra Goodman proclaimed that the cinema faced new demands from the public. Certainly, people still appreciated escapist films, but they also hungered for the serious treatment of serious issues. Goodman optimistically reported that the motion picture industry was emerging “from its mental shell,” but added that it still had a long road ahead: “It has yet to realize the essential seriousness of the war as a theme; it has yet to remove the last blonde from the bombers.” For Goodman, Hollywood had an awesome responsibility because the “screen can be a most effective medium for creating understanding between the peoples of the United Nations and for affirming the democratic ideals that we are fighting for.”90 Like Goodman, film commentators such as Manny Farber, Bosley Crowther, and Dorothy Jones believed Hollywood had important wartime obligations. But writing later in the war, they concluded that the film industry had, despite a few exceptions, done a poor job of informing the public of the great issues of the day. Unlike the FBI, Farber scoffed at the idea of Communist influence in film, for the studio system utilized self-censorship to protect itself from any controversy. Instead, Farber worried that the studios too often produced pictures marked by “melodramatic attitude, patriotic narrowness and glibness all around.” However, the documentaries made during the war, especially Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, were “unadorned with Hollywood whoop-la” as New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther proclaimed. The lesson was clear. The documentaries showed the potential of film outside the confines of the studio system. And as Dorothy Jones asserted, this new appreciation for realism was now seeping into the Hollywood studios, leading hopefully to a mature cinema that would recognize its “social and political responsibility.” The emancipation of film was for many the most pressing concern, for, as Farber concluded, the “war has once more pointed up the need for complete freedom from repression for the movie artist, and also the incongruous fact that in a war where freedom is the most prominent word, the most popular medium of expression is nowhere free.” Thus, while the FBI was compiling information that would ultimately be used to restrict freedom of expression in the name of democracy, a wider discourse now demanded greater artistic autonomy, believing this the necessary precondition for the promotion of democratic ideals.91 In wartime Hollywood, autonomy and responsibility could be competing imperatives, and the G-men were by no means the only ones seeking to subvert one by evoking the urgency of the other. As Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black have shown, the Office of War Information put significant pressure on the film industry to incorporate wartime propaganda, and though it did not claim formal censorship powers, it did, through its Overseas Branch, use its leverage on foreign markets to influence film content. Though some might consider OWI’s aims laudable—its film manual showed many traces of Henry Wallace’s “Century of

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the Common Man”—its tactics were often heavy-handed.92 The FBI, of course, did not appeal to Wallace in formulating its definition of democracy. As the war drew to a close, few imagined what lay in store. Instead, a brief moment of optimism regarding postwar American cinema emerged. Film, many hoped, might finally become an effective medium for discussing social problems and affecting change. Indeed, the early postwar era witnessed a boom in the productions of “social problem films” such as The Lost Weekend, The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, and Gentlemen’s Agreement. But the attack on Hollywood would quickly close the door on these types of productions. The fear of Communist propaganda in Hollywood had begun well before the Cold War. Though FBI concerns dated back to the first red scare, World War II served as the catalyst for its full-fledged investigation of the motion picture industry, particularly since the alliance with the Soviet Union set the conditions for a renewed Popular Front at home. Deeply concerned about the prospect of Communist propaganda, the G-men justified their investigation as a defense of American democracy. No doubt it was a subversion of this very principle.

3 PRODUCING HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR

Despite the attitude of the press and other informational processes now antagonistic to Communism on a national scale, Hollywood and the film industry still remain the key spots of contamination by this ideology. The motion picture producers themselves have never reacted to this subject now occupying so much attention throughout the world. —FBI report from Los Angeles agent, 1947

The year is 1945; the great struggle has finally ended in victory. Three of democracy’s heroes return to their small hometown only to find a new struggle awaits. Readjusting to civilian life is much harder than they had ever expected. Homer Parrish has survived the war, but at the cost of losing both his hands. He must now learn to get by with his prosthetic “hooks.” Fred Derry, a U.S. Air Force captain during the war, comes back to his less glamorous job as a “soda jerk” for what used to be a small-town drugstore but is now just another national chain. His beautiful wife, so enthralled with him when she first saw him in his military attire, now finds that the uniform looks good on other guys as well. Army sergeant Al Stephenson has also returned from overseas, secure in his bank job, but a bit too reliant on the bottle. For Homer, Fred, and Al, and the society welcoming them back, the future is unclear. This portrait of postwar reconversion is from The Best Years of Our Lives (RKO), the most critically acclaimed motion picture of 1946. The recipient of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, Best Years was also a huge hit with audiences, tied with Duel in the Sun as the year’s top blockbuster. For New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, this shining example of filmmaking encapsulated “almost all that could possibly be said on the screen at this critical moment about the tensions involved in home-coming, about the natural and humorous embarrassments of the comparatively well-established man, about the delicate and torturing readjustments of the socially-wrenched and the physically maimed.”1 Esquire critic Jack Moffitt also found Best Years to be a powerful film, noting especially its unequalled portrayal of the nation’s returning servicemen: “It makes no attempt 69

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to oversimplify these millions of individuals into One Composite Veteran. This strong picture presents them as men, matured by combat, who face the problems of readjustment with dignity, courage and patience.” Yet to Jack Moffitt, The Best Years of Our Lives also represented a serious threat. Moffitt was appalled by one scene in which a banker “is finicky over lending his depositors’ money to worthy G.I.s without gilt-edged collateral.” Moffit worried that such scenes seemed all too prevalent in the modern motion picture and that such coarse portrayals of sound capitalist practices “may irritate many businessmen.”2 Moffitt was not alone in his worries. A number of like-minded individuals in the motion picture industry formed an alliance to fight the Communist propaganda they feared was so rampant in filmdom. The first premise of this organization was that insidious propaganda pervaded the screen. The second premise was equally daunting. For this group feared that in an industry so tightly controlled by the major studios, the top dogs were asleep at the watch. Soon relegated to the fringes in Hollywood, they turned to a powerful ally most sympathetic to its worldview, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Together these zealous partners constructed and interpreted an elaborate guide for detecting subversion on the screen, thus playing a major role in producing Hollywood’s cold war.

The Motion Picture Alliance On Friday, February 4, 1944, roughly one hundred persons from the motion picture industry packed into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles to launch a new anti-Communist organization, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. These anti-Communists detected an insidious plot to infiltrate the nation’s influential institutions, Hollywood being among the most important of these, given its ability to reach the masses. As the previous chapter has shown, the alliance with the Soviets during World War II created favorable conditions for cooperation between the Left and liberals at home, especially within the film industry. The grand alliance triggered something of a renewed Popular Front in Hollywood, though winning the war now took precedence over all other causes. Despite the Left’s move to the center, anti-Communists, especially within the FBI, grew wary of the changing Communist Party line and fretted over perceived Communist control of film content. Now with the formation of the MPA, the film industry had an internal, if unofficial, watchdog to fight and expose what it regarded as a totalitarian menace.3 The MPA chose Sam Wood as its first president. Wood had achieved great success directing several comedies, including two Marx brothers films, A Night at the Opera (MGM, 1935) and A Day at the Races (MGM, 1937), as well as The Devil

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and Miss Jones (RKO, 1941), which starred Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn. Wood also directed the immensely successful film version of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (Paramount, 1943), a picture as notable for its box office success as it was for its deliberate eschewing of all things political. Producer Adolph Zukor proudly labeled this film about the Spanish Civil War “a great picture, without political significance. We are not for or against anybody.” Wood’s rendition of Hemingway’s brilliant novel led film critic James Agee to warn filmgoers that “if you are not careful, you may easily get the impression that Gary Cooper is simply fighting for the Republican Party in a place where the New Deal has got particularly out of hand.”4 The MPA president’s daughter remembered him as a zealous anti-Communist, even postmortem. After Sam Wood’s death from heart failure in 1949, Jeane Wood learned that she would only receive her inheritance after filing an affidavit swearing that she was not now nor had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Such dedication made Wood a perfect choice to head the Motion Picture Alliance.5 In announcing the MPA’s founding, Wood declared that the Motion Picture Alliance would “combat the rising tide of Communism, Fascism and kindred beliefs that seek by subversive methods to undermine and change the American Way of Life.”6 In this endeavor he was joined by MPA first vice president Walt Disney and an executive committee chaired by James Kevin McGuinness and including Rupert Hughes, Ayn Rand, Howard Emmett Rogers, Lela E. Rogers (mother of Ginger, no relation to Howard Emmett), Morrie Ryskind, and several others who would become notable cold warriors within the motion picture industry. At their first formal meeting in February, MPA members unanimously approved a statement of policy that in zealous language expressed their “duty” to fight Communism in the film industry and to expose Communist propaganda for the benefit of the “vast unorganized majority.” This statement indicated the group’s uneasiness regarding the grand alliance: “We shall do our utmost to assist in the winning of the war, but shall be watchful that we be not blinded by any minority groups’ efforts to pattern, or change, our form of Government to conform to that of any of our Allies or Enemies, so that we truly win the peace.” The Motion Picture Alliance also approved a separate statement of principles with rhetoric notable for its glorification of individualism and claims that true Americanism entailed “the right to succeed or fail as free men, according to the measure of our ability and our strength.” The MPA’s Statement of Principles also suggested more than a hint of American exceptionalism, for the Alliance proclaimed its mission as a defense of “that freedom which has given man, in this country, the fullest life and the richest expression the world has ever known.” The MPA spread its message throughout the film industry through trade papers and a grassroots membership drive.7

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The MPA operated on two fundamental assumptions. First, it regarded the motion picture industry as a powerful shaper of national politics and culture now deeply threatened by a Communist conspiracy. As the Alliance’s Statement of Principles declared: “Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s great forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad. In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs.”8 The second assumption, related to the first, explained how the motion picture industry, under the tight control of the major studios, could find itself vulnerable to this Communist propaganda operation. “In power in our studios are men who are politically and socially blind,” proclaimed Lela Rogers to a women’s luncheon of the Americanism Defense League just a few months after the founding of the MPA. “That is why the Motion Picture Alliance was formed to educate Hollywood to the dangers of Communism which so many are too blind to see.” The MPA regarded the situation as dire; the Communists were well organized and successfully infiltrating the film industry, and the producers were too naïve to even detect this.9 Thus the Motion Picture Alliance set out to counteract this propaganda offensive and open the eyes, forcefully if necessary, of these “blind” studio bosses. To this end the members sought to use the power of the state, turning to the FBI and the Dies committee (predecessor to HUAC). Lela Rogers’s activities throughout 1944 exemplify this tactic.

Lela Rogers and Tender Comrade Rogers worked as an executive at RKO, assistant to its president, Charles Koerner. Her duties included helping with both script development and the hiring of writers. Rogers viewed this work as more than just a job, indeed as part of the crusade, as long as she could use her influence to shield the industry from the Reds. However, her coworkers, by her estimation, were either Communists, fellow travelers, or the “politically blind,” a label she repeatedly attached to her boss, Charles Koerner. When word of this charge got back to Koerner, he summoned her to his office only to be told, “It is the kindest thing I can say about you because you refuse to see that there is something happening in America today that you could stem partly from your position here and you won’t listen.”10 Though mindful of Communist activities in Hollywood since the early 1930s, Rogers became incensed during the production of Tender Comrade (RKO, 1944), a film she considered communistic. Lela Rogers found it particularly irking that her own daughter, Ginger Rogers, had the lead role in this film.

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Directed by Edward Dmytryk and written by Dalton Trumbo, both members of the Communist Party and future members of the Hollywood Ten, Tender Comrade told the story of four Rosie the Riveter types as they struggle to work for the war effort and keep faithful to both the new war rationing rules and to their husbands who are fighting overseas. This moralistic tale offered a melodramatic presentation of women’s wartime duties (one unfaithful coworker shamefully ceases her infidelity when she learns her husband is missing in action) that offered audiences a semiprogressive view of women’s social role. On the one hand, these women, especially Jo (Ginger Rogers), are depicted as capable workers at the Douglas Aircraft factory. Indeed, Jo is a strong, independent woman fully adept at her work outside the domestic sphere and not particularly fond of performing her household tasks. On the other hand, Jo’s aspirations are solidly linked to her husband’s return, when she will quit her job and resume her wifely duties.11 Lela Rogers did not react to this film’s presentation of gender issues but rather to its communal message, though the two were indelibly intertwined. Indeed, through the four female characters, Dmytryk and Trumbo offered a vision of solidarity, democracy, and communal living. Ever the leader, Jo convinces three coworkers to pool their rents so that they might live in a “real house” where “we could run the joint like a democracy, and if anything comes up we can just call a meeting.” Thus the women construct a democratic space “on a share and share alike basis,” a vision not only of the home but, by suggestion, of the postwar world. Tender Comrade, however, largely focuses on domesticity, and though the film is hardly progressive on questions of gender by today’s standards, its presentation of domestic work conveyed a “democratic” message. Discovering that “housekeeping isn’t our racket,” Jo and her housemates decide to hire a housekeeper. Their ad for the job reads “Wanted—Woman to cook and keep house for four women employed in war plant until husband’s return from service” (italics added). Like her fellow “Rosies,” the female housekeeper would find her job to be of a temporary nature. However, our heroines decide to pool their salaries and give the housekeeper a full one-fifth share, since, after all, “we’re running this joint like a democracy.” Tender Comrade, therefore, offered audiences a unique story in which the female protagonists innovate a model of democracy implicitly applicable to the public sphere, wherein all are deserving of an equal share, yet without permanently disrupting traditional gender roles in the labor market.12 Critics found the film mawkish, or as Bosley Crowther wrote, “more intent on being cute and wistful than . . . on cutting close to life.” The film’s closing scenes especially perturbed James Agee: “At the climax, getting news of her husband’s death, [Jo] subjects [her] defenseless baby to a speech which lasts twenty-four hours and five minutes by my watch and which, in its justifications of the death,

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FIGURE 2. Ginger Rogers as a “Rosie the Riveter” in Tender Comrade (1943). The film presented a progressive view (for its time) of women’s social role, but Ginger’s mother, Lela, feared that it contained Communist propaganda. RKO/Photofest.

the obligations it clamps on the child, and its fantastic promises of a better world to come, is one of the most nauseating things I have ever sat through.”13 Lela Rogers, however, was not bothered by the critical reviews, but rather by what

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she considered Communist propaganda, successfully slipped into a motion picture despite her efforts to block it by using her position as studio executive and mother of the star. Her first inclination led her to seek an ally in the Dies committee, which had succeeded in bringing down the Federal Theatre Project. To date the Dies committee had not opened fire on Hollywood, though rumors of an investigation spread in 1940 after Dies interviewed Hollywood stars Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Fredric March in closed session hearings. Dies quickly dropped the matter, but by 1944 his investigators were focusing more and more on tinsel town. In the spring of that year Rogers interviewed with a committee investigator in Los Angeles, informing him of the ordeal she and her daughter suffered through in the filming of Tender Comrade. Rogers insisted that the finished version contained heaps of Communist propaganda, though it would have carried more if she and Ginger had not insisted on several cuts. Lela Rogers maintained that Ginger’s contract allowed her to censor her own lines but that the filmmakers (she identified Dmytryk and Trumbo as Communists) simply gave such lines to other members of the cast. When pressed for an example, Lela Rogers offered the line, “Share and share alike, that is democracy.”14 The investigator noted that “Mrs. Rogers was emphatic in stating that ‘share and share alike’ was Communism.” If the Dies committee investigator’s comment here suggests some level of skepticism regarding Rogers’s judgment, we can nevertheless see how such a message would offend a stalwart member of the Motion Picture Alliance, especially given the MPA’s pronounced emphasis on individualism, as noted in its Statement of Principles.15 If Rogers sought immediate results, she may have picked a poor place to start with the Dies committee. In 1944, HUAC’s predecessor was only beginning its foray into Hollywood, and the committee would never fully adopt the view that Communists presented a grave threat due to their influence on film content. By the fall, Rogers found a far more suitable ally in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. As chapter 2 showed, the bureau began a systematic investigation of the motion picture industry during the Second World War. Its investigation was far more thorough than anything the Dies committee had assembled to date, its surveillance more widespread, and its primary motivation—a distinct fear of Communist propaganda subverting the American screen—much more in tune with that of Rogers and her fellow activists in the Motion Picture Alliance. On November 9, Lela Rogers telephoned J. Edgar Hoover in an effort to enlist his agency’s help in her cause, which she claimed was fully supported by MPA leaders Sam Wood and Walt Disney. She highlighted the menace to the screen, made worse now that she had been removed from her position in story development and given other tasks. FBI assistant director Louis B. Nichols reported that

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“Mrs. Rogers claims that the RKO people who handle the reviewing of stories and the selecting of vehicles for their stars are either Communist or fellow travelers and are allied in a common group against Ginger, so much so that Mrs. Rogers has had to go out and personally buy a story for her daughter.” Ever consistent, Rogers maintained that Koerner was “genuinely not aware of the menace,” and she urged Hoover to meet with him. There is no documentary evidence to confirm whether this meeting took place, but Hoover was inspired by her phone call nonetheless. He soon ordered the Los Angeles office to make a full report on RKO. Los Angeles quickly complied, producing an extensive report on the studio that provided a complete breakdown of RKO’s executive organization, its producers, directors, writers, actors, contracts with Soviet film companies, and of course its motion pictures, three of which (North Star, The Master Race, and Tender Comrade) were labeled as Communist propaganda. Los Angeles reported that RKO chief Koerner was probably not a Communist sympathizer, but rather that “the chief interest of Koerner as head of production at RKO Studios is to release motion pictures with box office appeal in order that RKO may be financially successful, and he is not interested in fighting the Communists.” This report also claimed that many of RKO’s producers were either unaware of or indifferent to “any Communist messages which might be injected into the picture by the writers or directors so long as the picture as a whole has box office appeal.”16 Thus even the capitalist impulse itself could hinder the fight against Communism. It was neither the first nor the last time that the FBI and MPA saw eye to eye. Rogers, however, soon proved to be a troublesome ally. She told director Cecil B. DeMille of her phone call with Hoover, leaving DeMille with the impression “that the Director [Hoover] is supposed to have stated that the whole idea and plan of the Communists is to get the big people of that industry put out, such as Mrs. Rogers, DeMille and so forth and get other persons in those positions who are friendly towards the Communists.” DeMille, on hearing this information, contacted Richard Hood, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office, to verify Hoover’s statement. When word got back to the director, Hoover exclaimed, “I never made any such statement to Mrs. Rogers. She talked and I listened.” Hoover, as always, was protective of his bureau’s public image and had no desire to let his investigation of the motion picture industry become public knowledge. Yet Lela Rogers and her compatriots in the Motion Picture Alliance knew more about the FBI’s activities in Hollywood than Hoover may have wished. Much documentary evidence shows that MPA members served as informants for the bureau’s investigation, thus they certainly knew that the FBI was actively soliciting information.17 Even more, the Office of Naval Intelligence had apparently given reports it received from the FBI to the Motion Picture Alliance, and though such “difficulties” had been “patched up” with ONI, bureau leaders were

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quite aware that the MPA knew of its activities in Hollywood. Lela Rogers’s lack of discretion, however, alarmed bureau officials. After learning from informant Carlo Ciliberti, Joe Davies’s ex-chauffer, that Lela Rogers mentioned that J. Edgar Hoover would soon travel to Hollywood to “check up on the whole situation,” assistant director Louis Nichols noted, “It definitely appears that Mrs. Rogers has been talking too much.” The FBI-MPA relationship was off to a rocky start.18

“The Truth about Hollywood” The Motion Picture Alliance’s rash and bold denunciations of the political situation in Hollywood triggered a backlash from a great many members of the motion picture industry who formed the Emergency Committee of Hollywood Guilds and Unions (which soon became the lasting Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions) to expose and condemn the MPA. Approximately one thousand delegates from seventeen guilds and unions gathered at the Women’s Club of Hollywood on June 28, 1944, to pledge unity to the war effort and denounce what they considered the stirring of disunity on the part of the Motion Picture Alliance. Representing over two-thirds of all motion picture industry workers, these delegates released the proceedings of the meeting in a pamphlet entitled “The Truth about Hollywood.”19 Producer Walter Wanger explained the immediacy of the gathering. Hollywood, he argued, had contributed greatly to the war effort. Yet the daily papers were consumed with the Motion Picture Alliance, spreading word of its characterization of Hollywood as a subversive industry, thereby providing “ammunition to the industry’s chronic enemies, who can now cite statements from self-appointed industry spokesmen to support their damaging charges against us.” And to Wanger these blanket charges were unsupported by any facts. Wanger concluded that if the charges had any merit, the MPA could have taken them to the producers or to the Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s selfcensorship board, headed by Joseph Breen, a man “who is as much opposed to and would be as quick to see supposed communistic propaganda as any member of the Alliance.” Instead, the MPA turned to the press to publicize its salacious charges, leaving Wanger with serious questions regarding the Alliance’s good faith.20 To Mary McCall Jr., president of the Screen Writers Guild, the MPA’s actions were in keeping with a succession of attacks on Hollywood by disreputable persons and groups. McCall contended that the red-baiting in Hollywood arose out of the labor struggles of the 1930s when her own Screen Writers Guild clashed with the more conservative Screen Playwrights, a “company union” by her estimation. In

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fact, the Screen Playwrights did represent the more conservative writers in Hollywood and were the preferred bargaining partners of the studios. Though the Screen Playwrights won some concessions for rank-and-file members, theirs was an organization geared more for the top writers. That most writers preferred the SWG became abundantly clear when the National Labor Relations Board held elections in 1938. To McCall, the MPA offered evidence of a grudge by two of its prominent members, James Kevin McGuinness and Howard Emmett Rogers, both of whom had been active “union wreckers” in the Screen Playwrights. (For his part, McGuinness believed that the battle against Communism in the motion picture industry dated back to these same labor struggles.) McCall proclaimed that the MPA was merely the latest in a long line of red-baiters, including Martin Dies, California State Senator Jack Tenney, Senator Gerald Nye and other propagators of the warmongering smear in 1941, and the Hearst-McCormick press.21 The truth about the Motion Picture Alliance, so the delegates at this Women’s Club of Hollywood meeting charged, was not particularly attractive. Attendees lobbed two main charges against the Alliance. First, several pointed to the MPA as a dangerous threat to the freedom of the screen. Sidney Buchman, executive producer at Columbia Pictures Corporation, proclaimed that the Alliance’s reckless charges of Communist propaganda in the motion pictures “can only serve to destroy the free voice of this powerful democratic medium.” Furthermore, Oliver H. P. Garrett, a delegate from the Screen Writers Guild, presented a “bill of particulars” compiled by a research committee for the Hollywood Guilds and Unions, which, among its other indictments, charged the MPA with undercover censorship. The bill noted comments made by Lela Rogers and Howard Emmett Rogers to the effect that the producers were responsible for letting Communist propaganda seep onto the screen, and that the public should react by boycotting the films. Further quotes from these two hinted that they both sought to thwart such propaganda in their work as executives, and the research committee even concluded that they had surreptitiously taken scripts from company files. Moreover, at a time when much of Hollywood yearned to produce more socially meaningful films, several spokesmen for the MPA, especially its executive chairman James Kevin McGuinness, demanded that motion pictures stick to entertainment. Thus Garrett presented the harrowing scenario of zealots, guided by the notion “that films must not touch the mind,” secretly engaged in a plot to censor Hollywood films to their liking.22 The second main allegation against the MPA depicted this organization as thoroughly antilabor. The bill of particulars once again focused on statements by Howard Emmett Rogers and Lela Rogers. Howard Emmett, a staunch opponent of the Wagner Act, was singled out for his support of “anti-labor” congressional candidate John M. Costello, while Lela was quoted charging female defense workers

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responsible for “a slowing down of the output, and this again is not the American way, but is the Communist way.” Furthermore, Herbert K. Sorrell, president of the Conference of Studio Unions, argued that the Alliance’s own Statement of Principles tipped off its approach to labor. Citing the MPA’s equation of Americanism with “the right to succeed or fail as free men,” Sorrell asserted that this language suggested the MPA’s support for “right to work” petitions currently being circulated to place an “open shop” referendum on the upcoming November ballot.23 Beyond these two main themes—that the MPA was against labor and against the freedom of the screen—the bill of particulars accused the MPA leaders of being antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, and not sufficiently antifascist. In making such charges, the report drew heavily on discursive comparisons of statements made by MPA leaders and well-known fiends and maniacs. For example, reminding those gathered of Hitler’s familiar equation of “Jew” and “Communist,” Garrett proceeded to quote Howard Emmett Rogers as saying “I have never seen a Communist that is not disagreeable to look upon.” From this, Garrett’s report inquired, “Whereas Hitler openly said Communists and Jews were all the same, does Rogers wish to give the same impression without daring to say it?”24 As further evidence of the rhetorical case made against the Motion Picture Alliance, consider the following quotations grouped together in the research committee’s report: Howard Emmett Rogers: “We say in the film industry they (the Communists) will give you just one hour and twenty minutes of a picture if you will just give them one minute of their propaganda.” Mrs. Lela Rogers: “The motion pictures have been used for the subtle dissemination of Communist propaganda. The Communists are working constantly, and their propaganda is creeping subtly into all forms of art. You have seen it in sculpture, painting, etc.” Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the America First Party: “If we herd all the reds and Communists into concentration camps, outlaw two-thirds of the movies . . . the problem would be solved.” Herman Schwinn, West Coast Bund leader, declared that film actors and the Anti-Nazi League were working with “alien refugees to spread subversive doctrines in this country.” He demanded Dies committee investigation. Fritz Kuhn, imprisoned National Bund leader, demanded a “thorough cleaning of the most important medium of propaganda and entertainment, the Hollywood film industry.” George Deatherage, now on trial for sedition, declared that the Shirley Temple fan clubs were “training points in Communism for the kiddies. The salute is the clenched fist of Communism.”

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Such a list shows that the research committee paid close attention to the discourse and rhetoric used by those charging subversion. But at the same time it reveals that the anti-MPA forces were not above using “brown-baiting” tactics.25 Indeed, the research committee’s report, as well as the statements of many other delegates at the Women’s Club meeting, fully utilized the discourse of subversion in denouncing the MPA. Sorrell, for instance, referred to the Motion Picture Alliance as a “subversive movement” consisting of “fascistminded individuals,” and by unanimous vote the approximately one thousand delegates passed a resolution declaring the MPA “potentially a subversive and dangerous organization, which may comfort the enemy.” Throughout “The Truth about Hollywood” lay the notion that the MPA sowed disunity in the motion picture industry, thereby weakening an industry that envisioned itself as vital to the war effort. In utilizing this language of subversion, in questioning the loyalty of MPA members, in resorting to guilt-by-association tactics, and in demanding conformity to the current war effort—“there can be no legitimate excuse for the formation of any such group as the Motion Picture Alliance which is not fundamentally, overwhelmingly and actively opposed to Fascist doctrines”—the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions embraced the very tactics that would be used so successfully against the Hollywood Left just three year later.26 Prior to the Hollywood Guilds and Unions meeting, members of the MPA had been invited to attend and contest the charges against them. The Motion Picture Alliance refused this invitation, but soon the battle went to the press. Elmer Rice wrote a scathing attack on the MPA in the Saturday Review that essentially summed up the indictments from the Women’s Club meeting: the Motion Picture Alliance was an “orthodox Red-baiting and witch-hunting” organization that was “deeply tinged with isolationism and anti-unionism and—off the record, of course—with strong overtones of anti-Semitism and Jim Crowism.” Singling out its close contacts with the Americanism Defense League, a descendent of America First, Rice repeated the charge that the MPA threatened disunity and, essentially, democracy, when it challenged the freedom of the screen, since “freedom of expression in the arts is essential to the preservation of democracy.”27 This time the MPA chose to respond, tasking Morrie Ryskind, its most witty writer, with penning their reply. The Jewish Ryskind was most convincing in shooting down the charges of anti-Semitism: Now, really, at my age and with my background (my grandfather was six-foot-two, and he had a beard that was six-foot even, which probably topped Elmer’s grandfather’s beard by at least a yard) I would be a sucker to go around joining anti-Semitic organizations. . . . As for the

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goyim in the Alliance, they work with, dine with, drink with, golf with, bowl with and play bridge with Jews; at least three of them have had the chutzpah to marry Jewish girls. The last might have been to get even with some of the Jewish boys who have married shicksas, though to me the whole thing seems to have been conceived in a spirit of good, clean sex. On the charge of isolationism, Ryskind pleaded guilty, for himself only, adding that most of the other members had been interventionists, and that the argument ended with Pearl Harbor. On the charge of antiunionism, Ryskind presented a “partial list” of fifteen labor members of the MPA. Ultimately, Ryskind contended that he joined the MPA for the same reasons that he joined the Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1939: to fight totalitarianism. And, he noted, the respected members of the CCF, including Elmer Rice himself, were soon targeted as antiSemitic, antilabor, profascist red-baiters.28 Ryskind’s article, if convincing in parts, nevertheless attested to the fact that the MPA was now on the defensive. Both the Dies committee and the FBI viewed the attack on the MPA as part of the left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood. The Dies committee sent an undercover investigator to the planning session for the Hollywood Guilds and Unions meeting at the Women’s Club, and in the days leading up to this meeting the FBI reported “the Communist elements have become highly wrought up over this situation and in order to combat it have planned an industry wide demonstration . . . for the purpose of putting the Alliance out of existence.” To the bureau’s dismay, this is exactly what seemed to be happening. By November the bureau was reporting that the MPA had gone dormant, and one month later the Los Angeles office claimed that the Hollywood producers were pressuring the Alliance to dissolve. In the spring of 1945, the FBI lamented that the Motion Picture Alliance was now nearly defunct.29 Thus by the end of its first year in existence, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals appeared to be floundering, while the Communists’ position in Hollywood seemed on the rise. Whereas the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions’ barrage against the Alliance appeared all too successful to the anti-Communists, this coalition of the Hollywood mainstream and Left had blundered in resorting to smear tactics, thereby failing to force the MPA into an open discussion of its main charge: that Communist propaganda filled the screen. As chapter 1 has shown, Wendell Willkie’s defense of the motion picture industry during the war-mongering hearings of 1941 succeeded by forcing the proponents of this accusation to prove their charges of propaganda. In 1944 the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions endeavored to do the same, but it drifted off message in its allegations of the Alliance’s fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and antiunionism. Yet, as we will see, this tactic backfired when repeated against HUAC

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in 1947. Before turning to these events, however, in the rest of the chapter I will focus on a major controversy in Communist cultural circles, and then chart the countersubversives’ increasing fear of Communist propaganda in the early postwar years and their efforts to develop a methodology for its detection.

The Maltz Affair As World War II drew to a close, several filmmakers and critics looked optimistically toward the future, believing that the motion picture was finally coming into its own as a medium for serious social commentary. This desire for socially significant filmmaking came largely from left and liberal quarters. The early postwar years witnessed a flowering of successful and critically acclaimed social problem films, such as The Lost Weekend (Paramount, 1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (RKO, 1946), Crossfire (RKO, 1947), and Gentleman’s Agreement (Twentieth Century Fox, 1947). With the rising tide of anti-Communism, such productions were soon deemed too politically risky. Nevertheless, the decline of this type of filmmaking owed also to the schism between Communists and their non-Communist left and liberal allies at the dawn of the Cold War. At the cultural level, this schism is best exemplified by the so-called Maltz affair. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s classic work of Cold War liberalism, The Vital Center, derided the cultural treachery of the U.S. Communist Party and pointed to the Maltz controversy as evidence that the party “has sought systematically to enforce the doctrine that writing must conform, not to the facts, not to the personal vision of the author, but to a political line.”30 Subsequently, most commentators have echoed Schlesinger’s interpretation of the Maltz affair as an example of Communist Party discipline of its cultural workers.31 That it was. But there is a more interesting aspect of the controversy that has yet to be explored. The Maltz affair ushered in the party’s rejection of a social democratic culture it previously supported when it had encouraged and applauded the production of progressive, but not revolutionary, artistic works. Strongest during the period of the Popular Front, this “cultural front”—to use historian Michael Denning’s apt phrase—survived World War II well poised to continue into the postwar era. In sundering this cultural project, the Communists played a role, albeit a secondary one, in the curtailing of their party’s cultural influence.32 Albert Maltz, noted Communist author, screenwriter, and soon to be member of the Hollywood Ten, sparked the affair that took his name when he penned a controversial article in the New Masses entitled “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” in February 1946. Maltz, born in Brooklyn in 1908 to a Jewish family with

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eastern European roots, had joined the Communist Party in 1935. During the Great Depression, Maltz grew alarmed about surrounding poverty and violence toward labor and embraced the idealism of Marxism and the new prestige the Soviet Union had achieved among intellectual circles. Years later Maltz claimed that he would never have joined the party had he been aware of the “repressive side of the Soviet system.” Nevertheless, he insisted that membership in the party was not an act of subversion, but rather “an act of conscience . . . since I believed that the Soviet Union on the world scene, and the Communist party on the American scene, stood for humanity’s hope for world brotherhood and peace and social progress.” Yet, even though Maltz in later years became critical of Soviet repression, he remained sympathetic to the antifascism of both the Soviet Union and the CPUSA during the 1930s. “The Soviet Union was the only major power struggling to [stop the spread of fascism],” Maltz told his interviewer, “and the Communist party in the United States was leading the educational and organizational struggle against it here.” Thus, despite his subsequent disillusionment, he never felt the need to repent of his motives in joining the party.33 Maltz was a figure of some prestige by the time he wrote his controversial New Masses article in 1946. During the 1930s, Maltz had been an aspiring playwright affiliated with the Theatre Union, a left-wing theater group that aimed to rival the more famous Group Theatre in theatrical excellence and choice of socially progressive subject matter. Theatre Union aimed to “produce plays that deal boldly with the deep-growing social conflicts, the economic, emotional, and cultural problems that confront the majority of the people.” According to Maltz, these democratic aspirations were reflected not only in the content of its plays, but also in Theatre Union’s low ticket prices and communal practice of paying all members the same salary of forty dollars per week. Attuned to issues of race as well, Theatre Union pioneered in desegregated seating for its performances.34 The 1935 play Black Pit served as Maltz’s most significant contribution to Theatre Union. A study of labor strife in a West Virginia coal town, Black Pit was hardly a critical success. Maltz later conceded Black Pit had been amateurish, not because of its social theme, but simply because he had yet to hone his skills as a writer. Yet Black Pit remains significant because it marked his first run-in with artistic criticism from the Communist Party. His play featured a protagonist who opts to inform on fellow workers seeking to form a union. Maltz deplored the criticism he received from the Daily Worker and New Masses, believing that these party organs uncritically “reflected the rumor . . . that Black Pit was the glorification of a stool pigeon.” And even Communist critics who were more discerning, such as Joseph North, chided Maltz for failing to offer audiences a role model protagonist. To Maltz, such attitudes suggested an immature preference for feel-good theater on the part of “these extreme left-wingers and Communist party members,” rather than a willingness “to

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FIGURE 3. Albert Maltz testifying before HUAC in October 1947. Despite the tumult of the “Maltz affair,” the screenwriter remained loyal to the Communist Party and refused to cooperate with HUAC, taking the First Amendment. Photofest.

face the fact that one of the enormous problems in the American labor movement was the presence of informers.” Thus, more than a decade before his famous plea for more artistic freedom within the Communist orbit, Albert Maltz had already been targeted by the party’s narrow-minded cultural critics.35

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Maltz would become a figure of prominence only after his arrival in Hollywood. Film historians have sought to shatter the myth that writers who headed West for film work did so only for financial reasons. Saverio Giovacchini, for instance, argues that many writers and artists appreciated film as a modern art form with truly democratic potential given its mass audience.36 However, though Maltz never believed that he had sold out by “ ‘going Hollywood,’ ” he viewed work in the film industry as “the way in which I could finance my serious writing,” which during the war he dedicated to his novel, The Cross and the Arrow.37 As a Communist novelist and screenwriter, Maltz never felt himself subject to party control over the content of his work. Time-consuming party meetings were his main gripe. On this issue, he once sparred with John Howard Lawson, the ranking Communist in Hollywood. Maltz had asked for a leave of absence from party meetings in order to complete his novel, but Lawson refused him. Maltz simply stopped going to the meetings and faced no censure. He wished more of his peers in the party’s Hollywood branch would stand up to Lawson. He found his colleagues’ practice of submitting manuscripts for Lawson’s approval disconcerting. That a number of these colleagues dropped projects because of Lawson’s rigid influence was unforgivable. Nevertheless, Maltz believed this censorial relationship had been consensual; Communists in Hollywood were not obliged to submit their work to Lawson nor to follow his advice. Indeed, Maltz himself “never submitted an idea with Lawson.”38 By the end of World War II, Maltz had matured as a writer. His novel, The Cross and the Arrow, was well received. Moreover, he completed two successful war films, Destination Tokyo (Warner Bros., 1944), starring Cary Grant and John Garfield, and Pride of the Marines (Warner Bros., 1945), also with Garfield. This latter production, an early “returning veteran” picture, achieved great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the influential New York Times film critic, lauded Pride of the Marines for its “honest approach” in telling the story of a war hero blinded in action. In commending this film for its honesty, realism, and integrity, Crowther essentially recognized the merits of social democratic cinema. Even Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, sent a letter of congratulations to Maltz, affirming, “I have just seen ‘Pride of the Marines’ and throughout my entire chaotic existence, I have never been so emotionally moved by anything—whether it be a film, a book or a story.” In awe of the power of the screen, Sinatra exclaimed, “You’ve got to hit ’em right in the kisser with it and, baby, you really did.” Soon Maltz and Sinatra teamed up for the powerful short film against racial and religious intolerance, The House I Live In (RKO, 1945), which won a special Academy Award.39 Each of these works endeavored to confront social problems. None could seriously be termed “Communist propaganda.” Instead, Maltz, like many other Communist writers and artists, aimed to comment on social issues from a broad

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perspective that united liberals, Communists, and other left-of-center groups. Maltz, therefore, had achieved great success under the “cultural front” paradigm, or what Giovacchini labels “Hollywood democratic modernism,” an approach to art that called for the presentation of social realism in nonsectarian forms attractive to a mass audience.40 Maltz’s 1946 New Masses article, which created an unanticipated controversy, essentially served as a plea for the continuation and furthering of this “democratic modernism” or “cultural front” approach to the arts. Maltz feared “the vulgarization of the theory of art which lies behind left-wing thinking: namely, ‘art is a weapon.’ ” The key word here is vulgarization. Maltz did not call into question the function of art in illuminating “the struggle of social classes.” Rather, he believed that what had started as “a profound analytic, historical insight” on the role and function of the arts in society had now become a “straightjacket” in which the original insight had become narrowly interpreted into the following: “art should be a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon.” Finally, in practice, it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless, or escapist, or vicious. Essentially, Maltz now detected a shift away from a democratic modernism that encouraged the integration of social realism into mass culture and toward a strict demand for “correct” political messages in works of art, regardless of the effect this would have on artistic quality.41 As a demonstration of such narrow criticism, Maltz referred to the party’s vastly different appraisals of the theater and film versions of Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine. The New Masses viciously assailed the 1940 play version yet hailed the movie version just two years later. What had changed? Not the work itself, but rather the altered political environment. The play’s anti-Nazism ruled it out as “the proper ‘leaflet’ for the moment” during the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact, but perfectly suited the party’s tastes during the grand alliance. With criticism yoked to the current party line, Hellman’s “work of art was not viewed on either occasion as to its real quality—its deep revelation of life, character, and the social scene,” but only its opportunistic usefulness as a political tract. Maltz continued that an artist need not be correct in his or her politics in order to create a great work of art. Engels, he insisted, understood this when he credited the “reactionary” Balzac for offering the most penetrating insights into French social structure. Maltz demanded that modern works of art likewise be judged by their effectiveness at capturing the human experience, and that even politically suspect writers, anti-Stalinists such as John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, be regarded highly for their enduring works.42

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Maltz directed his message not only to the literary and film critic, but as a warning to the creative writer as well, for he believed “that the failure of much left-wing talent to mature is a comment on how restricting this canon is for the creator in practice.” Maltz heralded the “social novelist,” who is tasked with “revealing men and society as they are,” over the “political propagandist,” who cares only “to serve an immediate political purpose.” Maltz, in essence, called for a deeper form of realism, arguing that “profound characterization presents all characters from their own point of view, allowing them their own full, human justification for their behavior and attitudes, yet allowing the reader to judge their objective behavior.” Too many writers, he lamented, now followed the strict dictates of “art as a weapon,” and in so doing they rendered their work shallow. Of such a writer, Maltz proclaimed, “it is very, very difficult for him not to handle characters in black and white since his objective is to prove a proposition, not to reveal men in motion as they are.” Ultimately, Maltz warned, this perversion of art actually degraded its usefulness as a weapon, since it called for the creation of works lacking artistic merit.43 Maltz’s treatise did not receive a warm welcome from his Communist peers. Communist writer Samuel Sillen devoted a six-part series in the Daily Worker to rejecting Maltz’s deviation. In these articles, he denounced Maltz for “substituting a bourgeois liberal for a Marxist approach” to culture. Sillen insisted that now was a time of intense class struggle between imperialistic and progressive forces, and amid this great historic clash Albert Maltz was asking writers to stand on the sidelines. As Sillen put it, “Maltz rips out the very heart of Marxism by adopting for himself and urging upon other writers a supra-class attitude.” Sillen grounded his dismissal of Maltz not only in the works of Marx and Engels, but in Lenin, Stalin, and Soviet cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov. He concluded that “the struggle for correct theory must be as sharp on the cultural front as on the political front, for they are two fronts in a common battle. Capitalism bombards us with its ideas virtually every moment of our lives. We dare not relax our vigilance.”44 Also writing in the Daily Worker, Mike Gold, another of the party’s cultural authorities, interpreted Maltz’s article as a total repudiation of the “Communist literary movement.” Gold waxed indignant, “Albert Maltz seems to have let the luxury and phony atmosphere of Hollywood at last to poison him.”45 Though Maltz had focused more on the struggles of the novelist than the screenwriter, the implications of his piece soon engulfed Hollywood, where he would encounter face-to-face criticism when party members convened at the home of Morris Carnovsky to discuss the controversy. By many accounts the discussion was really an inquisition. According to writer Leopold Atlas in his “friendly” appearance before HUAC, Maltz drew the “bitter vituperation

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and venom” of John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, and Herbert Biberman (all of whom were soon to be his fellow members of the “Hollywood Ten”). Though exactly what was said remains the subject of hearsay, Lawson and Bessie criticized him in the pages of New Masses as well. Here Bessie scornfully derided Maltz as an “anti-Marxist”; Lawson dogmatically insisted “art is a weapon.”46 Soon Maltz recanted. In his “Moving Forward” piece, Maltz plead guilty as charged. To focus on the errors of left critics without regard to the “total social scene,” he now recognized, was to “magnify those errors and to concentrate attention upon them without reference to a balanced view of the many related forces which bear upon left culture, and hence a tendency to advance from half-truths to total error.” Though insisting this was not his original intention, Maltz now claimed to recognize that his article “severed the organic connection between art and ideology.” But it was not some newfound appreciation of strict Marxist cultural theory that really motivated Maltz’s reversal. Instead, he had never meant his article to be a stern rebuke of the party, and when it was interpreted as such, Maltz renounced his position and encouraged his supporters to do the same.47 Why did “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” incite the wrath of leading Communist screenwriters, authors, and critics? The issue was not merely that Maltz had challenged party discipline in the artistic sphere, but rather the timing of his piece. In an act of ill-fated luck, Maltz published his article in February 1946, the very month that the party expelled its former leader, Earl Browder, charging him with revisionism. The deterioration of the U.S.-Soviet relationship influenced this dramatic shift. In April 1945, a leading French Communist official named Jacques Duclos wrote an article entitled “On the Dissolution of the American Communist Party” in Les Cahiers du Communisme. Acting out a Soviet directive, Duclos scolded Browder for accommodating the party to America’s capitalist rulers. Browder, of course, had favored the broad front strategy, and had even disbanded the U.S. Communist Party, replacing it with the Communist Political Association in 1944. After the Duclos letter, the CPUSA quickly reconstituted itself and replaced Browder with hardliner William Z. Foster. Then, in February 1946—the very month of Stalin’s famous Bolshoi Theater speech and George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram”—Browder was expelled. So too for “Browderism,” a policy line Foster described as the “fastening of a right-wing bourgeois liberalism upon our Party.” Foster ridiculed “Browderism” for abandoning the class struggle and not recognizing the exploitative nature of the capitalist system. But Foster’s critique of Browder extended beyond politics, for Foster also condemned “Browder’s revisionism in the cultural field.” Thus, “Fosterism”

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represented not only a new political line but a new cultural line as well. Foster demanded that Communist cultural workers view the cultural sphere as an arena of class conflict. Weighing in on the Maltz controversy, Foster insisted, “there must be a clear understanding that ‘art is a weapon’ in the class struggle.” Hence we might say that Maltz’s crime had been “cultural Browderism,” and it was his misfortune to publish his manifesto at the precise moment this line was dramatically reversed.48 Maltz, however, had not intended anything so earth-shattering. Even in his later years, he defended his decision to pen the second article in which he recanted his views: However ineptly or embarrassingly expressed, my second article was one of conscience and fundamental loyalty to an ideal. I wanted to remain linked to the movement that represented, in my eyes at that time, the hope of mankind for a decent future. My integrity depended upon that and not on the rightness of my first article as a whole or in any part. Unfortunately, I was not at that time able to state any of this. To have acknowledged party membership would have meant the end of my ability to work in films.49 Maltz, therefore, insisted that the controversy had been a theoretical debate that was later misconstrued as an example of Communist thought control. In an interview with Victor Navasky, John Howard Lawson echoed Maltz’s sentiments. Lawson insisted that the Maltz affair “has been regarded as a dispute about freedom of expression solely, whereas what was involved was a deeper understanding of the nature of the artistic experience.”50 Here, however, Lawson was not entirely forthcoming. The essence of Fosterism, to which he subscribed, demanded a new conformity to “art as a weapon.” Such rigidity had important ramifications in Hollywood. No longer could any Hollywood films be recognized as truly progressive. Rather, the rejection of “cultural Browderism” meant the return to a rigid interpretation of the relationship between cultural production and economic structure. Foster proclaimed that Communist artists in Hollywood could strive to force the industry to abandon offensive racial stereotypes or antilabor messages in film. But, he insisted, “one would be blind not to see that the major art forms of today—the radio, the motion picture, the novel, the theater and so forth—all of which are highly organized and capitalized—are instruments used by the bourgeoisie not only for profit and pleasure’s sake, but also to defend their class rule.”51 As a capitalist enterprise, Hollywood, according to the party leadership, could only produce bourgeois propaganda. And yet even a hardliner like Lawson took some time to internalize this rethinking. As late as 1949 he would write, “There can be no permanent

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interference with the development of the American motion picture as a people’s art.” Yet on reading V. J. Jerome’s booklet The Negro in Hollywood Films (1950), Lawson finally realized the error of his ways. He penned his own mea culpa in his 1953 book, Film in the Battle of Ideas, published after he served a jail sentence for contempt of Congress as a member of the Hollywood Ten. Here he asserted: The motion picture has potentialities as a people’s art—when it is controlled by the people and serves their interests. But no such democratization of the art is possible under capitalism. The mass audience to which the Hollywood product is offered provides a social base for the film, but this must not be confused with the political content of the screen fare.52 Lawson’s views in 1953 represented his most hard-line approach to Hollywood, as well as a final nail in the coffin of cultural Browderism. Nevertheless, before the Maltz affair, the “cultural front” approach had inspired Hollywood Communists to write several of their best works, including Lawson’s Sahara (Columbia, 1943) and Maltz’s Pride of the Marines. Cooperation with the capitalist studios in this period had not been seen as a hindrance to progressive filmmaking. Indeed, less than a year before his controversial New Masses article, Albert Maltz himself, in a New York Times piece notable for its lack of controversy, proclaimed that though the profit motive guided all productions, talent groups had wide latitude in influencing film content and quality. Even “an indecisive producer or executive . . . may be prodded, cajoled, shamed into courage and Academy award by a firm, skilled director and a stubborn, imaginative writer, both of whom are happily conspiring ‘to do something good.’ The art, in short, is cooperative” (italics added). Furthermore, the right boss, such as Jack Warner, might not even need such prodding. That Maltz could credit Warner for his “social responsibility” without censure demonstrates Communists’ widespread willingness during the war years to work within the capitalist system to create a people’s cinema, whether such a program is labeled cultural Browderism, democratic modernism, or the cultural front.53 Thus, the ultimate significance of the Maltz affair lies in the party’s rejection of a cultural program that had succeeded in granting its members a large degree of cultural influence. Officially, it was now considered impossible to produce progressive films within the motion picture industry. Unofficially, of course, Communists like Abraham Polonsky, writer of Body and Soul (United Artists, 1947) and writer/director of Force of Evil (MGM, 1948), continued to strive for a

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progressive cinema within the industry until his blacklisting. For Polonsky, to be a filmmaker, to reach a mass audience, meant to be in Hollywood. As for the new party dictates, Polonsky declared, “We didn’t give a shit. The cultural leadership obviously didn’t know what they were talking about. We ignored them out here, and we did a lot of wonderful things despite them.”54 By reining in Albert Maltz, the U.S. Communist Party essentially turned its back on an approach to the culture industry that had brought its members great success in Hollywood. Yet to anti-Communists surveilling Hollywood, especially the FBI and the Motion Picture Alliance, the Maltz affair seemed to signal party strength in regimenting its artists. The real irony of the Maltz affair, therefore, is that anti-Communist fears were exacerbated by an event that actually signaled the Communist Party had begun to forfeit its cultural authority. An article entitled “Albert Maltz Eats Red Crow,” published anonymously in the MPA’s newsletter, The Vigil, interpreted the Maltz affair as a sign that “hereafter, attempts to use films for the Party will be more frequent.” The article explained that the controversy started when “Little Albie got tired of being an oppressed screen writing wage slave at an asking price of 75 G’s per script and decided to do some important writing for a Russia First rag called the ‘New Masses.’ ” Maltz’s “heresy” met with sharp ridicule from the MPA: “Hammers were weighted; sickles were sharpened. The Mental Mauling of Maltz began.” Yet, the MPA insisted, if Maltz’s capitulation “was all this whole thing was about, we could have a few laughs at the discomfiture of the lads who are always complaining that our capitalist economy is crushing their artistic souls because it asks them to write comedy, or drama, or what have you, for no reward but a filthy fortune—and then watching them being told off for not writing to strict ideological interpretation.” Instead, these Hollywood anti-Communists detected a serious threat, since “the Party decreed that Art is a weapon,” the MPA proclaimed, “we can look for more and more militancy from the writing Comrades, who will try unceasingly to get the latest Party Line dicta into what they write. And, among other things, the boys do write scripts.”55 Anti-Communists fundamentally misread the Maltz affair as a sign of Communist cultural strength when in fact it was a clear indication of the Party’s dwindling cultural influence. Even an anti-Communist liberal such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would fret that “Hollywood . . . has turned out to have a particularly favorable climate for the spread of Communism.”56 The anti-Communists failed to recognize the most important lesson of the Maltz affair. In returning to a strict Marxist interpretation of culture, the party rejected the “cultural front” approach that had allowed its members some influence in Hollywood. In so doing, the CPUSA, however unintentionally, surrendered its cultural authority. Ironically,

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at the very moment when the Communist Party began relinquishing its cultural influence, the anti-Communist Right stepped up its cultural surveillance.

A Screen Guide for Americans In the aftermath of the Maltz affair, and with the emerging Cold War breathing it new life, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals mobilized once again. According to the FBI, “this anti-Communist organization which has been quiet for some year or so has now come to life with a program to oppose Communist activities in the Hollywood motion picture industry.” Here the bureau was referring to a lecture series in Hollywood sponsored by the MPA, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the New Leader, hosting such anti-Communist luminaries as Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, and Eugene Lyons, author of The Red Decade. Yet in addition to this speaker series, the MPA’s rejuvenation in 1946 and 1947 spawned its first full-fledged attempt to provide a comprehensive guide for preventing Communist propaganda in the motion pictures.57 The MPA manual, Screen Guide for Americans, was written by Ayn Rand. Rand had struggled as a screenwriter but found success with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, which Warner Bros. made into a motion picture six years later. Rand was born in St. Petersburg in 1905. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks nationalized her father’s pharmacy. Nineteen seventeen left an indelible mark on her thinking. According to Rand, “when, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian Revolution, I first heard the Communist principle than Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil.” In October 1925, she finally fled Russia and soon made her way to Hollywood, where she claimed to have been “blacklisted” for talking “too much about Soviet Russia.” Rand joined the Motion Picture Alliance soon after it was formed in 1944.58 Before turning to her screen guide, it is necessary to examine her definition of Americanism, as presented in her “Textbook of Americanism,” which appeared in The Vigil, the MPA’s monthly publication, in 1946. Rand’s “ ‘textbook’ ” started with the supposition, “The basic issue in the world today is between two principles: Individualism and Collectivism.” For Rand, this ideological clash explained the struggle between the United States, on the one hand, and Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, on the other. Here Rand did not embrace the rhetoric of democracy versus totalitarianism, perhaps because democracy is still a group concept, whereas her argument rested solely on the rights of individuals and evinced a strong measure of suspicion toward any absolute principle other than individual

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rights. Americanism, then, equaled Individualism. Rand averred that in the Individualist social system, the “power of society is limited by the inalienable, individual rights of man. Society may make only such laws as do not violate these rights.” Furthermore, “man holds these rights, not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective—as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross.” However, in the Collectivist social system, the “power of society is unlimited. Society may make any law it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.” Rand exclaimed that coexistence was impossible: “There can be no social system which is a mixture of Individualism and Collectivism. Either individual rights are recognized in a society, or they are not recognized. They cannot be half-recognized.” And the stakes, of course, were high. Rather than confining her analysis to the purely economic, Rand contended that Collectivism led only to man’s total enslavement and death. Because this evil system recognized no moral principles, “Collectivism goes a step below savage anarchy: it takes away from man even the chance to fight back. It makes violence legal, and resistance to it illegal. It gives the sanction of law to the organized brute force of a majority (or anyone who claims to represent it), and turns the minority into a helpless, disarmed object of extermination.” As evidence, Rand pointed to the Holocaust and the Soviet extermination of the kulaks. Thus the fight for “Americanism” was a struggle for survival.59 Rand’s conception of a world divided between Individualism and Collectivism provided the ideological underpinning for her Screen Guide for Americans, a pamphlet published by the Motion Picture Alliance in 1947. However, as opposed to her “Textbook of Americanism,” Rand’s Screen Guide delved further into questions of political economy, extolling the virtues of capitalism, though this remained a moral issue connected to the virtues of individualism. As discussed, the MPA believed that the “ ‘political blindness’ ” of producers and top executives allowed the Communists to insert their propaganda into Hollywood films undetected. Now Rand and the MPA sought to educate the bosses so that their “unthinking carelessness” would no longer perpetuate the spread of Communism throughout the industry. Rand prefaced her guide with a warning that Communist propaganda could be very difficult to detect, since “the purpose of Communism in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—thus making people absorb the basic premises of Collectivism by indirection and implication.” Such propaganda techniques truly threatened the nation due to the very fact that they were so subtle. “Few people would take Communism straight,” Rand admitted. “But a constant stream of hints, lines, touches and suggestions battering the public from the screen will act like

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the drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock they are trying to split is Americanism.” This MPA publication did not refer to any specific films and was not offered as a blueprint for a new industry code—Rand of course abhorred “any form of collective force or pressure”—but rather as a resource to help inform “the independent judgment and . . . voluntary action of every honest man in the motion picture industry.”60 Rand’s Screen Guide consisted of a detailed list of thirteen “ ‘Don’ts,’ ” which, for analytical purposes, can be divided into three categories. The first category (“ ‘Don’ts’ ” number 1, 12, and 13) consisted of warnings about the dangers of producing films clearly political in nature. Here studio heads were told, “Don’t Take Politics Lightly,” “Don’t Use Current Events Carelessly,” and “Don’t Smear American Political Institutions.” As history moved from World War to Cold War, the political divide between “Americanism” and “Totalitarianism” remained the most pressing concern. Rand allowed that motion pictures could not avoid the dominant political questions of the day, but that very fact required the producers who employed “Reds” to inform themselves of their propaganda techniques in order to prevent them from contaminating the screen. Rand did not call for a total blacklist of Communists, though she did admonish producers, “If you have no time or inclination to study political ideas—then do not hire Reds to work on your pictures.” Further, Rand alerted the studios to the Communist technique of inserting “casual wisecracks” of a political nature, especially ones favorable to the Soviet Union, into the scripts. Such “cowardly little half-hints” were used by party propagandists to “suggest to the audience that the Russian people are free, secure and happy, that life in Russia is just about the same as in any other country—while actually the Russian people live in constant terror under a bloody, monstrous dictatorship.” Finally, Rand warned against making any pictures that criticized the American political system. Presenting politicians, judges, and other representatives of the state as corrupt only lent support to the Communist plot “to destroy our America [sic] political institutions.” Any such characterizations would have to be clearly presented as individual corruption, and not a general indictment of the United States.61 The second category (‘Don’ts’ 2–6, and 11) exhorted producers not to allow Communists to criticize Americanism: “Don’t Smear The Free Enterprise System,” “Don’t Smear Industrialists,” “Don’t Smear Wealth,” “Don’t Smear The Profit Motive,” “Don’t Smear Success,” and “Don’t Smear An Independent Man.” Here Rand fully equated capitalism with Individualism/Americanism. She warned readers that they could not “pretend that Americanism and the Free Enterprise System are two different things. They are inseparable, like body and soul. The basic principle of inalienable individual rights, which is Americanism, can be translated into practical reality only in the form of the economic system of

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Free Enterprise. That was the system established by the American Constitution, the system which made America the best and greatest country on earth.” Thus those who have succeeded in this system, Rand urged, should not be maligned and vilified in the movies. Rand praised industrialists, including the Hollywood producers, for creating the country’s great wealth and opportunities. Yet too frequently these “self made men” were “presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers or exploiters,” thereby planting “hatred for all businessmen in the mind of the audience,” thus rendering them “receptive to the cause of Communism.” For to smear wealth, success, and the profit motive was to smear all that made America exceptional. To imply that the rich obtained their wealth dishonestly was akin to questioning the legitimacy of all private property, “thereby implying that all property and human labor should belong to the State.” To discourage the profit motive and the drive for success was to give in to the enemy’s strategy, for, “it is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men to a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State.” Eradicating such smears, the MPA Screen Guide declared, was not simply a political duty, but a moral one as well.62 The final category in Rand’s Screen Guide (‘Don’ts’ 7–10) was a plea to producers not to allow praise for “Collectivist” values. Hence, “Don’t Glorify Failure,” “Don’t Glorify Depravity,” “Don’t Deify ‘The Common Man,’ ” and “Don’t Glorify The Collective.” Here Rand asserted that the Communists endeavored to force Americans to accept failure, even see it as a sign of virtue since they believed that all gains under the American system were ill gotten. Thus Rand demanded that the studios refrain from “present[ing] all the poor as good and all the rich as evil.” She also railed against sympathetic portrayals of the depraved: “Go easy on stories about murderers, perverts and all the rest of that sordid stuff.” For to sympathize with the downtrodden was to excuse his vices, to imply that the individual had no choice in his depravity, and hence to suggest that “man has no power to choose between good and evil.” Such logic inevitably would lead down the slippery slope until one arrived at “a basic tenet of Marxism that man has no freedom of moral and intellectual choice; that he is only a soulless, witless collection of meat and glands, open to any sort of ‘conditioning’ by anybody. The Communists intend to become the ‘conditioners.’ ” And films that glorified the “Collective,” or the common man, risked moving America closer to this Communist control. Rand did not indict all forms of cooperation, but rather drew a division between voluntarism and “forced herding.” The latter, of course, would be possible if the American people accepted the Communist view that they were chattel or, in other words, simply “ ‘common.’ ” Instead, Rand exclaimed, “America is the

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land of the uncommon man.” What made the United States exceptional, to her, was its unequaled freedom of opportunity that encouraged and allowed for great progress, unmeasured success, and unequaled development. All this, of course, Rand labeled anathema to the Communist, who “preaches the reign of mediocrity, the destruction of all individuality and all personal distinction, the turning of men into ‘masses’, which means an undivided, undifferentiated, impersonal, average, common herd.”63 Thus Rand’s Screen Guide for Americans envisioned a stark division between Americanism/Individualism/Free Enterprise/Success, on one side, and Communism/Collectivism/Failure/Depravity, on the other. The American people were faced with the moral choice between these clashing systems of values, and the motion picture business leaders could corrupt that choice were they to allow the injection of Communist propaganda. Though the MPA’s Screen Guide for Americans did not shy away from polemics or hyperbole, Rand’s glorification of individualism, wealth, and the system of free enterprise, if historically questionable, was at least logically and philosophically consistent. Not so her attitude toward propaganda. Throughout the guide, Rand described the dangers of subtle propaganda seeping into the public mind, rendering the nation susceptible to the Communist threat. In these passages, Rand seemed to subscribe to what film theorist Janet Staiger labels the “ ‘hypodermic needle’ theory of cultural production,” in which “ideology is simply ‘injected’ into individuals.”64 Yet, because the Motion Picture Alliance believed producers were only swayed by the bottom line, Rand stridently insisted that allowing even subtle propaganda into motion pictures turned off audiences by the barrel. “And it is a sad joke on Hollywood,” she bemoaned, “that while we shy away from all controversial subjects on the screen, in order not to antagonize anybody—we arouse more antagonism throughout the country and more resentment against ourselves by one cheap little smear line in the middle of some musical comedy than we ever would by a whole political treatise.”65 This contradiction in her assertions—that the public was vulnerable to subtle propaganda on the one hand, yet offended by this same propaganda on the other—suggests an ambivalent attitude toward the American populace. Indeed, if carried to its logical conclusion, the notion that the public could be threatened by propaganda questioned the very “Individualism” that Rand so cherished. For if Americanism offered the best political system known to man due to its unyielding embrace of Individualism, how was it that this society of strong individuals could find themselves so vulnerable to the machinations of a minority group bound together only by their devotion to an ideology preaching depravity and failure?66 Hollywood producers were not immediately swayed by Ayn Rand’s Screen Guide for Americans. However, as we will see, the FBI most certainly was. The

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bureau wholly adopted the MPA’s Screen Guide, using it as an ideological tool to determine the subversive nature of a number of motion pictures.

Hollywood’s “Unnecessarily Class Conscious” Movies Hollywood’s Academy Awards have long been an occasion full of glitz and glamour, but the Oscars handed out for films released in 1945 attracted special notice from unexpected quarters. Just days after the winners were announced, Richard B. Hood, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, sent Hoover a report listing all of the awards and their recipients. The big winner this year was The Lost Weekend (Paramount, 1945), a social problem film about alcoholism directed by Billy Wilder. The picture garnered the awards for best film, best director, best screenplay, and best lead actor, for Ray Milland’s portrayal of a talented writer destroyed by the bottle. Hood’s report related these top recipients, as well as the winners of the technical awards. Surveying this complete breakdown, the bureau’s report only spotted one known Communist among the winners, that being Anne Revere for her supporting role in National Velvet (MGM, 1945). Yet to the bureau, this was no sign of dwindling Communist influence, for “nearly all of the parties named who are not known to be members of the Communist Party have engaged in various Communist and Communist front activity.”67 The film industry, so the FBI believed, still reeked of red. Motivated by an unfeigned fear of Communist propaganda in the motion pictures, the FBI began its intensive investigation of Hollywood soon after the United States entered the Second World War. Yet by the end of the war the bureau had failed to develop a theoretical framework for detecting such agitprop, remaining glued to the notion that any film in which Communists appeared in or worked on likely contained some measure of party indoctrination. The FBI’s brief attempts at analyzing suspected films themselves proved not only troublesome but risky. For FBI leaders realized that if word of their cultural policing leaked out, the strong ideological tenor of their assessments would likely lead to embarrassment for an agency that prided itself on reporting facts and leaving judgments to others. Soon the Los Angeles office, once so zealous in reporting on film content, confined its reports to Hollywood’s political and labor struggles.68 Yet the FBI’s entire investigation hinged on its adamant belief that the motion picture industry had been infiltrated by the Communist Party for the purpose of disseminating its propaganda to a mass audience. By the summer of 1946 Hoover ordered the Los Angeles office to update him on the propaganda activities taking place in Hollywood. After nearly three months of not receiving a reply, Hoover

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scolded Hood, ordering his office to “immediately comply with the Bureau’s request.” Feeling the heat, the Los Angeles office quickly issued a report listing eighteen pictures possibly contaminated by left-wing messages. These films included Cornered (RKO, 1945), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Paramount, 1946), and Cloak and Dagger (Warner Bros., 1946). What these and the other fifteen films listed had in common was the simple fact that Communists and suspected fellow travelers were part of their cast and crew. Cornered, for instance, was produced by Adrian Scott, directed by Edward Dmytryk, and written by John Wexley; The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was written by Robert Rossen and directed by Lewis Milestone; Cloak and Dagger was written by Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner Jr. All of these men were either suspected or known Communists, and four of them—Dmytryk, Lardner, Maltz and Scott—would become members of the Hollywood Ten. Basing its report on information received from a secret source who had not viewed any of these pictures, the FBI nevertheless insisted that the propaganda content of these films should be assumed since they had been created by “members of the Communist Party or . . . ardent followers of the Communist Party line and for that reason it must be assumed that they would be expected to live up to the pledge of loyalty which they are required to take to the Communist cause, and would not hesitate to take advantage of their positions as writers, directors, and producers to inject propaganda sequences or suggestions into the pictures.” The bureau’s report, however, did nothing to substantiate these assumptions.69 Over the next few months the Los Angeles office continued to report on the propaganda threat while eschewing any actual analysis. Relying on secret sources—probably MPA members—the FBI started emphasizing that the root cause of the problem traced straight to the producers.70 One report named Walter Wanger, David Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, Charles Chaplin, and Jack and Harry Warner as the leading producers who employed and “protected” Communists. Several of these men were said to justify this practice by claiming that the need for talent left them no choice, but the bureau’s report considered this a “questionable” pretext. Instead, the FBI reported that many talented nonCommunist writers were never given an opportunity because they were either outside the Communist Party or, worse, in direct opposition to it. Through their control of the Screen Writers Guild, the bureau insisted, the Communists were able to perpetuate their domination of the industry. The FBI report concluded, “The whole situation boils down to this: The producers of motion pictures in Hollywood could clean up these conditions whenever they see fit. They just do not do so. There is no recorded instance where the Hollywood motion picture industry or any of its top influential individuals have ever denounced Communism or Communists. Basically, they are ‘internationalists.’ ”71 Again revealing

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their close affiliation with the Motion Picture Alliance, the FBI reported on an MPA meeting in April 1947, when new executive director John Lechner revealed a top-ten list of motion pictures contaminated by Communist indoctrination. The bureau reported that Goldwyn and other producers “raised a storm of protest” over this incident, taking “violent issue through the press . . . with the Motion Picture Alliance . . . stating the organization was irresponsible.” Owing to the power of the forces once again aligned against the MPA, the bureau fretted, “it is more than likely that the death knell of the Motion Picture Alliance has been sounded.”72 Thus, through the early stages of 1947, the FBI looked on the situation in Hollywood with gloom and despair, even while it believed the rest of the country was finally alert to the red menace. “Despite the attitude of the press and other informational processes now antagonistic to Communism on a national scale,” the bureau lamented, “Hollywood and the film industry still remain the key spots of contamination by this ideology.” The FBI very much understood the Cold War as a cultural and ideological struggle wherein the mass media featured as a central battleground. Yet the motion pictures, widely regarded as the most influential medium in the days before television reached a mass audience, seemed firmly in the hands of the enemy.73 J. Edgar Hoover considered the stakes to be high. Unsatisfied with the vacuous quality of the information he was receiving on Communist propaganda, he sent an urgent message to Hood in August, ordering “Analysis Of Current Films.”74 To this demand the Los Angeles office quickly complied. In a report issued the very next day, Hood’s office presented Hoover with its most in-depth analysis of film content since his own agents reviewed The Master Race (see chapter 2). This time, however, the bureau would interpret film content with the help of the Motion Picture Alliance, using its Screen Guide for Americans, then still in draft form, as an authoritative manual for detecting Communist propaganda. Thus, even before its publication, the MPA’s Screen Guide figured prominently as the main analytical tool used by the bureau in ferreting out Communist propaganda. The draft replicated in this report was a near match to the published version, lacking only some of Rand’s rhetorical flourishes. In fact, according to this report, the Screen Guide was written not only by Ayn Rand, but also by fellow MPA members Howard Emmett Rogers, James Kevin McGuinness, Morrie Ryskind, Lela Rogers, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Arthur. Whereas the Screen Guide for Americans indicted not a single film in its published form (the MPA had likely learned back in April that the producers did not respond kindly to attacks on their products), now the FBI, relying on the analysis of confidential informants (obviously MPA members despite FBI redactions), interpreted motion pictures though the lens of the MPA’s handbook.75

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These FBI/MPA film commentaries may be analyzed thematically under the three categories of Rand’s Screen Guide set out above. The first category expressed deep reservations about films clearly political in theme, warning producers that politics and current events were not subjects to take lightly, and that American political institutions needed to be portrayed with reverence. Rarely did the MPA or FBI contend that Communist propaganda pervaded an entire film (Mission to Moscow being the primary exception); instead, they believed that Communists inserted their agitprop in tiny doses. Films that were political in nature thus afforded the party excellent opportunities to slip in its propaganda, especially if the film’s broader political message was palatable to the American public. Here the MPA/FBI charged The Best Years of Our Lives with such political exploitation. This film, widely praised by critics and bestowed with multiple Academy Awards, was recognized, even by its detractors, as a compassionate plea for the proper treatment of America’s returning veterans. Moreover, though anti-Communists suspected its leading creators, director William Wyler, screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, and even producer Samuel Goldwyn, of leftist sympathies, none were known Communists, though the FBI report claims that suspected party member Howard Koch (a writer on Casablanca and Mission to Moscow) lent uncredited contributions to the script. The film’s political transgression, according to this report, occurred during a scene when two of the protagonists get into a scuffle with a local bigot who denounces the United Nations, the Soviet Union, African Americans, and Jews. Quoting ardent anti-Communist Isaac Don Levine’s journal Plain Talk, the bureau reported that this scene “employs a trick taught to all young writers in Communist indoctrination schools. This consists of identifying all criticism of Russia with anti-Semitism, Jim Crowism, Ku Kluxism and every belief that the American public, so rightly, considers obnoxious.” Hence by virtue of the dialogue’s “international comments . . . interlaced with a scurrilous tirade against the Negroes and the Jews,” the FBI labeled The Best Years of Our Lives a work of Communist propaganda.76 The FBI also deemed Best Years guilty of violating the second category of “Don’ts” in the MPA film guide, wherein criticisms of free enterprise, industrialists, wealth, and the profit motive are regarded as attacks on Americanism. These anti-Communists regarded Best Years as a denunciation of big business, and they pointed to two scenes as proof. The first, early in the picture, occurs when the Dana Andrews character is forced to give up his seat on an airplane to a cigarpuffing, golf club–lugging, businessman. The bureau’s source contended that this scene presented a patently false portrait of the aviation industry’s practices, claiming that during the first six months after the war 70 percent of airline seats were allocated for returning veterans. Next, when this character seeks to return to his former job at the local pharmacy, he finds that it is now a national chain and

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that the new company management is far more difficult to work for. Here again, the bureau’s source questioned the validity of this scene, claiming that the Rexall drug chain, where in fact these scenes were shot, made every effort to employ returning veterans, especially seeking to train them for management positions.77 Best Years was also singled out for its portrayal of bankers. FBI intelligence noted, in the words of Levine’s Plain Talk, the representation of a banker “as a smugly, inhuman reactionary who, basely, inquires concerning collateral before endorsing a GI loan to be made with his depositors’ money.” Hence, the bureau charged that what should be regarded as solid banking procedures was instead presented as crass cupidity endemic to the capitalist system. Indeed, filmic portrayals of bankers aroused the ire of the FBI and MPA in other motion pictures as well, including the now-perennial Christmas favorite, It’s a Wonderful Life (RKO, 1947). The bureau reported its informants’ view that this film “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” To the FBI and its informants, It’s a Wonderful Life was only the latest Frank Capra/James Stewart pairing that subverted the screen, since they regarded Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939) “decidedly Socialist in nature.”78 Indeed, according to FBI records, several other films, including Keeper of the Flame (MGM, 1942), Pride of the Marines (Warner Bros., 1945), A Song to Remember (Columbia, 1945), and Body and Soul (United Artists, 1947), constituted Communist propaganda due to their sordid presentations of the free enterprise system and of those who achieved wealth and success. Perhaps most illustrative of MPA and FBI vigilance on this point is the intelligence collected on the Lillian Hellman film, Another Part of the Forest (Universal, 1948), since they labeled this motion picture subversive based on the working script they obtained during the film’s production. That the FBI secretly recruited studio employees to furnish scripts of films currently in production suggests the wide extent of the bureau’s cultural surveillance of the motion picture industry. A prequel to Hellman’s The Little Foxes (RKO, 1941), this film told the story of the Hubbards, a Southern family greedily pursuing wealth during Reconstruction. According to the bureau’s secret informant, the script presented the Hubbard family “in a manner which implies that they represent a rising new social class—the businessmen.” Clearly utilizing Rand’s Screen Guide in determining Hellman’s script Communist propaganda, this informant singled out the script’s denunciation of the pursuit of wealth and profit: The father, the two sons and the daughter now spend all their time lying, cheating, doublecrossing, blackmailing one another and everybody—in order to get money. The pursuit of money is made to appear evil and

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sickening—and the audience is left with the impression that money can be obtained only by such methods, that these are the only kind of people that can become rich. This is not said explicitly, but it is implied very forcefully—because there is not one line of dialogue, not a single reference to any honest method of acquiring wealth. The Hubbards are not presented as a freak family of scoundrels. They are presented, by implication, as the rich. Like so many films already released, it appeared to the bureau and its allies in Hollywood that the motion picture industry was hell-bent on continuing to criticize greed, which they interpreted as part of the Communist propaganda program to impugn the capitalist system.79 Hellman’s script violated the MPA’s guidelines for “American” films, not only in its presentation of wealth ill gotten, but in its lurid representation of a “diseased” family. Another FBI informant bemoaned the paucity of virtuous characters in this script, save only “the negroes and the insane mother.”80 Such dwelling on depravity seemed straight out of the third category of the Screen Guide for Americans, which regarded positive portrayals of the common man, attempts to stir class consciousness, and any emphasis on failure and depravity in the American system to be part of the broader Communist campaign to glorify Collectivism. As in the case of categories one and two, the bureau documented several films believed to fall under this third category of subversion. For instance, as an example of a film promoting class consciousness, the FBI pointed to the seemingly “rather inoculous [sic] film” Buck Privates Come Home (Universal, 1947), starring Abbott and Costello. This film, cowritten by Communist Party member Fred Rinaldo, contained a scene of “a party given for a general in the Army whereas intermingling scenes disclose an enlisted man on KP duty, making the audience unnecessarily class conscious.” Furthermore, collectivist values were ascribed to North Star (RKO, 1943), the proRussian World War II picture written by Lillian Hellman. The FBI lamented that “besides giving a fictitious picture of the situation in Russia the picture portrayed the idea that collective farming was the only successful way to farm.”81 Films allegedly promoting moral decay were likewise said to bolster collectivist values. For information along these lines the FBI turned to the Southern California Motion Picture Council, a group that reviewed motion pictures for their moral content, representing the concerns of a vast array of Los Angeles–based organizations, including the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce, the American Legion Auxiliary, the Camp Fire Girls, the Council of Church Women, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Girl Scouts of America, the Los Angeles Country Library, the Los Angeles section of the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Women’s Club of Hollywood. The bureau’s contact with

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the organization, council president Mrs. William A. Burk, maintained that the motion pictures were responsible for “a definite trend toward the breaking-down of the moral character of the family.” To Burk, The Best Years of Our Lives transgressed the moral code due to its scenes of excessive drinking and its condoning of divorce. Burk also took issue with Communist director Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (United Artists, 1947), a prison drama wherein the criminals are treated sympathetically while “the men of the law are presented as drunkards, sadists, and weakling brutes.” To both Burk and the bureau’s undisclosed informants, such films represented an “attempt to break down constituted law enforcement” and “the moral state of this country”; like the MPA, Burk believed that “Communists in the motion picture industry were responsible primarily” for these pictures. Communism, therefore, presented both a political and moral challenge.82 Thus, in analyzing films according to their smearing of ‘Americanism’ and glorification of ‘Collectivism,’ the FBI detected subversion in the movies by completely adopting the standards of the Motion Picture Alliance as set out in its Screen Guide for Americans. Yet the bureau also secretly reported on a strain of subversion not enunciated in the MPA’s film guide. FBI reports treated films critical of racism in America as akin to Communist propaganda. For example, in August the Los Angeles office forwarded the script for The American Crime, an independent short subject film tackling the problem of lynching. The “substance of the script,” the FBI noted, “indicates Communist propaganda in the form of racial hatred.”83 The FBI denounced Body and Soul (United Artists, 1947), Abraham Polonsky’s film about prizefighting, for criticizing white “success” as a product of dishonesty and for presenting the “colored fighter” as the most virtuous character: In bribing various fighters, the white man takes the bribe and the negro refuses $60,000 to throw a fight; portraying the negro in a fine light, according to the informant, is the principle form of propaganda in this picture. The negro fighting while injured, knowing that he is injured, and his manager knowing that it may be his death, and the negro refusing a bribe while the white man accepts it, shows the former as a noble character and sympathetic character, while the successful promoter is shown as an unscrupulous, dishonest, heartless character.84 Ironically, this informant missed the Communist Polonsky’s broader indictment of a corrupt society, focusing only on his attempt to counteract negative stereotypes of African Americans in Hollywood. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the FBI also condemned one of the early postwar era’s most celebrated attempts at exposing bigotry through an entertainment vehicle. Crossfire (RKO, 1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk

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and produced by Adrian Scott, both Communist Party members, was a dramatic, film noir murder mystery that earned five Academy Award nominations. Though narratively a standard crime drama, the film was unique in regards to the killer’s motive, anti-Semitism. FBI informants charged that Crossfire was “a good example of a picture in which the racial angle has been unduly emphasized.” Burk criticized the film for its failure “to point out that Jews and others should likewise have more love and tolerance for gentiles.” And another secret informant believed that the film would “do well in Russia.” He believed that Crossfire was similar to The Grapes of Wrath (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1940) in that “there is nothing pleasant in it anywhere,” and he concluded that “there is nothing that is anti-capitalistic about it in any way that I could see, but it is propaganda for race tolerance.”85 Thus the bureau considered that exposing prejudice was but one tactic the Communists used to “smear” Americanism. The FBI’s collaboration with the Motion Picture Alliance appeared to be paying dividends since it finally had a formula for detecting Communism attributable to outside “expertise.” In some regards, both the FBI and MPA believed they were making progress. For instance, the bureau reported on three Dalton Trumbo films, A Guy Named Joe (MGM, 1944), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (MGM, 1945), and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (MGM, 1945), that it believed contained no Communist propaganda. Trumbo was “closely watched” at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a studio that employed thirteen members of the MPA’s executive committee, including James Kevin McGuinness and Howard Emmett Rogers. The lesson was that vigilance paid off, but the Communists were tricky foes. Their tactics, according to the bureau, included using several uncredited writers so as to avoid detection and making changes to already approved scripts during production. Such standard industry practices created opportunities for Communist exploitation and therefore were deemed dangerous by the industry’s secret watchdog. And while the MPA aimed to make the studios alert to the red menace, the bureau continued to worry that “the chase for the dollar” would blind producers to the evil in their midst, or, more ominously, that “persons representing production hid behind the dollar sign in order to further Communism in pictures.” Thus, in the great battle to save the free enterprise system, the greatest hindrance, ironically, might not be the revolutionaries but rather the capitalists themselves.86 In fully adopting the ideological guidelines of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the FBI finally had a blueprint for detecting subversion on the screen. Many of the films it impeached under the criteria of the Screen Guide for Americans, including especially The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, and Body and Soul, were widely regarded among the best of Hollywood’s early postwar output. These were certainly political films, embodying

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leftist cultural, political, and social critiques of American society. Although many film histories have denigrated the motion pictures of this era for a supposed lack of meaningful social content, some historians have come to appreciate the ability of artists, especially those on the left, to create films that significantly reflected their political ideals and aspirations.87 The FBI and its allies in the MPA grasped this essential truth much earlier than most academics. Just as these films put forward political and ideological claims, so did their detractors formulate their critiques on ideological grounds. Yet, whereas these motion pictures appeared in the realm of public discourse, the explicit criticisms of these films existed largely in the confines of the national security state. The bureau and its collaborators in the Motion Picture Alliance effectively turned this cultural battle into a question of domestic security.88 Yet for the time being the FBI had done little more than collect information. Like that of its partners in the Alliance, the bureau aimed to counteract and put an end to what it considered dangerous Communist propaganda. The MPA’s Screen Guide for Americans beseeched the studios to voluntarily adopt their standards, but soon the anti-Communists would adopt more coercive measures to bring the producers into line. Indeed, both the FBI and MPA would soon work with HUAC in “exposing” the Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. But for the FBI, cooperation with HUAC, a body it considered reckless and irresponsible, would not come easily. The next chapter traces the FBI/ HUAC path to convergence, and the important role played by the bureau and the Motion Picture Alliance in the coming of HUAC’s famous Hollywood Ten trials in the fall of 1947.

4 THE COALESCENCE OF A COUNTERSUBVERSIVE NETWORK

The Party is content and highly pleased if it is possible to have inserted in a picture a line, a scene, a sequence, conveying the Communist lesson and more particularly, if they can keep out antiCommunist lessons. —J. Edgar Hoover, statement before HUAC, March 1947

By 1947 the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its anti-Communist allies viewed Hollywood as the central battleground in the domestic cold war. In order to wage this cultural struggle successfully, disparate anti-Communist forces would need to form a more tightly knit network. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals would play a key role within this network, but the secret for success owed to the ability of the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee to overcome a previously fractious relationship. Eventually, the FBI’s desire to find an outlet for its intelligence on the Communist situation in Hollywood outweighed its qualms about cooperating with the controversial and often reckless committee. An eruption of labor violence in Hollywood in the immediate postwar years brought increased attention to the problem of political radicalism in the film industry. This chapter starts by surveying the jurisdictional struggles that led to this labor strife. Rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of the battle between an emerging leftist labor group and the more entrenched, corrupt, but antiCommunist labor federation known as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, countersubversives attributed the labor unrest to Communist meddling. Most important, anti-Communists envisioned the labor struggle as part of the Communists’ broader propaganda goals; by securing a foothold among workers and craftsmen, the Reds, so it was believed, could buttress their position in the film industry and use this newfound power to influence film content. The resulting Hollywood strikes encouraged HUAC to finally prepare for public hearings on the question of Communist infiltration of the motion picture 106

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industry. Since its inception (as the Dies committee) in 1938, the Un-American Activities Committee had frequently signaled its interest in Hollywood. But until 1947 the committee repeatedly shied away from investigating the powerful film industry. The labor strife, the cooperation of anti-Communist allies in the Motion Picture Alliance and the FBI, and especially the conservative victories in the 1946 midterm elections all emboldened HUAC, which now believed that the political tide favored its mission. The second part of this chapter traces HUAC’s first official foray into Hollywood during the spring of 1947 when the committee held closed-session interviews with various “ ‘friendly’ ” witnesses, the vast majority being members of the Motion Picture Alliance. The committee and the MPA decided on an aggressive strategy, not simply of targeting Communists, but rather charging the producers with ultimate responsibility. Yet such an ambitious program necessitated a more powerful ally than the relatively small Motion Picture Alliance. Acknowledging that the FBI had a far more complete surveillance program, HUAC appealed to the bureau for assistance. Specifically, the FBI’s documentary proof of the existence of Communist members in the film industry would be used to support the ideological claims of the existence of Communist propaganda in the films. The final part of this chapter discusses the rough road to cooperation between these leading anti-Communist institutions. Overcoming a rocky past filled with personal enmity and strategic disagreements, the FBI and HUAC banded together to fight the red menace in Hollywood.

The Hollywood Strikes The image of Hollywood as a hotbed of radicalism was further ingrained in March 1945 when, amid a soaring heat wave, the industry faced a widespread and increasingly violent strike.1 At stake was a jurisdictional battle of set decorators between two American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). Struggles over jurisdiction among labor groups in Hollywood were nothing new; however, this strike, which would last until October and then return in 1946 only to be squashed by a studio lockout, assumed larger proportions when countersubversives, led by IATSE’s international representative and leader in Hollywood, Roy Brewer, effectively red-baited the leftist CSU, thereby paving the way for its demise. Perhaps most important here, the anti-Communists envisioned this labor struggle as part of the broader propaganda war. Should the Communists further their control of Hollywood labor groups, these cold warriors believed, they would use their economic and organizational strength to fortify their ideological initiative to control the content of Hollywood films.

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Gangsterism and corruption marked IATSE’s history in Hollywood. Ironically, its strength derived not so much from its presence in Los Angeles but rather its control of screen projectionists nationwide, a fact that two of its leaders, George Browne and Willie Bioff, exploited ruthlessly. Connections to mobsters Al Capone and Lucky Luciano catapulted Browne and Bioff to national leadership of IATSE in 1934. Soon Browne, the IATSE’s new international president, and Bioff, his West Coast representative, were drawing hefty sums from each of the studios. When all this came to light the producers claimed extortion (and in 1941 that is exactly what Browne and Bioff were convicted of), but according to historian Gerald Horne, the arrangement was quite satisfactory to the moguls, who were assured labor peace in exchange for the loot.2 Horne’s assessment of this cozy relationship was first voiced by left-wing critics at the time. Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo found the moguls’ claims of extortion far-fetched. Studio leaders did not seem to be such pushovers, especially in light of their reactions to the 1945 strike: But it is extremely interesting to know that the producers did not go to the police with their troubles. They preferred to pay off. They did not call out Blaney Matthews [Warner Bros. security chief] and Whitey Hendry [MGM security chief] and the sheriff and their company police to protect them from Mr. Bioff. They did not resort to tear gas or high pressure fire hoses. They did not hire thugs with chains. They didn’t even seek an injunction. For these drastic measures they reserve for those who are not gangsters, for those who will not accept money from them, for those who insist upon democratic rights for all rather than dictatorial privilege for the few.3 For Trumbo and his allies on the left, the only path to democratic unionism was through the CSU. The Conference of Studio Unions emerged out of the 1941 Disney cartoonists strike. Cartoonists from MGM, Warner Bros., and Disney had turned to Herbert K. Sorrell, leader of the painters’ union, for assistance in creating the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG). Disney animators were tops in their field in terms of artistic and commercial success, but poor wages, long hours, and the denial of screen credits topped their list of grievances. When the Screen Cartoonists Guild endeavored to organize the Disney animators, Walt Disney responded by laying off the union activists at his studio, including Art Babbitt, a leading animator who created the Goofy character among others. This move prompted the cartoonists to walk out until Disney recognized the new guild. Disney attributed the strike to Communist influence and maintained that the presence of his company union made the SCG unnecessary, despite the fact that, as historian Michael Denning writes, “Disney’s company union was cited by the National

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Labor Relations Board as an unfair labor practice.” Government mediation led to a favorable settlement for the strikers. Embittered, Disney soon became a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Meanwhile, inspired by the victory, Herb Sorrell formed the Conference of Studio Unions, as an alternative to the IATSE. Consisting largely of painters and carpenters, the CSU membership numbered nearly ten thousand by 1945.4 The FBI and other intelligence bodies painted the CSU’s strike as a Communist ploy to stir disunity. However, when the Conference of Studio Unions began its strike in March 1945, the Communist Political Association—Earl Browder had dissolved the party as a wartime gesture of unity—condemned the strike as “a disgraceful situation” through its West Coast publication, People’s World. Blaming both the producers and the CSU, the People’s World advocated a cessation of the strike in the interests of national unity.5 Military intelligence analysts were well aware of the Communist disapproval of the strike and reported that the CPA wanted Sorrell to call it off. Ironically, Sorrell’s refusal to do so seemed at this juncture to indicate Communist weakness. “The result of this refusal,” the Military Intelligence Division reported, “is seen as hampering the continuation of unopposed CPA infiltration of the motion picture industry.”6 Yet soon the strike would serve as the emblem of Communist strength in the minds of fearful anti-Communists. As tensions mounted in U.S.-Soviet relations following FDR’s death, and with signals from Moscow through the Duclos letter, the Communist Political Association reconstituted itself as the Communist Party in July. The Communists now denounced their “revisionist” policies of cooperation, and the changing line was felt in Hollywood. As the FBI reported, “The ‘no strike’ pledge and all that went with it is now abandoned. Evidence of the new position is the open support which the Communists are now giving to the Communist lead [sic] unions in the present strike.” Failing to take seriously the friction between the Communists and Sorrell’s CSU during the first few months of the strike, the bureau analysis insisted that the Conference of Studio Unions was “a completely Communist-dominated group” that sought not to do economic battle with the producers but rather to deplete the IATSE, which the bureau considered a most important bulwark against Communist infiltration in the trade unions.7 The FBI soon formed a close relationship with Roy Brewer, IATSE’s leader in Hollywood. In October Brewer visited the Los Angeles office to introduce himself to special agent in charge Richard Hood. Describing himself as a “liberal in the progressive labor movement,” Brewer nonetheless expressed his deep concern over Communist infiltration of Hollywood labor groups, and, according to Hood, intimated that “if necessary he will turn in politics and become a Republican as he would prefer to have a reactionary American in public office to the type of totalitarian factionalism he believes we will have in our government

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under CIO domination.” Brewer also maintained that Sorrell, despite his AFL affiliation, secretly championed the CIO cause and closely followed the Communist Party line, whether or not he was an actual member.8 Fretting an outcome favorable to the CSU, Brewer quickly took his message public, lambasting Sorrell as the “spearhead” of the Communist labor movement.9 In attacking Sorrell as a Communist, Brewer received the support of California State Senator Jack B. Tenney, chairman of California’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. The Tenney committee had questioned Sorrell in 1941, the year of the Disney strike. Sorrell then denied Communist Party membership, but Tenney claimed to have evidence to the contrary, specifically a copy of Sorrell’s application to join the party under the name Stewart, which was, in fact, his mother’s maiden name. Despite Sorrell’s denials, and on evidence of his membership in various “California Communist front organizations,” such as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, the American Peace Mobilization, and the Harry Bridges’ Defense Committee, the Tenney committee determined that the “close association and fellow-traveler status in the Communist Party of Herbert K. Sorrell” was beyond any doubt. The FBI concurred, reporting through a source (possibly Brewer himself) that Sorrell was “a known Communist.”10 The question of Sorrell’s status vis-à-vis the Communist Party remains controversial. Years later Roy Brewer maintained that Sorrell had cancelled his party membership and had denied it ever since for strategic reasons. The Communists had learned a lesson when Jeff Kibre, an open party member and leader of the progressive faction within the IATSE in the late 1930s, was easily discredited by his foes. Moreover, Brewer claimed that Sorrell admitted as much before his death. Yet there is much to Sorrell’s history and character that suggests otherwise. First and foremost, Sorrell’s leadership of the 1945 strike while the Communists advocated the wartime ‘no strike’ pledge suggests a degree of independence, if not separation, from the party. Communists considered Sorrell a poor tactician for this move. Moreover, his views regarding African Americans did not reflect the party’s more enlightened antiracism. And when questioned by a congressional committee in 1948, not only did Sorrell proclaim his preference for keeping Communists out of leadership positions within the union, but he also accused two associates of ties to the party. When asked about his association with John Howard Lawson, the leading Communist in Hollywood’s creative fields, Sorrell admitted only to having met Lawson on a few occasions, adding, “All I know is that he has a great big nose.” If Sorrell were a secret member of the party, he was most certainly a troublesome one. More likely, Sorrell’s militant unionism ingratiated the CSU leader with the Communists during their own periods of militancy but created unwanted problems when the party disavowed its oppositional strategies, as during the war.11

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Sorrell’s militancy included a zest for violence. “I love to hear the cracking of bones on a scab’s legs,” he once exclaimed.12 Indeed, violence pervaded the labor unrest in Hollywood in 1945 and 1946, much of it located on the picket line at Warner Bros. According to Jack Warner, the strikers selected his studio first because of the general view of Warner Bros. as a pro-labor studio that would therefore give in to the union’s demands. Warner Bros. had evinced a measure of pro-labor paternalism in the 1930s when Jack and Harry Warner raised wages during hard times; the studio’s sympathies, however, did not extend to those who endeavored to force change through more radical means. As Motion Picture Alliance member Rupert Hughes declared, Jack Warner “was very liberal until they had the big strike and he could not get into the studio.”13 Both sides partook in the violence. CSU picketers overturned cars bringing in IATSE workers. IATSE men marched on the strikers, backed by Warner Bros.’ security forces and Burbank police. Fists, knives, and gas bombs ruled the streets, and one morning nearly eighty people suffered injuries. Suspected of inciting the violence, Sorrell was arrested. After police discharged their weapons, Julius and Philip Epstein, the writing team for films such as Casablanca and Arsenic and Old Lace, quipped that Warner Bros. should change its slogan from “Combining good picture making with good citizenship” to “Combining good picture making with good marksmanship.”14 Amid this inflamed environment, Screen Actors Guild board member Ronald Reagan began carrying a .32 Smith and Wesson. Reagan, who would become the guild’s president in 1947, appeared to be at a crossroads in his political and ideological thinking. Hollywood’s cold war served to push Reagan from the liberal left to the anti-Communist right, and for the future U.S. president, the postwar strikes marked a decisive moment in this transition. The key issue for SAG during the strikes was whether or not to cross the CSU picket line. The decision to do so came quick and easy. Soon after the first strike began, SAG members voted 3,029 to 88 in favor of crossing the line. Only a small faction, led by Karen Morley, fought to support the CSU, and soon Reagan, who would be listed in bureau reports as informant T-10, informed the FBI that she and others in SAG were advocating the Communist Party line. By contrast, the Screen Writers Guild, with its much larger proportion of radical members, only narrowly decided to cross the picket line. Isolated, the CSU lost its struggle against Brewer’s IATSE.15 For Hollywood’s anti-Communists, the postwar labor problems in the motion picture industry could only be understood within the broader framework of an alleged Communist attempt to seize control of the screen for propaganda purposes. Ronald Reagan later explained this rationale: The Communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple. It was merely to take over the motion picture business. Not only for its profit,

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as the hoodlums had tried—but also for a grand world-wide propaganda base. In those days before television and massive foreign film production, American films dominated 95 per cent of the world’s movie screens. We had a weekly audience of about 500,000,000 souls. Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a Communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies.16 FBI analysts echoed Reagan’s understanding of the labor strife as part and parcel of the party’s broader propagandistic program. In 1948, well after the CSU had been relegated to the sidelines, the bureau catalogued its influence on motion picture content. Here the FBI referred to the minutes of CSU meetings from 1942 to 1944, made available to the bureau through a confidential source. The report called attention to a CSU proposal for the establishment of a labor/management committee tasked with minimizing production problems during the war and “influencing picture content.” Although nothing was to come from this proposal, the Conference of Studio Unions did advocate against the production or distribution of films with which it disagreed politically. For example, in 1943 the CSU urged MGM not to release Tennessee Johnson, a sympathetic portrait of President Andrew Johnson. The CSU disagreed with the film’s historical interpretation, arguing that Johnson destroyed the possibilities for a real reconstruction after the Civil War and that Thaddeus Stevens, villainized in the film, was instead a sincere proponent of “economic and political democracy.” If debates over Reconstruction seem far afield from the issues surrounding Hollywood’s cold war, one must recall the bureau’s conflation of efforts to fight racial prejudice in film with Communist propaganda. The FBI concluded that the CSU’s attempts to use its influence to thwart the production or distribution of Tennessee Johnson and other films, such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Captain Eddie, “constitutes a perfect example of how a labor union can control the content of a motion picture by declaring it ‘unfavorable to labor.’ ”17 That these films all reached the screen did not figure into the FBI’s estimation of the Conference of Studio Unions’ ability to “control” motion picture content.

HUAC Comes to Town As the labor strife in Hollywood brought increased attention to the question of Communist influence in the motion picture industry, the House Un-American Activities Committee gathered testimony from IATSE leader Roy Brewer in December 1946. Brewer spoke of the Communist attempt to stir disunity through

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the strikes, but stressed that their main objective was to “color the product of the motion picture industry.” Brewer explained that by establishing “control of the unions down the line,” the Communists “intended to use those unions to support the guilds,” especially the Screen Writers Guild, “which has been under control of the communists, without any question, since its inception.” With control over the unions, the writers, and also the readers who recommended scripts to producers, Brewer charged that the Communists would be in perfect position to control the medium. Brewer’s words encouraged HUAC to finally make its first official foray into Hollywood by taking closed-session “executive” testimony of several important players, mainly “friendly” witnesses affiliated with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, in the spring of 1947.18 Brewer’s testimony, however, hardly represents the first instance of HUAC’s interest in the Communist issue as it pertained to Hollywood. Indeed, before HUAC became a standing committee in 1945, it was known as the Dies committee, after its chairman, Texas Democrat Martin Dies. The Dies committee, perhaps more anti–New Deal than anti-Communist, emerged in 1938 and immediately raised the question of Communist influence in Hollywood when one of its investigators charged that a significant number of movie stars had made financial contributions to Communist causes. Over the next few years, rumors of an impending investigation of the motion picture industry abounded.19 Despite its never launching a public investigation of Hollywood, the records of the Dies committee indicate a strong interest in the activities and influence of the left in the motion picture industry. Like their FBI counterparts, Dies committee investigators selectively gathered clippings from the press that suggested a red menace in Hollywood. During World War II, the committee kept tabs on many of the same organizations that the FBI also suspected of Communist infiltration, including the Hollywood Democratic Committee (its membership included Dies committee investigator Thomas L. Cavett, who joined under a fictitious name), the American Writers’ Congress, and the anti-MPA Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions. Motion picture content interested the Dies committee as well. In addition to keeping records on Mission to Moscow, committee investigators also reported on the “share and share alike” message of Tender Comrade, relayed to them through an interview with MPA member Lela Rogers in 1944.20 That year, Dies committee probing of Hollywood picked up steam when committee investigator James H. Steedman began compiling a lengthy study. The Steedman report touched on many familiar themes, including the Communist infiltration of labor groups, such as the Conference of Studio Unions, and “front organizations,” such as the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, the Joint AntiFascist Refugee Committee, and the People’s Educational Center (PEC), a leftwing film school in Los Angeles infiltrated by a Dies committee investigator, who

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considered it a breeding ground for red screenplay writers. Spearheaded by John Howard Lawson, the People’s Educational Center offered a plethora of courses on subjects including literature, history, labor relations, foreign affairs, and, of course, writing for stage, screen, and radio. Steedman fretted that by equipping its students with technical expertise, the PEC served to increase Communist leverage in Hollywood. “If the industry itself continues to do nothing about it,” the Steedman report warned, “the great majority of the persons in the industry performing work of a creative nature will, within the not distant future, be either Communist Party members or close sympathizers following the Party line. The industry will then be dependent upon this radical group for its output.” Steedman gave no indication as to the numbers enrolled by the PEC, but by this investigator’s account, the situation was dire.21 As with the FBI and MPA, the fear of Communist propaganda motivated the investigation of Hollywood for this Dies committee investigator. As Steedman began his report, “Communists have a long-range plan to ‘take over’ the motion picture industry. Motion pictures, as they well realize, furnish the widest possible channel for the dissemination of their propaganda. Motion pictures are shown everywhere in the world, wherever there are eyes to see and ears to hear.” But Dies committee records also suggest that its anti–New Deal impulse provided much of the rationale for its suspicion of Hollywood. To be sure, anti-Communism and opposition to the New Deal were often one and the same. For instance, investigator Cavett’s files on the Hollywood Democratic Committee, a strong contributor to Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944, reveal that both the Dies committee and the Tenney committee envisioned it as a Communist front. “Many of these are Communist and fellow travelers,” Cavett informed Dies committee chief investigator Robert E. Stripling, despite that out of the nearly six hundred members listed in a Variety advertisement for the organization’s mass meeting at the Shrine Auditorium, fewer than forty were highlighted as suspect by Cavett. Likewise, the Steedman report referred to the script for Brooklyn U.S.A., on file at Warner Bros., based on the play by Communist Party member John Bright and Asa Bordages (party member Alvah Bessie later did some work on the screenplay as well). The film, never made, was intended as an exposé of gangsterism and Axis sabotage on the Brooklyn waterfront, and, according to Steedman, its heroes including a Communist and a New Dealer. Hence Brooklyn U.S.A. represented the threat of Communist propaganda and New Deal publicity all rolled up into one.22 Why, then, did the Dies committee shrink from a public investigation of the motion picture industry? During the grand alliance of the war years, antiCommunism simply did not carry as much weight. Moreover, correspondence between Stripling and his investigators indicates that the committee feared that “the [Roosevelt] Administration would defend the motion picture industry by any

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and every means at its command,” a conclusion that seems reasonable, especially considering Hollywood’s staunch support for FDR in 1944. The hope, then, was that the Democrats would lose, and in the meantime, as the committee’s secret informant, known only as Contact “B”, recommended, “the Committee should gather all of its information,” hold out until the political environment was more favorable, and “with the Administration’s protection gone . . . the motion picture industry should be investigated not only from the standpoint of Communism, but from monopolies, shady financial practices against the stockholders, morals, etc.” The hopes of Contact “B” for a Republican victory in 1944 proved premature; however, the game plan proved remarkably prescient. Republican victories in the 1946 midterm elections ushered in heightened concerns over domestic security and effectively created the favorable political climate that HUAC, now a standing committee, believed a prerequisite to any advance on Hollywood. Moreover, as Contact “B” anticipated, Hollywood would not only fall prey to a public investigation alleging Communist infiltration in 1947, but one year later the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. sounded the death knell for the industry’s monopolistic practices, such as direct ownership of first-run theaters and block-booking arrangements with exhibitors.23 Republican control of the Eightieth Congress resulted in the first GOP chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. Yet the makeup of the committee did not change significantly. In addition to Thomas, HUAC consisted of four Republicans (Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, John McDowell of Pennsylvania, Richard M. Nixon of California, and Richard B. Vail of Illinois) as well as four Democrats (John S. Wood of Georgia, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, J. Hardin Peterson of Florida, and Herbert C. Bonner of North Carolina). Of these men, only McDowell, Nixon, and Vail were new to the committee; moreover, Robert E. Stripling remained the committee’s secretary and chief investigator. Most important, HUAC continued as a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats. The committee seized on Hollywood in 1947, taking advantage of a political climate more conducive to its mission.24 In Hollywood, HUAC found an ally most sympathetic to its mission in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Several MPA leaders were happy to oblige by testifying in closed sessions before a HUAC subcommittee at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in May 1947. These antiCommunists again put forward the twin messages that Communists were subverting the screen and that the producers stood idly by. At these closed-session hearings, MPA members testified to the propaganda content of several motion pictures. Their testimonies prefigured the assumptions laid out in the MPA’s Screen Guide for Americans, then being written by Ayn Rand.25 In her testimony, Lela Rogers indicated that the Motion Picture Alliance’s

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motives for publishing the Screen Guide extended beyond the ostensible goal of enlightening otherwise “politically blind” studio heads. Instead, as Rogers affirmed, the MPA fretted that the producers might be a lost cause and therefore intended the Screen Guide as a tool to educate the public, in the belief that irate moviegoers would be their best ally against nervous Hollywood executives. Moreover, Rogers and several others attested to the MPA’s materialist definition of Communist propaganda, attributing any negative characterization of business leaders to Communist machinations. “If they want a villain,” Rogers complained, “they make him a banker, a lawyer or big industrialist.” Leo McCarey, fellow MPA member and famed director of such films as Duck Soup (Paramount, 1933) and Going My Way (Paramount, 1944), agreed with this analysis, adding, in a particularly colorful description, his view that left-wing actors could achieve this negative characterization even when the screenplay appeared benign: It makes your blood boil; instances of the bankers. He chews at his cigar and tobacco juice drools down his mouth as he talks. They will get a character with a bad mouth to start with. There is something wrong with his lips, or something. In the dialogue it may be sweetened and right, but when this fellow plays the role, when you see him, you don’t like bankers. That Hollywood’s industrialists allowed such negative portrayals of their own social class befuddled these MPA representatives, leading Rogers to conclude that the producers were either politically unaware or possibly themselves subversive.26 Esquire film critic and Motion Picture Alliance ally Jack Moffitt provided HUAC with the most in-depth and pervasive analysis of “ ‘subversive’ ” films. Moffitt’s criteria echoed Randian fears of critiques aimed at the rich and wealthy. For example, Moffitt assailed Boomerang! (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1947) for its portrayal of a corrupt banker, Two Years before the Mast (Paramount, 1946) for its presentation of “money-mad industrialists,” and The Little Foxes (RKO, 1941), which was based on the Lillian Hellman play, for its “unrelieved attack on the Southern industrialists.” Moffitt singled out three war pictures set in Europe—Dragon Seed (MGM, 1944), Edge of Darkness (Warner Bros., 1943), and This Land Is Mine (RKO, 1943)—for “serv[ing] the party line by emphasizing that the property owner or the managerial class were invariably the Quislings, the only people who sold out to the Nazis.” Moffitt was further dismayed by one film, Undercurrent (MGM, 1946), in which an American industrialist profits by murdering a German refugee. Most important, however, Moffitt feared films that managed to weave a critique of capitalists into a broader narrative, especially when the result was excellent entertainment. Moffitt fretted over The Best Years of Our Lives (RKO, 1946), not simply because he viewed it as a misguided representation of the returning GI’s victimization by the

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free enterprise system, but also because of the excellence of the film itself. Moffitt found Best Years to be a moving, human story and as such all the more dangerous and effective as propaganda. Likewise, he considered The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Paramount, 1946) excellent entertainment corrupted by its suggestion of elite control of the justice system. Furthermore, despite praising the “very sympathetic and beautiful performance by J. Carol Nash, an actor who is extremely antagonistic to Communism,” in Irving Pichels’s A Medal for Benny (Paramount, 1945), Moffitt registered his dismay over this film for presenting “the business men of a small community willing to crucify anybody for the purpose of selling a few hot dogs.” Wealth, success, the profit motive . . . criticism of these concepts equaled Communist propaganda according to Jack Moffitt.27 Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas expressed his gratitude to Moffitt for his testimony. “To the best of my recollection,” said Thomas, who had been with the committee since its inception in 1938, “I know of no witness who has ever come before the committee on anything that has given a better description and a better statement than you have.” Indeed, HUAC readily adopted the standards for identifying subversive films spelled out by Moffitt and his MPA associates. Chief investigator Stripling was convinced by Moffitt’s testimony that “a significant number” of Hollywood films advanced “the party line by degrading American institutions.” Indicating HUAC’s real concern over motion picture content, Stripling added, “I have seen every one of the pictures with the exception of one which Mr. Moffitt has mentioned, and I was quite aware myself at the time that they did contain propaganda.” Furthermore, during the testimony of MPA leader James K. McGuinness, J. Parnell Thomas, believing himself a spokesman for public opinion, expressed frustration over perceived instances of propaganda in Hollywood films: I will tell you what the people object to in all of them, and we hear a lot of it in Congress and particularly in the mail that comes to the Committee on Un-American Activities. We object to the lines, or at least they object to the lines that tear down the American way of life, tear down the businessman, the capitalist, the member of a governing body, the school system, the civic organizations, and almost everything that is in the American way of life and has made this country great, and those are the things we keep seeing all of the time, not only whole pictures, but lines, and those are the things that are beginning to make the public rebel. HUAC and the MPA were in accord; systemic criticisms in film, particularly ones that challenged those at the top of the social hierarchy, were nothing less than “un-American.”28

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Who was to blame? Stripling, believing that the writers were the “principle vehicle or medium for injecting Communism into motion pictures,” nevertheless feared that the problem ran deeper. “What do you think the answer is,” he asked Lela Rogers, leadingly, “when you have top executives who will continue to employ these people and give them an opportunity to plant their poison . . . in the films? Shouldn’t the finger be pointed right at the top just as much as to the Communist writers?” Indeed, Rogers and her cohort believed the producers were very much to blame. McGuinness, Moffitt, Howard Emmett Rogers, and Adolphe Menjou all struck the same chord: Hollywood’s executives were, as a class, irresponsible, naïve, unaware, and “politically immature.” Any solution to the problem of Communist propaganda would have to begin with overcoming the producers’ apathy.29 In fact there was reason to hope that the producers could be won over. According to McGuinness and Moffitt, both Paramount and Warner Bros. offered shining examples of studio vigilance on the Communist question. Two men in particular deserved praise, for as Moffitt put it, Paramount executive Henry Ginsberg “is well alive to this issue,” while “Jack Warner is watching his scripts very closely to keep Communist ideology out of them, and I am also sure that he favors non-Communist writers.”30 Such high praise was not without a cost; both Warner and Ginsberg were soon called before HUAC’s subcommittee. HUAC first questioned Henry Ginsberg, executive producer and general manager of Paramount Pictures. Ginsberg professed his anti-Communist views and indicated his general support for HUAC’s concerns. He reasoned that ardent Communists would ineluctably be fired from studio positions since, by “following other ideologies not consistent with democratic principles, it is natural to assume they are being distracted from their work and cannot give a day’s work and cannot work there.” Ginsberg also mentioned his cooperation with the FBI during its wartime investigation of the screenwriters. Yet Ginsberg also challenged the committee on several of its premises. Not only was he cagey in shifting the conversation away from one of Paramount’s films to The Best Years of Our Lives, which was produced by Samuel Goldwyn for RKO, but he also disagreed that Best Years contained Communist propaganda. Whereas Stripling insisted that Best Years “made a pretty bad stinker out of the banker,” Ginsberg, admitting that the scene in question “may be construed that way,” nevertheless retorted that the committee “might be reaching a little bit too far.” Stripling, refusing to back down, countered, “everybody concedes this propaganda is very subtle. It is not something that hits you in the face.” For Ginsberg, however, the filmmakers’ intent mattered most, and Best Years remained “one of the finest contributions” to hit the silver screen.31 While the hearing remained cordial and cooperative, Ginsberg continued to dispute HUAC’s understanding of the Communist problem in Hollywood

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as well as its prescriptions. Foreshadowing future policy, Stripling pressed the notion that the “payroll route” would be “the easiest and quickest way to eliminate any Communist influence in the motion picture industry.” Ginsberg, however, refused to endorse what would amount to a blacklist and called instead for a conference between HUAC representatives and those from the motion picture industry in order to study the problem better, thus avoiding “a witch hunt.” Indeed, Ginsberg resisted the notion that Hollywood had been infiltrated by Communists; he insisted instead that “a rotten apple among a thousand may look like a thousand rotten apples.” And even the few bad apples could be redeemed by working in Hollywood, for “while they are broke they are Communists, but give them $10,000 and they become capitalists.” Ginsberg, therefore, endorsed antiCommunism but maintained a high level of confidence in regard to his industry’s ability to withstand any attempts at Communist infiltration. Stripling remained unmoved. “Here is how it seems to me,” he threatened this Paramount executive. “If the motion picture industry does not make an effort itself to see that Communist propaganda films are not produced then you are going to bring down upon you the wrath of the American people.” Stripling warned of mass picketing and public booing in theaters. Gauging the national mood, the HUAC chief investigator exclaimed, “I can very well see as this pendulum swings away to the right that people will become aroused and if they have these kind of pictures in the moving picture theatre and two or three people get up and holler, ‘This is a Communist film,’ that everybody identified with the film is going to suffer.” The message could not have been clearer: clean house or suffer the consequences.32 The committee found a much more agreeable Hollywood executive in Jack Warner, vice president in charge of production at Warner Bros. Warner, according to his testimony, had already implemented the “payroll route” strategy advocated by HUAC when he fired writers whom he and Warner Bros. security chief Blaney F. Matthews considered subversive. This group included Alvah Bessie, Guy Endore, Julius and Philip Epstein, Sheridan Gibney, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner Jr., Emmet Lavery, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, Irwin Shaw, Dalton Trumbo, and John Wexley. Yet Warner complained that his vigilance was to no avail, for despite his protests, many of these men were rehired by other studios, a reality the Warner Bros. head considered “exceedingly unhealthy.” Chairman Thomas applauded Warner for doing “a splendid job” but fretted that other producers only followed “the dollar sign.” Not only did Warner clean house, but he claimed to be personally on guard against Communist propaganda, though he admitted that even being alert could not prevent Communist “innuendos and double meanings” from slipping into the scripts. Thus Warner appeared far more supportive of an industry “purge” of

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Communists and fellow travelers, though, unlike the committee, he had misgivings about labeling his employment practices as such.33 Through these closed-session hearings, Stripling indicated that the HUAC subcommittee had discovered who was ultimately responsible for the problem of Communist propaganda in Hollywood: “primarily it rests with the executive heads of the motion picture industry.” According to the MPA’s friendly witnesses, as a class the producers were blind to the red menace. Even Paramount executive Henry Ginsberg, given high marks for his anti-Communism by McGuinness and Moffitt, did not seem sufficiently worried and resisted the committee’s prescription for a “payroll route” strategy. Jack Warner proved more receptive to HUAC’s recommendations, but by his own testimony other Hollywood producers lacked his concern. Yet the committee believed that the current public mood favored its mission. As evidence, Thomas and Stripling repeatedly pointed to the public boycotts of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux in Ohio and the troubles Paul Robeson faced in trying to book concert halls in Indiana and New York. The political tide was turning, so these HUAC members believed, and it favored their program. Further public exposure of the Communist problem in Hollywood would only incite the public more. The producers, should they remain recalcitrant, would be hit where it mattered most: the bottom line.34 In one sense HUAC wished to restore the entertainment function of Hollywood. According to Jack Moffitt, Communist propagandists had been waging a battle to make the cinema a “forum for reform” by favoring social problem films “attacking American institutions, showing up the worst side of it.” Committee member John McDowell agreed and repeatedly advised “that pictures ought to stay in the pure field of entertainment.” Yet as much as these cold warriors cherished preserving the screen’s entertainment function, the appeal of “ ‘art as a weapon’ ” could not be resisted. As McGuinness testified, great dramatic potential existed in anti-Communist morality plays such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Victor A. Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom. Indeed, Hollywood’s propaganda potential proved too alluring even for those who pretended to advocate that the industry stick to entertainment. Stripling bemoaned that Hollywood, despite being “one of the biggest molders of public opinion,” had to date “made no anti-Communist films of any note.” Entertainment alone would not suffice. HUAC had more ambitious plans.35 At least one producer seemed willing to oblige. Jack Warner, eager to erase the public memory of Mission to Moscow, announced to the committee and the press his studio’s plans for an anti-Communist feature tentatively titled “Up until Now.” His company’s press statement affirmed that “backslid Americans, as well as outside enemies of our free institutions, will be exposed in this story of a Boston family. Here at Warner Brothers we have no room for backslid Americans and

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wishy-washy concepts of Americanism.” The film was to star Claude Rains as the troubled father of a wayward son, played by Ronald Reagan, who would be lured into the Communist Party. Warner, however, dropped the project later in the year, believing that the public had had enough of Hollywood politics in the wake of HUAC’s fall hearings. Nevertheless, it would not be long before Hollywood fulfilled the committee’s call for anti-Communist movies.36 HUAC concluded its closed session hearings in Los Angeles convinced that Communist propaganda in Hollywood threatened the nation. The problem was dire, but the committee held the confident view that increasingly the public was on its side. HUAC was fully aware of its power. Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas boastingly recalled the Dies committee’s victory over Hallie Flanagan’s New Deal–supported Federal Theatre Project: “We probably had more to do with putting the Federal Theatre Project out of business than any other committee or all the other committees of Congress or in the United States.”37 Hollywood, however, was a bigger beast. In order to assure victory, HUAC would need a strong ally. The committee soon determined that it would need the support of the FBI. But would the bureau come to its assistance?

A Difficult Alliance On a cold and cloudy afternoon in Washington, D.C., FBI director J. Edgar Hoover appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify on the red menace. It was March 26, 1947. Just two weeks earlier, President Harry Truman had pronounced his now-famous doctrine of containment, positing a world in which the forces of freedom were threatened by the forces of tyranny. The Truman Doctrine insisted that the spread of totalitarian regimes abroad threatened American security. Truman’s foreign policy initiative soon had a domestic counterpart when the president’s Executive Order 9835 created a new loyalty-security program for government employees. Not to be outdone, HUAC initiated hearings to consider outlawing the Communist Party. Hoover, their star witness, realized that the real goal of the sessions was “spotlighting and focusing public attention upon Communism.”38 To this purpose, Hoover was glad to oblige. He characterized the Communist Party as a clandestine organization on a mission to destroy the American government by force. True, the party’s numbers were small, but the threat was still immense, for the party’s allies, the so-called fellow travelers, were plenty. Moreover, the Communists themselves were tightly organized, highly motivated, and under “iron-clad discipline.” According to Hoover, the lessons of history indicated the potential power of Communists, even in small numbers: “In 1917 when the Communists overthrew

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FIGURE 4. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover appearing before HUAC on March 26, 1947. Hoover used the occasion to warn about the dangers of Communist propaganda. Photofest.

the Russian government there was one Communist for every 2,277 persons in Russia. In the United States today there is one Communist for every 1,814 persons in the country.” The small size of the party, therefore, masked its potential impact. To Hoover, the United States already lived under the peril of revolution.

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Only an enlightened public could thwart the red menace. “The best antidote to Communism,” professed the director, “is vigorous, intelligent, old-fashioned Americanism with eternal vigilance.” To this end Hoover depicted HUAC as a great medium for educating the public and exposing the extent of Communist treachery. Hoover outlined the respective functions of his bureau and the UnAmerican Activities Committee within the anti-Communist network: “I have always felt that the greatest contribution this Committee could make is the public disclosure of the forces that menace America—Communist and Fascist.” The FBI, so Hoover maintained, had an entirely different function. Its duty was “to get the facts” in order to investigate violations of federal law and espionage or sabotage threats. Hoover averred that secrecy necessarily enshrined FBI business, for, “in any intelligence operation, security of information is of primary concern.” Hoover’s depiction of a stark division of labor, with HUAC’s function being public exposure and the FBI’s being intelligence gathering, obscured the central fact that his bureau secretly disseminated its intelligence to other antiCommunists and that HUAC itself was in the process of becoming the key outlet for such promulgation. Hoover’s characterization of the bureau as an apolitical, disinterested, fact-finding agency masked its behind-the-scenes activities.39 Yet FBI-HUAC relations had not always been so publicly cordial or so secretly intertwined. Indeed, before 1947 a great deal of enmity existed between the two bodies. When the committee began in 1938, its chairman, Martin Dies, casually expected the FBI to serve at his beckoning. An irritated Hoover obliged in clearing Dies committee investigators, even recommending, through columnist George Sokolsky, the services of J. B. Matthews as chief investigator. Dies’ condescension, as well as his committee’s staunch anti–New Deal stance (it considered “New Dealism” one of the “four horsemen of autocracy”), distanced Hoover, who, though clearly conservative, was nevertheless dependent on the Roosevelt administration’s patronage. Though Hoover sympathized with his intentions, the director found the chairman’s style appalling. An open feud between the two erupted in 1940 when Dies accused the FBI of assisting the administration in minimizing the committee’s findings, labeling the G-men as “a bunch of boy scouts.” At one point Hoover even began to suspect that the Dies committee was itself a Communist front out to demolish his FBI. Such passions eventually cooled, but Hoover remained convinced that the committee was in the hands of amateurs.40 Through the efforts of Congressman Rankin, the Dies committee became a standing committee in 1945. Though Rankin never served as HUAC’s chairman, the Mississippi Democrat was perceived to be its guiding force during this period. Yet the passing of the reins from Dies to Rankin did not improve HUAC’s standing vis-à-vis the FBI. By the summer, rumors spread that Rankin was set

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to launch an attack on Hollywood, but even though the bureau considered the motion picture industry a key threat and had yet to fix on a policy solution, FBI leaders refused to consider cooperating with HUAC. Bureau officials instructed the Los Angeles office “to be very careful to keep completely out of any investigation. The committee is not, of course, to make use of our offices and, likewise, we are not to furnish them any information.” Nevertheless, nervous Hollywood executives feared that the FBI would assist the Rankin investigation. One Hays Office representative personally met with Hoover on the matter; the director assured him that the bureau would not collaborate with HUAC. Yet Hoover did not want to alleviate the pressure on Hollywood. When producer Walter Wanger asked that the FBI refute Rankin’s charges, Hoover told his officials to cordially reply that the FBI could not get involved with congressional affairs. Furthermore, Hoover instructed that a recent article depicting Hollywood as a hotbed of Communist activity “should be casually mentioned” to the producer.41 Hence, the bureau continued to hold the committee at a distance despite agreeing with its goals. Soon HUAC furnished the FBI with a copy of its own extensive secret report on the motion picture industry. Bureau officials were not impressed. D. Milton Ladd, assistant director of the bureau’s Security Division, pointed out several discrepancies in the HUAC report. Ladd informed Hoover that the committee believed Herbert Biberman to be the leading Communist in Hollywood, despite Biberman’s antiwar activity during the Nazi-Soviet pact era costing him such standing, and despite John Howard Lawson having replaced Biberman as the party’s number one man in tinsel town. Although Ladd praised the report for cleverly tracing the twists and turns that writers such as Dalton Trumbo made in following the ever-changing party line, he drew attention to the lack of factual evidence, such as party membership numbers. Even the quality of the prose was not up to par, for Ladd criticized the committee’s writers for going off on tangents. Of the HUAC secret report Ladd concluded, There is little factual data appearing therein, and blanket statements are made without supporting evidence that certain persons and organizations are Communists. It is observed that the Bureau’s records are by far more replete with factual data concerning Communists and their infiltration tactics in the movie industry. The report leaves the impression that it is setting forth the opinions of others and it could be readily attacked by Communist or Pro-Communist elements because of generalities and because of the lack of factual data. Thus the committee’s apparent amateurism threatened to damage the antiCommunist cause in Hollywood.42

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FBI officials endeavored to solve the problem by seizing control of the antiCommunist network through a directed public information campaign. In February 1946, at an FBI executives’ conference, D. Milton Ladd proposed an extensive program to disseminate “educational materials” through “available channels.” According to historian Kenneth O’Reilly, Ladd’s ambitious goal envisioned “nurturing an anticommunist consensus.” Greeted enthusiastically by Hoover and other bureau executives, Ladd’s propaganda initiative marked an intensification of previous bureau activities rather than an innovation of new policy. Previous attempts by the FBI to shape public opinion had been sporadic and informal; now the G-men would attempt a more massive undertaking, aiming to inculcate anti-Communist values into a vigilant citizenry. Ghostwriters within the FBI’s Crime Records Division made J. Edgar Hoover “one of the nation’s most prolific authors” of the postwar era. From February 1946 to Hoover’s death in May 1972, the director put his stamp on numerous books, articles, pamphlets, and speeches, the vast majority dealing with the topic of Communism.43 The American Legion served as a special ally, and Hoover’s speech before the Legion’s annual convention in 1946 highlighted the threat of Communism. Hoover preached that the Communists had “made their deepest inroads upon our national life” during the war years and warned that Communist propaganda emanated from America’s cultural institutions, including “the screen.”44 Indeed, throughout 1946 Hoover personally identified Communist propaganda in motion pictures as a dire threat and demanded that his agents issue monthly reports of “all motion pictures of a propaganda nature.”45 But the FBI would not risk the embarrassment of openly taking on the film industry on the question of propaganda. Certain of the threat, the bureau’s willingness to expose Hollywood contributed to its decision to improve relations with HUAC and use that body to covertly disseminate its intelligence. Such activity constituted the secret side of Ladd’s public education campaign, and while the bureau continued to spread its data through other leading anti-Communist groups, the House Un-American Activities Committee would be its primary outlet. However, HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas took the initiative in ending the hostilities between the committee and the bureau by inviting Hoover to testify during its hearings in March 1947.46 After positing a harmonious division of labor between the two major arms of the anti-Communist machinery, the FBI and HUAC, and haranguing listeners on the red peril, J. Edgar Hoover dwelled on the hazards of Communist propaganda during his appearance before the committee. Hoover insisted that the objective of such propaganda “is to develop discontent and hasten the day when the Communists can gather sufficient support and following to overthrow the American way of life.” The director charged that this agitprop emanated from Communist

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letter-writing campaigns, front organizations, and the popular media, including radio and motion pictures. Hoover painted an image of Hollywood as ripe for Communist treachery. “Some producers and studio heads realize the possibility that the entire industry faces serious embarrassment because it could become a springboard for Communist activities,” Hoover acknowledged. But these forces were not enough to challenge the insidious Communist agitators and their liberal dupes, for “Communist activity in Hollywood is effective and is furthered by Communists and sympathizers using the prestige of prominent persons to serve, often unwittingly, the Communist cause.” And, to Hoover, this lack of awareness was certainly dangerous because of the film industry’s great potential as a medium for propaganda, and especially because of the Communists’ success at disseminating their message in such a subtle fashion: “The Party is content and highly pleased if it is possible to have inserted in a picture a line, a scene, a sequence, conveying the Communist lesson and more particularly, if they can keep out anti-Communist lessons.” Hoover believed that in Hollywood, as with the nation at large, the solution depended on overcoming public ignorance and apathy; only then could Americans establish a “quarantine” of the “epidemic” of Communism “to keep it from infecting the nation.”47 Suggestive of the strong association of the motion picture industry with the problem of Communism, HUAC called Eric Johnston, successor to Will Hays as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, to testify the day after Hoover. Johnston, the former U.S. Chamber of Commerce president, personified a new breed of anti-Communist eager to transform anti-Communism from negative fear-mongering into a positive affirmation “of a new Americanism rooted in big business, class consensus, and consumer democracy,” according to scholar Lary May. Johnston believed that America’s potential to provide a “utopia of production” could overcome the “nightmare of class rhetoric” and create the perfect capitalist society. Sensitive to charges of subversion in Hollywood films, in 1946 Johnston informed screenwriters: “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads, we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as villain.”48 These words attested to the MPA’s interpretive influence among Hollywood’s leaders. Nevertheless, Eric Johnston still frightened the countersubversives in the FBI and the Motion Picture Alliance. Johnston’s testimony suggests the reason why. Speaking before HUAC, Johnston offered a direct rebuttal to Hoover’s charges of Communist infiltration in the industry and subversion of the screen. Johnston acknowledged Communist attempts to seize the screen, but he insisted that such efforts met with “an overwhelming defeat.” According to the MPAA president, Hollywood’s products differed substantially from the nation’s other media sources, such as radio or the

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news press; for, unlike these, American films reached audiences outside national borders., Hollywood’s output was welcomed everywhere abroad, except in Communist countries, where it was banned. Therefore did Johnston defend his industry’s product by pointing out that “American films are the target for bitter, organized attack by Communists all over the world. The Communists hate and fear American motion pictures. It is their No. 1 hate.” How, Johnston reasoned, could these films be Communist propaganda when Communists criticized them for being reactionary? Indeed, Johnston endeavored to create a more positive image of his industry by focusing on its patriotic contributions. For example, he pointed out Hollywood’s collaboration with the State Department in sending films to “the occupied countries of Austria, Germany, and Japan to assist in the reorientation of these former enemy peoples.”49 Yet to his critics on the right, Johnston’s defense of Hollywood amounted to a whitewash. So alleged Jack Moffitt in a secret conversation with Richard Hood, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office. Moffitt, soon to be the featured film analyst during HUAC’s upcoming executive session hearings that spring, was enraged that Johnston had denied that “red propaganda” soiled the screen. He believed that HUAC could only succeed by exposing the full extent of subversive film content. FBI officials agreed and began limited cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee in May by preparing dossiers on a few Hollywood radicals, including Bertolt Brecht and Edward Dmytryk. Yet bureau officials knew that they would need to do more if they were to thwart the red menace in Hollywood. Anti-Communism was a much stronger force in 1947 than it had seemed the previous year when the bureau initiated its public education campaign. But victory could not be claimed on all fronts. “Despite the attitude of the press and other informational processes now antagonistic to Communism on a national scale,” one FBI report concluded, “Hollywood and the film industry still remain the key spots of contamination by this ideology.” Hollywood, therefore, remained the major battleground in the domestic cold war.50 The time was ripe for action. In June, J. Edgar Hoover and J. Parnell Thomas met face to face to devise a plan for stronger collaboration. The HUAC chairman expressed his gratitude for the limited assistance the FBI had thus far extended his committee, but he implored Hoover to provide more. Thomas acknowledged that the bureau files were confidential, but he requested access nonetheless. He understood, however, that the FBI’s key concern was avoiding embarrassment. As Hoover noted, Thomas “stated he would greatly appreciate it if entirely off the record and with absolute assurance that it would not pass beyond him as Chairman of the Committee, I could arrange for leads and information of value to the Committee to be furnished to the Committee.” Thomas’s assurance that the FBI’s assistance would remain confidential convinced Hoover to increase support

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to HUAC. To maintain the utmost secrecy, all HUAC requests were to go through Assistant Director Louis B. Nichols, the FBI’s congressional liaison, as opposed to the Los Angeles office. Hoover, now “most desirous of being as helpful to this Committee as I can,” immediately directed his officials to begin scrutinizing bureau files to determine which information could best assist HUAC’s investigation. If Hoover remained at all skeptical of the Un-American Activities Committee, his desire to finally strike at Hollywood overcame such qualms: “I do think that it is long overdue for the Communist infiltration in Hollywood to be exposed, and as there is no medium at the present time through which this bureau can bring that about on its own motion I think it is entirely proper and desirable that we assist the Committee of Congress that is intent upon bringing to light the true facts in the situation.” Ultimately, therefore, Hoover’s desire to fight the Cold War in Hollywood from behind the scenes forced him to accept the committee’s public lead in this struggle.51 Precisely what did HUAC need from the FBI? Thomas told Hoover “that one of the first persons they wanted to inquire about would be Charles Chaplin.” Hoover must have sympathized, for his FBI had been investigating the comedian for several years and would ultimately play a leading role in driving “the tramp” out of the country. Yet the FBI had never been able to establish any proof that Chaplin had been a Communist Party member; while it was quite willing to secretly disseminate information that could be used by columnists such as Hedda Hopper to smear Chaplin’s public image, the bureau did not want to expose HUAC to being criticized for recklessness.52 In short, while the investigation of Hollywood was motivated by ideological claims of the existence of Communist propaganda, it would be substantiated by more concrete evidence. And bureau files abounded with such data. In addition to having at least one confidential informant within the Los Angeles Communist Party, the FBI had collected the party’s membership records through repeated “black bag jobs”—bureau code for break-ins and covert surveillance operations—of the party’s northwestern, or “cultural,” section. On several occasions agents photographed party records after having broken into automobiles and residences of various party record keepers. In addition to obtaining these records, Los Angeles G-men utilized “certain technical informants and physical surveillance” in order to determine which Hollywood personalities were in the party. One bureau calculation estimated that roughly six hundred Communists were employed in the motion picture industry; from break-ins conducted during 1944 and 1945, the FBI had a verified list of 287 members.53 Hence, only the FBI could legitimize HUAC’s claims of Communist infiltration in Hollywood. Nevertheless, when Thomas met with Hoover, he requested more than just information. The HUAC chairman claimed that his investigators

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suffered great pressure from the film industry to cease their work. After his dazzling testimony in May, the committee wanted Jack Moffitt to play a leading role in its investigation, but Moffitt was forced to back off. Likewise, former Dies investigator James Steedman had been set to resume work on the Hollywood investigation but “was now threatened with a nervous breakdown and was unable to assume the duties anticipated.” Thomas and Stripling were well aware that their probe needed to be handled with the utmost care. According to Stripling, one Dies committee investigator in Hollywood had bungled the operation when, “while on board the train back to Washington, D.C., he got drunk and exposed the entire investigation.” In fact Stripling believed that Dies himself had compromised the inquiry, claiming that “the interests in Hollywood had gotten to Dies.” Hoover and Thomas therefore arranged for a former FBI agent, H. Allen Smith, to assist Thomas and Stripling in their investigation. Smith and his associate, A. B. Leckie, were soon hired by the committee to line up witnesses, both friendly and unfriendly, for the fall hearings. The FBI considered Smith the right man for the job. He had served the bureau from 1935 to 1942, leaving for a position with Lockheed. Smith still considered the FBI his first loyalty. Hoover had agreed to provide HUAC with information, but FBI data would only change hands at the highest levels. Smith would be greeted by FBI agents in Los Angeles, where he could pass information to the bureau through SAC Hood, but the Los Angeles office was strictly forbidden from giving any evidence to Smith. Smith soon proved his loyalties when tensions between the FBI and HUAC reerupted.54 Two factors created problems for the FBI-HUAC relationship. First, despite Thomas’s brownnosing before Hoover, the committee chairman soon evinced some of the same condescending attitudes that had made the FBI so leery of Dies. In August, the committee put in a request for intelligence on forty film personalities and expected immediate results. According to D. Milton Ladd, the committee did not appreciate that “the proper handling of the requests will require the examination of literally thousands of files before we can prepare the desired memoranda.” Ladd’s statement is remarkable, not merely because it is suggestive of the bureau’s nascent frustration with HUAC, but especially because it reveals both the staggering extent of the FBI’s investigation of Hollywood thus far as well as its determination to assemble an amazingly thorough case for the committee. In order to complete the job the bureau transferred several supervisors from working on profiles of suspected Communist front groups, a task assigned by the Attorney General. These officials now labored to prepare “blind memoranda” (i.e., without any indication that the intelligence derived from the FBI) setting out the background, list of personal associations and group affiliations,

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and party membership records of each Hollywood suspect. This process was ultimately completed in mid-September (too late for the hearings to begin in late September as originally planned). Before it was passed to HUAC, eight ranking FBI officials vetted this intelligence, including Hoover himself.55 Bureau officials, however, did not think that the committee appreciated the extent of their labor. HUAC continued to press for the goods when J. Parnell Thomas called Nichols, his designated contact in the bureau, to make further demands. According to Nichols, Thomas had been vacationing, “enjoying the breeze” in Connecticut, while the FBI labored long hours amid the swampy D.C. summer to comply with his request. Tempers rose. Nichols relayed what happened next: “He [Thomas] then said he was not an easy man to cross and that he didn’t want to have to put pressure on us. I told him to keep his pants on and keep his feet on the ground. He said I was using pretty strong language. I told him not half as strong as he had been using and to come down off his high horse in a hurry.” Eventually the two calmed down and pledged to maintain their alliance. But personal friction was only one of the factors dividing HUAC and the FBI.56 Soon HUAC investigator and former FBI agent, H. Allen Smith, was warning the bureau that Thomas and Stripling were perhaps concerned most with making headlines. Discord now set in between Smith and Stripling, and the HUAC chief investigator complained that the upstart former G-man was overstepping his bounds in criticizing HUAC’s aggressive strategy against the industry. Smith charged that Thomas and Stripling “are still more concerned with having ‘big named’ people appear than with developing some real information of value.” Charlie Chaplin, for instance, still headed the list of HUAC’s preferred targets. Once again, it appeared that the committee was reverting to its “irresponsible” anti-Communism, thereby upsetting the FBI, which labored hard to maintain its professional image.57 One the eve of the Hollywood hearings, these fissures threatened the grand anti-Communist alliance. FBI officials envisioned the House Un-American Activities Committee as a key player in their program to shape an anti-Communist consensus, with Hollywood serving as a central battleground. But HUAC was starting to seem all too reminiscent of the old Dies committee. With the autumn trials fast approaching, Hoover bemoaned, “Well it begins to look as if this investigation is going to be another ‘dud.’ ”58

5 THE 1947 HUAC TRIALS

I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. —Ronald Reagan, speaking before HUAC, October 1947

The show began on Monday, October 20, 1947. Microphones and loudspeakers amplified the air, floodlights swung from the majestic chandeliers, and lawmen steered the crowd of hundreds eager to get a glimpse of Gary Cooper or Robert Montgomery. Such was the atmosphere as the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities ushered in its most publicized investigation to date with its hearings on Communist infiltration in Hollywood. “It has been launched with that ineffable touch of showmanship which the naïve Easterner associates with a Hollywood premiere,” the New York Times reported, “lacking only in orchids, evening dress and searchlights crisscrossing the evening sky.” HUAC reserved the largest available auditorium in D.C. for the event—the caucus room in the Old House Office Building—and welcomed coverage from the national press and major broadcasting networks. The committee hoped for a spectacle.1 Chairman J. Parnell Thomas opened the hearings by recognizing the enormity of his committee’s undertaking. Hollywood represented one of the nation’s largest industries, its output consumed by eighty-five million Americans each week. This fact, so Thomas charged, necessitated HUAC’s investigation, for the movies held the power to shape American thought and culture. “With such vast influence over the lives of American citizens as the motion-picture industry exerts,” Thomas pleaded, “it is not unnatural—in fact it is very logical—that subversive and undemocratic forces should attempt to use this medium for un-American purposes.” Thomas claimed that the soured relations with the Soviet Union created an international system fraught with peril. Communists in the United States had long practiced their “boring from within” strategy, but the new Cold 131

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War made their endeavors all the more hazardous to national security. Thomas asserted that Soviet plans for world domination were made clear by the reopening of the Communist International. Communists in Hollywood, therefore, represented both an internal and external threat to the United States, the “chief target in what we might call the Soviet Union’s ideological war” against the West. No longer merely a domestic concern, the threat of Communism in Hollywood now struck a more dire chord, and HUAC’s investigation marked an opening salvo in the cultural cold war.2

Eleven Days in October The now-infamous hearings reached their climax during the second week of testimony when a frustrated committee, led by its gavel-pounding chairman, engaged in shouting matches with confrontational witnesses, soon dubbed the Hollywood Ten.3 The first of these so-called unfriendly witnesses was John Howard Lawson. Lawson’s testimony established the pattern followed by the other nine. Like most of his colleagues, Lawson was denied the opportunity to read a prepared statement. Refusing on First Amendment grounds to answer committee questions, he even challenged HUAC’s inquiries regarding his position in the Screen Writers Guild or which films he had written. Chief investigator Robert Stripling then moved on to the “$64 question”: MR. STRIPLING : Mr. Lawson, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States? MR. LAWSON: In framing my answer to that question I must emphasize the points that I have raised before. The question of communism is in no way related to this inquiry, which is an attempt to get control of the screen and to invade the basic rights of American citizens in all fields. MR. [John] MCDOWELL: Now I must object— MR. STRIPLING : Mr. Chairman— (The chairman pounding gavel.) MR. LAWSON (continuing): Which has been historically denied to any committee of this sort, to invade the rights and privileges and immunity of American citizens, whether they be Protestant, Methodist, Jewish, or Catholic, whether they be Republicans or Democrats or anything else. THE CHAIRMAN (pounding gavel): Mr. Lawson just quiet down again. Mr. Lawson, the most pertinent question that we can ask is whether

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or not you have ever been a member of the Communist Party. Now, do you care to answer that question? MR. LAWSON: You are using the old technique, which was used in Hitler Germany in order to create a scare here— THE CHAIRMAN (pounding gavel): Oh—4 Such showdowns continued with each subsequent unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., and Lester Cole. Because of the intelligence it had received from the FBI, the committee did not need the witnesses to answer the $64 question. After each of the ten had been removed from the witness chair, HUAC investigators read into the record their Communist Party registration numbers followed by the extensive memoranda that had been secretly disseminated to the committee by the FBI. Forcing the showdown, however, made for good drama, though at times the quick-witted writers proved more adept than the politicians. Thomas belittled Lardner by insisting, “It is a very simple question. Anybody would be proud to answer it— any real American would be proud to answer the question, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party’—any real American.” Lardner’s reply, however, stole the show: “I could answer it, but I would hate myself in the morning.” Like the other “unfriendlies,” Lardner hoped to steal the stage from HUAC and expose the committee as a reactionary force seeking to rein in American freedoms. This tactic backfired, however, since the committee removed the hostile witnesses from the stand, thereby robbing them of the platform to denounce the proceedings. Moreover, the confrontational attitude adopted by the Hollywood Ten distanced them from some sympathetic liberals such as producer Dore Schary, who wished they would have been more “dignified” in their resistance. As Schary lamented, “I felt the Committee acted with absolute banality . . . but the Ten acted stupidly—they were trying by their hysterical acting to get the Committee to admit error.”5 Schary’s own HUAC testimony, along with that of several others, calls into question the standard interpretation of dividing witnesses into “friendly” and “unfriendly” camps. Instead, there were two distinctly different types of cooperative witnesses. Some, including Schary, Eric Johnston, Ronald Reagan, and, to the committee’s surprise, Emmet Lavery, president of the Screen Writers Guild, pronounced their anti-Communist views and willingly testified, but they also challenged HUAC’s basic premise that Hollywood had been subverted by Reds. Hence these men cooperated with the committee, but unlike the members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, they did not collaborate with it.

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Those who cooperated with the committee while contesting its assumptions did so more out of concern for the industry’s public image than for the rights of Hollywood Communists. Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), complained before the committee that its investigation created the “damaging impression” in the public mind “that Hollywood is running over with Communists and communism.” Johnston and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, argued that Hollywood’s leaders were already vigilant in containing the red menace, and that as far as the motion picture industry was concerned, the Reds simply were not that menacing, for they were vastly outnumbered by the legions of patriotic men and women working in the film industry. In his polite and cordial testimony, Reagan confidently proclaimed that American “democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology.” Reagan expressed his disdain for Communism but warned against excesses: “I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment.” Neither Johnston nor Reagan could be counted as unfriendly witnesses, but in portraying the problem of Communism as relatively minor, both men undercut the committee’s rationale for investigating the motion picture industry.6 Moreover, Reagan and Johnston vehemently disputed the assertion, made by HUAC and its zealous allies in the Motion Picture Alliance, that the Reds had contaminated the screen with their propaganda. Reagan asserted, “I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.” Reagan allowed that Communists had tried to do so, but he insisted they had been thwarted nonetheless. Johnston was more aggressive in defending Hollywood’s films. He challenged the committee to make public its list of subversive films so that the accusation could be rebutted. Paul McNutt, the MPAA’s legal counsel, issued the same challenge in a public press conference. HUAC, of course, never did so, perhaps having learned a lesson from the 1941 war propaganda hearings: the industry would go to the mat to defend its product. Indeed, leading executives such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer endorsed the committee’s anti-Communist mission but stood firm in maintaining that their pictures remained free of any subversive messages. Instead, they endeavored to portray Hollywood films as patriotic Americana.7 Other so-called friendly witnesses challenged the committee even further. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the hearings, at least from the committee’s point of view, was the cooperative testimony of Emmet G. Lavery, president of the Screen Writers Guild. The FBI had prepared memoranda on forty film employees, Lavery among them. When querying Lavery, Stripling expected an “outburst” similar to the antics of the other unfriendly witnesses; instead Lavery denied any party

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FIGURE 5. Ronald Reagan testifying before HUAC on October 23, 1947. Reagan expressed his anti-Communist views but denied that the Communists had ever succeeded at inserting propaganda into Hollywood films. Photofest.

membership and openly spoke of his associations. Lavery testified that he had even met with Richard Hood, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, to offer the bureau access to the SWG’s records. Lavery’s willingness to cooperate, however, did not suggest that he shared the anti-Communist fears of subversion. Lavery admitted that his guild had “an extreme left” as well as “an extreme right,” but he insisted that its “liberal center” constituted the mass. When Stripling suggested that the guild’s small but organized group of Communists could do great harm, Lavery countered that such a view was alarmist: “I don’t know why you rate so highly the influence of Mr. Maltz, Mr. Lawson,

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Mr. Trumbo. They are able men. They are articulate men. And they are competent screen writers. But they are only a few of a membership of 900 some.” Furthermore, Lavery gainsaid HUAC’s assertion that the American people were not alert to the Communist menace and that the screen should perform this service. Lavery agreed with the committee’s opposition to Communism, but disputed its tactics. “I think that if we are to keep harping on the note of fear,” he argued, “it is like the old-fashioned revival or the old-fashioned mission, where you scare the devil out of the parishioners for a week, and after that they are rather accustomed to the notion of fear.” Such cooperation did not exactly advance HUAC’s mission.8 RKO producer Dore Schary was perhaps the most combative “friendly” witness. Schary not only denied that Communist propaganda had reached the screen, but he also suggested that no serious attempt had been made to do such a thing, at least so far as he could ascertain. He testified that RKO employees Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk, two of the Hollywood Ten, had never tried “to get anything subversive into the films I have worked on with them.” Concerned with preserving American political freedom, Schary maintained that he would not fire a Communist unless it was proven that he or she was “dedicated to the overthrow of the Government by force or violence, or by any illegal methods.” Thomas scolded Schary, likening such a policy to “the Rip Van Winkle opinion that has been permitting communism to grow throughout the world the way it has.” Schary, however, maintained his belief that domestic Communism did not endanger the nation.9 Thus the “friendly” testimony of Johnston, Reagan, Lavery, and Schary did little to advance the committee’s cause. These men all insisted that there were few Reds in Hollywood, that their influence did not exceed their numbers, and that the screen remained untainted by their ideology. However, the other group of “friendly” witnesses, consisting largely of members of the Motion Picture Alliance, provided HUAC with the testimony it sought. They were Hollywood’s real cold warriors. As during the spring closed-session hearings, Jack Moffitt served as a key witness. He claimed the Communists employed insidious methods to inject their propaganda onto the screen, whether through the subtle gestures of a red actor or the deceptive pen of the writer. The latter, according to Moffitt, was most successful in utilizing “the ‘drop of water’ technique, the 5 minutes of party-line technique, the gradual conditioning of American thought along the leftist line.” Yet Moffitt’s testimony here differed from his spring testimony in one crucial regard: Moffitt did not provide a sweeping analysis of actual films containing Communist propaganda. Nor, for that matter, did any subsequent witnesses.10 Why? The reasons were threefold. First of all, the blanket condemnation of Hollywood films was more difficult to refute. Johnston and McNutt had repeat-

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edly and to no avail challenged HUAC to name the films it considered subversive. To withhold specific charges frustrated the industry’s plan of defense. The testimony of Moffitt and others on general techniques employed by the Communists to inject their propaganda offered the tantalizing spectacle of red intrigue without venturing into the more vulnerable territory of cinematic interpretation. Second, and perhaps more important, HUAC and its allies must have learned a lesson after the disaster of Ayn Rand’s testimony on the opening day of the hearings.11 After sparring with Louis B. Mayer over the content of MGM’s 1944 film Song of Russia, HUAC brought in Rand to give expert testimony on the subversive content of that film. Because she was born in Russia and had worked in Hollywood as a writer, the committee considered her a “qualified reviewer.” Rand gave an in-depth reading of Song of Russia, noting the display of the hammerand-sickle flag “that made me sick,” and the seeming impossibility of the plot in which an American conductor romances a Russian peasant girl without the obstruction of Soviet secret police. Rand lamented that instead of portraying the horrors of Soviet collectivization of the farmland, the film’s depiction of a blissful peasantry created a false image of life outside the cities. You see the happy peasants. You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. You see a peasant at home with a close-up of food for which anyone there would have been murdered. In other words, Song of Russia was typical Hollywood entertainment. Ironically, however, the entertainment principle so cherished by Hollywood’s antiCommunists served here as the main source of propaganda, according to Rand.12 Rand’s iron-clad insistence that life in Russia was constantly wretched and desolate led to this most famous, and embarrassing, exchange: MR. MCDOWELL [R—PA]: You paint a very dismal picture of Russia. You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia any more? MISS RAND: Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no. MR. MCDOWELL: They don’t smile? MISS RAND : Not quite that way; no. If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don’t smile in approval of their system.13

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FIGURE 6. Ayn Rand appearing before HUAC on October 20, 1947. Rand’s description of why Song of Russia was subversive proved so embarrassing that HUAC thereafter did not seek out in-depth analysis of film content. Photofest.

Rand’s testimony offered up the sole in-depth analysis of film content during the course of the hearings. Repeat performances might have brought ridicule on the entire investigation. A final reason why the committee and its allies shied away from propaganda analysis may have been because they desired to wield a broader impact. They

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wished to target not merely the three pro-Russia wartime films but the more voluminous body of social problem films as well. Committee witness Oliver Carlson, a self-proclaimed expert on Communist propaganda techniques, expressed his concern over Hollywood’s “films of social conscience.” Carlson allowed that limited social criticism had its place in a democratic society, yet he maintained that systemic criticism served only to “break the spirit of the American people, to make them think the American way of life is not good, that all politicians are opportunists, that businessmen in general are corrupt, that labor leaders who do not follow the Communist line are venal and stupid, and agents of capitalism, as they call it.” Indeed, HUAC succeeded in creating a fearful climate in regards to the social problem film. Within a month of the hearings the New York Times reported “one important executive hazarded privately, the prevailing attitude in public opinion will stifle for several years hence the production of films containing any ‘social significance’ lest they be considered ‘red.’ ”14 The hearings were having the desired effect. Furthermore, by dealing with the subject of film propaganda in a vague manner, HUAC could, indeed did, threaten to hold in-depth hearings on this question at a future date. Thomas closed the hearings on October 30, vowing to resume them soon with a focus on film content. Such an event never took place, and HUAC did not return to its investigation of Hollywood until 1951, when it focused on propaganda far less than during these 1947 hearings. The threat of impending hearings, however, put pressure on the industry to squelch political filmmaking, with one exception: the committee repeatedly called for the production of anti-Communist films. Richard Nixon advised that producing such movies would not only perform a valuable service by communicating “the truth about totalitarian communism,” but it would also “be a really good business gamble from the standpoint of the industry,” since the American people endorsed anti-Communism. Hollywood soon obliged with a cycle of mainly B-films, including The Iron Curtain (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948), The Red Danube (MGM, 1949), The Red Menace (Republic Pictures, 1949), I Married a Communist (RKO, 1950), I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (Warner Bros., 1951), My Son John (Paramount, 1952), and Big Jim McLain (Warner Bros., 1952). These films failed with audiences and critics alike, but they still allowed the industry to claim it was satisfying HUAC’s demands.15 Less than a month after the conclusion of the hearings the Hollywood Ten were handed their fate when the House of Representatives decided, by an overwhelming vote, to issue them contempt citations for refusing to answer questions regarding their membership in the Communist Party. The very next day the leaders of the motion picture industry announced that the Ten would be discharged and, further, that Hollywood “will not knowingly employ a Communist or a

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member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” The announcement, known thereafter as the Waldorf Statement, marked the culmination of a two-day conference that gathered fifty of the industry’s top executives at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. These leaders included Eric Johnston; industry legal consultant and former Supreme Court Justice and Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes; Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck; Paramount president Barney Balaban; Columbia Pictures heads Jack and Harry Cohn; president of Twentieth Century–Fox Spyros Skouras, and independent producers Samuel Goldwyn and Walter Wanger. The blacklist had begun.16 Why, after resisting HUAC’s charges of Communist subversion, did the industry issue the Waldorf Statement? The producers were most concerned with deflecting smears against the films themselves, and the Waldorf Statement was coupled with a declaration that nothing “subversive or un-American” had reached the screen.17 Still, the producers feared that the negative publicity from the hearings would register at the box office. The industry hired George Gallup’s Audience Research, Inc. to take the public pulse. Gallup’s results were telling. The vast majority of the American public—80 percent—were aware of the congressional investigation, and half had followed it somewhat closely. People were split, however, in terms of their approval: 37 percent approved of HUAC’s handling of the investigation, 36 percent disapproved, and 27 percent had no opinion. Despite this split, 61 percent believed that there were some Communists employed in Hollywood, though only 10 percent believed that the Reds were there in large numbers. “Nevertheless,” as Gallup asserted, “10% represents a substantial segment of the public and warrants serious consideration.” Gallup concluded that the industry needed to take evasive action despite the relatively murky public sentiment. Gallup did not believe that the public desired political censorship of the movies, though he reported that there was enough general confusion over the issue to warrant concern. “A substantial segment of the public believes in moral censorship,” Gallup stated, “and there is no well-defined line between moral censorship and political censorship in the public’s mind.” Although Gallup concluded that the HUAC hearings “will have little immediate effect on the box office,” he nevertheless affirmed that the investigation threatened the bottom line, for it gave “a segment of the American public one more reason for staying away from the movies.” Timing was crucial. With recovery from World War II still underway, and with the emerging Cold War, Gallup determined that Hollywood’s “foreign situation” was shaky; hence it was “more imperative than ever to exploit more fully the domestic market.” Yet Gallup ascertained that those Americans most critical of Hollywood in the wake of the HUAC hearings—indeed, those most devoutly anti-Communist—were from

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the age group over thirty. It was precisely this group that “includes the greatest number of non-moviegoers and infrequent moviegoers. It is the group which offers the greatest opportunity for increasing domestic revenue.” Thus, the polls indicated that only a small group of Americans had been stirred to a frenzy over a fear of Communists in Hollywood. Nevertheless, such findings necessitated action; unlike politicians, the producers did not write off any segment of their constituency. The Waldorf Statement marked the beginning of the end for radical Hollywood.18

Hollywood Fights Back Hollywood Communists and their allies did not go down without a fight. The struggle against HUAC marked the last instance when Hollywood liberals joined their red counterparts in united political action. Most important, this coalition united not merely in the defense of the “unfriendly” individuals, but in the face of the perceived attack on the screen itself, particularly its ability to comment on social issues. In this sense, the defense of the Hollywood Ten might be seen as the last gasp of “Hollywood democratic modernism,” a label employed by historian Saverio Giovacchini to describe the widening of the modernist movement to include the elements of social realism and the embrace of a mass audience.19 Yet in the wake of the Maltz affair, the Popular Front that sustained this artistic paradigm was left fractured. The demise of the Popular Front, brought on in part by the Communists themselves, left a shallow base of support from nonCommunist allies.20 Nevertheless, Hollywood liberals were determined to resist HUAC even before the hearings were underway. In September, directors William Wyler and John Huston, along with writer Philip Dunne, launched the Committee for the First Amendment. The CFA’s founding meeting, held at the residence of Ira Gershwin, gathered many prominent stars as well as lesser lights. While the “unfriendly” witnesses engaged Bartley Crum, Ben Margolis, and Robert Kenny as legal counsel, the Committee for the First Amendment would come to their defense in the field of public relations through mass meetings, newspaper ads, radio programs, and a high-profile trip to Washington, D.C., to protest the hearings. Notably, the CFA declined membership to Communists. In part this was a strategic decision reached by Dunne, Wyler, and Huston in order to avoid red-baiting of the CFA. But this decision also suggested a strong measure of liberal distrust of Hollywood Communists who had proven to be unreliable over the years, most notably during the Nazi-Soviet pact era and in the aftermath of the Maltz affair. The Committee for the First Amendment sought to distance itself from the suspected

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Reds, even as it embarked on a principled defense of their rights. As William Wyler remarked, “what mattered to us was that the Nineteen challenge HUAC in a dignified manner on the basis of the First Amendment.”21 During the HUAC hearings and immediately after their closure, the Committee for the First Amendment put on the radio program Hollywood Fights Back, a two-episode series that was broadcast on ABC that fall. The CFA flexed its star power by including the following celebrities in its program: Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Leonard Bernstein, Humphrey Bogart, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, John Garfield, Judy Garland, Paulette Goddard, June Havoc, Rita Hayworth, Paul Henreid, William Holden, Marsha Hunt, John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Peter Lorre, Thomas Mann, Frederick March, Groucho Marx, Archibald McLeish, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Ryan, Frank Sinatra, Walter Wanger, Jane Wyatt, and William Wyler.22 During these broadcasts, the CFA highlighted HUAC’s threat to the screen, noting the popularity of the social problem films now in danger. Actor Gene Kelly referred to the Academy Award–winning, box office smash The Best Years of Our Lives, asking audiences, “Did you like it? Were you subverted by it? Did it make you Un-American? Did you come out of the movie with the desire to overthrow the government?” Actress Lauren Bacall referenced another enormously popular contemporary film: “Have you see Crossfire yet? Good picture? It’s against religious discrimination. It is one of the biggest hits in years. The American People have awarded it four stars, but the Un-American Committee gave the men who made it three subpoenas.” Humphrey Bogart questioned the logic underlying the Motion Picture Alliance’s allegations that Communists had inserted subtle propaganda into these films by asking, “Is Democracy so feeble that it can be subverted by a look, or a line, an inflection, a gesture?” Meanwhile, director William Wyler lamented that the Un-American Activities Committee had already secured a victory. “I wouldn’t be allowed to make The Best Years of Our Lives in Hollywood today,” Wyler fretted. The famed director predicted a new era of “self-censorship” if HUAC were to emerge triumphant. Hence the Committee for the First Amendment sought to challenge HUAC by defending the freedom of the screen and, in particular, the importance of the social problem film to the vitality of American culture.23 At this point, liberals and radicals marched hand in hand. During October, Hollywood members of the liberal anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action condemned HUAC’s attack on “cultural freedom” in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, the leftist Civil Rights Congress published a pamphlet entitled “America’s Thought Police,” with a foreword by Henry A. Wallace, calling for the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American

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Activities. Communist members of the Hollywood Ten also utilized the CFA’s strategy of defending the social problem film. Director Edward Dmytryk, speaking before the National Lawyer’s Guild, worried that HUAC sought to squelch the production of films such as Crossfire, the Dmytryk-directed “murder mystery— with a difference,” where the murder is caused by “a social illness, anti-Semitism” instead of the usual motives of greed or adultery. Affirming his belief in the popularity of the Hollywood democratic modernist project, Dmytryk contended that audiences embraced his film precisely because of its “real content.” Ring Lardner Jr. injected some humor into the proceedings by proclaiming that the HUAC/ MPA brand of censorship “would make it impossible for a leading man even to blurt out the words ‘I love you’ before he had secured a notarized affidavit that she was a pure white Protestant gentile of old Confederate stock. And naturally, no girl who was a product of such an untarnished background would want to have anything to do with a boy until she was sure where he stood on free enterprise, white supremacy and the right to stockpile atomic bombs.” In words both solemn and jesting, the Hollywood Ten appealed to the hope for a progressive cinema in mounting their defense in the court of public opinion. Hence the appeal of the cultural front still resonated with these Communists, even after the party pronounced its hard-line position on cultural matters during the Maltz affair.24 Had the Hollywood Ten confined their public defense to the principles of the First Amendment, they may have found their liberal allies more willing to stick around. However, the Ten’s confrontational antics before the committee diminished their standing in the eyes of many a Hollywood liberal. Then, in November, the House voted to issue contempt charges to the Hollywood Ten, and the industry put forward the Waldorf Statement announcing that the Ten would be discharged or suspended and that Communists would not be hired. These events irritated liberals, and caused them to fear for their own jobs. The Committee for the First Amendment dissolved almost overnight.25 The Hollywood Ten endeavored to carry on. Without the support of liberal Hollywood, the Ten searched for allies among the laborers. Alvah Bessie appealed directly to trade unionists, warning of a rising tide of fascism in the United States, spearheaded by HUAC, with the goal of using racism, anti-Semitism, and antiCommunism to divide the masses. Such a message must have resonated with radical unionists in the wake of the Taft-Hartley legislation passed earlier that year, but then they too were on the defensive. Bessie portrayed the cinema as the people’s medium now threatened by a propaganda campaign spearheaded not by Communists, but by the Thomas committee, in order “to corrupt, mislead and distort the thinking of the people.” Bessie’s appeal to unionists suggests the Ten’s lingering faith in the democratic modernist paradigm, for the workers made up the mass audience necessary to sustain a social democratic culture, or what

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historian Michael Denning terms the “cultural front.”26 Bessie averred that the films under attack, such as The Best Years of Our Lives, Boomerang, Pride of the Marines, Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Body and Soul, were hardly Communist propaganda but, rather, vital cultural products that served American democracy. “In each of these films,” Bessie pleaded, “there is some small, honest reflection of life as it is lived in America: real problems are touched upon, such as the difficulties facing returning veterans, corrupt city administration, corrupt candidates for public office, the fascist disease of anti-Semitism, etc.” Without the support of Hollywood liberals, the Ten turned to the mass audience that sustained their cultural project. But with the defeat of Herb Sorrell’s Conference of Studio Unions in Hollywood, and the decline of radical unionism in general post Taft-Hartley, unions were not strong enough allies to offset the grassroots action sprouting up in support of anti-Communism, as represented by the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Legion of Decency, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other patriotic or religious organizations.27 Facing contempt citations, the Hollywood Ten’s real defense would be launched in the courts. After the House voted to charge the “unfriendly” witnesses with contempt of Congress, Attorney General Tom Clark immediately secured federal grand jury indictments. When both Lawson and Trumbo were convicted of contempt in their individual trials, the prosecution and defense agreed that the remaining eight would forego trial, their fate to be determined by the final verdict bestowed on Lawson and Trumbo in the appeals process. Mounting their legal defense was a costly affair, and the Hollywood Ten hoped to raise funds and stir mass support through meetings of the newly founded Stop Censorship Committee, or by selling copies of Hollywood on Trial, a book written in support of the Ten by Gordon Kahn, a screenwriter who had been among the original nineteen “unfriendly” witnesses subpoenaed by HUAC. As Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund note, the Ten’s “theme of ‘we’re first, but you’re next’ was repeated ad infinitum, but though many heard, few responded.” Despite this ever-shrinking cultural presence, countersubversive groups fretted over the Communists’ public defense strategies. Fearful of being charged with “thought control,” the FBI navigated its counterpropaganda policy with great circumspection; meanwhile, agents of the American Business Consultants, a red-baiting organization founded by ex-FBI men, secretly attended the Stop Censorship Committee meetings, noting the names of suspected Communists and fellow travelers. The FBI also dreaded the publication of Kahn’s Hollywood on Trial, which assistant director D. Milton Ladd considered “first class literary debris” for characterizing the Thomas committee as a fascist body endeavoring to establish thought control and for denying that Hollywood Communists were guilty of “spreading subversive, un-American propaganda in the film industry.”

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Despite this rather damning assessment, Ladd warned J. Edgar Hoover of the real danger represented by Hollywood on Trial: It is not improbable that it will be convincing to those people who, a priori, already accepted Gordon Kahn’s conclusions even before they bore the Kahn seal of fabrication. But more important from a security point of view is the fact that this book is another example of veiled “fellow traveller” writing (thin though it is) which will serve to further confuse and divide unsuspecting American citizens on the question of Communist influence in Hollywood. It is another example of a foreign born writer abusing American liberties. It is another example of how difficult it is to combat subversive influences in the realm of ideas. It is another example of what a Herculean task confronts all persons who seek to maintain truth in the face of falsehood. Even though the Hollywood Ten were clearly on the defensive and the rising tide of anti-Communism favored the FBI’s mission, the bureau continued to betray its insecurities in the cultural sphere. FBI leaders agonized over the limits to their power in waging the war over ideas, the cultural cold war.28 In pursuing this cultural warfare, the FBI had been monitoring the “unfriendly” witnesses’ attorneys even before the HUAC hearings began. They stepped up this surveillance as the Ten sought to appeal the contempt charges. According to Athan Theoharis, a leading historian of the FBI, “through illegal wiretaps of three of their attorneys—Bartley Crum, David Wahl, and Martin Popper—FBI officials obtained advance intelligence about how these attorneys planned to avoid trial and conviction.” Hoover forwarded this intelligence to the office of the Attorney General.29 Adding to the forces arrayed against the Hollywood Ten, the chief justice of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that decided the cases of Lawson v. United States and Trumbo v. United States was none other than Bennett Champ Clark, the former Democratic Senator from Missouri who in 1941 had introduced the resolution calling for the Senate’s investigation of Hollywood’s “pro-war” propaganda. Justice Clark ruled decisively against the Hollywood Ten. Clark justified his decision, not only on the grounds that HUAC could inquire into Communist Party membership, but further because of his belief “that the motion picture industry plays a critically important role in the molding of public opinion and that motion pictures are, or are capable of being, a potent medium of propaganda dissemination which may influence the minds of millions of American people.” Clark went on to state that the screenwriters’ positions of creative influence within the industry made it all the more important to “require disclosure of whether or not they are or ever have been Communists.”30 This decision by the Circuit Court of Appeals implemented the circular logic of the

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countersubversive campaign against Communist propaganda in Hollywood: the Reds were dangerous because they could use the screen for propaganda purposes, but the existence and danger of that propaganda need not be demonstrated since the Communist presence in Hollywood itself substantiated the charges. In June 1950, the Hollywood Ten were handed their sentences. Eight of the Ten got the maximum one year in prison plus a one thousand dollar fine. Facing a more lenient judge, Biberman and Dmytryk were assessed the full fine but received shorter jail sentences of six months each. The ultimate irony occurred when Ring Lardner Jr. and Lester Cole found themselves in the same Connecticut prison as HUAC chair J. Parnell Thomas. Thomas received his prison sentence for defrauding the government by padding payroll records. Put to work in the chicken coops, Thomas one day saw Cole cutting hay. “Hey, Bolshie, I see you still got your sickle,” quipped Thomas. “Where’s your hammer?” Cole shot back, “And I see just like in Congress, you’re still picking up the chickenshit.” According to Cole, from that moment on, Thomas “was politely addressed as Congressman Chickenshit” by the rest of the inmates.31 To the members of the Hollywood Ten, American political culture appeared on the verge of fascism. So charged Dalton Trumbo in his pamphlet “The Time of the Toad.” Trumbo took his title from an article by Emile Zola, who mockingly contended that swallowing a whole live toad every morning was the only way to immunize himself from the poisonous daily headlines. Yet, despite the Communist Party having, through the Maltz affair, rejected the cultural front, or “cultural Browderism,” Hollywood Communists continued to demonstrate their attachment to democratic modernism in their public efforts to combat HUAC. As late as 1949, John Howard Lawson could write that “there can be no permanent interference with the development of the American motion picture as the people’s art. For it is an essential part of the national culture that represents the life and heritage of the people.” Yet Lawson and his Communist colleagues would soon lose all faith that Hollywood could create and sustain a social democratic culture.32 Herbert Biberman evinced this cultural disillusionment in his unpublished 1949 pamphlet, “Films on Fire.” Here the future director of the independently produced Salt of the Earth lamented the state of Hollywood filmmaking: The battle for control of the motion picture is also not over. But for the moment it has been lost by the people of America, and their children will pay the bitter penalty for the lost battle. They will be assaulted by films which are contemptuous of human beings, which present them as without the possibility of solving their problems, as filled with corruption and degraded sensuality, as naturally violent and illogical, as sexual gluttons whose triumphs exist only in the battle of the sexes.

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Biberman’s polemic bemoaned the movement for social realism tragically cut short by the HUAC investigation.33 Soon, however, Communists would reject the very possibility of a people’s art produced in the Hollywood studio system. Party cultural functionary V. J. Jerome elaborated this strict Marxist critique of Hollywood in his 1950 pamphlet, The Negro in Hollywood Films. In this study of four “Negro interest” films—Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust—Jerome argued against interpreting these as “progressive” works of art. Instead, he insisted, “under capitalism . . . the film serves monopoly, not only as a source of colossal profit, but as one of its most potent ideological weapons to master the minds of millions.” Following Jerome’s lead, John Howard Lawson retracted his argument for the inevitable development of Hollywood filmmaking along progressive lines. Lawson, in his 1953 book, Film in the Battle of Ideas, now claimed that “no such democratization of the art is possible under capitalism. The mass audience to which the Hollywood product is offered provides a social base for the film, but this must not be confused with the political content of the screen fare.” The works of Jerome and Lawson marked the logical culmination of the Communist Party’s stance during the Maltz affair; what is most interesting, however, is the significant lag between the 1946 controversy and the production of these theoretical treatises. This suggests that the cultural front approach still resonated in the interregnum between the Maltz affair and the imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten. Losing that final battle put the last nail in the coffin of cultural Browderism.34

“The Trend Is Toward Pure Entertainment” The FBI’s covert assistance to HUAC proved to be critical to the committee’s success. Immediately following John Howard Lawson’s harangue-laden testimony on October 27, 1947, HUAC knew it had secured victory. Chairman Thomas credited the bureau. After Lawson was dragged from the stand, former FBI agent Louis J. Russell produced Lawson’s Communist Party membership card and chief investigator Robert Stripling read a single-spaced, nine-page synopsis of the FBI’s twenty-six page memoranda on Lawson’s activities. Thomas declared “that the presence of Lawson’s card and record had a very visible reaction upon the audience.” Extremely grateful to the FBI for its intelligence sharing, Thomas conveyed “his heartfelt appreciation” to Hoover, professing that “the Director more than any other person is responsible for his Committee not being put out of business.”35 But had the committee succeeded, from the FBI’s point of view? Containing Communist propaganda had always been the bureau’s chief concern in its operations in Hollywood. Soon after the hearings finished, FBI

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informant and MPA member Howard Emmett Rogers anticipated the Waldorf Statement when he reported that the industry, concerned with the potential adverse effect of the hearings on the box office, was now prepared to purge Communist employees. Seemingly, the FBI/MPA strategy of pressuring the producers by threatening their bottom line was paying off. Another informant delivered a less rosy assessment of the hearings, stating that HUAC “did a 65% job when they could have done a 90% job.” This source, whose name is redacted in the COMPIC file, credited the committee for winning over the public and the press, and predicted that when hearings resumed “some of the weaker Communists” would break. Yet this informant expressed dismay over the abrupt ending to the hearings, which in his opinion occurred because columnists George Sokolsky and Westbrook Pegler warned Thomas that “the testimony of these Communist witnesses was getting repetitious and was losing headline value.” In his final assessment, this FBI informant worried that the HUAC hearings would not lead to a complete purge of Communists in Hollywood; more sustained pressure would be required to force the compliance of “the movie industry . . . still in the hands of the first generation.” Once again, the FBI reported on the fear that the predominantly Jewish Hollywood moguls lacked the fortitude to defend “Americanism,” as this source complained that the industry was still “in the hands of junk dealers, fur traders, push cart operators and their like and that these people have never learned that there is a moral code in America against which you cannot buck.” The “movie problem” persisted.36 As 1947 drew to a close, the FBI, balancing the optimistic and pessimistic assessments of its informants, seemed to regard HUAC’s performance as a good start but nothing more. The purge of ten men constituted the tip of the iceberg, as far as the G-men were concerned. Richard B. Hood, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office, reported that “the industry is worried and if the Committee will continue to expose Communists, they will be dropped from the payrolls” (italics added). Furthermore, Hood’s office believed that Americans were now more aware of Communist propaganda in films: “Now that these facts have become public and people are sharpened so that many themselves can detect the slanted scenes and dialogue, the entire Hollywood industry is badly inflicted with a case of nerves.” Yet though Thomas had promised to resume Hollywood hearings, HUAC turned its sights elsewhere, most notably toward the Whittaker Chambers/Alger Hiss affair. The committee would not return to its investigation of Hollywood until March 1951. Meanwhile, the FBI feared that HUAC’s investigation of the film industry would remain a token one. On several occasions the Los Angeles office reported allegations that HUAC member John Wood, Democrat from Georgia, had been bought off by Louis B. Mayer. This charge seemed all the more serious when Wood took over the chairmanship after Thomas was

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convicted of accepting kickbacks in 1948. J. Edgar Hoover, clearly upset by these developments, complained, “It is outrageous that House Un-American Activities Committee got ‘cold feet’ and dropped Hollywood investigation.”37 Increasingly, FBI reports pointed to an industry plot to whitewash the entire issue of Communism in Hollywood. With the exception of the Warner brothers, Hollywood producers were seen as insincere in their attempts to rid the industry of subversives. Anti-Semitic discourse offered one explanation. In the words of one informant, “You just can’t get away from the Jewish question. In my opinion 90% of the Jewish people are not actively fighting Communism.” FBI agents freely included such assessments in their reports, though bureau officials themselves did not adopt overtly anti-Semitic rationales for Hollywood’s timid approach to the Communist problem. Rather, they worried that the producers remained “soft” on Communism. The founding of the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC), a public relations group seeking to counteract adverse publicity, was initially greeted with trepidation by the G-men. Chaired by Dore Schary, MPIC was suspected by the FBI of being a “white wash” organization, designed “to cover up and play down all public information relating to Communist activities.” The Motion Picture Industry Council included anti-Communist stalwarts such as Roy Brewer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Ronald Reagan, but the presence of Schary, Walter Wanger, and William Wyler raised bureau concerns. Indeed, the MPIC would struggle to form a consensus over how to deal with the problem of Communism in the film industry. The issue of loyalty oaths proved especially divisive in coming years. Eventually Reagan and Brewer would use the MPIC as one of the main outfits for “clearance” of repentant former Reds, though those further on the right remained suspicious of this program.38 The FBI and MPA suspected not only an industry whitewash campaign, but also an attempt to purge Hollywood of the anti-Communists. In this period, before the onset of the extensive blacklisting of the 1950s, MPA members who collaborated with HUAC considered themselves victims of vindictive producers. In the months immediately following the hearings, several members of the MPA feared that industry pressure would force the Motion Picture Alliance to dissolve. One MPA leader, MGM executive James K. McGuinness, maintained that Louis B. Mayer ordered him to cease his anti-Communist activities for fear that he was harming Hollywood’s image. Then, after Howard Hughes, a zealous anti-Communist, fired Dore Schary from RKO, Schary moved to MGM to head production. Subsequently, McGuinness was forced out of the studio, believing himself the victim of anti-anti-Communism, though one bureau report suggests that MGM may have severed ties with McGuinness to avoid having to provide him with a pension.

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Other MPA stalwarts, such as Adolphe Menjou, Morrie Ryskind, Jack Moffitt, and Fred Niblo fretted that they had been blacklisted by the industry. Menjou wrote his friend J. Edgar Hoover about the travails of anti-Communists in Hollywood: “ There is a blacklist here of course and the Reds help the Reds in almost all casting of pictures.” Hoover thanked Menjou for his observations and replied that Communist sympathizers in Hollywood displayed a “total disregard for an employer or society as a whole.” However, from 1948 to 1960, Menjou starred in over fifteen films. Bureau officials, nevertheless, believed the worst. As assistant director Ladd informed Hoover, “the studios are not actively attempting to ban the Communist writers from the studios but are on the other hand penalizing those individuals who have attempted to fight Communism within the industry.” In the months that followed the 1947 HUAC hearings, the FBI feared that the Cold War consensus had yet to take root in Hollywood.39 The bureau’s abiding fear of Reds in the entertainment industry fueled its continuing search to innovate an effective counterpropaganda policy. While they were preparing material to disseminate to HUAC just before the 1947 hearings, FBI officials worried that, though they had succeeded in identifying Communist members in Hollywood, their investigation had failed thus far to determine their influence on film content. They now revisited SAC Hood’s 1945 proposal to have his agents review suspected films,40 which the bureau had rejected, fearing that the G-men would never be “classified as expert witnesses” in the world of film criticism. Moreover, FBI leaders bemoaned the fact that during World War II, “the Communist line at the time, at least on the surface, was most harmonious with the nation’s policies and in many instances it would have been most difficult to show that a line or sequence in a motion picture had been wilfully [sic] injected as Communist propaganda.” Yet with the new Cold War, the Communist line now stood out like a red thumb, and top FBI officials believed it would be easier to demonstrate their charges of Communist propaganda in the movies, if called on to do so. The decision to step up the bureau’s surveillance of Hollywood films was reached at an executive conference meeting in September 1947, gathering assistant director Louis B. Nichols, assistant director D. Milton Ladd, assistant director Edward Tamm, and associate director Clyde Tolson (second in command to Hoover), plus several other top FBI officials. These FBI leaders unanimously decided to instruct the Los Angeles office to have its agents review films “on a confidential basis . . . which responsible critics or reliable informants have indicated to contain Communist propaganda.” The secrecy of this operation required that FBI agents abstain from obtaining film scripts and instead attend theaters undercover in order to write their reviews. Hoover approved the executive conference’s recommendations and quickly relayed the new instructions to

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SAC Hood. FBI agents were ordered to identify specific scenes that contained Communist propaganda by tying the scene to the party line utilizing quotations from official Communist Party publications. Hoover insisted that these reviews “set forth factual information rather than opinions of agents.” Clearly, however, the director was tasking his G-men with interpretive work.41 The FBI’s top man in Hollywood, Richard B. Hood, responded to Hoover’s missive with a surprising proposal. Hood now asked the bureau to approve an operation to monitor not only completed films but scripts yet to be produced. Most striking, Hood informed Hoover that this surveillance of Hollywood’s production process had already “been used in recent months by this office with considerable effectiveness.” Hood’s script-monitoring operation required informants to sneak scripts out of the studios and furnish them to FBI agents, who in turn entrusted them to other confidential informants willing and able to construct reviews. Hood argued that this operation saved his agents time and also enabled the bureau to covertly observe filmmaking from a film’s preparatory stages to its completion. “It has been learned that frequently changes will be made in the script and that propaganda can be cut out or added to the script as it progresses,” Hood noted, adding that this closer surveillance enabled the bureau to identify both those who endeavored to insert propaganda into films and those who tried valiantly to block it. Should the bureau endorse this existing practice, Hood’s agents would only have to review completed films that “qualified informants” had already fingered as subversive.42 FBI higher-ups quickly determined Hood’s program “most dangerous and undesirable.” The bureau directed its Los Angeles office to cease this procedure, fearing especially the threat to studio property that resulted from having employees from one studio review material taken from another. Hood ultimately complied, but his office issued one last report wherein informant “T-2” reviewed the final shooting script (obtained by “T-1”) for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which Universal Pictures later released in 1948. Miller’s play, written for the screen by Chester Erskine, presented the story of an unscrupulous industrialist who knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the U.S. Army during the war, leading to the deaths of twenty-one servicemen. “Joe Keller, the villainous industrialist, is not presented as a freak, an exception or a plain criminal,” complained informant T-2, “but as the typical representative of all industrialists.” Miller’s story, argued T-2, smeared “the self-made man.” In the climactic scene, Joe Keller’s son admonishes his father for his wrongdoing: “I was so proud you were helping us win, and you were worrying about your business!” According to T-2, “if the play’s intention were to expose a criminal, and not all business men, such a line as the above could not and would not be written. One does not accuse a criminal of ‘worrying about business.’ ” In words that betrayed a Randian outlook—if not

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the voice of Ayn Rand herself—informant T-2 concluded that All My Sons “is the product of a thorough-going Collectivism. It presents two basic tenets of the real Collectivist philosophy: that man has no right to exist for his own sake, and that all industrialists are criminal monsters.”43 Subsequent FBI reports kept to the bureau’s ban on obtaining scripts but pointed to the continuing threat to the screen nonetheless. In the wake of the HUAC hearings, one FBI informant determined “that the trend is ‘definitely away from social problems and grim stuff.’ The informant went on that the studios are concentrating on entertainment and that the so-called ‘pictures with a message’ are not on the program of any of the majors.” When All My Sons hit the screen, this informant still considered it “grim,” but gladly remarked that “the message is toned down, the industrialist is made to appear as just one person” guilty of a crime, as opposed to the representation of an entire class. Moreover, while other films, such as Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, represented “a move on the part of the communists in their bid for minority groups, including the Jews,” this informant believed that the industry would not produce similar films in the near future.44 More troubling was Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, which one source labeled “anti-capitalist propaganda.” In this film Chaplin plays an unemployed bank clerk who supports his family by marrying and then killing several rich widows. The problem, as far as the FBI was concerned, was that Chaplin explicitly compares Verdoux’s murderous rampage to far greater crimes committed by nations in their warmongering and the amoral plundering of big business. The bureau cited one critical review of Chaplin’s film as proof of its subversive qualities: “Dangerous and destructive are the theories advanced that society owes one comfort, security, even luxury, and that crime committed for love of family or because of need makes the perpetrator an object of sympathy and forgivable. Exonerating the individual and blaming society for all evils, is a very wrong kind of philosophy.” The FBI monitored this film’s reception among Communists as well, going so far as to report on personal conversations between Communist Party members, one of whom remarked that Chaplin “is a genius. The message at the end was marvelous. It is a real indictment of our system.” Such an endorsement was of little help to the politically troubled Chaplin, who was ultimately the victim of an FBI-led campaign to drive him out of the country.45 Chaplin, part owner of United Artists, had a measure of independence most Hollywood artists only dreamed of. Thus his ability to use the cinema to mount a leftist social critique did not give the lie to the judgment of one FBI informant that “the trend [in Hollywood] is toward pure entertainment,” a view that indicated the success of the countersubversive campaign to police the screen. Nevertheless, in the late 1940s FBI agents continued to pursue an aggressive policy to monitor the content of Hollywood films. Richard Hood renewed his

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FIGURE 7. Charles Chaplin as Henri Verdoux, preying on one of his victims in Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The FBI considered Chaplin’s film “anti-capitalist propaganda.” Charles Chaplin/Photofest.

request to let his office obtain scripts, noting that if his agents only secured screenplays from films already produced, the potential dangers would be minor. At their January 1948 executive conference, top FBI officials ruled against Hood’s recommendation, fearing that any attempt to obtain screenplays “might relate too closely to censorship.” The Hollywood Ten’s efforts to denounce censorship as part of their public defense made the bureau all the more wary of having its investigation of Hollywood exposed. Hood wanted access to screenplays from motion pictures already released because his agents were having trouble taking notes of films playing in dark theaters while posing undercover as regular audience members. He therefore also proposed that the bureau allow his agents to set up private screenings of suspect films, a regular practice among industry members that Hood himself had been party to. Apparently, this G-man had been taking in the Los Angeles lifestyle, for he claimed, “I have personally on numerous occasions viewed pictures in the homes of various motion picture personages and usually they are not the pictures produced by those showing them.” Hood’s words indicated the close ties between Los Angeles G-men and some members—likely the bureau’s informants from the MPA—of the entertainment industry. The bureau’s

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response, however, indicated its fervent determination to keep the reins tight on its Los Angeles agents. Hood’s office would be allowed to arrange private screenings of films only after securing permission from Washington in each instance.46 The bureau’s approval was not merely a rubber stamp; Hoover later denied Hood permission “to obtain showing of films wherein the only Communist connections are through the actors appearing in such pictures, inasmuch as the actors have very little to do with the content of the picture.” Hoover’s instructions indicate that the director did not put much credence in the HUAC testimony of his friend Adolphe Menjou, who claimed that a Communist actor could subvert a film “by a look, by an inflection, by a change of voice.” J. Edgar Hoover fretted more over exposing his FBI to charges of censorship. The director explained his caution to Hood: “As you know, many charges of attempted ‘thought control’ have been leveled against various Government agencies, including this Bureau, and you should, therefore, be extremely discreet in attempting to obtain these pictures for review so that no publicity will result therefrom.” Hoover’s carefulness did not indicate a waning of his desire to combat Communist propaganda. Indeed, for the first time he allowed a loosening of his ban on obtaining scripts. Should the Los Angeles office be unable to secure a private screening of a film heavily suspected of Communist propaganda, they would henceforth be allowed to ask the bureau for permission to obtain the script.47 Indeed, the FBI would go to extreme measures in order to monitor film content. In spring 1948, as Communist writer/director Abraham Polonsky was working on his noir masterpiece Force of Evil (MGM, 1948), the bureau secretly obtained the script from Richard Day, the film’s art director, and also bugged Polonsky’s phone in an effort to keep watch on radical Hollywood. Richard Hood was especially alarmed by Polonsky’s conversation with Ira Wolfert, coauthor of the screenplay and author of the novel Tucker’s People, from which the film was drawn. Polonsky had been making the film under independent producer Bob Roberts (also identified as a Communist by the FBI), but he was now seeking to find a major studio for its distribution. Like Monsieur Verdoux, Force of Evil likened criminals to businessmen. Polonsky’s film tells the story of a corporate lawyer, played by John Garfield, who represents a big-time gangster out to take charge of the local numbers racket by violently incorporating the mom-and-pop “banks” servicing New York gamblers. Force of Evil subtly presents the corruption of this criminal world as an extension of Wall Street values. Polonsky was determined to keep this critical material in the story and tiredly told Wolfert, “We’re winning against the studios. They are trying to get control of our content and our cutting. And it has been very tough, let me tell you.”48 In this FBI-tapped conversation, Polonsky relayed to Wolfert the difficulties of progressive filmmaking in post-HUAC Hollywood. Abe Polonsky, a radical Marxist who disdained the Communist Party’s cultural dictates after the Maltz

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FIGURE 8. John Garfield in Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948). Like Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, Polonsky’s film pointed out commonalities between criminal behavior and the practices of big business and was likewise considered Communist propaganda by the FBI. MGM/Photofest.

affair, retained his belief in the cinema’s potential to speak to social issues and provide a leftist critique of American society. The message, however, would need to be subtle enough to get past Hollywood self-censorship. As Polonsky told Wolfert, finding the right studio to act as distributor was a big part of the game: POLONSKY : Now, in one of the places we had a bad reaction to the script on the grounds that “What are you trying to do—overturn the system?” So we dropped them like a hot potato. But other places do not say anything about the real content. It makes it look good for us. They are going to try to—Either they are sensitive to it and they will try to kill it while we are making it. But that’s a normal fight, as they say. That’s what you call ordinary combat. WOLFERT : Yes. POLONSKY : Or else they just don’t understand it that way. WOLFERT : Yes. POLONSKY : As one guy says, “I consider this the sheerest melodrama.”

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(Both laugh.) WOLFERT: Don’t enlighten them. (Both laugh.) Polonsky envisioned radical filmmaking as an act of resistance wherein the major studios represented one of the biggest obstacles. Polonsky recounted his efforts to fool the nervous executives by drawing their attention to what he considered “very trivial stuff ” in the film. For instance he made a big show of relenting to one executive’s demand that the film be set during the Great Depression in order to explain why one of the film’s characters is so fearful of losing his job. Polonsky claimed that by making “a big fuss about these points . . . we take their minds off the real point of the story, which is the big game I have been playing here.” SAC Hood called Hoover’s attention to these passages of Polonsky’s conversation with Wolfert, believing they highlighted the insidious methods used by Communists to contaminate the screen.49 Polonsky, as the FBI learned, was well aware of the bureau’s surveillance. During his conversation with Wolfert, Polonsky was reluctant to mention the name of the studio he was setting the film with; Wolfert’s suspicions were raised: WOLFERT : Is your phone tapped? POLONSKY : Yep. (Laughter.) POLONSKY : By the FBI—not by the studio. (Both laugh.) POLONSKY : You know, we’re not living in a police state, you understand that. WOLFERT : Oh, no, no. POLONSKY : We’re living in a free democracy. Polonsky must have felt a great sense of triumph when Force of Evil was finally released in December. Perhaps as a further dig at the bureau, the presence of wiretaps figured prominently in the film’s climax. Despite Hollywood’s strictures, Polonsky’s artistic achievement brought a left critique of capitalism to the screen. The FBI considered Abe Polonsky an enemy to reckon with. SAC Hood reported the judgment of one informant, “that Polonsky, although only thirty-six years of age, is a very smart young man, full of brilliant ideas, and apparently headed for a very successful future as a screen writer and possibly as a director.” The antiCommunist campaign in Hollywood, however, cut short this blossoming career, and it was nearly twenty years before Polonsky received another film credit. Yet, as the 1950s approached, the FBI continued to worry that crafty Communists like Polonsky and their loosely defined “fellow travelers” would find ways

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to subvert the American screen. Despite the clear trend in Hollywood toward “pure entertainment”—a trend that the bureau had certainly helped create— critical films such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Warner Bros., 1948), We Were Strangers (Columbia Pictures, 1949), and Home of the Brave (United Artists, 1949) raised the ire of the G-men and their informants. As the decade drew to a close, J. Edgar Hoover lamented, “The picture industry still continues to be a stinking mess.”50 Ultimately, the FBI never developed direct means for stifling the production of Hollywood films it deemed communistic. Fearing charges of thought control, bureau leaders considered their agents’ most aggressive proposals to be “most dangerous and undesirable.” Hoover had always insisted that his bureau confine its mission to collecting only the facts. His instructions that his agents identify only “factual” instances of Communist propaganda in films suggests that perhaps he truly believed film analysis of this kind left no room for differing interpretations. Convinced as they were that Communist propaganda pervaded the screen, FBI leaders nonetheless remained reluctant to put the bureau’s prestige on the line. Instead, the FBI would continue to fight the cultural cold war from behind the scenes. The bureau’s vast fears of red Hollywood did not dissipate during the 1950s. Rather, the FBI learned that the most effective means of fighting what it considered Communist propaganda in Hollywood films was simply to get rid of Communists in Hollywood. SAC Hood reported the remarkably prescient view of one secret informant: In speaking of communist propaganda in motion pictures, T-8 feels that it is unfortunate that the House Un-American Activities Committee mentioned communist propaganda in motion pictures because it then becomes a matter of opinion as to what is and what is not propaganda and communists are skilled in discussions where the point at issue is a matter of opinion. He continued, that in his estimation, “the evidence against these men (the Unfriendly Witnesses) is so overwhelming that the issue of communism in motion pictures becomes unimportant.” If the committee would confine itself to an investigation and exposure of communism it would accomplish its purpose and could not be led astray into the field of opinion. However, since it did adopt this policy, it gave the communists a chance to “holler thought control.”51 Such words practically wrote the playbook for the second round of HUAC hearings on Hollywood beginning in 1951. In these hearings, the committee did not venture into the realm of opinion by tackling film content head-on. Instead, it

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used the infamous $64 question to ferret out “friendly” and “unfriendly” witnesses; the former could redeem themselves through the “clearance” process set up by the Motion Picture Industry Council, the Motion Picture Alliance, and the American Legion, while the latter faced the cruel blacklist. Meanwhile, the committee and its secret sponsor, the FBI, could wage the cultural cold war utilizing only “the facts,” thereby avoiding having to put their ideological assumptions up to public scrutiny. The lessons of the 1940s proved extremely valuable to the anti-Communist drive of the 1950s. In 1947, ten men were singled out as Hollywood Reds. During the next decade, the blacklist claimed the careers of at least three hundred.52 The effect on the screen, however, cannot be quantified.

6 ROLLBACK

I’m gonna have to ask her questions. She being a truthful woman, every answer is going to incriminate her son. It could be quite a test—God and country or her son John? —FBI agent in My Son John (1952)

Though it is impossible to take measure of the films that were not made due to the stifling of dissent in the early Cold War, we can take note of a new cycle of movies that explicitly sought to explain the stakes of this conflict. Since most of these films focused on the domestic threat of Communism, it is more accurate to dub these red scare movies rather than Cold War movies.1 As these films all appeared after the 1947 trials—that is after HUAC, and especially Richard Nixon, continually questioned why Hollywood had not made any anti-Communist pictures—it is clear that these movies represented the industry’s coerced contribution to the politics of un-Americanism. This chapter opens with a glimpse into the idiosyncratic anti-Communism of Ayn Rand, presented to film audiences in the Warner Bros. 1949 film, The Fountainhead. Rand’s strident individualism was in full display in this production, but her refusal to imbue her anti-Communism with a traditional reverence for religion left her, and her film, on the outskirts of mainstream anti-Communism. The void was filled both by J. Edgar Hoover and the red scare movies that reinforced his brand of countersubversion. Hoover, in his many speeches, interviews, and publications, along with Hollywood, presented audiences with a broader social definition of the red peril. Whereas Rand narrowly defined the threat to the principle of individualism, Hoover and Hollywood presented an expansive image of the danger, in which not only the American state, but the school, church, and family all were in jeopardy. The solution, Americans were told, lay in reinvigorating these social institutions and gearing them toward awareness of Communist treachery. Yet average citizens were not to try to thwart 159

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the red menace on their own, but rather they were consistently told to alert the authorities when trouble arose. Politically, their only duty entailed assenting to the national security state and entrusting it with their safety and protection, thereby freeing these ordinary Americans to focus their attention on building vibrant religious and family lives.

Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead Alisa Rosenbaum was obsessed with the movies. On graduating from the University of Leningrad, she quickly enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography, a new school designed to boost Soviet filmmaking. But it was Hollywood that caught her eye. She viewed hundreds of films and even kept a film diary wherein she dutifully ranked each movie she attended. The movie stars of Hollywood’s silent age enchanted the young Alisa, especially the Polish-born actress Pola Negri. Yet it was the image of America itself that most captivated her. Hollywood, America’s foremost cultural ambassador, impressed Alisa as a dreamland where denizens “stream in a constant wave over its boulevards, smooth as marble,” and where “shining, elegant Fords and Rolls-Royce’s fly, flickering, as the frames of one continuous movie reel. And the sun strikes the blazing windows of enormous, snow white studios. Every night an electric glow rises over the city.” Soon she seized on the chance to visit relatives in Chicago as an opportunity to escape Russia. Chicago would be but a brief first stop on her way to Tinseltown. Leaving behind the old country, Alisa would also cast off her old name. While on board the rocky ocean liner that would carry her to America’s shores, she dubbed herself Ayn Rand.2 Rand made her way to Hollywood in 1926, where she capitalized on a chance (or perhaps planned) encounter with her favorite director, Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille offered her a job as an extra, but Rand soon obtained a writing position summarizing scripts and suggesting changes. A few years later she went to work in the wardrobe department at RKO. She loathed the work but appreciated the good pay once the Great Depression hit and jobs became scarce. Her writing remained her real passion, and she set out to compose her first anti-Communist novel, We the Living. But the writing lagged, and the day job only seemed to steal time from her true purpose. So Rand decided to write and sell a screenplay in the hopes of better financing her more serious writing. She sold her script, Red Pawn, to Universal in 1932. Though the film was never made, its combination of melodrama and anti-Communism foreshadowed Rand’s future literary and film work.3 It was more than a decade before Rand earned a screen credit and not until 1949 that an original story of hers was filmed. Rand’s brand of strident anti-Communism,

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so out of fashion in the literary world of the 1930s, her abhorrence of collectivism, and her insistence in including the New Deal under this rubric, placed her on the right-wing fringe, both politically and artistically. As Jennifer Burns puts it, “Rand could see little difference between armed Communist revolution and Roosevelt’s rapid expansion of the federal government. She railed against both. It was an opposition that quickened her pulse and fired her pen.” Rand floundered in Hollywood and blamed her failures on her outspoken anti-Communist views. She left Hollywood for New York, abandoned screenwriting for novel writing, and set to work on the anticollectivist manifesto that would take her many years to write, The Fountainhead.4 Ayn Rand’s purpose in writing The Fountainhead was avowedly propagandistic. “You know what a good propagandist I am and what I can do,” she wrote to the politically sympathetic president of the National Small Business Men’s Association in 1943, the year the novel was finally published. “In the last ten years,” Rand declared, “the Reds have done a good job of building up literary celebrities for their own purposes, such as Orson Welles, Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck, etc.” She continued, “It’s time we realized—as the Reds do—that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.” Rand envisioned The Fountainhead as a weapon against FDR’s policies, proclaiming “I want the book and the ideas of this book to be spread all over the country. When you read it, you’ll see what an indictment of the New Deal it is, what it does to the ‘humanitarians’ and what effect it could have on the next election—although I never mention the New Deal by name.” Rand insisted, “I can be a real asset to our ‘reactionaries.’ ”5 When The Fountainhead quickly became a best seller, Warner Bros. purchased the screen rights and hired Rand to adapt her own screenplay. Lured back to Hollywood in late 1943, Rand soon became a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Presentation of American Ideals. She would briefly serve as a guiding force for the MPA, writing its Statement of Principles as well as a series of articles for its monthly publication, The Vigil. The admonitions in her Screen Guide for Americans, published by the MPA in 1947, echoed the themes of her novel and foreshadowed the message of the Warner Bros. film that would finally appear on the screen in 1949. Robert Vogel, an executive at MGM, remembered Rand as an active member of the Motion Picture Alliance. At parties hosted by MPA member Morrie Ryskind, as Rand’s biographer notes, “all the men in the room would cluster around her, listening, rapt, as she discoursed on politics and economics.”6 But whereas Rand got a warm reception from Hollywood’s anti-Communists, she initially struggled to get her film on the screen. Director Mervyn LeRoy lamented

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that wartime shortages prohibited him from making the film due to the elaborate sets that would require “too many strategic materials.” LeRoy’s inability to take on this project in early 1945 remained a “bitter disappointment.” Rand too must have been disappointed, until work on the project was finally resumed in 1948. Ironically, Rand’s sermon against collectivism would have to survive the collective process of Hollywood filmmaking.7 Though the film was a critical flop and a commercial disappointment, The Fountainhead nevertheless was a remarkable achievement in terms of Rand’s ability to bring her vision to the screen nearly unadulterated. She fended off attempts to radically alter the characters and story content by two other screenwriters who had been assigned to the project. These other writers tried not only to eliminate Rand’s stiff dialogue but also to bring the message of the film more into line with mainstream American political and moral values, the result of which likely would have made the film more palatable to a broader audience. Rand regarded the novel’s popularity as her ace in the hole when it came to the studio, but she still had to obtain the approval of the Production Code Administration. Rand had no illusions that the sexual content would remain explicit, as she acknowledged the need to “treat such scenes as my famous rape scene through tactful fade-outs.” But she guarded jealously her message that enshrined absolute individualism by celebrating self-interest and besmirching altruism.8 Like the screenwriters who failed to change the philosophical content of this work, the Production Code Administration likewise did not get Rand to budge much. The PCA nevertheless pinpointed the theme in the film that would render it unpalatable. Though the PCA applauded the condemnation of collectivism when enforced by an authoritarian state, it found Rand’s likening of individual altruism to collectivism most troubling. As one PCA official wrote Jack Warner, “the confusion seems to arise in characterizing the voluntary submission of one’s intellectual attainments to the welfare of others as being the same as involuntary subjugation of individual rights and prerogatives. Self-sacrifice is regarded as the same as enforced subordination to collectivistic control.” Rand, however, was able to appease Hollywood’s internal censors by expanding what was already a lengthy courtroom speech that concludes the film. Ayn Rand was elated. My experience with the movie has been perhaps even more miraculous than with the book. I wrote the screenplay myself, preserving my theme and philosophy intact. For the first time in Hollywood history, the script was shot verbatim, word for word as written. I had no legal control over the production, yet the picture was made as faithfully as if I controlled it. This in Hollywood—where they ruin and distort every story they buy, particularly every serious story, and where they are scared of the faintest suggestion of a controversial subject. The first picture ever shot

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here verbatim will be . . . the most uncompromising, most extreme and “dangerous” screenplay they ever had.9 Though the finished product would faithfully reflect her ideas, it would not fulfill her vision for its influence. The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor, features several characters emblematic of the ideological tenets of Rand’s Screen Guide for Americans. The first is Howard Roark (played by Motion Picture Alliance member Gary Cooper), the supreme individualist who represents all the traits of what Rand described in the Screen Guide as the “independent man.” Rand had beckoned Hollywood producers to “remember that America is the country of the pioneer, the non-conformist, the inventor, the originator, the innovator. Remember that all the great thinkers, artists, scientists were single, individual, independent men who stood alone, and discovered new directions of achievement—alone.”10 Through Howard Roark, Rand would offer movie audiences a glorified view of this independent man. Howard Roark is an architect by trade, an individualist by nature. His integrity is tied to his modernist designs, and he associates the popular penchant for classicism with vulgarity and mediocrity. He faces unemployment because he will not pander to popular tastes. When it comes to the masses, Roark declares, “I don’t care what they think about architecture or anything else.” Oddly, Rand’s model capitalist disdains the wishes of his clients. Roark likewise disdains altruism. “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing,” he proclaims. Yet it is not the pursuit of wealth that motivates him; rather, Roark acts only to fulfill the greatness of his ideas.11 But Roark is more than a man of ideas; he is also the model of masculinity. He is obsessed with building skyscrapers, and visually the film often juxtaposes him against these towering phallic symbols. Roark catches the eye of Dominique Francon by wielding a powerful drill. After she fails to seduce him, he takes her by force. As Merrill Schleier writes, “Roark’s body conquers Francon’s, just as his buildings conquer space and his creativity conquers the forces of mediocrity and collectivism.”12 Of course she falls in love with him, but she leaves him out of fear he will be squashed by these very forces. Rand’s sappy dialogue plays up the melodrama, with Francon delivering lines like “Roark you’re everything I’ve always wanted, and that’s why I hoped I’d never meet anyone like you.” Roark’s antagonist is Ellsworth M. Toohey, the evil embodiment of collectivism. As with the Roark character, Rand resorts to gender stereotypes with Toohey as well. He speaks with a British accent, moves around with mincing steps, and sports an effete cigarette holder. Toohey is the manifestation of Rand’s image of the Communist. He disdains wealth, success, and independence—“It’s always safe to denounce the rich.” He likewise glorifies failure and depravity. He fiendishly proclaims, “My only motive is a selfless concern for my fellow man.” In

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FIGURE 9. Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) as the prototype of the great individual in the film version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1949). Warner Bros. Pictures/ Photofest.

reality, his motive is power, an outcome made easier if a great man like Roark is replaced by the mediocre, “totally self-less man.”13 This brings us to Howard Roark’s foil: Peter Keating, mediocrity incarnate. In her Screen Guide Rand identified glorification of the “common man” with Communist propaganda. She asserted that Communists aimed to wipe out the independent American spirit and exalt the commoner as part of their method of

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seizing control. “Communism preaches the reign of mediocrity,” she insisted, “the destruction of all individuality and all personal distinction, the turning of men into ‘masses’, which means an undivided, undifferentiated, impersonal, average, common herd.”14 With Peter Keating, Rand offered audiences a character that she hoped would replace the heroic Tom Joad archetype of the common man. Peter Keating is a “parasite.” As an architect he is a failure; as a man he is without virtue. Floundering professionally, Keating comes to Roark for assistance. He has been offered the opportunity to design Cortlandt Homes, a government housing project for the needy. But Keating lacks the skills for the job and begs Roark to secretly do it for him. Keating naively tries to appeal to Roark’s better nature, pleading, “It’s a humanitarian project. Think of the people who live in slums. If you can give them decent housing, you’d perform a noble deed. Would you do it just for their sake?” Keating’s assumption that Roark would act out of anything but self-interest triggers an angry response: “No! The man who works for others without payment is a slave.” But Roark has his own motives to help Keating—the challenge of the design itself. He agrees to the bargain on the condition that the project will be built exactly as he designs it. Keating, however, lacks Roark’s spine and is unable to resist when his clients demand changes that corrupt Roark’s modernist masterpiece. Appalled, Roark takes matters into his own hands by dynamiting Cortlandt Homes, a feat that leads to his criminal trial, where Roark, in one of the most tediously long speeches in cinema history, defends his dangerous act by claiming it as a principled assertion of his individual rights. Addressing the jury, Roark situates his destructive deed in the context of “an ancient conflict that has another name—the individual against the collective. Our country, the noblest country in the history of man was based on the principle of individualism.” Patriotism, American exceptionalism, anti-Communism . . . all demand that the jury acquit.15 Rand had hoped that this fictional portrayal of her ideological message would serve her political cause by stirring emotion. Yet the film’s mediocre box office performance, combined with its brutal critical reception, suggests that The Fountainhead did not live up to her dreams.16 New York Times’ film critic Bosley Crowther, in two separate reviews, denounced the film for its “half-baked ideas” and “utter contempt for the masses,” also noting its failure as entertainment: “Wordy, involved, and pretentious . . . a more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven’t seen for a long, long time.” In her rebuttal, Rand praised Warner Bros. for the studio’s “great demonstration of courage and consistency” in faithfully adapting the film, and suggested that Crowther’s criticism presented evidence that he “shares the philosophy of Mr. Toohey.”17 But, more troublesome for Ayn Rand, it seemed that Americans, even in the midst of the Cold War, did not share her philosophy. As Robert Spadoni has

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argued, The Fountainhead presented audiences “something distinctly un-American.” Rand’s attack on collectivism impugned not just Communism but many tenets of American democracy as well. Individualism had deep roots in American society, but definitions of Americanism were intrinsically tied to collective institutions, such as the church, the family, and the state. Furthermore, as others have noted, Rand’s atheism rendered tenuous her position as a leading proponent of anti-Communism at a time when conservatives endeavored to link capitalism and Christianity and to define the Cold War struggle as a battle of these forces against godless communism. In this context Rand’s ideas appeared too materialistic, and her attack on altruism seemed to be an assault on Judeo-Christian ethics as well.18 This is not to say that Ayn Rand failed to influence the content of Hollywood films in the early Cold War. Her “Objectivist” philosophy may have been relegated to the fringe, but her defense of American capitalism, and of capitalists specifically, proved quite powerful. Years later, Rand credited her Screen Guide for Americans for its impact on film content. Though she believed it was largely ignored by the major studios initially, in the aftermath of the 1947 HUAC hearings the New York Times ran an article in its Sunday edition summarizing the guide’s key points. Once the Screen Guide captured the headlines, according to Rand, “I began hearing one studio after another ordering it from the MPA [by the] dozens. And all the points I made in it, particularly about the attacks on businessmen as villains, disappeared—certainly in the form in which they had been. If you watch old movies on TV you’ll see the difference.”19 Indeed, Lary May’s systematic survey of film plots in these years yields findings that would support Rand’s claim, as he has provided strong evidence that the films of this period contained significantly less criticism of wealth and far fewer portrayals of businessmen as villains.20 However, when it came to how Hollywood presented the struggle against Communism to American audiences in the early years of the Cold War, “Hooverism,” not “Randism,” served as the guiding force.

“Hooverism” in American Popular Culture Unlike so-called hot wars, the Cold War has no clear starting date. But historians Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall nevertheless pinpoint the significant transitional period of February (and early March) 1946 as the time when habitual distrust of the Soviet Union became widespread in American political culture. In this five-week period, news broke of a Soviet atomic spy ring in Canada, Joseph Stalin declared the inevitability of another world war due to the forces of monopoly capitalism, U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan composed his famous “long telegram” calling for the containment of an expansionistic Soviet adversary, and

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Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri, instantly providing a “gripping metaphor” for the coming struggle.21 Yet there was another important development in February 1946 that occurred behind the scenes. That very month FBI leaders determined to embark on a propaganda campaign designed to create an anti-Communist consensus in America. The bureau had certainly engaged in propaganda tactics before, but now its endeavor would be more widespread and systematic. In its effort to shape popular opinion, the FBI would selectively leak material from its files to sympathetic members of the press, such as Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, George Sokolsky, and Walter Winchell, as well as to like-minded members of Congress, including James Eastland (D-MS), Pat McCarran (D-NV), Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI), Richard M. Nixon (R-CA), Karl E. Mundt (R-SD), and J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ). Likewise, the FBI would cultivate close relations with blacklisting organizations such as the Church League of America and American Business Consultants (ABC). A company formed by ex-FBI agents, ABC especially targeted Hollywood with its publications Counterattack and Red Channels, which published the names of suspected subversives in the entertainment industry. The bureau also strengthened ties with veterans’ organizations, most notably the American Legion, which utilized the sway of its large membership base to advance the politics of antiCommunism in the film industry and elsewhere. Perhaps most significantly, J. Edgar Hoover became the nation’s most prominent spokesman for the domestic cold war. The bureau’s Crime Records Division authored numerous articles, reports, and pamphlets that were distributed under Hoover’s name. Such works appeared in publications ranging from Popular Mechanics to the Harvard Business Review. Hoover’s message was also spread through his many public speeches and interviews and in his magnum opus, Masters of Deceit (1958), a best seller that, as one historian puts it, “contained everything the director had ever thought or felt about the apocalyptic battle between Christian America and the satanic forces of communism.”22 In these many public forums, Hoover not only played the role of the nation’s top cop but also one of its leading sermonizers. Although Hoover was as ferociously anti-Communist as Ayn Rand, his brand of countersubversion differed from that of the quirky pseudo philosopher. Unlike the atheistic Rand, for whom the Cold War was a struggle between the forces of individualism and collectivism, Hoover conjured up a spiritual battle between good law-abiding, god-fearing patriots and godless Communists, whom he portrayed as sinister nemeses backed by fellow travelers and liberal dupes. Collectivism was certainly a dirty word for Hoover as well, but he nevertheless rooted his definition of Americanism in collective social institutions, such as the church, school, family, and state, all of which he deemed threatened by Communist infiltration. Yet, if the citizenry

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could be stirred to awareness, these American institutions could also serve as powerful bulwarks against Communism. Americans would defeat the red menace, not as individuals per se, but as citizens united in a common cause working actively to resist Communism through revitalized traditional institutions. Hoover’s message was also Hollywood’s message. This is not to suggest that Hollywood’s anti-Communist fare directly interpreted Hoover’s ideology. Nor should it be said that these films merely echoed the powerful pronouncements of the director. Hollywood surely looked to Hoover as a leading expert on antiCommunism, but Hoover likewise drew on melodramatic narratives of intrigue and subversion popularized by Hollywood spy and gangster films in his depiction of the dreaded foe. Thus Hoover and Hollywood put forward mutually reinforcing images of the red menace. The first thing to note about the Hoover/Hollywood depiction of Communism is its tendency to conjure up images of a criminal underworld. In Masters of Deceit, Hoover describes the Communist Party USA as having two parts, an aboveground political unit that sought to infiltrate key sectors of American society and spread its propaganda, and an underground criminal core “that is a maze of undercover couriers, escape routes, hide-outs, and clandestine meetings,” where only the most sinister Reds are admitted. The very movements of the Communists described by Hoover seemed menacing. They lurked in dark shadows and employed evasive tactics to avoid being followed. A Communist might be observed “leaving subways, buses, and trains at the last minute, even holding the door open and jumping off,” or possibly “stooping over in the aisles, then suddenly rising and looking around to see if anybody is searching for them.” Life in the underground suits only the most fanatical, who willingly cut themselves off from friends and family in order to lay the groundwork for a Soviet America. In this lurid world, party leaders live as “petty dictators” and sexual mores are abandoned without qualms. “This type of fanatical communist,” Hoover warned, “would not hesitate to lead a riot, steal vital military secrets, sabotage defense industries, or perform illegal activities.”23 This depiction of the CPUSA as a criminal underground operation was prevalent in such films as The Red Menace (Republic Pictures, 1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (Warner Bros., 1951), and Big Jim McLain (Warner Bros., 1952). The Red Menace, for instance, opens with the image of a fiendish octopus stretching its tentacles across the globe, a visual metaphor for the film’s theme. Much of the plot is dedicated to showing the evil means by which Communist Party leaders scheme to entice new members into their grip. Once inside the party, it is almost impossible to leave, unless one deviates from the party line, in which case the offender is ostracized. Moreover, the film literally blames the victims for

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the atmosphere of anti-Communist repression. For example, when Reachi, an Italian American comrade, criticizes the party’s definition of democracy as the dictatorship of the proletariat, he is brutally murdered by Communist goons, only to be lionized in the red press as a victim of anti-Communist thuggery. Repeatedly, party members who lack American citizenship are kept in line by the threat that evidence of their membership will be leaked to the State Department, leading to their deportation. And then there are those who face the blacklist, such as Solomon, the Jewish American poet. Like the real-life Albert Maltz, Solomon questions the party’s rigid approach to art, but unlike Maltz he stands by his principles only to be shunned by his comrades. Now Solomon cannot hold down even the most menial job because the party, rather than anti-Communist zealots, leaks evidence of his membership to each new boss. Essentially, the Reds are the real red-baiters. Furthermore, whereas Maltz faced condemnation for his alleged artistic suicide, Solomon’s suicide is literal. Not only is he deprived of the means to support himself but contact with his girlfriend Mollie (the “common Party girl”) brings her under suspicion, and as the heinous party boss Partridge makes clear, there is only one way to spare her the same misery.24 Likewise, in Big Jim McLain, John Wayne—a leader of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—plays the title character, an investigator for HUAC who is sent to Hawaii on a secret mission, code-named “Operation Pineapple,” in which he must match brawn with the Communists, who are once again portrayed as members of a murderous criminal syndicate. In addition to furthering this gangster portrayal of the party, the film is also direct propaganda for the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose members are featured on-screen while the narrator proclaims, “We the citizens of the United States of America owe these, our elected representatives, a great debt. Undaunted by the vicious campaign of slander launched against them as a whole and as individuals they have staunchly continued their investigation pursuing their stated beliefs that anyone who continued to be a Communist after 1945 is guilty of high treason.” Oddly, though the film extols the committee, it nevertheless portrays HUAC as ultimately ineffective against the Reds, who hide behind the Fifth Amendment. Big Jim resents that the Constitution can be so readily “used and abused by the very people that want to destroy it,” yet the “Commies” get their comeuppance when his fists start flying.25 I Was a Communist for the FBI also climaxes with the ritual beating of a party boss. Based loosely on the real-life exploits of Matt Cvetic (played by Frank Lovejoy), a secret party informant for the FBI, the film presented audiences with yet another glimpse of the Reds as racketeers and thugs. Set in the steel town of Pittsburgh—“the arsenal of democracy . . . until we lower the boom!”—this Warner Bros. picture highlights the dangers of Communist infiltration of labor unions.

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In one scene, an innocent factory worker is deliberately maimed so that a party member can take his job. In other scene, the Reds incite labor violence by arming ruffians with metal pipes and ordering them to attack strike-breakers.26 Though I Was a Communist stayed true to the Hoover formula in its depiction of the party, the film nevertheless irked the FBI director. The real Matt Cvetic had joined the Communist Party in 1943 to serve as a paid bureau informant. Though never more than a low-level functionary, he was a prized source nonetheless. In 1948 Hoover noted, “I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that Cvetic is at the present time the best possibility that the Bureau has to get into the inner circle of the Communist Party.” But Cvetic soon became more trouble than he was worth. A chronic alcoholic, Cvetic frequently tried to exploit his secret work with the bureau to his own advantage. His indiscretions irritated his FBI handlers, and Hoover especially grew annoyed at Cvetic’s grandiose definition of himself as an undercover FBI agent, when in fact he had been only a confidential informant. After Cvetic’s much publicized HUAC testimony in 1950, Warner Bros. purchased the screen rights to his story. Unwilling to support Cvetic’s attempt to cash in on his bureau connections, the FBI refused to lend its cooperation to the studio during filming.27 On hearing of the film’s pending release, Hoover noted, “A very bad title and will be accepted by many as official.”28 I Was a Communist for the FBI played loose with the facts and presented Cvetic as a glorious hero, but the film nevertheless furthered the ideology of Hooverism. Whereas Rand launched a frontal assault on the values of collectivism, rejecting all principles but individual self-interest, the Hoover/Hollywood formula acknowledged the appeal of Communism to people of good conscience. Therein lay the danger. Hoover, for instance, did not criticize the “basic human yearnings for better social conditions” that made the party attractive; he instead took pains to illustrate the “deceitful double talk” through which Communists exploited these values “in the service of tyranny.”29 Many of the anti-Communist films also attempted to depict the Reds as hypocrites rather than to directly criticize the morality of causes the party championed. Rand scorned the very notion of collective welfare, but in these films sympathy for the masses is in itself no offense. Though these movies may ultimately impugn idealism as a value easily exploited by Reds, a frequent motif in these films occurs when idealistic young recruits come to see that the party does not really cherish the values it proclaims. Cvetic’s on-screen love interest, Eve Merrick, is one such dupe. This young, comely teacher believes her work in the party is in service to a noble cause, until she comes face to face with the Communists’ brutal tactics, leading to her disillusionment. She joined the party believing “Communism was an intellectual movement, a movement toward true freedom,” but ends up fleeing for her life after criticizing the brutality of the red goon squads. Similarly, in The

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Red Menace, Communists are depicted exploiting noble sentiments, and it is the hypocrisy of the party leaders that merits contempt. Of course, like any B-movie villains, the Reds easily divulge their true motives. Reachi’s gentle prodding on the party’s definition of democracy, for instance, leads Greta Bloch (alias Yvonne Kraus), the sexually frustrated, power-hungry female comrade, to scream, “We’ll have our way if it means bloodshed and terror!”30 Indeed, painting the Reds as hypocrites was a prominent strategy utilized when these films broached the subject of race relations. Communists are portrayed as exploiting the race issue as a means of garnering support among minorities. Yet, in actuality, these Reds are dyed-in-the-wool racists. In Big Jim McLain one comrade mocks the “white trash and niggers,” prompting John Wayne to knock him out cold. In The Red Menace, Sam, an African American journalist for a Communist paper, is ordered to write a nasty obituary for Solomon, the disgraced poet. Sam has his qualms because he remembers Solomon as a good man, but his boss insists, “You know what the Party is doing for your race, and Solomon was a traitor to the Party.” However, when Sam’s father compares “having to think as the Party dictates” to slavery, the young journalist walks out, leading the paper’s editor to fret about “wasting our time on these African ingrates.”31 Ironically, despite seeking to portray the Communists as bigoted hypocrites, these films demean African Americans as pliable targets for Communist treachery. In I Was a Communist for the FBI, Soviet directives lead party leaders to agitate discontent among blacks, the strategy being “the old rule of divide and conquer.” Party boss Jim Blandon proclaims, “Those niggers ate it up” and readily confesses to using the accepted term “Negro . . . only when I’m trying to sell them the Party line.” When Cvetic’s handlers in the bureau learn of these tactics, they are not surprised. As one G-man notes, “That’s the way they started the race riots in Detroit in ’43, and the riots in Harlem that same year when five Negroes were killed . . . those poor fellas never knew their death warrants were signed in Moscow.”32 Hence these films suggest that African Americans were easy to incite and manipulate, and also that racial tensions in the United States owed not to American racism but rather to Communist agitation. Hoover frequently voiced a kindred message. “The red hand of communism intensifies racial division while pretending to strive for equality,” warned the director in the American Legion Magazine. “The Party’s sole interest,” Hoover opined elsewhere, “is to hoodwink the Negro, to exploit him and use him as a tool to build a communist America.” That blacks could be so easily “hoodwinked” was an assumption Hoover never questioned. Even when he praised black anti-Communists, Hoover let slip his racism. In one passage in Masters of Deceit he applauds the way in which one NAACP leader ferreted Communists out of the organization. At the opening of a meeting, the leader asked each individual

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present whether he or she were connected to the party. Only one refused to answer—“the state organizer of the Communist Party [who] was sitting with a white woman.” Thus, Hoover raised the specter of interracial sex as a means of denouncing the Communist foe, even in the context of a passage meant to commend this NAACP leader for his fervent anti-Communism.33 Hoover’s not-so-subtle race-baiting was part and parcel of his broader effort to emphasize the danger of the Communist threat to traditional American institutions, not only those in the public sphere, such as the state or school, but also the private refuges of the church and family. In this regard, Hoover’s writings, like the typical Hollywood anti-Communist movie, contrasted with Ayn Rand’s definition of the threat. To Rand, collectivism threatened to displace the authority of the supreme individual with rule by the common horde. To Hoover and Hollywood, Communism threatened the very social fabric that united Americans and rendered their country exceptional. Both Hoover and Hollywood played up the Communist threat to the American form of government. True Communists, in these narratives, supported espionage, plotted bloody revolution, and reserved their loyalty solely to the Kremlin. Yet Hoover’s greatest fear was that Americans did not realize the extent of the danger. Even during the party’s heyday in the late 1930s, membership numbers were minuscule. With the onset of the Cold War, party membership declined rapidly.34 Thus, in almost every speech and publication, J. Edgar Hoover took pains to stress that the Communists endangered national security despite their tiny numbers. In an appearance before the American Legion in 1946, Hoover fretted that the party’s small numbers “lulled many Americans into a feeling of false complacency. I would not be concerned if we were dealing with only 100,000 Communists. The Communists themselves boast that for every Party member there are ten others ready to do the Party’s work. These include their satellites, their fellow travelers and their so-called progressive and phony liberal allies.”35 Similarly, in The Red Menace, protagonist Bill Jones flirts with the Reds mainly as a way to meet women, believing that a movement with such trifling membership could not possibly seize power. But Nina Petrovka, Bill’s main love interest, has experienced the horrors of Communism behind the Iron Curtain. “In every country communism has conquered the Party membership was small,” she insists, “a small and highly disciplined group of fanatics backed by thousands of fellow travelers.” Nina’s message to the neophyte Bill Jones clearly echoed Hoover’s warnings to the American public.36 Another discursive strategy frequently employed by Hoover to create awareness of the red peril despite the party’s small numbers was to utilize metaphors of infection and disease. Depicting Communism as a contagion allowed Hoover to stir up fears, regardless of the party’s actual strength. To the FBI director,

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Communism appeared as “a malignant growth which is nurtured in darkness.”37 Here the Hollywood analogue is to be found in the science fiction films of the 1950s, such as Them! (Warner Bros., 1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Allied Artists, 1956). In the former, giant mutant ants have to be quarantined, whereas in the latter, alien pods infiltrate human hosts like a quickly spreading virus. “They’re taking us over cell by cell,” fret the townspeople. “It’s a malignant disease spreading through the whole country!” Given the anti-Communist discourse of infection and the tendency to describe Communism’s subjects as robotlike automatons, it is not surprising that many cultural critics have detected connections between these science fiction films and the red scare. Notably, in these films only the FBI can protect Americans from the contamination.38 Hoover likewise drew on science fiction imagery in his representation of Communism. The Reds he described had an almost supernatural presence, for the “Communist is protean in nature, assuming many shapes and forms.” And like the menacing sci-fi alien pods, Hoover alerted readers of the American Magazine that “the Communists are after our minds.” Hoover warned that like the giant mutant ants in Them! Communists were attempting to “colonize” key sectors of American industry and government.39 Communists not only threatened to infiltrate the state, according to Hoover, they also targeted other public institutions, most notably the school. Teachers and intellectuals were potentially subversive agents of whom students should be wary. “You, the college student,” Hoover bellowed, “are the rich earth which the Communist conspirator hopes to till. Your mind is the soil in which he hopes to implant alien seed.”40 One such college dupe appears in My Son John (Paramount, 1952). Lucille Jefferson has three sons—two are good patriotic young men who are frequently seen tossing a football or making their way to church. But her youngest son, John, is an intellectual who “has more degrees than a thermometer.” John shuns members of the opposite sex, preferring to keep company with his highbrow professors who have presumably contaminated him with subversive ideas. When Lucille awakens to the fact that her son is a Communist, she resolves to prevent him from making a commencement speech—“Just because my son has been poisoned I’m not going to let him infect other mothers’ sons and daughters”—even if this means turning her son in to the FBI. In the end, John is redeemed, but when the party finds out that he has turned against them, John is gunned down and left for dead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fortunately, he has recorded a new commencement speech, and the university graduates are spared the contagion of Communist propaganda.41 In these parables, Communist teachers targeted younger students as well. In I Was a Communist for the FBI, Eve, the idealistic young teacher, seeks to indoctrinate adolescent minds with party ideology, “and what better field could

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I find to work in than a high school.”42 Hoover likewise painted the schoolhouse as a veritable breeding ground for the red epidemic. Playing off common parental concerns with shielding children from viruses, Hoover exhorted mothers and fathers to be aware that their child’s “mind is the fertile plot in which the Communist hopes to implant his Red virus and to secure a deadly culture which will spread to others. When enough are infected the Red Pied Piper hopes to call the tune.” Even the preschooler could be a target, as Hoover declared that “Communist teachers or fellow travelers are subtly persuading children aged 2 to 5 not to believe in religion, and are poisoning their minds with contempt or dislike for other ‘capitalistic institutions.’ ” Children needed to be sheltered not only from red teachers but Communist youth groups as well. Hoover warned of the “unsuspecting youngster” who is brought into the Communist orbit through social gatherings. In one of Hoover’s lessons, “Billy Doe” is endangered when “an attractive young girl invites him to a party, or it may be a dance, or just a social get-together at her ‘club.’ ” Before too long, “Billy is parroting the party line.”43 To Hoover and Hollywood, Communism did not just threaten youth but the entire American family. Such a message surely struck a chord in the early Cold War era, a time when the ideology of domesticity was not only reaffirmed but also linked to national security. Good Americans were expected to abide by traditional gender roles, form close-knit nuclear families, and rear patriotic children who would have the moral fiber to compete successfully in the Cold War. But to the purveyors of this domestic ideology, American society came under threat when men and women failed to perform their proper roles. Homophobia and sexism abounded. Defined as sex “deviants,” homosexuals were considered so threatening that they were purged from the State Department and other government offices. Meanwhile, traditionalists depicted women with too much independence or power as equally menacing.44 Hoover’s parables and Hollywood’s anti-Communist films played upon all these gender fears. In the movies, Communism and homosexuality combined to produce both the evil villain (Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead) and the easily duped victim (John Jefferson in My Son John). Communist women came in two forms: the alluring temptress or the neurotic, defeminized power seeker. The Greta Bloch character in The Red Menace conformed to the latter stereotype. She is summed up in the film as a model of the many “psychopathic misfits who are seeking an outlet for their frustrations and failures” through leadership of the totalitarian movement.45 This characterization of the red female anticipated J. Edgar Hoover’s description of a “Communist woman” as one who proceeds with “fanatical dedication” and “with humorless, single-minded intensity” in her abnormal quest to spread the “soulless, vicious, totalitarian, end-justifies-themeans doctrine” of Communism.46

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Yet The Red Menace also presents us with Mollie O’Flaherty, the “common Party girl.” Mollie exists to lure recruits like Bill Jones into the party. Between passionate kisses Bill notices Marx’s Capital on her bookshelf. “I always heard commies peddled bunk,” he remarks, adding, “I didn’t know they came as cute as you.” When she interrupts the love making to pontificate on class injustice, Bill frets that “it’s all been just a come on for the Party!” But Mollie knows her task, and when the scene cuts to the next morning, the audience knows that Bill left satisfied. Like viewers of The Red Menace, readers of Masters of Deceit would also find Communism presented as a lurid underworld where sexual immorality reigns and where party prostitutes entice young male recruits to join.47 If Communism violated sexual mores, it also threatened domestic tranquility. A common motif in the red scare films was the marriage torn asunder when one of the spouses turns out to be a Communist. This theme predominated in MGM’s Conspirator (1949), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor, and RKO’s The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), better remembered by its original title, I Married a Communist. In these films, the wife is betrayed by her husband; in other films mom is betrayed by her son. As Michael Paul Rogin has noted, the domestic ideology of the 1950s had a “demonic” flip side sometimes referred to as “momism.” In the 1950s, mothers were bestowed with the responsibility for ensuring that the home would serve as a bulwark against subversion. Typically mothers were sanctified for serving this role, but the mom who domineered her husband and coddled her son produced a soft boy ill-equipped for the rigors of Cold War confrontation and easy prey for Communist indoctrination. “Momism” pervades My Son John. Lucille dotes on John more than on her husband or other two sons. When John’s father suspects he is a Communist, Lucille naively has her son swear on the Bible that he is not now nor has ever been a party member. Her incessant coddling—“I’ll make you cookies, pies, cake, and jam, if you’ll learn Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”—only backfires because she has never allowed John’s masculine traits to develop. (“He never played football!”) In the end, mom has failed, and only the state can substitute for this lack of proper motherly discipline. The film’s G-man realizes Lucille faces “quite a test—God and country or her son John.” But Lucille acknowledges her maternal failings. With rosary in hand, she informs on her son to the FBI, pleading, “Take him away, he has to be punished!” Loyalty to God and country prevails over the maternal bond.48 If Hoover’s political sermons and Hollywood’s melodramatic propaganda played up the threat of Communism to American institutions, they likewise presented the church, school, and family as the most powerful bastions defending against red encroachment. As social institutions, these figurative bulwarks suggested a collective solution to the red menace, something Ayn Rand surely would not countenance. Yet, as Hoover consistently preached, these traditional

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FIGURE 10. Robert Walker as John Jefferson and Helen Hayes as his overdoting mother, Lucille, in My Son John (1952). Lucille is pleased when John swears on the Bible that he is not a Communist, but the film contends that such sacred pledges mean little to the Reds. Paramount/Photofest.

forces needed to be made aware of the menace and revitalized to embrace this vital function. Hoover always coupled his dire warnings with a revivalist message. Communists targeted America’s social institutions, but eternal vigilance could thwart this danger. “The Communist attack upon the institutions of free society can be met—and turned back,” the director confidently asserted. The key lay in the ability of these institutions to recognize the menace and direct their energies toward its defeat. Teachers and intellectuals, for example, needed to overcome “the feeling that Communism is not a danger” because such “smug complacency” played into the Communists’ hands. Reds could easily capitalize on a situation in which Americans were not sufficiently educated to the threat, and therefore Hoover insisted that the “task of education is to unmask the Communist masquerader—to reveal Communism in its true light.” Hoover praised the American intellectual tradition of “free inquiry,” and yet he simultaneously demanded that educators perform the anti-Communist function he envisioned, without his noticing the contradiction.49

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J. Edgar Hoover fulfilled the role of prominent spokesperson for what historian Elaine Tyler May later described as the ideology of “domestic containment.”50 The traditional home, headed by a male breadwinner and supported by his wife, the dutiful homemaker and selfless nurturer, bolstered the international policy of containment with an equally powerful domestic variant. Hoover defined the housewife as the linchpin of the successful home, “because I feel there are no careers so important as those of homemaker and mother.” Her duty entailed instilling in her children the moral virtue required to wage the Cold War. Most important, women were tasked with maintaining the “security that a good Christian home affords.” To Hoover, “the real danger in communism lies in the fact that it is atheistic,” and therefore the American mother could take part in this apocalyptic struggle by raising an upright Christian family. As the FBI director told a group of Catholic women, “so long as the American home is nurtured by the spirit of our Father in Heaven and is a center of learning and living, America will remain secure.”51 Together, faith and domesticity could fend off the red menace. Indeed, Hoover would join those such as Billy Graham and Francis Cardinal Spellman in defining the Cold War as a spiritual battle between Christianity and atheistic Communism. Graham’s claim that Communism had been “masterminded by Satan” was echoed by the FBI director when he asserted that the Reds’ “rejection of God gives communism a demonic aspect—transforming it into a fanatical, Satanic, brutal phenomenon.” The 1950s witnessed a surge in religiosity. Church membership skyrocketed. National surveys indicated that 90 percent of the country believed in Christ’s divinity, while 99 percent believed in the existence of God. This was the decade when Americans added the phrase “one nation under God” to their Pledge of Allegiance and formally adopted “In God We Trust” as their official motto. Historians attribute this outpouring of piety to the anxieties of the Cold War.52 For his part, J. Edgar Hoover harangued churchgoers to beware of Communist propaganda emanating from the “Christian pulpit,” and preached that without “Christian renewal” Americans would face the specter of Communist rule. Hoover conjured up fire and brimstone imagery in his description of Communism as hell on earth. But ultimately his message focused on revival through “the unmatched power of Christ. The task for us is spiritual rededication.” Americans needed to practice Christianity with the same “iron will and firm determination” that Communists brought to their ideology. Likewise, Hoover implored clergymen to do battle with the evil forces of Marxism-Leninism: “Have you, as a minister, preached any sermons describing the frightful challenge which communism poses for the spiritual heritage of America?” Christian America could “roll back the iron curtain of communism” if only this spirit of revival flourished.

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As one historian aptly writes, “The nation’s number one G-Man had dropped his machine gun and picked up the cross.”53 Hollywood, too, picked up the cross in the 1950s. Biblical sagas dominated the box office throughout the decade. Cecil B. DeMille presented The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1956), the most popular of these epics, as a Cold War allegory. In his on-screen prologue, DeMille told audiences, “The theme of this picture is whether man should be ruled by God’s law, or by the whims of a dictator like Ramses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? This same struggle is still going on today.”54 DeMille, a fervent anti-Communist, was not the only filmmaker to comment on Cold War politics through allegory.55 Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (Columbia, 1954) is often considered an antiCommunist parable as well. The film’s narrative tension builds around the question of whether longshoreman Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) should inform on the racketeers who have subverted his union. Because Kazan had “named names” before HUAC in 1952, and because the Brando character comes to see informing as the morally correct path, On the Waterfront has frequently been interpreted as a text imbued with Cold War symbolism. Kazan himself contributed to this interpretation: “When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, ‘I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!’ that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had.” To view this film solely as a parable justifying informing, however, is far too reductionist, not least because there is little evidence that audience reception recognized Kazan’s authorial intention. (Unlike DeMille, Kazan did not provide audiences with a Cold War prologue.) Nevertheless, the film’s reverence for the church as a pillar of Americanism and morality very much conformed to the religious tenor of 1950s anti-Communism. After all, it is Father Barry (Karl Malden) who leads the fight against union corruption on the docks. And it is Father Barry who helps Terry overcome his childlike understanding of informing as something only a “stool pigeon” would do. Father Barry provides a superior morality to the simplistic street code against “ratting on your friends.” Christ spoke against evil, says Father Barry to Malloy, but “how does he feel about your silence?”56 Such religiosity in film was not limited to Cold War allegory. Hollywood’s explicitly anti-Communist films typically invoked Christianity as the most powerful force buttressing society against totalitarianism. For example, though the real-life Matt Cvetic created a problem for the bureau by too frequently boasting of his undercover work, in I Was a Communist for the FBI, despite suffering personal turmoil because of his party membership, the Cvetic character jealously guards this secret, albeit with one notable exception—he freely discusses his FBI connections with his priest. That Cvetic could trust his priest with such knowledge, but not his brothers, or son, or even his mother (who dies before

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learning of her son’s true patriotism), suggests the high esteem for the church as a most trusted American institution. Likewise, in The Red Menace, Mollie, the party prostitute, is ultimately redeemed by God’s graces. When she finally returns to the fold, Father O’Leary advises her how to thwart the red menace: “The best way to defeat communism is for us to live Christianity and American democracy every day of our lives.”57 Such preachment surely chimed with Hoover’s moralizing. And just as J. Edgar Hoover championed domesticity, so too did Hollywood’s Cold War films promote the notion that the good American home provided a stronghold against red infiltration. The Red Menace climaxes with Bill and Nina seeking refuge from the dreaded Communist goons. They drive all the way from California to a small town in Texas where the local sheriff, known only as “Uncle Sam,” convinces the nervous couple that the U.S. government will surely shield them from the Communist Party. Rather than fret, Uncle Sam tells them, “What you two ought to do is get yourself hitched. Raise a couple of good American kids.” The message is that American citizens should trust the government to protect them from the perils of Communism and that they can do their part simply by devoting themselves fully to family life. These films also suggested that domestic tranquility hinged on adherence to traditional gender roles. Women would have to be both alluring and submissive. Men would have to be virile and authoritative. In fact, masculinity is a prominent theme in many of the red scare films, but perhaps none more so than Big Jim McLain. In this picture, John Wayne has his fair share of female admirers. When the stereotypical floozy inquires how tall he is, “the Duke” responds that he is six feet, four inches. She immediately does the math: “Seventy-six inches, that’s a lot of man!” She takes to calling him “Seventy-six”—a conflation of his patriotism and virility—for the rest of the picture. But she is not the marrying kind, and Big Jim instead selects a more easily tamed mate to become his future spouse and homemaker.58 At the end of the decade, Hoover and Hollywood finally joined forces in the production of a film, The FBI Story (Warner Bros., 1959), that focused as much on the family life of the G-man (played by James Stewart) as it did on the bureau’s exploits in fighting crime and thwarting domestic fascism and Communism. The FBI had previously collaborated in the production of several films and radio shows that promoted its image. Such publicity turned the bureau into a pop culture phenomenon, but only through adherence to the action detective formula that harkened back to nineteenth-century pulp fiction. Yet, as part of Hoover’s 1950s moralistic campaign, the bureau sought to downplay the action adventure formula in favor of trumpeting family values. As one film critic complained, the resulting movie focused more on “the joys and sorrow of the American home and the bliss of domestic security than the historic details of crime.” Nevertheless,

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as Richard Gid Powers has astutely observed, “The FBI of the fifties seemed to believe that the G-Man’s role as the moral center of his family was more interesting (or at least more important) than his on-the-job heroics.”59 The prevalence of the domesticity theme in The FBI Story is all the more interesting when one realizes just how much control the bureau had over this film. Hoover himself had interested Warner Bros. in the project in 1956 when he sent Jack, Harry, and Albert autographed copies of the Don Whitehead book by the same name. By agreement with Whitehead, the bureau had retained the film rights to the story. When Jack Warner expressed his interest in filming it, Hoover set stringent conditions. The FBI demanded approval of all personnel, including especially the producer, director, and writers. Furthermore, it insisted on approving both the screenplay and the film itself prior to release.60 Thus, it is hardly surprising that The FBI Story so closely matched the ideological proclivities of the FBI director. But what is perhaps most telling is just how closely attuned Hoover’s messages were to Hollywood’s in its spate of red scare films. This synchronicity was no coincidence. Unlike Ayn Rand’s peculiar variant of anti-Communism, which never quite took hold in mainstream America, Hoover unquestionably wore the mantle as the nation’s chief expert on the internal Communist threat. Among his most frequent assertions was the notion that the anti-Communist crusade must be directed by his FBI. American citizens could best aid the crusade by cooperating with the bureau, but in the end, this was a job for professionals. Hollywood typically followed suit, as most of the anti-Communist films instructed audiences to place their faith in the government, indeed often the FBI itself. Moreover, in portraying the peril in the most expansive terms—as a threat not only to the state, but the church, school and family—Hoover’s presentation of the red menace resonated with a broader audience. Such themes also made for easy material for screenwriters seeking the most effective ways of dramatizing the dangers of Communism. No wonder, then, that Hoover’s message was Hollywood’s message. FBI files indicate the bureau’s marked sympathy for Hollywood’s anti-Communist films. When one of the earliest Cold War films, The Iron Curtain (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948), flopped at the box office, the FBI attributed this failure to Communist-led boycotts. The bureau lamented that the film, which dealt with a Soviet spy ring in Canada, “only played a week in Los Angeles and was afforded a very poor reception in Northern California. It has been reported that the Communist Party takes credit for having arroused [sic] popular anti-sentiment against ‘The Iron Curtain.’ ”61 FBI reports indicate concern that Hollywood studios might shy away from anti-Communist fare in the wake of The Iron Curtain’s failure, and the bureau stepped up its surveillance of Communist attempts to target these films.

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For example, the FBI reported on attempts by the Daily People’s World, the West Coast equivalent of the Daily Worker, to stir up a campaign against The Red Menace. Here readers were advised to picket the film wherever it was playing and to call managers of local theaters to warn against further bookings. Nevertheless, the G-men were likely more content to note the “considerable free publicity” afforded to this picture by the Los Angeles press, and they included in their report a quote from the Los Angeles Times’ review of the film, which asserted that The Red Menace “will do more to arouse the public to the dangers of Communism than any other picture ever made, and it is more pertinent for instance, than the ‘Iron Curtain,’ which 20th Century Fox exhibited a year and a half ago.”62 In fact, for a B movie with a “cast of unknowns,” The Red Menace performed well at the box office, cracking the weekly top ten and proving to have more staying power than The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s anti-Communist picture that Warner Bros. had heavily invested in.63 On the other hand, the FBI initially reported some trepidation over RKO’s I Married a Communist. J. Edgar Hoover refused to allow Howard Hughes to use newsreel footage of him in this film. Probably Hoover’s reluctance owed mainly to his traditional concern with protecting his image, but it could not have helped matters that “persons of Communist sympathies,” such as John Cromwell, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, and Art Cohn, had all been rumored to be attached to the project. Thus, the prospect of Reds subverting an anti-Communist film reared its ugly head. One informant fretted that Hughes “considered this picture his pet but apparently had not been watching it too closely or he would not have let a person like Art Cohen [sic] write the screen story.” Yet the bureau also reported speculation that Hughes assigned suspected subversives to the project in an attempt to make them break their contracts. Ultimately, the bureau judged the completed movie “a good dramatic anti-Communist picture,” but bemoaned that because of its poor opening, Hughes had decided to pull the film from release and retitle it. What had led to this disaster? The FBI noted Communist criticism of the film, but also lamented, “It appeared that the public considered it as a propaganda type of picture and sufficient interest was not aroused.”64 How influential were these red scare films? One can detect the G-men’s high hopes and dashed expectations for these movies throughout the FBI’s files. AntiCommunist labor journalist Victor Riesel expressed lofty hopes for My Son John in his column, which the FBI clipped for its records. By Riesel’s count, My Son John would be the forty-second anti-Communist feature film produced by Hollywood, and he predicted that though the film had been “shot in a private studio, it will be an arm in our government’s global campaign to keep the Russians from turning working people into fanatical anti-American troops.” For Riesel this “propaganda race for the soul” took place on battlefields both “in the movie

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palaces of our own metropolises” and internationally, as he argued these films would be “flown across the world . . . for outdoor showings to loin-clothed Africans, burnoosed Arabs and togaed Hindus.” It seems unlikely that My Son John or any of the other films in this red scare cycle quite had the effect hoped for by Riesel or his FBI allies.65 Indeed, many of these films appear to have been produced “on the cheap” in an effort by the industry to appease its anti-Communist critics in the wake of the 1947 HUAC trials. And yet, if none of these pictures became box office smashes, their very ubiquity surely registered with audiences. These movies frequently appeared as second features, thereby broadening their viewership, and occasionally they were minor hits, as in the case of The Red Menace. A few even garnered the prestige of Oscar nominations. My Son John, for instance, earned a nomination for best screenplay in 1952. And, in a ludicrous stretching of the category’s boundaries, I Was a Communist for the FBI received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature the previous year. Hollywood’s antiCommunist propaganda surely did not fly under the radar.66 And yet, as cultural artifacts, films could never be entirely malleable to the wishes of their makers or the expectations of their genres. Two examples will suffice at the close of this final chapter. Take first the case of On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s putative anti-Communist allegory. Surely, some viewers must have connected the dots between Kazan’s HUAC testimony and Brando’s heroic informing, though eight months after the film’s opening Ed Sullivan quipped: No one has pointed out that Kazan actually dramatized his own denunciation of the Commies. Marlon Brando, in turning against the dictators on the waterfront, at the urging of the priest and the girl with whom he was in love, actually was reenacting the role which Kazan played in real life before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan named names and dates just as Brando did.67 The FBI, in fact, did not read this film as symbolic of Cold War values. Quite the contrary. The Los Angeles office instead flagged On the Waterfront “as being the type of picture which could be shown in foreign countries by the Communists to the detriment of the American way of life.” Because the film dwelled on American “corruption, graft, and crime,” the FBI reported that it would likely be detrimental to the government’s efforts “to promote a better understanding of American democracy . . . and could be circulated by Communist nations to counteract our propaganda efforts to sell democracy to nations throughout the world.”68 The anti-Communist allegory was now cast as a Communist weapon! It is likely that most audiences, then and since, took little note of these tenuous Cold War connections and instead appreciated this compelling human drama for its gripping story, powerful method acting, and breathtaking cinematography and score.

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And then there is the case of the explicitly anti-Communist film that subverted its very genre, Pickup on South Street (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1953). Directed by Samuel Fuller, this gritty film noir, like most of the red scare movies, presented the “Commies” as gangsterlike thugs whose schemes involved espionage and murder. And yet there the similarities end. The G-men and local cops in this film are hapless obstacles to the protagonist, a pickpocket named Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) who accidently lifts microfilm the Reds had been trying to smuggle out of the country. Skip feels no compulsion to turn the stolen secrets over to the authorities and instead looks to make his big score. The Cold War means nothing to Skip McCoy. “So you’re a Red—who cares? Your money is as good as anybody else’s,” he says as he tries to shake down the party. In the end, Skip does beat his red nemesis to a bloody pulp, but not for any patriotic reasons. Instead, he is merely seeking revenge for the murder of his friend Moe (Thelma Ritter) and the savage beating and cold-blooded shooting of his love interest, Candy (Jean Peters).69 “Hooverism” has no place in Pickup on South Street. Skip McCoy lives outside the reach of traditional American institutions. There is no Irish priest to steer him back to the moral center. If anyone redeems him, it is Candy, a thinly disguised prostitute (she has “knocked around a lot”) who spoils his attempt to sell back the microfilm only because “I’d rather have a live pickpocket than a dead traitor.” But patriotism means little to Skip. The FBI tries to pressure him into helping them recover the stolen secrets and nab the Communist spies, threatening that if he doesn’t cooperate, he would be “as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.” Skip replies nonchalantly, “Are you waving the flag at me?” According to Samuel Fuller, J. Edgar Hoover, incensed by the pickpocket’s political apathy, personally tried to pressure the studio to cut this scene. Fuller alleged that Hoover met with him and executive Darryl F. Zanuck and insisted, “I don’t want an American in this Cold War . . . to say to anyone, especially to the cops, don’t wave the flag at me.” But to Fuller and Zanuck, Skip McCoy had to be true to his character. “Mr. Hoover,” Zanuck reportedly said, “you don’t know movies.”70

Conclusion

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON THE DEATH OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM FILM

As the 1940s drew to a close, the Cold War intensified. The “twin shocks” of 1949—the Soviet detonation of the atomic bomb and the “fall” of China to Mao Zedong’s Communists—heightened fears of the red menace at home and abroad. In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy began his anti-Communist rampage with his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech in which he boldly claimed to have in his possession a lengthy list of Communists in the State Department. The senator from Wisconsin frequently changed the length of said list, but his sensational allegations only grew more frightening after war erupted in Korea in June. U.S. participation in this hot war, as well as the espionage arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, exacerbated fears of subversion at home. In the fall, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto, forcing Communist groups to register with the government. In this frenzied context, the House Committee on Un-American Activities cast its gaze back on the motion picture industry in 1951. This time its hearings targeted hundreds. What remained of the Hollywood Left was torn asunder. Victor Navasky has accurately described these latter hearings as “degradation ceremonies.” Ostensibly gathering information, the committee in fact already had all the “facts”; instead its public sessions functioned as a ritual to enforce ideological conformity.1 Moreover, during these 1951–53 hearings—and in contrast to the 1947 hearings—HUAC paid scant attention to film content. Had fears of Communist propaganda, so pronounced during the 1940s, been a mere ruse? Or, rather, had the job already been accomplished?

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As we have seen here, the countersubversive attack on Hollywood during the 1940s was certainly motivated by a fear of radical film content. The FBI, the Motion Picture Alliance, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were correct in finding political elements of a left and liberal shade in some Hollywood films. However, not only did they err in attributing these to the devious infiltration of Communist propagandists, but they effectively transformed this legitimate discourse about American political culture into a matter of national security. In seeking to put an end to the production of films it deemed communistic, the FBI and its allies were wildly successful. Indeed, by 1948 the bureau could report that “the trend [in Hollywood] is toward pure entertainment.”2 The death of the social problem film amid the political turmoil of the early Cold War years is well established.3 Yet, no longer can we attribute the decline of this artistic movement to an almost accidental byproduct of blacklisting politically minded screenwriters or merely to the general atmosphere of timidity in Hollywood during the sterile 1950s. Instead, as these pages have revealed, the countersubversive network cast its aim at the films themselves and, in so doing, turned Hollywood into an ideological battleground in the struggle against Communism. Yet, as the FBI had come to realize, publicly framing the battle around the issue of film content was a risky proposition, “because it then becomes a matter of opinion as to what is and what is not propaganda and communists are skilled in discussions where the point at issue is a matter of opinion.” Film criticism left room for differing interpretations; Communist Party membership could be demonstrated on a factual basis. Furthermore, if the state avoided investigating film content directly, it would deny “the communists a chance to ‘holler thought control.’ ”4 Thus the countersubversives’ primary purpose in seizing on the motion picture industry was to dramatically alter film content. The fact that HUAC buried this motivation in its public hearings during the early 1950s represented a shift in strategy, not motive. The casualties of Hollywood’s cold war can be quantified if we are concerned with tallying the hundreds of people whose careers were destroyed. So too can we count those, such as John Garfield or Canada Lee, who suffered the more ghastly fate of death, possibly due to the stress brought on by anti-Communist investigations.5 But it remains much more difficult to measure the effect on film content. Let us take a look, then, at how the major players discussed in these pages explored this question. First, the countersubversives. Perhaps surprisingly, considering their ascendancy, they exuded little in the way of triumphalism, at least when it came to the question of prohibiting Communist propaganda. In its report on the 1951 HUAC hearings, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American

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Ideals proclaimed “our efforts stand vindicated. The ‘communists under the bed,’ whose presence we were constantly accused of imagining, were really there.” Moreover, because HUAC decided to televise these sessions, MPA leaders reckoned that the public was finally enlightened on the danger of Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. But the Motion Picture Alliance lamented the impression created by these hearings that “no film containing communist propaganda was able to reach the screen.” Not wishing to tarnish the industry’s reputation—a precaution it hardly considered in 1947—the Motion Picture Alliance nevertheless fretted that the “failure to recognize the facts of the past” would render the industry and the public ill-equipped to deal with future attempts by Communists to use Hollywood as an instrument of propaganda. “While the conspiracy itself has been smashed,” MPA executives reported in 1951, “the poison and the hatred which it spread still remain. So do some of the more subtle influences of their clever propaganda machine.” Thus did the MPA affirm its mission to remain ever vigilant.6 In waging this celluloid cold war during the 1950s, the FBI and MPA were joined in full force by the American Legion. Not only did the Legion play an active role in the “clearance” of those tainted by red connections, it also provided the manpower needed to picket allegedly subversive films. And no film of the 1950s did more to stir the fears of countersubversives than Salt of the Earth (IPC, 1954), an independent picture, written, directed, and produced by blacklistees— Michael Wilson, Herbert Biberman, and Paul Jarrico, respectively. In telling the story of a southwestern mine strike by Mexican American workers, Salt of the Earth presented a powerful argument for racial and gender equality, and a call for organized labor to fight for better working conditions and higher wages. The American Legion directed its members to “be on guard” against Salt of the Earth, which it deemed “one of the most vicious propaganda films ever distributed in the United States.” Across the nation, Legionnaires threatened to picket any theater screening the film.7 Meanwhile, the FBI reported that Salt of the Earth “contains many scenes which undoubtedly stress or point up the questions of discrimination against racial minorities and similar alleged conditions.” Motion Picture Alliance leader Roy Brewer, who also served as the Hollywood head of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, used his control of screen projectionist unions across the country to quash nearly all screenings of the film. Despite the powerful suppression of this independent film at home, the FBI remained wary that Salt of the Earth would promote anti-Americanism through exhibition abroad.8 The FBI’s abiding fears of Communist propaganda in film were not limited solely to the independents, however. Hollywood, as always, remained the principal focus, given the industry’s widespread influence. The prospect of Communists

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seeping back into the film business alarmed bureau leaders. As the 1940s drew to a close, J. Edgar Hoover personally informed the office of the Attorney General that Hollywood Ten member Lester Cole sold a script to Warner Bros. under the name J. Redmond Prior. Hoover advised “that the name J. Redmond Prior might be a pseudonym for one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ because of the ‘Red’ in the author’s name.” Sometimes hunches pay off. Cole did in fact write the story for the Humphrey Bogart film Chain Lightning (Warner Bros., 1950) using this alias. As with much of its investigation, the FBI got the facts right but erred in interpreting them as dangerous threats.9 Despite its tendency to exaggerate the red peril, the FBI could not help but notice the Communists’ waning influence in Hollywood. In 1950, the bureau’s investigation of the party’s Cultural Division in Hollywood revealed much stagnation. Of 332 members, only two had joined within the past year. By mid decade, and largely as a result of the second round of HUAC trials, this stagnation turned to decline. The bureau now reported that most Reds had left Hollywood for New York or Europe. The previously strong Communist faction within the Screen Writers Guild had now been reduced to three—Paul Jarrico, Michael Wilson, and Robert Lees—according to one informant. The rest had “dropped out . . . for lack of screen credits.” Even Salt of the Earth had proven futile at the box office. The Los Angeles Cultural Division of the Communist Party had been reduced to approximately one hundred members, only nine of whom were screenwriters. In January 1956, bureau officials concluded that “Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry is practically nonexistent at the present time.” The bureau now ceased compiling its running memorandum on Hollywood for the director, though its Hollywood file remained open. After Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February, the CPUSA practically dissolved in Hollywood as it did throughout the country. This cultural cold war was no more.10 Yet, rather than reveling in the almost total exclusion of Communists from the film industry, the FBI continued to focus on threats. Throughout the 1950s, the fear of Reds using “fronts” in order to continue work in Hollywood served as the bureau’s main concern. According to the FBI, Hollywood Reds used the Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood “as a sort of liaison agency” where front arrangements were made. For example, the FBI reported that Paul Jarrico allegedly used Ed Louis, a Beverly Hills accountant, to front his scripts. Dalton Trumbo used Ian McClellan Hunter as his front for Roman Holiday (Paramount Pictures, 1953), and astonishingly RKO producer/director George “Dink” Templeton baldly informed the bureau that he intended to use Trumbo as a ghostwriter for a rewrite job. Templeton insisted that various Hollywood studios had secured Trumbo’s services in this manner. In 1957 Trumbo’s continued status as

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an elite screenwriter became all too apparent when, under the name Robert Rich, he won an Academy Award for writing The Brave One (RKO, 1956). Rich, in fact, soon admitted to the bureau that he served as Trumbo’s front for this picture. The FBI kept tabs the next year when Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (Columbia Pictures, 1957). Boulle had authored the novel on which the film was based, but, as the bureau was well aware, Hollywood radicals Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, both uncredited, had written the screenplay. The trifecta was completed the subsequent awards season when two writers with Communist Party affiliations—Nedrick Young (credited as Nathan Douglas) and Harold Smith—won the Oscar for best original screenplay for The Defiant Ones (United Artists, 1958).11 Such critical success surely irked the bureau. Indeed, the antimilitarist thrust of The Bridge on the River Kwai and the condemnation of racism in The Defiant Ones showed that Hollywood radicals could still find some opportunities to infuse scripts with political meaning of a liberal/left shade. Given the high barriers that tainted screenwriters had to surmount, however, it is hardly surprising that such films were rare during the 1950s. As a result of pressure from the FBI, MPA, and HUAC, the films of the 1950s differed markedly from those of the previous two decades, especially in terms of Hollywood’s willingness to tackle social problems on the screen. If anti-Communist forces rarely took measure of their victories, the other side dwelled endlessly on Hollywood’s position in the hands of the capitalist enemy. With the Maltz affair in 1946, Communist cultural leaders took a hard-line approach to culture making, insisting that, because Hollywood was a capitalist industry, its product could not be progressive. This line, of course, contrasted sharply with the party’s softer approach to the culture industry during the Popular Front and Second World War eras. However, as we have seen, the new party line pronounced during the Maltz affair did not mark an abrupt change of course, for even the most doctrinaire Communists, such as John Howard Lawson, continued to profess hope in the ability of artists to produce progressive works within the studio system. By the early 1950s, with Cold War battle lines more firmly drawn, with the Hollywood Ten imprisoned, and with hundreds of others on the blacklist, such hopes were quickly discarded. The party’s cultural commissar, V. J. Jerome, and its Hollywood leader, John Howard Lawson, made the most significant contributions to this theoretical shift in Communists’ attitudes toward the motion picture industry. Jerome, editor of the Marxist journal Political Affairs and chairman of the Communist Party’s National Cultural Commission, wrote a scathing attack on the industry’s portrayal of African Americans—and, more broadly, on its cultural function—in his 1950 booklet, The Negro in Hollywood Films. According to Jerome,

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the film industry was in the hands of “monopolists,” and as such its cultural product served as the imperialists’ ideological weapon in their class warfare against the people. Jerome, however, recognized that Hollywood’s portrayal of blacks seemed to be improving in the late 1940s. Having analyzed the treatment of African American characters from the earliest silent films to the studio era, Jerome acknowledged that the most blatant stereotypes—the brute, the buffoon, even the Uncle Tom—had been driven from the screen. He identified a new cycle of “Negro interest” films—Pinky (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1949) and Intruder in the Dust (MGM, 1949) among them—but insisted that their positive portrayal of blacks was merely a ruse. “So obviously does this represent a sharp departure from Hollywood’s past patterns that, to those who are content with first impressions, these films constitute nothing short of a revolutionary change,” Jerome asserted. Regardless of what must be said in criticism . . . it would be anything but realistic not to see in this new screen depiction of the Negro the fact that the advancing movement of the Negro people, together with their white labor and progressive allies, has forced a new tactical concession from the enemy. At the same time, it would be even more unrealistic not to see in this very concession a new mode—more dangerous because more subtle—through which the racist ruling class of our country is today re-asserting its strategic ideology of “white supremacy” on the Hollywood screen. Racism, Jerome contended, was a tool used by a reactionary ruling class in order to prevent the masses from uniting, and Hollywood played a leading role in perpetuating this false consciousness.12 Jerome’s specific criticisms of these films keenly pointed out their shortcomings in erasing all remnants of racial stereotypes from the screen. Elia Kazan’s Pinky, for example, endeavored to expose Southern discrimination through its story of a black woman who, because of her light skin color, is able to “pass” for white in the North. As a white woman in Boston her opportunity for social mobility—with a career as a nurse and an engagement to a white doctor—far surpasses anything available to her as a black woman in the South. Jerome praised this film’s condemnation of the Jim Crow South but condemned its paternalist resolution wherein Pinky finds justice in the Southern legal system while poor whites are presented as the most ardent foes of civil rights: “Where but on the Hollywood screen can we get such ‘insight’ into the class alignments of social conflict!” Kazan’s film not only offended Jerome’s belief in the possibilities of working-class solidarity across racial lines, but it also failed, in his view, to overcome racial stereotypes in its portrayal of some of the African American

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characters. Moreover, Pinky’s superiority seems grounded in the fact that she can pass as white; that the studio cast a white actress for the Pinky role only reinforced Jerome’s suspicions.13 More favorably inclined toward Intruder in the Dust, Jerome nevertheless argued that this Clarence Brown film ultimately served the interests of the counterrevolutionary upper classes. Based on the eponymous William Faulkner novel, Intruder in the Dust abandons the “passing” narrative of Pinky in order to dramatize the far more pressing problem of lynching. Jerome asserted that, as with Pinky, this film advanced the myth that blacks could find protection in the Southern legal system. As Jerome contended, “When, therefore, Intruder in the Dust seeks to present starkly the mob of poor whites as the camp of the lynchers, and the judicial arm of the Government as the ‘protector’ of the Negro against the poor whites, it is shielding the villain of the drama—the state power of the class which enforces ‘white supremacy’ and organizes and protects lynch mobs.” Jerome’s criticism did not lack saliency in an era when Congress would not pass an antilynching bill, yet it is worth noting that Communists were much more favorably inclined toward the American government during the Popular Front and World War II years. Hence, Jerome’s application of Marxist theory to his reading of Hollywood films took its inspiration more from the historical context of the Cold War than from a rigid understanding of Marx’s historical laws. Ideology, in other words, was flexible enough to fit the moment.14 Jerome’s polemic for a “class approach” served as a call for a more strict Marxist interpretation of filmmaking. Without naming names, Jerome scolded Lawson and others who proceeded from the fact of Hollywood’s mass appeal to the alleged misconception that the motion picture industry had the potential to be a “people’s art.” Rather, Jerome insisted, film was not “above-class.” Controlled by the monopolists, its ideological function required that it perpetuate “the false values of capitalist society.”15 As first signaled by the Maltz affair, the Cold War confrontation had the effect of narrowing the range of art acceptable to the party faithful. Either a film served the revolutionary cause or it expressed the interests of the capitalist enemy. Already marginalized by a powerful anti-Communist movement, such rigidity only served to further isolate Hollywood Communists. As late as 1949, the most doctrinaire Communist in Hollywood, John Howard Lawson, had yet to internalize fully the new line emanating from the Maltz affair. In that year he recognized the anti-Communist attack on Hollywood as a severe setback, but he asserted that “there can be no permanent influence with the development of the American motion picture as a people’s art.” Four years later—and with one of those years spent in prison along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten—Lawson admitted his error and now fully subscribed to Jerome’s stringent application of Marxist theory to Hollywood film. So long as

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capitalism prevailed over the motion picture industry, the American film could only reflect the ideology of the bourgeoisie.16 A hallmark of American Communist thought in the early Cold War period, John Howard Lawson’s 1953 book, Film in the Battle of Ideas, presented a fullblown analysis of the “fundamental class character of culture” as manifested in Hollywood, an industry he regarded as a key component of the “cultural superstructure.” Like Jerome, Lawson argued that Hollywood would always be Wall Street’s mouthpiece. Hollywood, however, could be contained. Ignoring the competition from television, Lawson maintained that Hollywood’s declining box office was a result of audience disgust over the “fascist propaganda on the screen.” Lawson believed that audience pressure, combined with competition from independent filmmakers, could at least force Hollywood to abandon its most blatantly “anti-democratic” film fare.17 Lawson extended Jerome’s criticism of the “Negro interest” films to cover the full range of Hollywood’s output in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Tracing what he considered a new “cycle of pornography and gangsterism,” Lawson charged that this heightened preoccupation with “sex and violence” was quickly evolving “toward direct propaganda for war and fascist regimentation.” Lawson’s contempt for Hollywood’s latest productions included criticism of Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1952), a film he claimed twisted the story of a peoples’ resistance to accommodate imperialist propaganda. Lawson condemned other historical films, such as John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (MGM, 1951) for presenting the Civil War “in a social vacuum” by not explaining its causes or focusing on the black struggle for freedom. He also denounced the film industry’s “degradation of women.” Writing after Kazan had famously “named names” in his HUAC testimony, Lawson asserted that his 1951 film, A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros.), was nothing less than “cold war propaganda.” The film’s portrayal of sexual violence committed by Stanley Kowalski, a lower-class “Polack,” upset Lawson’s sensibilities regarding the proletariat. Furthermore, Lawson interpreted Blanche DuBois’ “unusual responsibility for arousing the male’s baser instincts” as not only an attempt to whitewash rape, but also the effort of “Wall Street . . . to frighten people into submission.”18 Lawson reserved his most biting critique for Hollywood’s new round of war films inspired by the Korean War. The military films of the Second World War, despite Lawson’s awareness of their shortcomings, had emphasized the war’s moral issues and underlying causes, seeking to educate the citizenry on the need to fight fascism. But now, according to Lawson, Hollywood sought only to inspire blood thirst and “total obedience” as the highest values. Although Hollywood was far from the fascist stronghold Lawson made it out to be, his revulsion toward The Desert Fox (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1951), a film celebrating German field

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officer Erwin Rommel, is understandable. Here Hitler is denounced “as the killer who gets out of hand,” as the “madman” who lost sight of the wise policy of containing Communism and foolishly declared war on the United States. But Rommel is characterized as the prototypical “good” German, the foundation for an anti-Communist alliance. To John Howard Lawson, The Desert Fox “offered proof of the threat of fascism in the United States.” Yet, like Jerome, Lawson’s sympathy for the Soviet Union marred his interpretation; his simplistic understanding of the Cold War as being merely the result of U.S. imperialism led him to see all signs of anti-Communism in Hollywood films as emblems of a nascent fascism.19 Lawson and Jerome presided over the Communists’ redefinition of Hollywood’s cultural function, a project inspired by the historical context of the Cold War, which encouraged doctrinaire Communists to more rigidly apply Marxist theory to film analysis. Yet, even amid this great ideological struggle, not all Hollywood Reds adopted the Lawson/Jerome line. Adrian Scott, member of the Hollywood Ten and victim of the Hollywood blacklist, maintained his belief in the ability of liberals and left-wingers to create a progressive cinema within the capitalist film industry. The theoretical shift of hardliners Lawson and Jerome required not only a strict interpretation of current films, but a reinterpretation of past films, once championed as progressive by the party. Scott, producer of Crossfire (RKO, 1947), remained enraptured by Blockade (United Artists, 1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia Pictures, 1939), The Grapes of Wrath (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1940), Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941), The Oxbow Incident (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1943), Sahara (Columbia Pictures, 1943), Pride of the Marines (Warner Bros., 1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (RKO, 1946), and several other films that, whether made by liberals or Communists, all put forth “humanist, democratic and anti-fascist” messages. Scott’s nostalgia for the sundered left-liberal alliance and its pre–Cold War motion picture triumphs offers a stark contrast to the hard-line position of Jerome and Lawson.20 Scott recognized that the blacklist functioned not merely in the realm of employment, but more important, in the realm of ideas. Leftists suffered from the former, but liberals were the chief target of the latter, according to Scott. He maintained that charges of Communist propaganda were merely a cover used by conservatives to thwart liberal reform. Hence Scott failed to understand that antiCommunists in the FBI and MPA conflated liberal and left-wing ideas. Nevertheless, he was correct in spotting the decline of “social significance” filmmaking as a product of the anti-Communist campaign in Hollywood. Scott’s longing for the era of social problem filmmaking and his disdain for its death at the hands of the countersubversives was by no means an exclusively Communist viewpoint. In fact, not only did Scott differ from Lawson and Jerome

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in his assessment of Hollywood’s potential for progressive art, but, though he criticized liberals for their newfound timidity in the face of the anti-Communist charge, Scott’s views were shared by liberal anti-Communists such as Dorothy B. Jones, the former chief film analyst for the Office of War Information during World War II. Though liberals and Communists were divided politically, culturally some could still find common ground even in the mid-1950s. In 1956, Jones published her study of Communist influence on film content as part of the John Cogley/Fund for the Republic Report on Blacklisting. Though clearly appreciative of some of the films made by the Hollywood Ten and other Hollywood Communists and ex-Communists, Jones nevertheless condemned Communist propaganda activities. She recognized Communist interest in putting the medium to political use. Lenin, after all, foresaw the political possibilities of the motion picture, and Jones denounced those Communists in Hollywood who endeavored to insert red agitprop into their screenplays. Yet she insisted that this endeavor was a total failure. After completing a yearlong “objective” analysis of nearly three hundred films, Jones concluded: The facts brought to light indicate that some Hollywood writers in some instances made attempts to adapt the content of the films on which they worked in a manner which would have been beneficial to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. The facts also showed, however, that the very nature of the film-making process which divides creative responsibility among a number of different people and which keeps ultimate control of content in the hands of top studio executives; the habitual caution of moviemakers with respect to film content; and the self-regulating practices of the motion picture industry as carried on by the Motion Picture Association, prevented such propaganda from reaching the screen in all but possibly rare instances.21 Her argument that the studio system prevented Communist propaganda from reaching the screen clearly suggested the groundless nature of the anti-Communist attack on film content. Jones did not deny the potential of the motion picture in terms of its ability to affect cultural discourse and to promote social reform. Though she contended that Communist propaganda did not find its way to the screen, she reached this conclusion not by denigrating Hollywood’s potential to comment on serious social issues but rather by adopting strict criteria for identifying Communist propaganda: Did the film follow the party line at the time it was made? If so, was this viewpoint unique to the party, or was it shared by non-Communists as well? Did the film actually adopt the party’s symbols and phrases? Did it egregiously depart from known facts? Did it benefit the Soviet Union or the CPUSA?

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In assessing the films made by the Hollywood Ten and, to a lesser extent, those made by other known Communists or ex-Communists from 1929 to 1949, Jones found that no film actually produced fit her criteria. Controversial films, such as John Howard Lawson’s Blockade or the handful of pro-Soviet films made during World War II, such as Mission to Moscow, could not be counted as such, Jones argued, because the views expressed in these films were not unique to the Communist Party. Indeed, the pro-Soviet war films, though clearly misrepresenting the reality of life in the Soviet Union, were welcomed by the government (indeed by Jones’s OWI) as a valuable contribution to the war effort and were no more misleading than the pro-British and pro-Chinese films made in these years. Jones, therefore, adopted more discerning criteria for detecting Communist propaganda than the FBI and MPA; in so doing she did not make the same error of conflating Communist propaganda with ideas that resonated with New Deal liberals. For Jones, the real tragedy of the government’s investigation of Hollywood was the effect it had on the screen itself, not merely on the screen credits. Jones was well aware of the optimism in the early postwar years, the enthusiasm for social problem filmmaking that was squashed by HUAC. In 1947, the year of the committee’s first round of hearings on the motion picture industry, nearly 21 percent of Hollywood films could be classified by Jones as social problem pictures. By 1953, when the second round of HUAC investigations came to an end, this type of film had declined to 8 percent. For Jones, the connection was clear: “The attack made by the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the content of Hollywood films was the result of a fear . . . that motion pictures—the most popular medium of our time—were beginning to devote themselves seriously to an exploration of some of the social, economic and political problems of our time.” An advocate of the social problem film as an instrument of pubic education and reform, Jones deplored Hollywood’s increasing diet of “pure escapisttype films.”22 Thus we find three perspectives on the effect of the Cold War on Hollywood filmmaking. The FBI, MPA, and other fervent anti-Communists still found traces of red in the film industry, despite their almost total victory. Irked by independent films like Salt of the Earth and instances of blacklistees using fronts to continue their Hollywood work, the countersubversives nevertheless came to terms with their victory, not through joyous celebration, but rather by quietly closing shop. By 1956 Hollywood was no longer a priority for the FBI; within a few years its now-sporadic investigation drew to a close. Hollywood Communists had been driven from the industry, their cultural influence reduced to shambles. The most doctrinaire members of the party now maintained that the film industry could never espouse progressive ideas, and during the 1950s they attacked Hollywood

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as the mouthpiece of an incipient fascist movement. Neither the countersubversives nor the hard-line Communists got it right. Hollywood had never threatened America with Communist propaganda, nor was it now preparing the ideological grounds for a fascist uprising. The real effect of the Cold War on Hollywood was not missed by all Communists and anti-Communists. Both the radical Adrian Scott and the antiCommunist liberal Dorothy Jones bemoaned the death of the social problem film that resulted from the government’s investigation of Hollywood. Both were correct in recognizing that the targeted films—The Grapes of Wrath, The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, to name just a few—advocated ideas representative of liberal rather than Communist thought. Sure enough, many Communists made significant contributions to this progressive film movement. Many were themselves reform-minded radicals; the more doctrinaire revolutionaries among them simply went along for the ride when Soviet policy dictated cooperation with the antifascist West. The political gulf separating anti-Communist liberals like Jones and reform-oriented Communists like Scott during the 1950s obscured their cultural common ground. Their inability to unite, both culturally and politically, was a strong testament to the power of the cultural cold war waged by the FBI and its allies.

Appendix ANALYSIS OF MOTION PICTURES CONTAINING PROPAGANDA: AN FBI FILMOGRAPHY OF SUSPECT MOVIES 1

Alice in Wonderland (Lou Bunin Productions, 1951) Directed by Dallas Bower; screenplay by Henry Myers, Albert Lewin, and Edward Eliscu; starring Stephen Murray, Ernest Milton, and Pamela Brown FBI analysis: “The Bunin version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ went so far as to have a certain social significance historically, in that its puppet characters were identified to a certain extent with supposedly real personages.” All My Sons (Universal Pictures, 1948) Directed by Irving Reis; screenplay by Chester Erskine; starring Edward G. Robinson, Burt Lancaster, and Mady Christians FBI analysis: “The technique employed here is one used very frequently in stories written by Reds . . . the whole plot is slanted and twisted into an indictment of money-making.” All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal Pictures, 1930, re-released in 1950) Directed by Lewis Milestone; screenplay by George Abbott; starring Louis Wolheim and Lew Ayres FBI analysis: “This picture has been described by the ‘Daily Worker’ as an intense anguished appeal for peace.” Another Part of the Forest (Universal Pictures, 1948) Directed by Michael Gordon; screenplay by Vladimir Pozner; starring Fredric March, Dan Duryea, and Edmond O’Brien

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FBI analysis: “This picture deals with the reconstruction period in the South and portrays the Southern aristocracy as a degenerate and ignorant class. . . . The only characters that are decent are the negroes and the insane mother.” The Best Years of Our Lives (RKO, 1946) Directed by William Wyler; screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood; starring Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Myrna Loy FBI analysis: “Producer Cecil B. DeMille stated that this picture portrayed the ‘upper class’ in a bad light.” The Big Knife (United Artists, 1955) Directed by Robert Aldrich; screenplay by James Poe; starring Jack Palance and Ida Lupino FBI analysis (citing the Daily Worker): “The prominent theme of ‘The Big Knife’ is that artistic integrity . . . cannot survive in a Hollywood dominated by Big Money as a profit-making Big Business Institution.” Blockade (United Artists, 1938) Directed by William Dieterle; screenplay by John Howard Lawson; starring Madeleine Carroll and Henry Fonda FBI analysis: “Communist film from start to finish.” Border Street (Ulica Graniczna, Globe Film Distributors, 1950) Directed by Aleksander Ford; screenplay by Jan Fethke, Aleksander Ford, and Ludwik Starski; starring Mieczyslawa Cwiklinska and Jerzy Leszczynski FBI analysis: “Deal[s] with the case of Jews in Poland during the Nazi invasion and the activities of the Jewish workers in opposing the ‘Nazi oppressors.’ ” Born Yesterday (Columbia Pictures, 1950) Directed by George Cukor; screenplay by Albert Mannheimer and Garson Kanin; starring Judy Holliday, William Holden, and Broderick Crawford FBI analysis: “Denounced by Film Critic William H. Mooring as ‘diabolical’ Marxist satire.” The Boy with Green Hair (RKO, 1948) Directed by Joseph Losey; screenplay by Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt; starring Pat O’Brien, Robert Ryan, and Dean Stockwell FBI analysis: “The ‘Daily Worker’ reviewed the picture favorably. . . . It cited an alleged parallel between the abusive treatment of the boy because of the color of his hair, and discrimination against negroes because of the color of their skin.”

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Broken Arrow (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1950) Directed by Delmer Daves; screenplay by Michael Blankfort (front for Albert Maltz); starring James Stewart and Jeff Chandler FBI analysis (citing Counterattack): “The article stated that the Communist Party hailed this film as speaking for ‘peace.’ ” Brute Force (Universal Pictures, 1947) Directed by Jules Dassin; screenplay by Richard Brooks; starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn FBI analysis: “This picture portrays criminals in a sympathetic light and discredits law enforcement officers.” Buck Privates Come Home (Universal Pictures, 1947) Directed by Charles Barton; screenplay by John Grant, Fred Rinaldo, and Robert Lees; starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello FBI analysis: “One scene portrays a party given for a General, while other scenes reflect an enlisted man on KP duty, making the audience unnecessarily class conscious.” Carnival Story (RKO, 1954) Directed by Kurt Neumann; screenplay by Hans Jacoby, Kurt Neumann, Dalton Trumbo (uncredited), and Michael Wilson (uncredited); starring Anne Baxter and Steve Cochran FBI analysis: “Release[d] through Howard Hughes’ RKO organization. . . . Hughes of course had no idea that Trumbo had anything to do with the script.” Cass Timberlane (MGM, 1947) Directed by George Sidney; screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sonya Levien; starring Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner FBI analysis: “The picture deals with efforts of the ‘country club set’ to obtain war contracts, and their attempts to get rid of an honest judge. The latter is portrayed as an exception to the rule.” Christ in Concrete (released in the United States as Give Us This Day, EagleLion Films, 1949) Directed by Edward Dmytryk; screenplay by Ben Barzman; starring Sam Wanamaker and Lea Padovani FBI analysis: “Communists have been active in promoting the production of this picture.” Crossfire (RKO, 1947) Directed by Edward Dmytryk; screenplay by John Paxton; starring Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Ryan

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FBI analysis: “This picture is a good example of placing over-emphasis on the racial problem.” Cyrano de Bergerac (United Artists, 1950) Directed by Michael Gordon; screenplay by Carl Foreman; starring Jose Ferrer, Mala Powers, and Morris Carnovsky FBI analysis: “Ferrer has been affiliated with several Communist front groups, while Carnovsky has been identified as a Communist Party member.” Death of a Salesman (Columbia Pictures, 1951) Directed by Laslo Benedek; screenplay by Stanley Roberts; starring Fredric March and Kevin McCarthy FBI analysis: “The real harm will come when ‘Death of a Salesman’ is released abroad because by sly editing . . . and clever choice of subtitles a very unflattering portrait of American life is offered to millions of foreigners who already know very little of America and who instinctively distrust or dislike all things American.” Emergency Wedding (Columbia Pictures, 1950) Directed by Edward Buzzell; screenplay by Nat Perrin, Claude Binyon, and Dalton Trumbo; starring Larry Parks and Barbara Hale FBI analysis: “Trumbo was one of the ‘Hollywood Ten.’ ” The Farmer’s Daughter (RKO, 1947) Directed by H. C. Potter; screenplay by Allen Rivkin and Laura Kerr; starring Loretta Young, Joseph Cotten, and Ethel Barrymore FBI analysis: “This picture depicted an obvious attempt to belittle the present congressional form of government.” Force of Evil (listed by its prerelease title Tucker’s People, MGM, 1948) Directed by Abraham Polonsky; screenplay by Abraham Polonsky and Ira Wolfert; starring John Garfield and Thomas Gomez FBI analysis: “[A producer] stated that a police brutality angle had been eliminated from the script.” Four Days Leave (aka Swiss Tour, Film Classics, 1950) Directed by Leopold Lindtberg; screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. and Richard Schweizer; starring Cornel Wilde and Simone Signoret FBI analysis: “This picture has been made abroad in order to evade the motion picture ban on the ‘Hollywood 10.’ ” Gentlemen’s Agreement (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1947) Directed by Elia Kazan; screenplay by Moss Hart; starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and John Garfield

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FBI analysis: “A Police Lieutenant is a party to anti-Semitism and as such is subjected to much criticism. . . . This was a deliberate effort to discredit law enforcement.” Greed (Metro-Goldwyn Pictures, 1924) Directed by Erich von Stroheim; screenplay by June Mathis and Erich von Stroheim; starring Gibson Gowland and Zasu Pitts FBI analysis (citing Communist Party film critic): “Shows how the pursuit of money corrupts all human values.” Halls of Montezuma (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1950) Directed by Lewis Milestone; screenplay by Michael Blankfort; starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Robert Wagner, and Karl Malden FBI analysis: “[Blankfort and Milestone] have been suspected of Communist affiliations.” Hazard (Paramount, 1948) Directed by George Marshall; screenplay by Roy Chanslor and Arthur Sheekman; starring Paulette Goddard and Macdonald Carey FBI analysis: “No character in the picture had any good qualities except one person, a negro, who appeared as a fine, upstanding individual.” High Noon (United Artists, 1952) Directed by Fred Zinnemann; screenplay by Carl Foreman; starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly FBI analysis: “Carl Foreman . . . invoked his privileges under the Fifth Amendment when appearing as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in connection with his Communist party affiliations.” The Informer (RKO, 1935) Directed by John Ford; screenplay by Dudley Nichols; starring Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, and Preston Foster FBI analysis (citing Communist Party film critic): “Masterly study of a stool pigeon.” In Place of Splendor (unproduced) Screenplay by Richard Collins FBI analysis: “When [name redacted] reviewed the script she threw it on the floor in disgust, calling it outright Communist propaganda.” It’s A Wonderful Life (RKO, 1946) Directed by Frank Capra; screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra; starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, and Lionel Barrymore

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FBI analysis: “The picture represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.” Keeper of the Flame (MGM, 1942) Directed by George Cukor; screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart; starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn FBI analysis: “In the script the screen writer, in a veiled manner, attempted to make the audience believe that fascism and Americanism were synonymous.” The Flame and the Arrow (Warner Bros., 1950) Directed by Jacques Tourneur; screenplay by Waldo Salt; starring Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo FBI analysis: “Salt has been identified as a Communist Party member.” The Glass Wall (Columbia Pictures, 1953) Directed by Maxwell Shane; screenplay Ivan Shane, Maxwell Shane, and Ivan Tors; starring Vittorio Gassman, Gloria Grahame, and Ann Robinson FBI analysis: “According to [columnist George] Sokolsky, Senator [Pat] McCarran was outraged when he saw this picture inasmuch as it portrays the story of a displaced person who comes to the United States and gets a ‘raw deal’ until the United Nations intervenes. The aliens are depicted in this picture as grand people while the Americans are portrayed in a most uncomplimentary manner.” Guilty Bystander (Film Classics, 1950) Directed by Joseph Lerner; screenplay by Don Ettlinger; starring Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, and J. Edward Bromberg FBI analysis: “Bromberg has been identified as a Communist Party member.” The Lawless (Paramount Pictures, 1950) Directed by Joseph Losey; screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring; starring Macdonald Carey and Gail Russell FBI analysis: “The ‘Daily Worker’ . . . review stated that the picture discloses discrimination, hate and violence practiced against the MexicanAmerican minority of the Southwest. . . . The original script of the story was much stronger in its exposing of race prejudice by showing that the wealthy were the power behind the lynch mob but that the story had been changed by the studio.” A Life of Her Own (listed by its prerelease title, The Abiding Vision, MGM, 1950) Directed by George Cukor; screenplay by Isobel Lennart; starring Lana Turner and Ray Milland

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FBI analysis: “The informant believed was Communist property inasmuch as it showed a big businessman who is dishonest and immoral and thinks nothing of his employees.” Limelight (United Artists, 1952) Written and directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin and Claire Bloom FBI analysis: “According to a ‘Daily Worker’ review . . . ‘Limelight’ ranks with Chaplin’s best films, and in it is to be found Chaplin’s real thinking about the world we live in, as well as his appeal for more fellowship among human beings.” The Marrying Kind (Columbia Pictures, 1952) Directed by George Cukor; screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; starring Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray FBI analysis: “The [Counterattack] article reflected that pickets led by Catholic war veterans would protest [Judy Holliday’s] appearance in this picture because of her impressive front record which included affiliations with such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress, the Council of African Affairs, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and many others.” The Master Race (RKO, 1944) Directed by Herbert J. Biberman; screenplay by Herbert J. Biberman; starring George Coulouris, Osa Massen, and Lloyd Bridges FBI analysis: “According to three Special Agents who saw this picture, it depicted a Russian officer in a most favorable light, discrediting, at the same time and by comparison, an American and a British officer.” The Men (United Artists, 1950) Directed by Fred Zinneman; screenplay by Carl Foreman; starring Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright FBI analysis (citing Counterattack): “This picture has been hailed by the Communist Party as a film with ‘high war impact.’ ” Mission to Moscow (Warner Bros., 1943) Directed by Michael Curtiz; screenplay by Howard Koch; starring Walter Huston, Ann Harding, and Oskar Homolka FBI analysis: “The pro-Soviet propaganda in this picture was so obvious that it was criticized by numerous newspapers on these grounds. This led to a change in the Communist technique of inserting propaganda into motion pictures.”

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Monsieur Verdoux (United Artists, 1947) Written and directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin and Martha Raye FBI analysis: “Screen writer [name redacted] described the picture as ‘anticapitalistic propaganda’ which clearly implies that nations have made war to acquire property—that they have been ‘imperialistic’ wars.” More Than Defense (unproduced) Screenplay by Marc Siegel FBI analysis: “The informant stated that the picture included a number of lines stating that the Peekskill incident was another example of antiSemitism. The Peekskill incident referred to the Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill, New York, which resulted in a riot and considerable publicity.” Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia Pictures, 1936) Directed by Frank Capra; screenplay by Robert Riskin; starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur FBI analysis (citing Communist Party film critic): “Gary Cooper sides with the underprivileged.” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia Pictures, 1939) Directed by Frank Capra; screenplay by Sidney Buchman; starring James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains FBI analysis (citing Communist Party film critic): “First Hollywood movie to show tie-up between Congressman and Big Business.” No Sad Songs for Me (Columbia Pictures, 1950) Directed by Rudolph Mate; screenplay by Howard Koch; starring Margaret Sullivan and Natalie Wood FBI analysis: “One scene in the above picture in which a doctor was explaining why more money was not being spent in connection with cancer research, at which time he stated, ‘Most of our brains and money are going into things to make us more miserable instead.’ The informant was of the opinion that this statement was meant to be definite propaganda against the Government.” The North Star (RKO, 1943) Directed by Lewis Milestone; screenplay by Lillian Hellman; starring Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, and Walter Huston FBI analysis: “A former secretary of Sam Goldwyn, producer, advised that in addition to giving a fictitious picture of the situation in Russia, the film portrayed the idea that collective farming was the only successful way to farm.”

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Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1957) Directed by Nunnully Johnson; screenplay by Nunnully Johnson; starring Ginger Rogers, David Niven, and Tony Randall FBI analysis: “James O’Neill, National Executive of the American Legion . . . indicated . . . that action would be undertaken to present facts available to the American Legion concerning [Edward] Chodorov [author of the play suspected of Communist activities] to Twentieth Century Fox in an effort to discourage production of any material offered by him.” On the Waterfront (listed by its prerelease title The Hook, Columbia Pictures, 1954) Directed by Elia Kazan; screenplay by Budd Schulberg; starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb FBI analysis: “The source advised that the script of this picture [an early version authored by Arthur Miller] is a vicious indictment of working conditions among the longshoremen in the New York area and shows racketeers operating among the workers, extorting money from them for jobs and charging unreasonable prices for goods.” Pride of the Marines (Warner Bros., 1945) Directed by Delmer Daves; screenplay by Albert Maltz; starring John Garfield and Eleanor Parker FBI analysis: “[Daves and Maltz] had the actors say everything possible to ‘provoke doubts’ concerning representative government and free enterprise; they accused employers of everything from racial prejudice to a conspiracy to scuttle the GI Bill of Rights.” Roman Holiday (Paramount Pictures, 1953) Directed by William Wyler; screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter (front for Dalton Trumbo) and John Dighton; starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn FBI analysis (citing The Worker): “Hunter won the Oscar for writing the script. . . . You’d think they would hold on to an Oscar-winning writer with hooks of steel, but they let him go because he was an ‘unfriendly’ witness who would not betray his principles by bowing to witchhunting.” Ruthless (listed by its prerelease title Prelude to Night, Eagle-Lion Films, 1948) Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer; screenplay by Alvah Bessie, S. K. Lauren, and Gordon Kahn; starring Zachary Scott and Raymond Burr FBI analysis: “[Name redacted] described the plot as being anti-capitalist in character, and replete with Communist propaganda.”

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Salt of the Earth (Independent Productions, 1954) Directed by Herbert J. Biberman; screenplay by Michael Wilson; starring Juan Chacon and Rosaura Revueltas FBI analysis: “Although still under production, this picture will deal with the problems of the Mexican workers in the mining area of Silver City and will present them in a backward light and as victims of discrimination.” Saturday’s Hero (listed by its prerelease title The Hero, Columbia Pictures, 1951) Directed by David Miller; screenplay by Sidney Buchman and Millard Lampell; starring John Derek and Donna Reed FBI analysis: “An exposure of the seamy side of college football in the United States.” Silent Thunder (Desilu Productions, CBS, 1958) Directed by Ted Post; screenplay by James Edwards and John McGreevey; starring Desi Arnaz, John Drew Barrymore, and James Edwards FBI analysis (citing The Worker): “James Edwards, young Negro star of ‘Home of the Brave,’ starts work soon on an independent movie of his own story ‘Silent Thunder,’ about a Negro in the last century who was brought up by the Sioux Indians and won fame as an Indian scout for the U.S. Army and Pony Express rider.” Song to Remember (Columbia Pictures, 1945) Directed by Charles Vidor; screenplay by Sidney Buchman; starring Paul Muni and Merle Oberon FBI analysis: “[The composer Chopin] is tortured by the necessity of choosing between exercising his rights as an individual, and fulfilling his duty to the masses. Chopin finally decides to give all to the people, and dies in the attempt.” So Well Remembered (RKO, 1947) Directed by Edward Dmytryk; screenplay by John Paxton; starring John Mills, Martha Scott, and Patricia Roc FBI analysis: “Hedda Hopper . . . described this picture as being one which would surely be pleasing to Moscow. She wrote that it depicted capitalism as decaying, corrupt, perverted and unfeeling.” State of the Union (MGM, 1948) Directed by Frank Capra; screenplay by Anthony Veiller and Myles Connolly; starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn FBI analysis: “Seems to be a deep seated dislike for most of the things America is and stands for.”

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Steel Helmet (Lippert Pictures, 1951) Directed by Samuel Fuller; screenplay by Samuel Fuller; starring Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, and Steve Brodie FBI analysis: “The picture has become the center of attention as a result of praise of the picture by the ‘Daily Worker.’ ” Storm Center (Columbia Pictures, 1956) Directed by Daniel Taradash; screenplay by Elick Moll and Daniel Taradash; starring Bette Davis, Brian Keith, and Kim Hunter FBI analysis: “Contains propaganda of a type favorable to Communism.” A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Bros., 1951) Directed by Elia Kazan; screenplay by Tennessee Williams and Oscar Saul; starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Kim Hunter FBI analysis: “[Name redacted] described the plot as being symbolical of the downfall of the bourgeoisie.” They Shall Not Die (unproduced) Based on the play by John Wexley FBI analysis: “ ‘The Worker’ reported that the movie script of the Scottsboro play . . . had been approved by the Johnston Office and would be produced this summer in Hollywood by Charles K. Feldman for release through Warner Brothers.” The Time of Your Life (United Artists, 1948) Directed by H. C. Potter; screenplay by Nathaniel Curtis; starring James Cagney, Ward Bond, and Paul Draper FBI analysis: “Paul Draper, well known dancer, stated publicly . . . that upon reading the script he noted that it called for his making a reference to Hitler as the greatest menace of the day. . . . When it was suggested that he substitute ‘Stalin’ for ‘Hitler’ he refused to do so.” Tower of Lilies (Himeyuri no To, Toei Company, 1953) Directed by Tadashi Imai; screenplay by Yoko Mizuki; starring Kyoko Kagawa, Susumu Fujita, and Keiko Tsushima FBI analysis: “The [Film Daily] article continues that the charges are that the picture is aiming at discrediting the Japanese military as an argument against rearmament and creating anti-American sentiment by showing indiscriminate hospital bombings and non-military machinegunning of defenseless girls and mentioning poison gas as employed by Americans taking Okinawa.” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Warner Bros., 1948) Directed by John Huston; screenplay by John Huston; starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston

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FBI analysis: “Walter Huston makes a speech in this picture which . . . is practically a direct quotation from Marx’s, ‘Das Kapital.’ The speech is made during a scene in a flophouse in Nogales. It deals with the value of gold.” The Underworld Story (United Artists, 1950) Directed by Cy Endfield; screenplay by Henry Blankfort; starring Dan Duryea and Howard Da Silva FBI analysis: “Blankfort has been identified as a Communist Party member and Da Silva has also been so identified.” Watch on the Rhine (Warner Bros. 1943) Directed by Herman Shumlin; screenplay by Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman; starring Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, and Geraldine Fitzgerald FBI analysis (citing Communist Party film critic): “Lillian Hellman’s magnificent portrayal of an anti-fascist.” We Were Strangers (Columbia Pictures, 1949) Directed by John Huston; screenplay by John Huston and Peter Viertel; starring Jennifer Jones and John Garfield FBI analysis: “The ‘Hollywood Reporter’ stated . . . this picture ‘ . . . is the heaviest dish of red theory ever served to an audience outside the Soviet . . . the Americans are shown as nothing but money-grubbers and the downtrodden are urged to revolution to achieve their freedom.’ ”

Notes

The following archival abbreviations are used in the notes: AMPAS

Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California BRTC Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center CC “Charlie Chaplin,” Federal Bureau of Investigation File Number 100–127090, FBI Freedom of Information Act Reading Room, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C. COMPIC “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry,” Federal Bureau of Investigation File Number 100–138754, FBI Freedom of Information Act Reading Room, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C. DIES Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities (Dies), Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C. FBI ICF Federal Bureau of Investigation, Investigative Case Files of the Bureau, 1908– 1922, Record Group 65, Microfilm series M1085, National Archives, College Park HANL “Hollywood Anti-Nazi League,” Federal Bureau of Investigation File Number 100–6633, FBI Freedom of Information Act Reading Room, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C. HGRC Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University HUAC Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C. JBMP J. B. Matthews Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University LAPD RS Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities (Dies), Exhibits, Evidence, etc., Re: Committee Investigations, Los Angeles Police Department Radical Squad, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington D.C. MQC Martin Quigley, Sr. Collection, Georgetown University Library NACP National Archives, College Park, Maryland OHP Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles OWI Office of War Information, Bureau of Motion Pictures, Record Group 208, National Archives, College Park, Maryland SISS Records of the U.S. Senate, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington, D.C. TL NYU Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University WCFTR Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison INTRODUCTION

1. Report, Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Los Angeles to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–218. On the contributions of Maltz, Trumbo, 209

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and Wilson, see Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press, 2002), 359–60. 2. Although the subject of Hollywood’s red scare has received wide attention, the motives of the anti-Communists remain underexplored. The foundational books on this topic, though excellent, nevertheless focus more on the Left than the Right. These books, which make only passing mention of the FBI, suggest that anti-Communists seized on Hollywood because of the political activism of several screenwriters and because it was a surefire way of attracting attention for the anti-Communist cause, but they neglect the role that fear of Communist propaganda, however unfounded, played. The authors of these books also reasoned that since the studio system left control over screen content in the hands of producers, Hollywood films were never radical and the uproar over propaganda was nothing but “hoopla.” See, for example, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), intro. and chap. 9; Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), xv, 300–301; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982), 285. 3. Previous studies of the FBI in Hollywood consist either of articles or parts of books. See, for example, James Naremore, “The Trial: The FBI vs. Orson Welles,” Film Comment 27, no. 1 (1991): 22–27; John A. Noakes, “Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined that It’s a Wonderful Life was a Subversive Movie,” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 311–19; John A. Noakes, “Official Frames in Social Movement Theory: The FBI, HUAC, and the Communist Threat in Hollywood,” Sociological Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2000): 657–80; John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, “Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 4 (2003): 495–530; John Sbardellati, “Brassbound G-Men and Celluloid Reds: The FBI’s Search for Communist Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood,” Film History 20, no. 4 (2008): 412–36; Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), chap. 6. There are also several notable studies on the blacklist period that, though not focused on the FBI, pay more than passing attention to the bureau’s campaign in Hollywood. These include Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood; Larry Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); David Everitt, A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007); Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); James J. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 4. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 9. 5. Denning provides an excellent analysis of the “cultural front,” a term that was in heavy circulation among contemporaries. Giovacchini further contributes to our understanding of the cultural front in Hollywood, noting its modernist tendencies and stressing that “democratic modernism” in Hollywood was the joint production of “Hollywood Europeans” and “Hollywood New Yorkers.” May, on the other hand, challenges the “cultural front” thesis on the grounds that a more traditional republican “producers’ democracy” ethos was evident in Hollywood films before the formation of the Popular Front. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997); Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and

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Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 6. The claim that the films of the Hollywood Left were politically distinctive was first advanced by Thom Andersen in “Red Hollywood,” in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, ed. Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 141–96. This argument was further examined by Charles Maland in “Film Gris: Crime, Critique and Cold War Culture in 1951,” Film Criticism 26, no. 3 (2002): 1–30. Denning, Giovacchini, and May (cited in note 5) each present further evidence for the interpretation that the Hollywood Left had managed to infuse film with a steady dose of progressive fare. However, the interpretation that Hollywood films had actually been radicalized was put forward most boldly in a series of books by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. These works are A Very Dangerous Citizen; Radical Hollywood; Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Writing from a leftist perspective, Buhle and Wagner celebrate these numerous supposed left-wing screen triumphs, but ironically, as some critics have noted, their conclusions come close to the anti-Communist charge that Communists had subverted the screen. On the other hand, a few authors, writing from a right-wing perspective, argue that in fact the Communists did represent a threat in Hollywood, with one reason being their supposed propaganda successes. For this perspective, see Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Roseville, CA: Forum, 1998); Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005); Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005). These politically charged works are problematic, but the Buhle/ Wagner books remain much more useful to scholars than the highly polemical works by Billingsley, Mayhew, and the Radoshes. Nevertheless, a useful corrective to the Buhle/ Wagner tendency to overreach in some of their conclusions can be found in Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds., “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). This excellent collection of essays includes a reprint of Thom Anderson’s “Red Hollywood” article. A final work of note in this discussion is Alan Casty, Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009). Casty writes from an anti-Communist perspective, but does not hinge his arguments on specious claims that Hollywood Reds subverted the screen. Focusing on the moral issues surrounding the choice of testifying before HUAC, Casty’s book is tendentious, but no more so than Navasky’s Naming Names, which is a left-wing meditation on the morality of informing that surely inspired Casty’s rebuttal. 7. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987), 185–247. 8. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 25, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–4. 9. The literature on these related topics, McCarthyism and U.S. cold war culture, is far too voluminous to fully cite here, but some of the key works that have influenced my thinking include the following: Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Double Day, 1964); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon

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and Schuster, 1978); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Andrew J. Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968); Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995); Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998); Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Katherine A. S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Knopf, 1978); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 10. Douglas M. Charles, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939–1945 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007); David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin 1983); Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989); Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free

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Press, 1987); Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Free Press, 2004); Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow, 1992); Alexander Stephan, “Communazis”: FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Athan Theoharis, ed., Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Theoharis, Chasing Spies; Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). In addition to the above, there are a few compelling books on the portrayal of the FBI in American popular culture, including Bob Herzberg, The FBI and the Movies: A History of the Bureau on Screen and behind the Scenes in Hollywood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007); Daniel J. Leab, I Was a Communist for the FBI: The Unhappy Life and Times of Matt Cvetic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). 11. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 203. 1. A MOVIE PROBLEM

1. Lary May, Screening out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xii–xiv, 28, 35. Robert Sklar, MovieMade America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3. 2. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 19, 30, 32, 46. 3. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988), 277. 4. Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 277. Ironically, as Gabler notes, this “anti-Semitic demonology” occurred despite the Hollywood Jews’ strong desires for assimilation (see pages 1–7). 5. On movie houses, see May, Screening Out the Past, 43–45. Agee quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 127. On reactions to DeMille’s film, see Sklar, Movie-Made America, 91. On campaigns for censorship, see Alison M. Parker, “Mothering the Movies: Women Reformers and Popular Culture,” and Francis G. Couvares, “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies before the Production Code,” both in Movie Censorship and American Culture, ed. Francis G. Couvares (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). In his introduction to the book and in his article Couvares argues that censorship struggles are best understood as cultural negotiations. 6. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press, 2002); Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 7. Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 46–47. See also Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 17. 8. The Radical Division was renamed the General Intelligence Division (GID) by Hoover in 1920. 9. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), 56, 67, 72. See also Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, chaps. 2 and 3. 10. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 13–14. O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, 17. Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 81, 85.

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11. Anders Stephanson, “Liberty or Death: The Cold War as U.S. Ideology,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 81–100. 12. Athan Theoharis, Ellen Schrecker, and others have agreed that the term “Hooverism” is more appropriate than “McCarthyism,” since it signifies that not only was the FBI the center of anti-Communist operations but also that its power began well before and continued long after the senator from Wisconsin’s short stint in the national spotlight. See Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 333; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1998), 203. 13. J. Edgar Hoover, “Communist Virus,” speech reprinted from Washington TimesHerald, June 21, 1953, box 257, folder 7, JBMP. 14. On the countersubversive tradition, see Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xiii–xiv, 272–330; Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 10–15. 15. Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 117–20, 155; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 85–86. 16. “Hoover Banishes Gumshoe Sleuths,” Atlanta Constitution, December 27, 1924, box 1, “January 1921–December 1924,” folder, Director’s Office Records and Memorabilia, J. Edgar Hoover’s Scrapbooks, 1913–1972, record group 65, Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, NACP. See also Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI, 86–88. 17. Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 17, 116–19. See also Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), 462. Here Gentry tells of the director’s compulsive hand washing, his fear of flies, and his “insistence that agents not step on his shadow.” 18. Letter, Robert C. Deming, Director of the Department of Americanization, to W. P. Hazen, Department of Justice, November 3, 1920, reel 926, BS 202600–197, FBI ICF; Letter, Hoover to Brigadier General A. E. Nolan, Director of Military Intelligence, December 8, 1920, reel 926, BS 212657 (index number not legible), FBI ICF; Letter, Hoover to Nolan, January 6, 1921, reel 926, BS 202600–197–6, FBI ICF. Hoover’s letters to Nolan indicate that FBI agent Starr in New York City completed a report on LFS less than one month after Deming notified the Justice Department. It is possible that the bureau had already been alerted to Labor Film Service, but I have not discovered any record of LFS in the bureau’s files before Deming’s letter. Guy Hedlund’s motivation for contacting Deming cannot be deciphered here. For more on Labor Film Service and Guy Hedlund, see Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 153–60. 19. For more on Cannon, see Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 153. For Bureau surveillance of his gubernatorial candidacy, see Report, Agent W. L. Buchanan (Buffalo, NY), November 16, 1920, reel 926, BS 202600–33–96x, FBI ICF. 20. Letter, Joseph D. Cannon to W. L. Charlies, reel 926 (date and Bureau Security file number unclear, though possibly 212657), FBI ICF. 21. LFS brochure, “Presenting the Motion Picture in Its Relations and Possibilities for Labor and Human Betterment . . . ” and Cannon letters included with Robert C. Deming letter to W. P. Hazen, November 3, 1920, reel 926, BS 202600–197, FBI ICF. 22. For more on postal censorship during World War I and the red scare see, William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 144–49. 23. LFS brochure, “Presenting the Motion Picture in Its Relations and Possibilities for Labor and Human Betterment . . . ” reel 926, BS 202600–197, FBI ICF. LFS had several notable supporters, including Socialist leader Norman Thomas, economist Scott Nearing, New York assemblyman Louis Waldman, and socialist film critic Louis Gardy. On

NOTES TO PAGES 16–19

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the Soviet use of motion pictures, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 24. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 154–59, 171, 326. The bureau monitored several other figures in the labor film movement, including John Arthur Nelson, William Kruse, John Slayton, and Upton Sinclair. 25. The LAPD also kept track of other radical pictures, including Beauty and the Bolshevik, a comedy-romance, and Russia in Overalls, a documentary showing Russian industrial development. William F. Hynes, “Confidential Weekly Summary of Intelligence,” Report no. 2, August 23–29, 1924; Hynes, Report no. 5, September 13–19, 1924; Hynes, Report no. 7, September 27-October 3, 1924; Hynes, Report no. 12, October 31–November 7, 1924; all in box 43, LAPD RS. See also Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 155–56. 26. Hynes, Report no. 2, August 23–29, 1924, box 43, LAPD RS. 27. Hynes, Report no. 7, September 27–October 3, 1924, and Hynes, Report no. 12, October 31-November 7, 1924, box 43, LAPD RS. The Dawes plan (1924) reduced German reparations from World War I and provided Germany with American loans to help the country make its payments to Great Britain and France, both indebted to the United States. 28. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 223. 29. Hynes, Report no. 14, November 15–21, 1924, LAPD RS. 30. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, chap. 8; quote on page 213. 31. Report, Agent A. A. Hopkins, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 15, 1922, CC, FBI 100–127090-x1. The format of these early FBI reports differs slightly from those of later years. In the reports of the 1940s, the names of the agent writing the report are always redacted, thus one usually cites SAC (special agent in charge) as the sender (in 1922 SAC LA was Leon Bone). Likewise, reports in later years were usually sent straight to the director (though they were often read and summarized first by his assistants), but here Hopkins directs attention to Hoover, indicating that he played an important role in this investigation. 32. Chaplin presented less than rosy images of state authority in other films, including The Kid (1921). For more on wartime and postwar nativism, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 3rd paperback ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), chaps. 8 and 9. See also M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 51–59, 81–86. 33. Report, Agent A. A. Hopkins, Los Angeles to Hoover, 8/15/22, CC, FBI 100– 127090-X1. 34. Report, R. E. Ferguson to Hoover, 1/27/21, reel 929, BS 202600–685–2, FBI ICF. Chaplin’s divorce from Mildred Harris was quite tumultuous and very public. See David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York: Da Capo Press , 1994), 259–65. 35. Report, Agent A. A. Hopkins, Los Angeles to Hoover, 8/15/22, CC, FBI 100–127090X1. As further evidence of what was considered subversive, Hopkins also bemoans a scene in the play “showing a Polish labor agitator in a fiery soap box speech against the ten-hour day, and for better working conditions and higher wages.” The attention to nationality is significant, for xenophobia was at the heart of the first red scare and remained significant in the second as well. As my analysis will attempt to show, FBI fears of “Communist propaganda” in films reflected a fear, not of foreign individuals per se (though that was evident), but of foreign ideas. This fear of the foreign implies that the FBI cast itself as the defender of the national cinema. 36. Letter, William J. Burns to Leon Bone, SAC, Los Angeles, 8/24/22, CC, FBI 100– 127090–1. 37. In 1934 this tactic would become further institutionalized within the Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph Breen under the Hays Office.

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38. Report, Agent A. A. Hopkins, Los Angeles to Hoover, 8/15/22, CC, FBI 100– 127090-X1. 39. Memo, GFR, Jr. (Burns aide) to Hoover, 8/28/22, CC, FBI 100–127090-X1. 40. Letter, Will H. Hays to William J. Burns, 9/6/22, CC, FBI 100–127090-X2. 41. The Teapot Dome scandal, wherein government officials received kickbacks in exchange for leasing oil fields in Wyoming, exposed corruption in the Harding administration. 42. Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 103–7. These and other tactics developed by the FBI make the task of analysis quite difficult. Bureau files are laced with information from “confidential informants,” and thus it is very hard to distinguish whether such informants were bureau agents. Likewise, given that many records have been destroyed and others are withheld, usually in the interests of “national security,” most FBI experts agree that we will probably never know the true extent of FBI activity. 43. Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14–15, 29–33. 44. Ibid., 35–43. 45. Ibid., 53–55, 73–75. 46. Letter, Joseph Breen to Martin Quigley, May 1, 1932, box 1, folder 3, MQC. 47. Letter, Joseph Breen to Martin Quigley, May 1, 1932, box 1, folder 3, MQC. In historian Gregory Black’s estimation, Breen was “a rabid anti-Semite.” Black quotes Breen’s charge that the Hollywood Jews were “a foul bunch, crazed with sex . . . and ignorant in all matters having to do with sound morals.” Black, Hollywood Censored, 170. 48. Black, Hollywood Censored, 157–92. 49. Ibid., 173–74, 245–46. Ruth Vasey’s definition of “industry policy” is somewhat broader. She defines this concept in terms of the industry’s public relations with interest groups, including professions or commercial concerns within the United States, and with other nations. Vasey shows that such concerns were influential during the 1920s, well before the Production Code Administration came into effect. Ruth Vasey, “Beyond Sex and Violence: ‘Industry Policy’ and the Regulation of Hollywood Movies, 1922–1939,” in Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, ed. Matthew Bernstein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). See also Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 50. Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” chap. 3 in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 41. 51. Lea Jacobs, “Industry Self-Regulation and the Problem of Textual Determination,” in Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, ed. Matthew Bernstein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 94–98. 52. On the labor-capital genre, see Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 56–57. 53. In 1929 John Barcoski was murdered by industrial police. Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno—then a young attorney—was disgusted by the event. In a chance meeting with actor Paul Muni, Musmanno relayed the story with such conviction that Muni recommended he write a draft. Along with a play by Harry R. Irving entitled Bohunk, Musmanno’s story served as the basis for the screenplay written by Abem Finkel and Carl Erickson. See “Story behind a Story,” New York Times, April 21, 1935, X3. Muni had already acquired a reputation for “being a sociological crusader among actors.” Yet he tried to distance himself from this characterization in the months before Black Fury was released, claiming “I have not the slightest interest in the message a picture may convey.” Muni further tried to downplay his political reputation when he told reporters, “It may sound dull, but I really am not concerned with the depression or with communism or capitalism. Not concerned and not worried. If communism comes along, swell! If fascism, it’s all right by me.” See “A Word with Paul Muni,” New York Times, January 27, 1935, X4.

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54. Black, Hollywood Censored, 253. 55. Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 44. 56. Letter, Joseph Breen to Jack Warner, May 7, 1934, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 57. Francis R. Walsh, “The Films We Never Saw: American Movies View Organized Labor, 1934–1954,” Labor History 27 (Fall 1986), 565. As Walsh shows, the original Black Hell script intended a powerful indictment of mine owners and their violent industrial police. 58. Letter, J. D. Battle to Will Hays, August 29, 1934, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. Hays soon responded with assurances that the coal industry would not be misrepresented. Though he politely questioned Battle’s sources, he intimated that Battle’s concerns were understandable, and he informed Battle that he forwarded his letter to Harry Warner, thus showing that the film industry took the concerns of the coal industry quite seriously. Letter, Hays to Battle, September 4, 1934, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 59. Letter, Breen to Jack L. Warner, September 12, 1934, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 60. Letter, Breen to Hays, January, 23, 1935, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. See also letter, Breen to Hays, Sept., 20, 1934, and letter, Breen to Hays, May 21, 1934. Here Breen stressed that one of the film’s positive qualities was its ending, wherein the NRA settles the dispute. 61. Letter, Joe Breen to James J. Wingate, March 26, 1935; letter, Wingate to Breen, March 27, 1935; letter, Breen to Wingate, March 29, 1935; all in Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. Wingate was an official in the Hays Office whom Breen worked through in order to obtain New York’s approval. 62. Other reviewers shared Parsons’ view. For instance, the Hollywood Reporter praised screenwriters Finkel and Erickson for charting a course between left-wing “propaganda” and “too much flag-waving.” See Hollywood Reporter, March 26, 1935. For the article by Parsons, see Los Angeles Examiner, April 5, 1935; both in Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 63. Albert Maltz, “What Is Propaganda?” New York Times, April 28, 1935, X3. 64. Though all three acknowledge some liberal support for this film, Black, Ross, and Walsh essentially confirm Maltz’s view of Black Fury as an antilabor film. See Black, Hollywood Censored, 252–60; Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, 246–47; and Walsh, “Films We Never Saw,” 565–70. John Bodnar, however, places more emphasis on the radical potential in this text. John Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 21–25. 65. Variety, April 17, 1935, Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 66. “New ‘Black Fury’ Ban,” New York Times, April 6, 1935, 11. 67. Some foreign censors merely demanded cuts. Ontario and Alberta wanted fewer shots of violence between the miners and the industrial police. English censors demanded that the studio cut Croner’s line “We sweat blood to give them their fat salaries, their fancy offices and high price cars to ride around in. That makes us their bosses, doesn’t it?” Meanwhile, the film was banned in India, Venezuela, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, and the Straits Settlements. See Black Fury PCA file, AMPAS. 68. Walsh, “Films We Never Saw,” 569. 69. Otis Ferguson, “Men Working,” New Republic 82, April 24, 1935, 313. 70. Andre Sennwald, “Coal Mine Melodrama,” New York Times, April 7, 1935, X3. 71. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 18–27; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 9–15. 72. Schwartz, Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 15–16; Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 56–65; interview of John Bright by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 145.

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73. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 33–46; Schwartz, Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 61–79, 128–32. 74. Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 272–92; Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 37–38. 75. The FBI began its investigation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in early 1941. Letter, Hoover to Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles, undated, HANL, FBI 100–6633–1. 76. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 104–12; Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 13–39, 83–86; Radosh and Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood, 47–54. 77. “Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy,” 1938 pamphlet, in Vertical Files, box 255, folder 8, JBMP. 78. John Howard Lawson, Film: The Creative Process (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 124–27; Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 159–61; Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 205–8; Terry Christensen, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 56–58. 79. Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism, 85–86. 80. Walsh, Sin and Censorship, 159–60; Maltby, “Production Code and Hays Office,” 68. 81. See “Working Draft of the Lord-Quigley Code Proposal,” appendix A in Black, Hollywood Censored, 302–8. Italics in original. 82. Letter, Martin Quigley to Joe Breen, January 10, 1939, box 1, folder 3, MQC. 83. “Motion Pictures and Propaganda,” address by Martin Quigley before the Williamstown Institute of Human Relations, August 31, 1937, box 4, folder 7, MQC. 84. Douglas W. Churchill, “Hollywood Pledges Allegiance to America,” New York Times, January 15, 1939, X5; Martin Quigley, “A Reply to Walter Wanger’s Plea for Propaganda on Screen,” Motion Picture Herald, January 21, 1939, box 4, folder 13, MQC. 85. U.S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, Propaganda in Motion Pictures, 77th Congress, 1st session, September 9, 1941, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942, pages 1, 24. 86. Ibid., 1–35. 87. Ibid., 18–22. 88. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 40–47. 89. Will H. Hays, “Freedom of the Films,” 1941, Vertical Files, box 231, folder 11, JBMP; Martin Quigley editorial, Motion Picture Daily, January 25, 1940, The Grapes of Wrath PCA file, AMPAS. 90. For a celebratory account of the Left’s impact on Hollywood films, see Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press, 2002). Buhle and Wagner offer an encyclopedic account of left influence on the screen, including in their analysis a broad range of B films and genre pictures that have escaped the notice of most commentators. 91. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997). 2. THE FBI’S SEARCH FOR COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994), 7.

NOTES TO PAGES 41–45

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2. Ralph Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance, 1939–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 127. 3. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 4. Other studies utilizing the COMPIC file have tended to emphasize the early postwar period. See John A. Noakes, “Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined That It’s a Wonderful Life Was a Subversive Movie,” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 311–19; John A. Noakes, “Official Frames in Social Movement Theory: The FBI, HUAC, and the Communist Threat in Hollywood,” Sociological Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Fall, 2000): 657; Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 139–69. 5. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 18, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–4. Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, June 21, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–5. 6. Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, June 21, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–5. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Two examples of the indebtedness of film scholars to Anderson are Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2, 257; and Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), 8, 14. Films, of course, have always had a transnational character as well, but this by no means discredits the argument that film carries the ability to speak to national identities. 8. Janet Staiger, “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: Explaining the Development of Early American Film Narrative,” IRIS II (Summer 1990): 21. Of course one could add other markers of identity, including political and religious affiliations, that viewers would use to interpret messages in films and other media. 9. One should note that the CPUSA, too, was inflicted by too much secrecy. Screenwriter and former party member Paul Jarrico believed as much. He told interviewer Patrick McGilligan that the party blundered in following Soviet leadership. “But I think there was another serious mistake,” Jarrico added, “which was probably special to Hollywood, and that was that our membership was covert. Secret. There are good historical reasons why Party members did not advertise their membership in the Party. But in Hollywood it was a disastrous course, because though we would have been one-tenth the size that we were [if we had been public], we would never have suffered the plague of informers that we did suffer. And we would have accomplished just as much, I think—or more.” Paul Jarrico interview by Patrick McGilligan in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 348. 10. Hayward, French National Cinema, 6–8. 11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 153. Informed by Weber, Moynihan proclaims here that “a culture of bureaucracy will always tend to foster a culture of secrecy.” 12. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 13. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 14. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 25, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–21. 15. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. Its conclusions aside, the bureau by no means erred in detecting a large influx of Europeans into Hollywood. On this community and its relations with intellectual migrants from New York, see Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

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16. Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 3, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–35. 17. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 18. Letter, Philip Dunne to Spyros Skouras, April 2, 1952, Ralph de Toledano Papers, box 18, folder 8, HGRC. It is important to note that Dunne made these points not as a Communist sympathizer but as a liberal whose experience working with Communists pushed him toward anti-Communism. For more on the Popular Front in Hollywood and its disintegration, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chaps. 4–5. 19. See Allen Boretz interview by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, 119; Paul Jarrico interview by Patrick McGilligan, 335–36; and Robert Lees interview by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, quote at 423; all in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades. 20. “Call to American Peoples’ Meeting,” New York City, April 5–6, 1941, American Business Consultants/Counter Attack Collection, box 14, folder 12–35–1A, TL NYU. 21. “Stop Hitler/Defeat Appeasement” flyer, American Business Consultants/Counter Attack Collection, box 14, folder 12–35 (1–37), TL NYU. 22. William Z. Foster and Robert Minor, The Fight against Hitlerism (New York: Workers Library, 1941), 4. I found this pamphlet in the Van Deman Papers, box 30, R-5139, SISS. Retired General Ralph H. Van Deman was a regular provider and recipient of intelligence, whose network included the FBI, the military, and his own informants. For more on the Van Deman files, see Richard Halloran, “Senate Panel Holds Vast ‘Subversive’ File Amassed by Ex-Chief of Army Intelligence,” New York Times, September 7, 1971, 35. 23. Jarrico interview by Patrick McGilligan, in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 336. 24. See, for instance, Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 18, 1943, COMPIC 100–138754–4. Indeed, the FBI and other investigators often used adherence to the changing party line as proof of membership or fellow traveling. Navy intelligence issued an investigative guide for detecting Communists, based largely on familiarity with the party line. See Memorandum, D. Dwight Douglas to Officers-in-Charge, May 29, 1943, Van Deman Papers, box 43, R-6276, SISS. On the party’s inability to recover from the Nazi-Soviet pact, see Jarrico interview by Patrick McGilligan, in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 335–36. 25. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 25, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 21. This fear that the grand alliance bestowed dangerous opportunities for American Communists was echoed by other intelligence agencies, including the Office of Naval Intelligence, which issued a memorandum proclaiming that Communist “activities at the present time . . . are given a cloak of ‘patriotism’ and are obscured. . . .However, at the present time the Communist Party of the United States is thoroughly organized, nationally and locally, and is extremely active; in fact much more active than ever. Because of present world conditions, it is enjoying greater popularity than ever before and hence is more powerful.” Memorandum, D. Dwight Douglas to Officers-in-Charge, May 29, 1943, Van Deman Papers, box 43, R-6276, SISS. 26. For some this would simply constitute more evidence of their subservience to Moscow. See, for instance, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11. However, we must take into account the sincere antifascism on the part of the Hollywood Left, the period of the pact notwithstanding. On this point, see Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism, chaps. 3–5. 27. John Bright interview by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, 150–51; Lionel Stander interview by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, 619; both in, McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades.

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28. The document in question, entitled “The Motion Picture Industry and the War,” bears little identifying information. Obtained by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Radical Squad, the document is a seven-page brief on labor-management cooperation, union policy, and motion picture propaganda. It contains the following instructions: “This material is being furnished to you to form the basis for more organized and systematic work in your branch. It should be digested thoroughly in your branch bureau, and discussed in the branch primarily from the point of view of the action which the branch should undertake.” The suggested action included: “Stimulating the expression from the motion picture public of their desires and needs, through the People’s World, the Worker, and the union press.” In both language and content it is clearly a party document, though one cannot tell anything more about its authorship or level of distribution. Box 50, unlabeled folder, LAPD RS. 29. “The Motion Picture Industry and the War,” box 50, unlabeled folder, LAPD RS. The document notes great disagreement with the policy of supporting the producers, citing proposals to campaign for stronger powers for the OWI or for replacing Will Hays with Wendell Willkie. Here the OWI proposal is dismissed as not only too threatening to the producers but also unsatisfactory, given the OWI’s perceived failings in endorsing disagreeable pictures such as Tennessee Johnson, as well the fact that “the government does not know enough about entertainment values and the production of pictures to be able to direct industry intelligently.” Moreover, this document claims that the “mere substitution of Willkie for Hays” would not change the Hays Office’s “extremely reactionary role in relation to content.” 30. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 16, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–32. 31. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 25, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–21. 32. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 33. Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 311–15. 34. Bosley Crowther, “The Movies Follow the Flag,” New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1944, 18. 35. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chap. 2. Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art, 303–6. See also David Culbert, ed., Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), part 1. This collection of documents contains transcripts of both the Wheeler and Truman investigations. 36. “Hits Funds ‘Misuse’ in First Lady Film,” New York Times, October 6, 1943, 8; “Propaganda Code Planned by Hays,” New York Times, October 10, 1943, 40. 37. Of course the FBI did fear that Communists had infiltrated parts of the Roosevelt administration, including the OWI, which worked closely with the film industry; nevertheless their investigation of Hollywood was not driven by partisanship but, rather, intense anti-Communism. 38. Feature Viewing, Mission to Moscow, April 29, 1943 [quote from a review by BMP analyst Madeleine Ruthven], “Motion Picture Reviews and Analysis, 1943–1945,” box 3521, OWI. 39. Mission to Moscow, directed by Michael Curtiz, (Warner Bros., 1943); Todd Bennett, “Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II.” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (2001): 489–518; Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 185–221. See also David Culbert, ed., Mission to Moscow (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); and Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left

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(San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), chap. 5. Culbert’s introduction details the roles of Davies and the Roosevelt administration in the production of the film. Ronald and Allis Radosh instead argue that Communists (especially the film’s technical advisor Jay Leyda) and fellow-travelers (especially screenwriter Howard Koch) did more to shape this film. The Radoshes are more authoritative on the attitudes and roles of Koch and Leyda, but their analysis suffers from too much willingness to neglect the input of non-Communist participants in the making of this film. 40. Letter, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 27, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–14. 41. One example of the bureau’s efforts to influence public opinion is the 1946 “educational” campaign discussed in Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), chap. 3. 42. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 10, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–9. Culbert indicates that Caldwell was first hired on at the behest of Joe Davies, but that the writer, who had no screenwriting experience, was soon replaced by Koch. Caldwell’s treatment set the structure for the film, and he was the first to telescope the purge trials into one, but Koch and director Michael Curtiz did much more to influence the film’s dialogue and visuals. Culbert, Mission to Moscow, 18–25. 43. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 10, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–9. 44. Ibid. 45. Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance, 61, 99, 144–45; Time 41, January 4, 1943, 23. 46. David Lardner, “Repercussions Would Help,” New Yorker 19, May 8, 1943, 48–49. 47. “Successful Mission,” Newsweek 21, May 10, 1943, 74. 48. Nation 156, May 8, 1943, 651. 49. Form letter, Dwight McDonald et al. to “Dear Friend,” May 12, 1943, NAACP MSS, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Cited in Culbert, Mission to Moscow, 257–59. 50. John Dewey and Suzanne La Follette, letter to the editor, New York Times, May 9, 1943, sec. 4. 51. “V.F.W. Aide Defends ‘Mission to Moscow,’ New York Times, May 19, 1943, 8. The New York State Commander of the VFW issued a statement saying that the views of Devereaux were not those of the organization. 52. “Assail Foes of Film,” New York Times, July 5, 1943, 10. 53. Arthur Upham Pope, letter to the editor, New York Times, May 16, 1943, sec. 4. 54. Manny Farber, “Mishmash,” New Republic 108, May 10, 1943, 636. Bosley Crowther, “The Ecstasies in ‘Mission to Moscow’ Raise Doubts on Political Films,” New York Times, May 9, 1943, sec. 2. 55. James Agee, film column, Nation 156, May 22, 1943, 749. 56. David Culbert notes that Mission to Moscow ranked eighty-fourth out of ninetyfive films in its season. Its distribution abroad made up some of the losses, but the film never managed to break even. Still, because it played to many in the armed forces through the Army Motion Picture Service, Culbert concludes that the film reached an audience far larger than its receipts would indicate. Culbert, Mission to Moscow, 34–35. 57. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 10, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–9; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 20, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–26. 58. John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harvest, 1976), 157. 59. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 10, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–9. 60. Dorothy B. Jones, “The Hollywood War Film: 1942–1944,” Hollywood Quarterly 1 (October 1945), 11. Of course Jones’s opinion would have been easily discounted by the bureau. She had been the head of the Film Reviewing and Analysis Section of the

NOTES TO PAGES 58–60

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Hollywood office of the OWI, an agency of the government that Hoover considered subversive. Hollywood Quarterly itself would have been considered tinged if only because John Howard Lawson was on its editorial staff. 61. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 10, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–9. The films listed as propaganda pictures in this report were Mission to Moscow, Action in the North Atlantic, Keeper of the Flame, Hangmen Also Die, Our Russian Front, Edge of Darkness, and This Land Is Mine. Interestingly, the report also listed “Motion Pictures Believed To Have Propaganda Angle Which Have Been Made But Have Not Been Released, Or Are Now In The Process Of Production.” These were North Star, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Through Embassy Eyes, Russian People, Song of Russia, Boy from Stalingrad, Girl from Leningrad, The Seventh Cross, and Secret Service in Darkest Africa. That the bureau presumed these would be “propaganda” pictures illustrates their belief that Communists would subvert any film that they worked on. 62. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 12, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–24. 63. Sahara, directed by Zoltan Korda (Columbia, 1943). 64. Feature Viewing, Sahara, July 8, 1943, “Motion Picture Reviews and Analysis, 1943–1945,” box 3524, OWI. 65. Dorothy B. Jones, “Tomorrow the Movies III. Hollywood Goes to War,” Nation 160, January 27, 1945, 94. Bosley Crowther, “The Movies Follow the Flag,” New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1944, 18. 66. The OWI had a hand in the positive characterization of Tambul. It recognized “a great opportunity in the character of Tambul to show the heroic role of dark-skinned soldiers in this war . . . and by implication, the American Negro.” Yet early scripts raised OWI concerns that this character, though portrayed heroically, “remains apart from the others.” OWI was quite satisfied that the final version of the film incorporated its suggestions on this matter, proclaiming that “the Sudanese Negro character, Tambul, now appears on equal footing with the other soldiers, no longer a sort of faithful Gunga Din, but a convincing brother-in-arms.” Script Review, Sahara, February 1, 1943, and Feature Viewing, Sahara, July 8, 1943, “Motion Picture Reviews and Analysis, 1943–1945,” box 3524, OWI. 67. Sahara, directed by Zoltan Korda, (Columbia, 1943). The idea that an American institution like the Army could promote progress in race relations echoed the thesis of Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944). Myrdal asserted that America’s race problems presented a moral dilemma for white citizens, who believed strongly in what he calls the American creed—ideas of liberty and equality. Myrdal believed that the American creed would reach fulfillment in the nation’s institutions (especially its public institutions). Both Myrdal and the makers of Sahara were, in retrospect, too optimistic regarding the moral consciousness of whites, for civil rights reform came only after blacks themselves forced the issue through grassroots action. Indeed, government institutions could easily violate the American creed. 68. See, for example, Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989); Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987); Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 69. On this point, see John Noakes, “Racializing Subversion: The FBI and the Depiction of Race in Early Cold War Movies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 4 (July 2003): 728–49. 70. According to several former party members, Communists did organize to combat material in films that they deemed objectionable. According to Alvah Bessie, party leader

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William Z. Foster told members at a meeting, “The best you guys and girls can do here in this industry is what I would call, in military terms, ‘a holding action.’ You can’t really do very good work in this industry because they won’t let you. But you can prevent them, if you know how to do it, from making really anti-black, anti-woman, anti-foreign-born, anti-foreign-country pictures.” Paul Jarrico also contended that party members were able to influence film content along these lines. See Alvah Bessie interview by Patrick McGilligan and Ken Mate, 103; and Paul Jarrico interview by Patrick McGilligan, 334; both in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades. 71. B-31, “Entertainment World Linked to Communism,” May 24, 1944, Van Deman Papers, box 53, R-7110, SISS. The notation on this report indicates that it was sent to the FBI as well as other intelligence agencies. 72. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 20, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–26. The report also charged that the Communists prevented a film based on the life of Eddie Rickenbacker because they considered him a fascist. Blacks, of course, needed no such “stirring” when it came to questions of racist content in Hollywood films. For instance, NAACP leader Walter White labored unsuccessfully to persuade MGM from making Tennessee Johnson (1942), given Andrew Johnson’s deplorable record during Reconstruction. Letter, Walter White to Lowell Mellett, August 17, 1942, “General Records of the Chief: Lowell Mellett,” box 1436, MGM folder, OWI. 73. Memorandum, D. M. Ladd to Hoover, August 30, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–57. Navy Intelligence also listed “absolute social and racial equality” among the goals of Communists worldwide. Being that the other goals listed included abolition of religion, private property, and democratic government, it does not require much of a stretch to conclude that racial equality was seen as equally threatening. Memorandum, D. Dwight Douglas to Officers-in-Charge, May 29, 1943,Van Deman Papers, box 43, R-6276, SISS. 74. Letter, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 3, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-X. 75. Letter, Hoover to Hood, June 23, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–4X. 76. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 13, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 34. HWM, Today and Tomorrow: A Report on the Work, Purposes and Policies of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (Hollywood: Oxford Press, 1945), in “Correspondence Regarding Film Production, 1943–45—Records Concerning Film Ideas,” box 1535, OWI. See also Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference held in October 1943 under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944). The G-men were not the only ones who found the HWM’s activities to be subversive. HUAC’s research director, J. B. Matthews, considered an article by Lester Cole in the Hollywood Quarterly “a malicious attack upon Mr. William Randolph Hearst.” For Matthews, this connected the HWM and the University of California to a broad Communist propaganda campaign, especially given Cole’s party affiliations. See “Memorandum on University of California, Hollywood Writers Mobilization and Lester Cole versus Mr. William Randolph Hearst,” in “Fellow Travelers from Hollywood,” box 214, Folder 21, JBMP. 77. Riskin’s politics should not have threatened the FBI. Shortly after retiring from his OWI post, Riskin called for an American propaganda program to counter Russian propaganda activities in Germany. See “Urges U.S. Counter Reds’ Propaganda,” New York World Telegram, May 25, 1945, in “Records of the Historian Relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942–45,” box 2, entry 6B, OWI. 78. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 13, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–40. 79. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 11, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 42. The films listed here were The Story with Two Endings, It’s Murder, When He Comes Home, So Far So Good, World Peace through World Trade, and UNRRA.

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80. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, March 9, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–87. 81. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 11, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–93. 82. Letter, Hoover to the Attorney General, October 31, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–59. Hoover may have been able to justify this misrepresentation with his insistence that intelligence operations differed from actual investigations. Nevertheless, he hardly presented the AG with an accurate portrayal of the bureau’s operations in this letter, which accompanied a summary of the bureau’s file on Hollywood. Nor was this the first time Hoover mislead Biddle. In 1943 Biddle instructed Hoover to shut down his Custodial Detention Program that compiled lists of individuals to round up in an emergency. Hoover simply changed the program’s name to Security Matter. See Theoharis and Cox, The Boss, 199–201. 83. Letter, Hood to Hoover, April 2, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–86. 84. The Master Race, directed by Herbert Biberman (RKO, 1944). 85. Memo, Arnold Picker to W. S. Cunningham, April 17, 1945; Feature Viewing, The Master Race, reviewed by Eleanor Berneis, September 6, 1944; both in “Motion Picture Reviews and Analysis, 1943–1945,” box 3521, Los Angeles Overseas Bureau Motion Picture Division, OWI. 86. Memo, Los Angeles Special Agent to Hood, March 5, 1945; Memo, Los Angeles Special Agent to Hood, March 17, 1945; Memo, Los Angeles Special Agent to Hood, March 20, 1945; all included with Hood’s letter to Hoover, April 2, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–86. The bureau’s preoccupation with masculinity can be seen as a precursor to similar attitudes prevalent among many policymakers during the Cold War. There is a growing literature on American anxiety over masculinity during the Cold War. For example, see Frank Costigliola, “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997): 1309–39; K. A. Cuordileone, “ ‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 515–45; and Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 87. Memo, D. M. Ladd to Hoover, April 13, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–90. 88. Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, April 14, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–86. 89. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 11, 1943, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–22. 90. Ezra Goodman, “Hollywood Belligerent,” Nation 155, September 12, 1942, 213–14. 91. Manny Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” New Republic 110, January 3, 1944, 16–20; Bosley Crowther, “No Time to Quit: A Word on the Urgency of War Films, On What and Why They Should Be,” New York Times, May 23, 1943, sec. 2; Dorothy B. Jones, “Tomorrow the Movies III: Hollywood Goes to War,” Nation 160, January 27, 1945, 93–95; Dorothy B. Jones, “Tomorrow the Movies IV: Is Hollywood Growing Up?” Nation 160, February 3, 1945, 123–25. 92. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 66. 3. PRODUCING HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR

1. Bosley Crowther, “Superior Film: ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ Rings Bell,” New York Times, November 24, 1946, 81. 2. Jack Moffit, “The Businessman Cometh,” Esquire, March 1947, 193. This article was kept by HUAC research director J. B. Matthews in his Persons Files, box 625, Jack Moffitt folder, JBMP. 3. “M. P. Alliance Formed to Fight Subversive Forces,” Hollywood Reporter, February 7, 1944, 4.

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4. Fellow future MPA members James Kevin McGuinness and Morrie Ryskind received writing credits for A Night at the Opera. For more on The Devil and Miss Jones, see Michael Rogin, “How the Working Class Saved Capitalism: The New Labor History and The Devil and Miss Jones,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002): 87–114. On the lack of political context in For Whom the Bell Tolls, see Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 207–8. James Agee’s review appeared in The Nation’s July 24, 1943 issue and is included in James Agee, Age on Film, vol. 1 (New York: Universal Library Edition, 1969), 46–49 (Agee quote from page 46, Zukor quote page 49). 5. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 209. 6. America’s intelligence community welcomed the founding of the Motion Picture Alliance. This quote, in fact, is taken from a military intelligence report. (The Hollywood Reporter article cited above gives a similar though not exact quote.) See “Weekly Intelligence Summary,” Military Intelligence Division, February 8, 1944, Van Deman Papers, box 49, R-6738, SISS. The FBI also kept track of the Motion Picture Alliance, noting its February 1944 founding in its file on Hollywood. See Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 13, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–34. 7. According to materials sent by the MPA to Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the full executive committee membership in 1944 was as follows: Clarence Brown (MGM), George Bruce (MGM), Eddie Buzzell (MGM), Borden Chase (Paramount), Ralph Clare (Local 399), Carl Cooper (IATSE), Walt Disney (Disney Studios), Victor Fleming (MGM), Cedric Gibbons (MGM), Frank Gruber (RKO), Rupert Hughes, Louis Lighton (Twentieth Century–Fox), Ben Martinez (Local 755), James McGuinness (MGM), Murphy McHenry (RKO), Fred Niblo (Twentieth Century–Fox), Oscar Oldknow (National Theatre Supply Co.), Ayn Rand, Walter Redmond (INTL VP Local 755), Cliff Reid (MGM), Casey Robinson (MGM), Howard Emmett Rogers (MGM), Lela E. Rogers (RKO), Harry Ruskin (MGM), Morrie Ryskind (Twentieth Century–Fox), Norman Taurog (MGM), Joseph Tuohy (Local 399), King Vidor (MGM), Robert Vogel (MGM), George Waggner (Universal), and Sam Wood (Columbia). See Motion Picture Alliance membership drive letter, October 5, 1944, Motion Picture Alliance Folder, Hedda Hopper Collection, AMPAS. The MPA Statement of Policy and Statement of Principles quoted above were approved at the MPA’s first formal meeting in February 1944 and sent to Hopper along with this letter, which beckoned members to dedicate themselves to the membership drive. 8. Motion Picture Alliance membership drive letter, October 5, 1944, Motion Picture Alliance folder, Hedda Hopper Collection, AMPAS. 9. Lela Rogers quoted in “Picture Producers Politically Blind to Communist Trend, Declares Ginger Rogers’ Mother,” Los Angeles Examiner, May 10, 1944, pt. 2. For more on the MPA’s struggle against Communist propaganda and its belief that the producers unwittingly allowed such subtle agitprop to sneak into the films, see “Alliance Hits Left Wingers of Filmdom,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 29, 1944, pt. 1; and “Film Alliance Approves Fight on Communism,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1944. These articles were all retained by Dies committee investigators. See Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 29, folder 324, DIES. 10. Testimony of Lela E. Rogers, May 14, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 238–44, box 1.152–75–2, HUAC. 11. Tender Comrade, directed by Edward Dmytryk, (RKO, 1944). 12. Ibid. Tender Comrade’s shortcomings on questions of gender equality reflect the attitudes of many party members who never shed their male chauvinism. Norma

NOTES TO PAGES 74–77

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Barzman’s memoir of her experiences as a Hollywood Red refers repeatedly to the discrimination she faced within the Communist Party. Norma Barzman, The Red and the Blacklist: An Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003). See, for example, pages 27 and 245. 13. Bosley Crowther, “Comrade Ginger,” New York Times, June 2, 1944, 21; James Agee, “Death Takes a Powder,” Nation, May 6, 1944, included in Agee on Film, 89–92. 14. Dmytryk later contended, incorrectly, that Lela Rogers was not troubled by the “share and share alike” line until the 1947 hearings. See Edward Dmytryk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 4. 15. Interview with Lela Rogers, May 3, 1944, Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 29, folder 324, DIES. The investigator’s name is not given, though it is probably James Steedman. On the Federal Theatre Project’s fate at the hands of the Dies committee, see Jane DeHart Matthews, The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939, Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 199–234. For the 1940 executive session hearings with Bogart, Cagney, and March, see Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Random House, 2003), 211–13. 16. Memo, J. K. Mumford to D. M. Ladd, November 16, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–61; Memo, Ladd to Hoover, November 16, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–61; Teletype, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, November 15, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 62; Memo, Nichols to Tolson, November 10, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–65; Memo, Nichols to Tolson, no date, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–66; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 23, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–67. It is not clear from the documents how Rogers was able to telephone Hoover without prior arrangement. 17. Several MPA members have made reference to their contacts with the FBI regarding the investigation of Communists in the motion picture industry. For instance, see Morrie Ryskind, “Arts and Manners” (no date), and Morrie Ryskind, “Some Thoughts on Life, Literature, Hollywood and Points East,” (no date, though text suggests this was written in 1953), both in box 12, folder 5, Morrie Ryskind Papers (T-MSS 1996–024), BRTC; Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, p. 101, box 1.153–75–2, and Testimony of Rupert Hughes, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, p. 399, box 1.154–75–3, both in HUAC. The names of the bureau’s informers are almost always redacted in the FBI’s COMPIC file, however, occasionally, as in the case of Lela Rogers discussed here, informants names are left unredacted. Other examples include Jack Moffit and Ronald Reagan. Regarding Moffitt, see Teletype, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, (no sent date legible, but received date is April 20, 1947), COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–153. Regarding Reagan, see Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 4, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–188. 18. Memo, J. K. Mumford to D. M. Ladd, November 16, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–61; Memo, Ladd to Hoover, November 16, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–61; Memo, Nichols to Tolson, November 10, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–65; Memo, Nichols to Tolson, no date, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–66. 19. The seventeen guilds and unions represented were Building Service Employees International Union, Local 278; Film Technicians, Local 683, IATSE; International Association of Machinists, Local 1185; International Photographers, Local 659, IATSE; Conference of Studio Unions; Local Union 40, IBEW; Moving Picture Painters, Local 644; Radio Writers Guild; Screen Cartoonists, Local 852; Screen Office Employees Guild; Screen Publicists Guild; Screen Story Analysts Guild; Screen Writers Guild; Society of Motion Picture Film Editors; Songwriters Protective Association; Special Officers and Guards, Local 193; United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 946. At this meeting the delegates decided to make their council lasting, and soon the American Federation of Musicians, Local 47, and the Screen Actors Guild joined. The Council on Hollywood

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Guilds and Unions claimed to represent approximately 22,000 of the 30,000 workers in the film industry. See “The Truth about Hollywood” (Hollywood: Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions 1944), in vertical files, box 170, folder 23, JBMP. 20. Ibid., 8–9. 21. Ibid., 4–7. For McGuinness’s portrayal of the Hollywood labor struggles in the 1930s, see Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 73–76, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. For more on the Writers Guild struggles, see Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 38–46; and Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982), 104–30. 22. “Truth about Hollywood,” 14, 22–23. 23. Ibid., 15–16, 27–28. 24. Ibid., 25–26. 25. Ibid., 22. For more on these far right extremists, see Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). On Smith, see 128–77; on Schwinn, see 196–97; on Kuhn, see 66, 153, 203; on Deatherage, see 185, 196, 202, 210–11. The research committee’s report for the Hollywood Guilds and Unions also stressed the MPA’s connections, both through rhetoric and association, with Father Charles E. Coughlin and his followers. For more on Coughlin, see Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), chap. 4. 26. “Truth about Hollywood,” 15, 28, 30. 27. Elmer Rice, “The M.P.A. and American Ideals,” Saturday Review, November 11, 1944, 18. A copy of this article was kept in the files of HUAC research director J. B. Matthews: Vertical Files, box 348, folder 13, JBMP. Incidentally, the FBI kept a file on Elmer Rice, noting both his Jewish ethnicity and his left politics. See Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 64–66. 28. Morrie Ryskind, “A Reply to Elmer Rice about the M.P.A.P.A.I.,” Saturday Review, December 23, 1944, 9–10. J. B. Matthews kept this article with the Elmer Rice piece in the file noted above. The MPA’s executive chairman, James Kevin McGuinness, also penned a defense against these charges in his article: “Double Cross in Hollywood,” New Leader, July 15, 1944 (reprint of article found in Motion Picture Alliance Folder, Hedda Hopper Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Los Angeles). Here McGuinness says the MPA was formed because its members “were tired of having their industry represented by Charlie Chaplin demanding a Second Front at Carnegie Hall.” The editor of the New Leader, Sol Levitas, also kept up extensive correspondence with Morrie Ryskind, often pleading with the former Marx brothers writer to pen something for his publication. Ryskind’s reluctance in this matter appears to owe to the New Leader’s support of FDR’s fourth term, a prospect that Ryskind abhorred. See Correspondence with the New Leader, 1944–46, box 2, folder 9, Morrie Ryskind Papers, BRTC. For more on Sol Levitas and the New Leader, a publication of the anti-Communist Left, see Hugh Wilford, “Playing the CIA’s Tune? The New Leader and the Cultural Cold War,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 1 (January 2003): 15–34. 29. “Report of Committee Investigator on Efforts Being Made by Hollywood Left-Wing Groups to Counteract Charges of Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals,” Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 29, folder 324, DIES. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 13, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–34; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 9, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–60; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, December 12, 1944, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–70; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, March 9, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–87. The FBI later determined that some members of the Council of

NOTES TO PAGES 82–88

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Hollywood Guilds and Unions were Communists. See Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 4, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–188. 30. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 122. 31. The Maltz affair figures prominently in the literature on Hollywood’s Cold War. See, for instance, Thom Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” in “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 247–52; Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Roseville, CA: Forum, 1998), 136–45; Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press, 2002), 263–66; Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 232–37; Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 178–81; Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 213–16; Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 287–302; and Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 123–36. 32. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). 33. “The Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” Albert Maltz interviewed by Joel Gardner, 1983, 308–20, OHP. 34. “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 236–41. 35. “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 280–90. 36. Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism. 37. “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 501. 38. “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 364–65, 535–36. 39. Bosley Crowther, “Films about Veterans: ‘Pride of the Marines’ a Fine Example of a Literal, Constructive Approach,” New York Times, September 2, 1945, 35. Letter, Frank Sinatra to Albert Maltz, August 31, 1945, box 11, folder 1; script for The House I Lived In in box 3; both in Albert Maltz Collection, HGRC. 40. Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism. 41. Albert Maltz, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” New Masses, February 12, 1946, 19. 42. Ibid., 19–20. 43. Ibid., 20–22. 44. Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 1. Mischarting the Course,” Daily Worker, February 11, 1946, 6; Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 2. Art and Politics,” Daily Worker, February 12, 1946, 6, 8; Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 3. Art as a Weapon,” Daily Worker, February 13, 1946, 6, 8; Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 4. Ideology and Art,” Daily Worker, February 14, 1946, 6, 9; Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 5. The Path before Us,” Daily Worker, February 15, 1946, 6; Samuel Sillen, “Which Way Left Wing Literature? 6. Spectators or Creators?” Daily Worker, February 16, 1946, 8. 45. Mike Gold, “Change the World,” Daily Worker, February 12, 1946. 46. Alvah Bessie, “What Is Freedom for Writers?” New Masses, March 12, 1946, 8–10; John Howard Lawson, “Art Is a Weapon,” New Masses, March 19, 1946, 18–20. Maltz, however, received support from other Hollywood Communists, such as John Bright. See, for instance, Letter, John Bright to Albert Maltz, February 28, 1946, Albert Maltz Papers, box 15, folder 14, WCFTR. 47. Albert Maltz, “Moving Forward,” New Masses, April 7, 1946.

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48. William Z. Foster, “Elements of a People’s Cultural Policy,” New Masses, April 23, 1946, 6–9. See also Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 304–9. On the Soviet origins of the Duclos letter, see Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 95–100. 49. “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 576. 50. Navasky, Naming Names, 294. 51. Foster, “Elements of a People’s Cultural Policy,” 6, 8. 52. John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1953), 19–20. Here Lawson disapproves of his previous work, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting, from which his 1949 quote is drawn. Larry Ceplair traces the debate over the relationship between industrial form and cultural product that continued among Hollywood Communists in the 1950s. See Larry Ceplair, “The Base and Superstructure Debate in the Hollywood Communist Party,” Science & Society 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 319–48. 53. Albert Maltz, “War Film Quality: A Screen Writer Scans the Elements That Make— or Break—Such Fare,” New York Times, August 19, 1945, X3. 54. Abraham Polonsky interview by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 493–94. 55. “Albert Maltz Eats Red Crow,” Vigil 1, no. 2, May 1946, in Vertical Files, box 348, folder 14, JBMP. Members of the Motion Picture Alliance worked closely with the FBI’s Los Angeles office. On the FBI’s reporting on the Maltz affair, see Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 10, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–125. 56. Schlesinger, Vital Center, 125. 57. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 10, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–148. See also Ryskind’s correspondence with Eugene Lyons in box 2, folder 16, Morrie Ryskind Papers, BRTC. 58. Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 71–78. Unfortunately, Mayhew pays scant attention to Rand’s “Textbook of Americanism” and her Screen Guide for Americans discussed here. 59. Ayn Rand, “Textbook of Americanism,” Vigil 1, no. 2, May 1946. 60. Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans (Beverly Hills, CA: Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 1947), 1. 61. Ibid., 1–2, 10–11. 62. Ibid., 2–5, 9–10. 63. Ibid., 6–9. Rand’s glorification of American progress and exceptionalism echoes a dominant strain of “manifest destiny” in American ideology, yet the atheistic Rand removed all religious justifications from this creed, thereby stripping it of much of its allure with the American people. On the ideology of manifest destiny, see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). According to Jennifer Burns, Rand’s materialism led to her ambivalent reception among American conservatives, who applauded her defense of capitalism but deplored her godless framework. Burns related this insight on Rand’s stature in the conservative movement in her paper “Skyscraper on a Hill: Ayn Rand and the Cultural Politics of American Capitalism,” at the conference Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking 20th Century American Social Thought, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, February 28-March 1, 2003. See also Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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64. Janet Staiger, “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: Explaining the Development of Early American Film Narrative,” IRIS II (Summer 1990), 21. 65. Rand, Screen Guide for Americans, 10. 66. Here again, Anders Stephanson offers a helpful insight to understanding this apparent contradiction, not just in Rand’s thinking, but in “a specifically ‘American’ language of politics,” which posits, in his view, a sharp division between freedom and tyranny, wherein the “first principle . . . is the dynamic notion that freedom is always under threat, internally as well as externally, and that it must be defended by those called upon.” See Anders Stephanson, “Liberty or Death: The Cold War as U.S. Ideology,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 81–100. 67. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, March 12, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–122. 68. These are discussed further in chapter 4. The best work on the labor struggles in Hollywood, especially the Conference of Studio Unions’ strike in 1945 and subsequent lockout in 1946, is Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 69. Letter, Hoover to Hood, August 20, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–132; Letter, Hoover to Hood, November 13, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (no serial number); Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 29, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (no serial number). The other films included in this report were The Crimson Canary, Confidential Agent, Scarlet Street, Abilene Town, Tomorrow Is Forever, Three Strangers, Diary of a Chambermaid, Deadline at Dawn, Her Kind of a Man, The Searching Wind, O.S.S., The Stranger, Two Smart People, Till the End of Time, and A Boy, a Girl and a Dog. The production history of Cornered created some controversy. Dmytryk believed that Wexley’s original script contained too much agitprop. He then brought in “nonpolitical” John Paxton to rewrite the script. Dmytryk claims that Wexley, John Howard Lawson, and Richard Collins soon confronted him, alleging that the changes had turned the film from an antifascist to a profascist work. Although Dmytryk and Scott soon received support from party members Albert Maltz and Ben Barzman, according to Dmytryk this was an episode revealing “the Party’s control over its artists.” Edward Dmytryk, Odd Man Out, 19–21. This episode is highlighted by revisionist authors as a clear example of Communist discipline and control. See, for example, Radosh and Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood, 126–27. 70. On this point, see note 17. 71. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, December 12, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754 (no serial number). 72. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (no serial number). The MPA’s list of subversive films were The Best Years of Our Lives, Boomerang, Margie, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, A Medal for Benny, The Searching Wind, Watch on the Rhine, Pride of the Marines, North Star, and Mission to Moscow. 73. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 11, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–154. 74. Teletype, Hoover to Hood, August 6, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–186. 75. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 218. According to Robert Mayhew, Rand was upset that her fellow MPA members issued their writings anonymously in The Vigil. Thus it is likely that the bureau was correct here in reporting that the Screen Guide had several authors. Before completing the pamphlet, Rand had already resigned from the MPA, upset over the fact that the MPA had written a letter, which she deemed objectionable, without her consent. See Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia, 79. 76. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 218. The Best Years of Our Lives had swept the Oscars for 1946, winning best film, best

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director, best actor (Fredric March), best supporting actor (Harold Russell), and best screenplay. Here the FBI report also singled out The Farmer’s Daughter (RKO, 1947) as an example of a film indicting American political institutions due to its characterization of a congressman as corrupt. 77. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–218. 78. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 218. For more on the FBI’s review of this film, see John A. Noakes, “Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined That It’s a Wonderful Life Was a Subversive Movie,” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 311–19. As Noakes mentions, the FBI’s intelligence regarding the uncredited contributions made by Communist and left-wing writers on this film was “surprisingly shallow.” Noakes relates that Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker, and Michael Wilson all assisted in the writing. In fact, Albert Maltz performed some work on this script as well and was paid one thousand dollars for his duties, despite Capra not considering this “actual writing on the script.” See Letter, Frank Capra to Albert Maltz, January 21, 1946, box 11, folder 1, Albert Maltz Collection, HGRC. 79. Report, SAC, Los Angles to Hoover, September 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754 (no serial number). The informant, possibly Rand herself, presented a “Strictly Philosophical Note” (an interest of Rand’s) detecting “elite” Communist propaganda in a line smearing Aristotle, the “rationalist and individualist” philosopher despised by Marxists, who much preferred Plato, “the philosophical ancestor of Hegel and Marx.” 80. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, September 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754 (no serial number). 81. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 218. According to Buhle and Wagner, The North Star was shallow in its treatment of Soviet land policy: “The collective farm is seen as a happy village akin to U.S. prairie life at best, but less individualistic and more cutely ethnic.” Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), 163. 82. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–218. 83. Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 15, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 200. The script was forwarded to the Los Angeles office by MPA member Roy Brewer, head of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that challenged the more left-oriented Conference of Studio Unions in the postwar strikes. 84. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, September 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754 (no serial number). 85. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 218; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, September 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (no serial number). 86. The FBI singled out Dore Schary, at RKO, as a prime example of the producer who “hid behind the dollar sign in order to further Communism in pictures.” Considering her employment at RKO and her conflict with Schary, it is likely that Lela Rogers was the source for this information. See Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 7, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–218. The other members of the MPA executive committee at MGM were Clarence Brown, George Bruce, Eddie Buzzell, Victor Fleming, Cedric Gibbons, Cliff Reid, Casey Robinson, Harry Ruskin, Norman Taurog, King Vidor, and Robert Vogel. 87. See, for instance, Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism; Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies (New York: New Press,

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2002); and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 88. The FBI’s COMPIC file, for instance, carries a classification “100” number, denoting that this was a domestic security case. 4. THE COALESCENCE OF A COUNTERSUBVERSIVE NETWORK

1. The strike in Hollywood was by no means an isolated incident. Nationally, postwar reconversion ushered in a massive strike wave. See George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 99–119. 2. Browne received a ten-year term for his extortion conviction. Bioff ’s term was eight years. He later testified against Johnny Roselli and ended up killed by a car bomb. Fox executive Joseph Schenck, who served as the studios’ liaison to the corrupt IATSE men, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison. See Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 24–25, 45–51, 104. 3. “Dalton Trumbo Reports . . . The Real Facts behind the Motion Picture Lockout,” text of speech delivered by Trumbo at the Olympic Auditorium, October 13, 1945, Dalton Trumbo Papers, box 40, folder 3, WCFTR. 4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 403–13. See also Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movie and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134–35. 5. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 218. 6. Weekly Intelligence Summary no. 69, April 21, 1945, Van Deman Papers, box 58, R-7708, SISS. 7. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, September 12, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–109. 8. Letter, Richard B. Hood (SAC, Los Angeles) to Hoover, November 6, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–114. 9. “Unionist Lays Studio Strike to Communists,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1945, 2. On Brewer’s red-baiting of Sorrell, see also Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 174; Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 306. 10. Jack B. Tenney, compiler, Red Fascism: Boring from Within . . . by the Subversive Forces of Communism (Los Angeles: Federal Printing Company, 1947), 285–97; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 12, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–121. 11. Roy Brewer Oral History in Griffin Fariello, Red Scare, 113–14; Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 15–20. For the revisionist view of Sorrell and the CSU strikes, see Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 118–20. 12. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 17, 160, 181. 13. Testimony of Jack L. Warner, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, p. 370, and Testimony of Rupert Hughes, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, p. 403, both in box 1.154–75–3, HUAC. 14. Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 248–50; Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 139. 15. The FBI interviewed Reagan on April 10, 1947; see Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 4, 1947, COMPIC 100–138754–188. An internal memo in 1951 indicated Reagan’s “T-10” code name. This memo also reveals that the bureau may have briefly

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suspected Reagan’s politics due to his membership in the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. Reagan also belonged to the Hollywood Independent Citizen’s Committee of the Arts, Science and Professions, which the bureau considered a Communist front; however, the FBI noted Reagan as one of the anti-Communists in HICCASP who resisted the supposed Communist takeover. See Memo, [sender’s name illegible] to Louis B. Nichols, May 23, 1951, in “Reagan FBI Files,” box 1, folder 2, Stephen Vaughn Papers, WCFTR. On the policies adopted by SAG and SWG during the strikes, see Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 217–21; and Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 136–44. 16. Reagan, Where’s the Rest of Me?, 162. 17. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, January 15, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 393. The report noted the CSU’s activism against For Whom the Bell Tolls, specifically its charge that Paramount Pictures gave officials of Franco’s government in Spain powers of censorship and approval. The union also campaigned against a film about Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace. Rickenbacker’s conservative politics and membership in the isolationist America First committee made him anathema to many liberals and leftists. Herbert Sorrell personally appealed to Gary Cooper not to play the title role. When Captain Eddie was finally made in 1945, Fred MacMurray played Rickenbacker. According to the online American Film Institute catalog, Motion Picture Alliance member Howard Emmett Rogers, though not credited as a writer on the film, made some contribution to the screenplay. 18. Testimony of Roy M. Brewer, December 3, 1946, Executive Session transcripts, pages 48–51, Box 1.152–75–1, HUAC. 19. On the anti–New Deal orientation of the Dies committee, see Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 90–97; on the Dies committee’s early interest in Hollywood, see Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 90–91. 20. For press clippings, see Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 25, folder 212-A; on the Hollywood Democratic Committee and the American Writers’ Congress, see Reports, Exhibits and Associated Documents filed by Special Committee Investigators, Files of Investigator Cavett, box 12; on the Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions and also on Mission to Moscow, see Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 25, folder 210-A; all in DIES. 21. Steedman, who was cleared by the FBI before joining the Dies committee investigative staff, also highlighted the danger represented by the visit of Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov, whom he labeled “Stalin’s own representative.” In a letter to the committee’s chief investigator, Robert E. Stripling, Steedman reported that he was given access to intercepted cablegrams between Kalatozov and Moscow by “one of the security agencies in Los Angeles with the direct understanding that they would not be used publicly.” See “Resume of Hollywood Investigation to June 14, 1944,” by James H. Steedman, and Letter, James H. Steedman to Robert E. Stripling, June 14, 1944, both in Los Angeles Numbered Case Files, box 25, folder 210, DIES. On the FBI’s clearance of Steedman as well as other Dies committee investigators, see O’Reilly, Hoover and the UN-Americans, 42–43. 22. “Resume of Hollywood Investigation to June 14, 1944,” by James H. Steedman, Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 25, folder 210. Letter, Thomas L. Cavett to Robert E. Sripling, September 8, 1944; Letter (with Variety enclosure), Thomas L. Cavett to Robert E. Stripling, October 2, 1944; Letter, Thomas L. Cavett to Robert E. Stripling, October 4, 1944; and Letter, Thomas L. Cavett to Robert E. Stripling, November 6, 1944; all in Reports, Exhibits and Associated Documents Filed by Special Committee Investigators, Files of Investigator Cavett, box 12. All in DIES. For more on Brooklyn U.S.A. see Alvah Bessie, Inquisition in Eden (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 27, 31, 33, 48–49.

NOTES TO PAGES 115–120

235

23. Letter, James H. Steedman to Robert E. Stripling, April 7, 1944, Los Angeles Office Numbered Case Files, box 25, folder 210-A, DIES. On the 1946 elections, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 127–30. The relationship between New Dealers and the motion picture industry on the question of antitrust violations was not as neat as Contact B suggested, for the antimonopoly impulse competed for a place in the New Deal zeitgeist. On the complex relationship between Hollywood and the Roosevelt administration, see Giuliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). 24. For committee membership information, see Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968, rev. ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), appendix 1, 955–57. 25. Rand herself did not testify at these executive hearings, but she gave testimony in the public hearings in the fall (see chapter 5). 26. Testimony of Lela E. Rogers, May 14, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 263–65, box 1.153–75–2; Testimony of Thomas Leo McCarey, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 384, box 1.154–75–3; both in HUAC. 27. Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 141–68, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 28. Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 168, 176–77, and Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 106, both in box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. To be sure several MPA members also singled out the three notoriously pro-Soviet films made during World War II— Mission to Moscow (Warner Bros., 1943), North Star (RKO, 1943), and Song of Russia (MGM, 1944)—as extreme examples of Communist propaganda. But by 1947 the antiCommunists no longer expected such overt pro-Soviet propaganda and were more concerned with ferreting out more subtle “anti-American” messages. 29. Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 85; Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 156; and Testimony of Lela E. Rogers, May 14, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 263; all in box 1.153–75–2. Also Testimony of Adolphe Jean Menjou, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 304 and 309; and Testimony of Howard Emmett Rogers, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 415; all in box 1.154–75–3. All in HUAC. 30. Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 80; and Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 176; both in box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 31. Testimony of Henry Ginsberg, May 14, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 279–87, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 32. Testimony of Henry Ginsberg, May 14, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 290–99, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 33. Much of Warner’s testimony concerned his efforts to deflect criticism of Mission to Moscow, which was produced by his studio in 1943. Warner stressed the wartime conditions that contributed to the making of this film, noting especially the “general feeling” that Stalin might seek a separate peace with Hitler. The committee pressed him to divulge whether the government had inspired the film, but Warner insisted this occurred only indirectly through Joseph Davies. Though refusing to characterize his production as Communist propaganda, Warner claimed that he would not make such a film under the current political conditions and asked that the committee refrain from releasing anything on Mission to Moscow to the press. Testimony of Jack L. Warner, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 339–76, box 1.154–75–3, HUAC.

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34. For Stripling’s quote, see Testimony of Leo McCarey, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 383, box 1.154–75–3. On public protest of Chaplin and Robeson, see Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, page 90; Testimony of Robert Taylor, May 14, 1947, pages 199–201; Testimony of Richard Arlen, May 14, 1947, pages 229–30; and Testimony of Lela E. Rogers, May 14, 1947, pages 266–67; all in Executive Session transcripts, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 35. Testimony of James K. McGuinness, May 12, 1947, pages 92, 103–5; Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, page 137; Testimony of Robert Taylor, May 14, 1947, page 198; all in Executive Session transcripts, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 36. Testimony of Jack L. Warner, May 15, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, page 336, box 1.154–75–3, HUAC. See also Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood, 159–60. 37. Testimony of John C. Moffitt, May 12–13, 1947, Executive Session transcripts, pages 111–12, box 1.153–75–2, HUAC. 38. O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, 115. 39. “Statement of J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, March 26, 1947,” Vertical Files, box 211, folder 8 (FBI), JBMP. 40. O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, 38–70. 41. Memo, D. Milton Ladd to Edward Tamm, July 3, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 98; Memo, J. Edgar Hoover to Clyde Tolson and D. Milton Ladd, July 4, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–99; Memo, Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, July 2, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–96. 42. Memo, D. Milton Ladd to Hoover, October 9, 1945, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 113. 43. O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, 76–79; see also Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 249–57. 44. “Remarks of J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the Annual Convention of The American Legion, San Francisco, California, September 30, 1946,” Vertical Files, box 211, folder 8 (FBI), JBMP. 45. Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, August 20, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–132; Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, November 13, 1946, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 46. Thomas began prying the bureau for information in the period leading up to Hoover’s testimony, starting with intelligence on five suspected employees of the Atomic Energy Commission. See O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, 114–15. 47. “Statement of J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, March 26, 1947,” Vertical Files, box 211, folder 8 (FBI), JBMP. 48. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 175–91. 49. “Statement by Eric Johnston, President, Motion Picture Association of America, Before Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Thursday, March 27, 1947,” Dore Schary Papers, box 100, folder 2, WCFTR. 50. Teletype, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 20, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 151; Memo, D. Milton Ladd to Hoover, May 13, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Letter, Richard B. Hood to Hoover, May 14, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–157x; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 11, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–154. 51. Memo, Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd and Nichols, June 24, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–165. 52. Memo, Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd and Nichols, June 24, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–165. On Chaplin’s travails with the FBI, see John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw,

NOTES TO PAGES 128–133

237

“Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 4 (November 2003): 495–530. 53. The documented break-ins took place on August 31, 1944, January 8, 1945, January 16, 1945, February 26, 1945, and November 19, 1945. Letter, Richard B. Hood to Hoover, June 28, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; the estimate of six hundred Communists in Hollywood comes from Memo, Ladd to Hoover, October 2, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754- 251x1; See also Memo, J. P. Coyne to Ladd, July 9, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 54. Memo, Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd and Nichols, June 24, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–165; Memo, J. P. Mohr to Clyde Tolson, July 18, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–184; Memo, J. P. Mohr to Tolson, July 18, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, July 21, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 55. The forty were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Roman Bohnen, J. Edward Bromberg, Lester Cole, Norman Corwin, John Cromwell, Albert Dekker, William Dieterle, Philip Dunne, John Garfield, Don Gordon, John Houseman, Gordon Kahn, Jeff Kibre, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner Jr., Emmet Lavery, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Frederic March, Ruth McKinney, Lewis Milestone, Sam Moore, Karen Morley, Clifford Odets, Samuel Ornitz, Larry Parks, William Pomerance, Anne Revere, Edward G. Robinson, Robert Riskin, Robert Rossen, Waldo Salt, Sylvia Sidney, Herbert K. Sorrell, John Stapp, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, and Frank Tuttle. See Memo, Nichols to Tolson, August 21, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Memo, Nichols to Tolson, September 2, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Memo, Ladd to Hoover, September 3, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Memo, Tamm to Hoover, September 12, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Memo, J. P. Coyne to Ladd, September 17, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–251x. Before settling on the above forty, the bureau had intended to process memoranda of others, including Charlie Chaplin, Gene Kelly, and Katherine Hepburn. See Memo, J. P. Coyne to Ladd, July 11, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–185. 56. Memo, Nichols to Tolson, September 10, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–224. 57. Memo, Hood to Hoover, September 20, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 58. Memo, Hood to Hoover, September 20, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 5. THE 1947 HUAC TRIALS

1. Cabell Phillips, “Un-American Committee Puts on Its ‘Big Show,’ ” New York Times, October 26, 1947, E7. 2. Thomas used the old name, the Communist International (Comintern), which had been dissolved in 1943. The new organization, however, was called the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 1–3. 3. Originally the “unfriendly” witnesses were known as “the nineteen.” However, after the eleventh witness, Bertolt Brecht, testified and denied that he was a Communist, HUAC ceased its hearings, leaving the “Hollywood Ten” to face contempt charges. Brecht quickly left the country for the German Democratic Republic. The eight not called to testify were actor Larry Parks; writers Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, and Waldo Salt; and directors Lewis Milestone, Irving Pichel, and Robert Rossen. See Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 255–56, 449–50. 4. Testimony of John Howard Lawson, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 27, 1947, 293–94. 5. Testimony of Ring Lardner Jr., Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 30, 1947, 482. Lardner’s one-liner became one of the more famous quotes of the era and served as the title for his memoir. See Ring Lardner, Jr., I’d Hate Myself in the Morning (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000). For

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NOTES TO PAGES 134–139

the Dore Schary quote, see Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, Viking Press, 1980), 83–84. 6. Testimony of Eric Allen Johnston, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 27, 1947, 306–8; Testimony of Ronald Reagan, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 23, 1947, 217–18. 7. Testimony of Ronald Reagan, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 23, 1947, 217; Testimony of Eric Allen Johnston, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 27, 1947, 307; Testimony of Jack L. Warner, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 10; Testimony of Louis Burt Mayer, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 72; Anthony Leviero, “Menjou Testifies Communists Taint the Film Industry,” New York Times, October 22, 1947, 1. 8. Since HUAC did not enter into evidence any material they had on Lavery following his cooperative testimony, it is not clear whether the FBI mistakenly identified him as a Communist. Lavery’s contact with SAC Hood suggests the FBI knew otherwise, though this may be a case where the bureau’s strict policy of allowing only top officials in Washington to provide information to HUAC actually hindered its effort to ensure accuracy. Testimony of Emmet G. Lavery, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 29, 1947, 442–53. 9. Testimony of Dore Schary, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 29, 1947, 470–76. 10. Testimony of John Charles Moffitt, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 21, 1947, 108–28. 11. For an alternate view of Rand’s testimony, see Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), chaps. 6 and 7. 12. Testimony of Louis B. Mayer, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 70–81; Testimony of Ayn Rand, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 82–90. 13. Testimony of Ayn Rand, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 90. 14. Testimony of Oliver Carlson, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 24, 1947, 249; Gladwin Hill, “ ‘Safe and Sane’ Films New Hollywood Rule,” New York Times, November 30, 1947, E6. 15. For Thomas’s vow to resume the hearings, see Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 30, 1947, 522. For Nixon’s quote, see Testimony of James K. McGuinness, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 22, 1947, 145. For other examples of HUAC pressuring for anti-Communist films, see Testimony of Jack L. Warner, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 21 and 28; Testimony of Samuel Grosvenor Wood, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 64; Testimony of Louis B. Mayer, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 20, 1947, 76; Testimony of Adolphe Menjou, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 21, 1947, 106; Testimony of Robert Taylor, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 22, 1947, 170; Testimony of Gary Cooper, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 23, 1947, 223. For more on Hollywood’s anti-Communist films, see Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982), chap. 3; and Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chap. 6.

NOTES TO PAGES 140–147

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16. Jay Walz, “Ten Film Men Cited for Contempt in Overwhelming Votes by House,” New York Times, November 25, 1947, 1; “Movies to Oust Ten Cited for Contempt of Congress,” New York Times, November 26, 1947, 1. For more on the Waldorf meeting, see Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 325–31. 17. “Movies to Oust Ten Cited for Contempt of Congress,” New York Times, November 26, 1947, 1. 18. Audience Research, Inc., “Congressional Investigation of Communism in Hollywood— What the Public Thinks,” enclosure in Letter, Jack Sayers to Dore Schary, December 29, 1947, Dore Schary Papers, box 100, folder 2, WCFTR. 19. Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 1–5. 20. On these points, see chapter 3. 21. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 275–77. 22. Committee for the First Amendment, “Hollywood Fights Back” scripts, Sunday October 26, 1947, and Sunday, November 2, 1947, Alvah Bessie Papers, box 26, folder 8, WCF TR. 23. Ibid. 24. “America’s ‘Thought Police’ ” (New York: Civil Rights Congress, October, 1947), Vertical Files, box 90, folder 17, J. B. Matthews Collection, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University; Text of Speeches delivered by Edward Dmytryk and Ring Lardner Jr., National Lawyers Guild meeting, National Press Auditorium, October 20, 1947, Dalton Trumbo Papers, box 43, folder 9, WCFTR; on Hollywood Reporter, see Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 271. 25. Navasky, Naming Names, 83; Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 289–92. 26. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997). 27. Alvah Bessie, “Censorship and Porkchops,” draft for trade union pamphlet, December 13, 1947, Alvah Bessie Papers, box 26, folder 10, WCFTR. 28. Transcript for the Stop Censorship Committee meeting, March 11, 1948, Albert Maltz Papers, box 15, folder 1, WCFTR; Letter, J. Rogers to J. Buckley, March 24, 1948, A.B.C./Counterattack collection, box 16, folder 12–63, Item 12–63–9, TL NYU; Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, March 25, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–422; Memo, D. Milton Ladd to Hoover, May 21, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–465; see also Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 341–45. 29. Memo, Guy Hottel, SAC, Washington to Hoover, October 18, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–337; Memo, Ladd to Hoover, April 8, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–437; Letter, Hoover to Assistant Attorney General T. Vincent Quinn, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–452; for a more complete account of the bureau’s surveillance of the Hollywood Ten’s lawyers, see Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 164–67. 30. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 160, 347–48. 31. Navasky, Naming Names, 84; Edward Dmytryk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 118; Lester Cole, Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981), 319–20. 32. Dalton Trumbo, The Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); this collection contains the original pamphlet, “The Time of the Toad,” published by the Hollywood Ten in 1949. John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting, 2nd ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 361. 33. Herbert, Biberman, “Films on Fire” pamphlet draft, n.d., but ca. early 1949, Alvah Bessie Papers, box 26, folder 10, WCFTR.

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34. V. J. Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1950), 56; this pamphlet is housed in Vertical Files, box 255, folder 17, JBMP. John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1953), 19–21. 35. Memo, Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, October 28, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–286. 36. Teletypes, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 8 and 10, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (serial numbers unclear); Letter, Richard B. Hood, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 3, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–317. 37. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 17, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–324; Letter, Richard B. Hood, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 3, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–317; Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 22, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–514; Memo, A. H. Belmont to D. M. Ladd, June 27, 1950, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–625; Memo, D. M. Ladd to Hoover, August 6, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–481. 38. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, January 15, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 393; Report, SAC, Los Angeles, to Hoover, July 19, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–472; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, December 14, 1950, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–691. For more on the Motion Picture Industry Council, see Navasky, Naming Names, 87–90. 39. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–407; Memo, D. M. Ladd to Hoover, April 1, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 439; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 16, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–461; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 22, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 490; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, January 18, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 503; Letter, Adolphe Menjou to J. Edgar Hoover, December 12, 1949, and Letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Adolphe Menjou, December 15, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754 (serial numbers unclear). 40. See chapter 2. 41. Memo, J. P. Coyne to Ladd, September 6, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 236; Memo, Executive Conference to Hoover, September 11, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Letter, Hoover to SAC, Los Angeles, September 18, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 42. Letter, Richard B. Hood to Hoover, October 8, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 263. 43. Memo, Coyne to Ladd, October 16, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–260; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 20, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–273. 44. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–407. 45. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 17, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–324; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–407. For more on Chaplin’s troubles with the FBI, see John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, “Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 4, (2003): 495–530. 46. Letter, Richard B. Hood to Hoover, December 19, 1947, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–394; Memo, Executive Conference to Hoover, January 14, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–396; Letter, Hoover to Hood, January 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 396; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 407. For more on the demise of politically minded filmmaking in the late 1940s, see Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 284–99.

NOTES TO PAGES 154–162

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47. Letter, Hoover to Hood, March 25, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–422; Testimony of Adolphe Menjou, Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, October 21, 1947, 94. 48. Letter (with enclosure of transcript of telephone conversations), Hood to Hoover, April 14, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–469. 49. Letter (with enclosure of transcript of telephone conversations), Hood to Hoover, April 14, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–469. Polonsky relayed his criticisms of the Communist Party’s “heavy hand” approach to culture in his 1997 interview with Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner; see Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 493–94. The talented Polonsky is also the subject of a larger study: Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 50. Polonsky did not receive screen credit for his writing on I Can Get It For You Wholesale (1951) and Odds against Tomorrow (1959); in 1968 he received a screen credit for Madigan, and the following year he wrote and directed the western classic, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Letter (with enclosure of transcript of telephone conversations), Hood to Hoover, April 14, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–469; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 15, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–459; Memo, Ladd to Hoover, March 3, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 8, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–525. 51. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–407. 52. This estimate comes from Victor S. Navasky in Naming Names, 346. 6. ROLLBACK

1. Certainly some of these films, such as Conspirator (MGM, 1949), The Red Danube (MGM, 1949), and Man on a Tightrope (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1953), were set overseas. The majority, however, presented Communism as a domestic threat, and even in the case of Conspirator and The Red Danube, Communism is presented as a threat to the domestic bliss of romantic couples. 2. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16–19. 3. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 26–27; Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), 93–108. 4. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 34–39. 5. Ayn Rand to DeWitt Emery, May 17, 1943, in Michael S. Berliner, ed., Letters of Ayn Rand (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 72–74. See also Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 153. 6. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 175, 199. When interviewed in 1997, MPA leader Roy Brewer gave a very different impression of Rand’s role in the MPA, describing her as an extremist who “never was a dominant person in the meetings.” Here Brewer downplays her important role in the MPA prior to her split from the organization in mid-1947. The Brewer interview can be found in Scott McConnell, ed., 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand (New York: New American Library, 2010), 75–76. On Rand’s split from the MPA, see Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 79. 7. Jeff Britting, “Adapting The Fountainhead to Film,” in Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, ed. Robert Mayhew (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 91. 8. Britting, “Adapting The Fountainhead to Film,” 106. Britting’s account is highly sympathetic to Rand.

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NOTES TO PAGES 163–170

9. Britting, “Adapting The Fountainhead to Film,” 106–8. Ayn Rand to John Chamberlain, November 27, 1948, in Berliner, Letters of Ayn Rand, 414–15. Britting also quotes from this passage of Rand’s letter. 10. Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans (Beverly Hills, CA: Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 1947), 9. 11. The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor (Warner Bros., 1949). 12. Merrill Schleier, “Ayn Rand and King Vidor’s Film ‘The Fountainhead’: Architectural Modernism, the Gendered Body, and Political Ideology,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 3 (2002): 317. 13. The Fountainhead. 14. Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans, 7. 15. The Fountainhead. 16. The Fountainhead was the thirty-eighth highest grossing film of 1949. Despite a good opening, it lacked staying power at the box office, likely because of poor reviews and little word-of-mouth support. Robert Spadoni, “Guilty by Omission: Girding The Fountainhead for the Cold War,” Literature/Film Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1999): 225–26. 17. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” New York Times, July 9, 1949, 8; Bosley Crowther, “In a Glass House,” New York Times, July 17, 1949, X1; Ayn Rand, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, July 24, 1949, X4. A decade later Rand changed her tune about the film version of The Fountainhead and blamed director King Vidor for its shortcomings. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 209–11. 18. Spadoni, “Guilty by Omission,” 230. William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers were among the most prominent conservative critics of Rand’s atheism. On this point, see Burns, Goddess of the Market, 139–40, 174–78. Furthermore, the PCA, long noted as a stronghold of Catholicism, anticipated the Buckley/Chambers criticism when it put forward religiously based objections to The Fountainhead. One this point, see Britting, “Adapting The Fountainhead to Film,” 106–8. 19. Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia, 176. Mayhew cites this quote as being from a biographical interview housed at the Ayn Rand Archives but does not provide a date. In the quote, Rand refers to the Screen Guide appearing in the Sunday Times “in condensed form.” It seems clear, however, that she is referring to the following article, which appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times: Thomas F. Brady, “Hollywood ‘Don’ts’—Alliance Group Issues ‘Screen Guide for Americans,’ ” New York Times, November 16, 1947, X5. 20. See appendix 2, esp. figs. 1–3, in Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 273–74. 21. Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 67–73. 22. Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 76–95; Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 232. 23. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), 255–71. 24. The Red Menace, directed by R. G. Springsteen (Republic Pictures, 1949). 25. Big Jim McLain, directed by Edward Ludwig (Warner Bros., 1952). John Wayne served as Motion Picture Alliance president from March 1949 to June 1953. Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne: American (New York: Free Press, 1995), 338. 26. I Was a Communist for the FBI, directed by Gordon Douglas (Warner Bros., 1951). 27. Daniel J. Leab, “Anti-Communism, the FBI, and Matt Cvetic: The Ups and Downs of a Professional Informer,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115, no. 4

NOTES TO PAGES 170–174

243

(1991): 535–81; Hoover quote on p. 544. See also Daniel J. Leab, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”: The Unhappy Life and Times of Matt Cvetic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 28. Memo, Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, March 2, 1951, WARNER BROTHERS, FBI 94–1-17015-unclear, box 1, folder 14, Stephen Vaughn Papers, WCFTR. 29. Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 99. 30. I Was a Communist for the FBI; The Red Menace. 31. Big Jim McLain; The Red Menace. 32. I Was a Communist for the FBI. 33. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “God and Country or Communism?” American Legion Magazine (November 1957): 2, in Vertical Files, box 257, folder 7, JBMP; Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 229–30. 34. According to Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, “At its height in 1939 the American Communist party had only 100,000 members. For much of its 70-year history its membership has been a mere fraction of that number.” Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne, 1992), 1. Hoover gave conflicting numbers, however. He asserted that party membership peaked at 80,000 in 1944, and that by 1950 it had declined to 43,200, and by 1955 to 22,600. Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 5. 35. “Remarks of J. Edgar Hoover at the Annual Convention of the American Legion,” San Francisco, California, September 30, 1946, in Vertical Files, box 211, folder 8, JBMP. 36. The Red Menace. 37. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “Red Infiltration of Labor Unions,” American Federation of Labor, “Labor Guide,” Fall 1953, p. 5, in Vertical Files, box 257, folder 7, JBMP. 38. Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 196–201. Margot Henriksen points out the ambivalence of these 1950s science fiction films, noting their parallels to anti-Communism, but also detecting messages of antinuclear dissent. Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 56–58. 39. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “Unmasking the Communist Masquerader,” Educational Forum (May 1950): 3, box 211, folder 8; FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “The Communists Are After Our Minds,” American Magazine (October 1954): 2, box 257, folder 7; both in Vertical Files, JBMP. 40. J. Edgar Hoover, “Communism and the College Student,” Boston University Campus, March 1953, excerpted in J. Edgar Hoover, On Communism (New York: Random House, 1969), 133–34. 41. My Son John, directed by Leo McCarey (Paramount, 1952). 42. I Was a Communist for the FBI. 43. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “Communist Virus,” Times-Herald, June 21, 1953, and FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “The Communists Are after Our Minds,” 2, both in Vertical Files, box 257, folder 7, JBMP. 44. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Jane Sherron DeHart, “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America,” in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); John D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, ed. John D’Emilio (New York: Routledge, 1992); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 45. The Red Menace. The classic film example of the Soviet woman as hardened and unfeminine is Ninotchka (MGM, 1939). Only by exposure to Western values is Ninotchka

244

NOTES TO PAGES 174–181

(Greta Garbo) able to discover her feminine qualities. For more on this film, see Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 16–33. 46. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “A View of Reality,” General Federation Clubwoman Magazine, May–June 1961, in Vertical Files, box 257, folder 7, JBMP. 47. The Red Menace; Hoover, Masters of Deceit, 65, 269. 48. Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 240–52. As Rogin discusses, The Manchurian Candidate (United Artists, 1962) offered a much more explicit portrayal of the pitfalls of “momism” with the Angela Lansbury character’s incestuous relationship with her brainwashed son who becomes a Communist assassin. 49. FBI reprint of J. Edgar Hoover, “Unmasking the Communist Masquerader.” 50. May, Homeward Bound, 13–15. 51. “The Twin Enemies of Freedom,” Address of J. Edgar Hoover before the 28th Annual Convention of the National Council of Catholic Women, November 9, 1956, Chicago, Illinois, in Vertical Files, box 257, folder 7, JBMP. 52. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 60–87; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 77–100. 53. FBI reprints of J. Edgar Hoover, “The Communist Menace: Red Goals and Christian Ideals,” Christianity Today, October 10, 1960; J. Edgar Hoover, “Communist Propaganda and the Christian Pulpit,” Christianity Today, October 24, 1960; J. Edgar Hoover, “Soviet Rule or Christian Renewal?” Christianity Today, November 7, 1960, in box 688, Benjamin Mandel Series, JBMP. Powers, G-Men, 253. 54. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 44. 55. DeMille eagerly lent assistance to HUAC, and in 1950 he maneuvered to enforce a mandatory loyalty oath for all members of the Screen Directors Guild (SDG). He also served as president of the Motion Picture Industry Council. On DeMille’s role in the SDG, see Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 179–81. For DeMille’s connection to MPIC, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 359. 56. On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan (Columbia Pictures, 1954). Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 500. For a Cold War reading of On the Waterfront, see Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 107–17. 57. I Was a Communist for the FBI; The Red Menace. 58. The Red Menace; Big Jim McLain. 59. Powers, G-Men, 242. 60. Letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Jack Warner, November 16, 1956, Warner Brothers, FBI 94–1-17015-unclear, box 1, folder 14; and Memo, Milton A. Jones to Louis B. Nichols, January 18, 1957, Jack Warner, FBI 94–33509–5; both in Stephen Vaughn Papers, WCFTR. 61. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 22, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–490. 62. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, July 8, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–525. 63. Spadoni, “Guilty by Omission,” 226. 64. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, January 18, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–503; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, October 27, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–545; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, January 11, 1950, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–571. See also Daniel J. Leab, “How Red Was My Valley: Hollywood, the Cold

NOTES TO PAGES 182–186

245

War Film, and I Married A Communist,” Journal of Contemporary History 19 (1984): 59–88. On page 71 Leab notes Hoover’s refusal to allow Hughes to use his image. 65. Bureau clipping of Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor,” New York Daily Mirror, March 27, 1951, 4, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-A. Dorothy Jones listed thirty-five anti-Communist films produced between 1947 and 1954, though she added that her list “is probably not a complete one.” Dorothy Jones, “Communism and the Movies: A Study of Film Content,” in John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting I: Movies (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1956), appendix III-D, 300–301. 66. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 133. 67. Bureau clipping of Ed Sullivan, “Little Old New York,” New York Daily News, March 30, 1955, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-A. 68. Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 5, 1954, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 1059. The FBI had been skeptical of this film since its inception as a joint Elia Kazan– Arthur Miller project called “The Hook.” Bureau source “T-6” advised that the story employed a “Communist theme,” since it “described the living and working conditions among the people as being quite deplorable, and, in this regard, T-6 felt that the picture would be exceedingly detrimental to the labor movement in the United States and would be propaganda of a Communist nature.” Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 19, 1951, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–707. 69. Pickup on South Street, directed by Samuel Fuller (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1953). 70. Fuller also claimed that Hoover was irritated by the scenes showing the FBI men and local cops bribe the “stool pigeon” for information. Samuel Fuller, with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry Rudes, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 304–8. Fuller quotes Hoover and Zanuck in an interview included in the DVD extras of the Criterion Collection edition of Pickup on South Street released in 2004. There is no mention of a meeting between Fuller, Zanuck, and Hoover in the FBI files. CONCLUSION

1. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), 314–29. 2. Report, Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Los Angeles to J. Edgar Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–407. 3. See, for instance, Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 4. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, February 20, 1948, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–407. 5. According to Navasky, the blacklist played a role in the deaths of Mady Christians, Canada Lee, John Garfield, Philip Loeb, and J. Edward Bromberg. Navasky also estimates that at least three hundred people were made unemployable by the blacklist. See Navasky, Naming Names, 340–46. 6. “Report of the Executive Committee of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to the Membership,” October 30, 1951, Vertical Files, box 122, folder 5, JBMP. 7. The Firing Line 3, no. 10 (May 10, 1954), Vertical Files, box 487, folder 10, JBMP. See also James J. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 110, 141. 8. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, June 16, 1953, COMPIC, FBI 100– 138754–1028; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, September 15, 1953, COMPIC,

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NOTES TO PAGES 187–197

FBI 100–138754–1034; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 1043; Report, SAC, New York to Hoover, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1045. 9. Letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Assistant Attorney General Alexander M. Campbell, December 7, 1949, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754-unclear. 10. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, April 13, 1950, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 583; Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 30, 1954, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 1068; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1086; Memo, A. H. Belmont to L. V. Boardman, January 3, 1956, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1103;Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 14, 1958, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1126. 11. Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, March 15, 1956, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 1106; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, May 14, 1957, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1118; Memo, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, August 14, 1958, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754–1124; Report, SAC, Los Angeles to Hoover, November 14, 1958, COMPIC, FBI 100–138754– 1126. 12. V. J. Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1950), 21–21. 13. Ibid., 22–29. 14. Ibid., 36–42. 15. Ibid., 54–58. 16. John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1953), 18–21. 17. Ibid., 89–95. 18. Ibid., 29–71. 19. Ibid., 23–29. 20. Adrian Scott, “Blacklist: The Liberal’s Straightjacket and Its Effect on Content,” Hollywood Review 2, no. 2 (September–October, 1955): 1–6. 21. Dorothy B. Jones, “Communism and the Movies: A Study of Film Content,” in John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1956), 197. For more on Jones and the OWI see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987). 22. Jones, “Communism and the Movies,” 231–32. APPENDIX

1. This list of films is compiled from the bureau’s running memorandum, January 3, 1956, COMPIC, FBI 100-138754-E.B.F. Select FBI analysis listed here is culled directly from this memorandum. I have rearranged the films in alphabetical order, and added brief information on cast and crew. I have also omitted the stage plays that are included in this document. This is not an exhaustive listing of every film considered suspect by the FBI.

Index

In this index, “CP” is used as an abbreviation for Communist Party. Page numbers in italics denote photographs. Abbott and Costello, 102 Action in the North Atlantic, 58 actors, and propaganda power, 116, 136, 154 Agee, James, 10, 56 –57, 71, 73 –74 All My Sons, 151–152, 197 All Quiet on the Western Front, 197 American Business Consultants, 144, 167 American Civil Liberties Union, 12, 16 American Crime, The, 103 Americanism: collective institutions as intrinsic to, 166; Screen Guide and, 94 –95, 100 –102, 103 –104, 116 –117 Americanism Defense League, 80 American Legion, 125, 144, 158, 167, 186, 205 American Peace Mobilization (APM), 46 Another Part of the Forest, 101, 197 anti-Communist films: call for, 7, 120 –121, 139, 159; Communist-led boycotts of, 180 –181; criminality of CP, 168–169; disease and contagion metaphors, 172–174; domesticity, 179 –180; family as threatened, 174 –175, 241 n1, 244 n48; hypocrisy of CP, 170 –171; influence of, 181–183, 245 n65; race-baiting, 171–172; as red scare vs. Cold War films, 159; Reds involved with, 181; religiosity, 178–179; schools as threatened, 173 –174; subverting own genre, 183, 245 n70; Jack Warner and, 120 –121, 180. See also Fountainhead, The antifascism: film productions, 33 –34; Popular Front and, 3, 31–34, 36, 45– 46 antiracism: conflated with Communist propaganda, 103 –104, 112; CP and, 60 –61, 223–224nn70,72,73; as cultural front theme, 3; FBI hostility toward, 59 –61, 224 n73; optimism for, 223 n67; OWI and, 223 n66; in Sahara, 59; Theatre Union and, 83 anti-Semitism: of Breen (of PCA), 23, 216 n47; in Congress, 37; and films, control of, 10; in mainstream media, 9 –10; in MPA, 80 –81; and producers as “soft” on Communism, 148, 149; as subject in films, 100, 104, 143, 201, 204

Arthur, Mr. and Mrs. Robert, 99 Atlas, Leopold, 87–88 Babbitt, Art, 108 Bacall, Lauren, 142 Barrymore, Lionel, 1, 101 Barzman, Norma, 226 –227 n12 Beauty and the Bolshevik, 215 n25 Bell, Ulric, 61 Bessie, Alvah, 114, 119, 143, 144, 223 –224 n70, 237 n55 Best Years of Our Lives, The: and the cultural front, 192, 195; deemed unacceptable, 100 –101, 103, 198; excellence of, enhancing danger of, 116 –117; Screen Guide and, 6; as social problem film, 68, 82, 142, 144; success of, 69 –70, 100, 231–232 n76; Warner testimony on, 118 Biberman, Herbert, 32, 46, 64, 124, 146 –147, 186, 237 n55 Biddle, Francis, 63, 225 n82 Big Jim McLain, 8, 139, 168, 169, 171, 179 Bioff, Willie, 108, 233 n2 Black Fury, 24 –30, 216 n53 blacklisting: of anti-Communists, 149 –150; deaths resulting from, 185, 245 n5; effectiveness of, 7–8, 158, 187, 192; examples of, 156, 241 n50; numbers affected by, 158, 245 n5; organizations promoting, 167; resistance to idea of, 119, 120; Waldorf Statement announcing, 139 –141, 143, 148; Warner Bros. and, 119 –120 Black Pit (Maltz, play), 27, 28, 83 –84 Blankfort, Henry, 208 Blockade, 33, 36, 192, 194, 198 Body and Soul, 6, 90, 101, 103, 144 Bogart, Humphrey, 58, 59, 75, 142, 187 Boomerang!, 116, 144 Boretz, Allen, 46 Born Yesterday, 198 Boy with Green Hair, The, 198 Brando, Marlon, 178, 182 Brave One, The, 188 247

248

INDEX

Brecht, Bertolt, 127, 237 n3 Breen, Joseph I., 21–24, 25–30, 33–35, 77, 216n47 Brewer, Roy, 107, 109 –110, 112–113, 149, 232 n83, 241 n6 Bridge on the River Kwai, The, 188 Bright, John, 30, 32, 47, 114, 229 n46 Bromberg, J. Edward, 202, 237 n55, 245 n5 Brooklyn U.S.A., 114 Browder, Earl, 88, 109. See also cultural Browderism Brown, Clarence, 190, 226 n7 Browne, George, 108, 233 n2 Brute Force, 103, 199 Buchman, Sidney, 62, 78 Buckley, William F., 242 n28 Buckner, Robert, 53 Buck Privates Come Home, 102, 199 Burk, Mrs. William A., 103, 104 Burns, William J., 12, 19, 20, 44 Byrnes, James F., 140 Cagney, James, 75 Caldwell, Erskine, 53, 222 n42 Cannon, Joseph D., 14, 17 capitalism, hindering fight against Communism, 76, 104 Capra, Frank, 1–2, 49, 67, 101, 2332 n78 Captain Eddie, 112, 234 n17 Carlson, Oliver, 139 Carnovsky, Morris, 87, 200 Casablanca, 53, 100, 111 Catholic reformers, 21, 22, 23, 34 –35, 144 Cavett, Thomas L., 113, 114 censorship: and Black Fury, 27–28, 217 n67; calls for, 21; by CP, 85; FBI sensitive to accusations of, 5, 144, 153, 154, 157, 185; foreign, 28, 217 n67; moral transgressions and, 21; MPA and, 78; postal, 15; state and local boards, establishment of, 10, 22. See also self-censorship by film industry Chain Lightning, 187 Chambers, Whittaker, 148, 242 n28 Chaplin, Charles, 10, 18, 27, 45, 120, 215 n34, 228 n28; FBI report on, 98, 128, 130, 237 n55; films deemed unacceptable, 18, 38–39, 49, 152, 153, 203; and Hays Office, 19 –20 Christ in Concrete, 199 Churchill, Winston, 51, 167 Church League of America, 167 CIO (Congress for Industrial Organization), 31, 109 –110 Citizen Kane, 192 Clark, Bennett Champ, 37–38, 145 Clark, D. Worth, 38

Clark, Tom, 144 class consciousness: Chaplin and, 18; criticism of upper class, 2; FBI distaste for, in film, 101–102; film used to improve, 10; Fosterism and, 88–89; LFS and, 15; and Maltz affair, 86, 87, 88–89, 190; overcoming, 126, 152, 175; producers allowing in film, 116; and racism, 188–190; rise of film and, 9, 10; Wonderful Life and, 2 Cloak and Dagger, 98 Cohn, Art, 181 Cold War: as cultural and ideological struggle, 99; and freedom as always under threat, 12; grand alliance and, 4; On the Waterfront as allegory, 178; and religiosity, 177; significant transition in, 166 –167 Cole, Lester, 2, 146, 187, 224 n76, 237 n55 collectivism, Rand rejection of, 92–93, 95–96 Collins, Richard, 231 n69, 237 n3 Comintern (Communist International), 31, 45, 132 Committee for Cultural Freedom, 81, 92 Committee for the First Amendment, 141–143 Communist Party: approval of manuscripts, 85; break-ins by FBI, 128, 237 n53; changing party line of, 46 – 47, 86, 190 –191, 220 n24; and content of film, policy on, 60 –61, 223 –224 nn70,72,73; instructions to members during WWII, 47– 48, 220 –221 nn26, 28,29; Maltz affair and dwindling cultural influence of, 91–92; “no strike” pledge of, 109; number of members employed in film industry, 128; number of members in, 121–122, 172, 187, 243 n34; party meetings, length of, 85 Communist Political Association (CPA), 63, 88, 109 Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), 108–109, 111, 112, 113, 144, 227–228 n19 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 49 Conspirator, 175, 241 n1 containment: domestic, 177; of Hollywood, 191; ideological, within the U.S., 4 –5; “long telegram” calling for, 166; as Truman Doctrine, 121 Contrast, The, 14, 15–16 Cooper, Gary, 71, 131, 163, 164, 204, 234 n17 Cornered, 98, 231 n69 corruption: in Harding administration, 216 n41; in HUAC, 146, 148–149; and labor unions/studios, 108, 233 n2 Council of Hollywood Guilds and Unions, 77–82, 113, 227–228 n19, 228–229 nn25,29 Counterattack, 167

INDEX

countersubversives, defined, 12–13 Cromwell, John, 181, 237 n55 Crossfire, 6, 68, 82, 103 –104, 142, 143, 144, 152, 192, 195, 199 –200 Crowther, Bosley, 49, 56, 59, 67, 69, 73, 95, 165 Crum, Bartley, 141, 145 cultural Browderism, 88–89, 90, 146 –147. See also cultural front cultural front/democratic modernism: defined, 3, 82, 85–86, 210 n5; end of, 147; grand alliance and renewal of, 68, 70; Hollywood Ten defense and last gasp of, 90, 141, 143 –144, 146 –147; Maltz affair and destruction of, 82, 85–92, 188, 190; nostalgia for, 192; public efforts to combat HUAC and, 146; and social realism, 3 – 4, 34, 36, 86, 87, 147. See also Popular Front Curtiz, Michael, 24, 53, 222 n42 Cvetic, Matt, 170, 171, 178–179 Daily Worker (newspaper), 83, 87, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207 Da Silva, Howard, 208 Dassin, Jules, 103 Daves, Delmer, 205 Davies, Joseph E., 50, 222 n42, 235 n33 Day, Richard, 154 Defiant Ones, The, 188 DeMille, Cecil B., 10, 76, 149, 178, 198, 244 n55 democracy: freedom vs. responsibility and, 66 –68; Tender Comrade portrayal of, 73, 75 democratic modernism. See cultural front Desert Fox, The, 191–192 Destination Tokyo, 85 Devil and Miss Jones, The, 71–72 Dewey, John, 55, 56 Dies committee: 1940 investigation by, 75; as anti-New Deal, 113, 114, 123; bungled investigations, 129; establishment of, 107, 113; and Federal Theatre Project, 75, 121; and film content, 75, 113; and MPA, attack on, 81; public investigation, lack of, 114–115; relationship with FBI, 123, 129; Steedman report, 113–114, 234n21. See also House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) Dies, Martin, 46, 78, 113, 123 Dieterle, William, 33, 237 n55 Dimitrov, Georgi, 45 Disney, Walt, 6, 71, 75, 108–109, 110, 226 n7 Dmytryk, Edward, 73, 75, 98, 103 –104, 127, 136, 143, 146, 227 n14, 231 n69 Duclos, Jacques, 88, 109 Dunne, Phillip, 32, 46, 62, 141, 220 n18, 237 n55

249

Eastland, James, 167 Eastman, Max, 55 Edge of Darkness, 57, 116 Eisler, Hanns, 45 entertainment function of film: PCA and, 35; social problem film vs., 39, 120, 152, 194; as sole function correct function, 34 –37, 78; as trend in wake of HUAC, 152, 157 Epstein, Julius and Philip, 32, 111, 119 Erskine, Chester, 151 family as threatened, 174 –175, 179 –180, 244 n48 Faragogh, Francis, 32 Farber, Manny, 55–56, 67 Farmer’s Daughter, The, 200, 231–232 n76 Farrell, James T., 86 Faulkner, William, 190 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation): “black bag jobs” (break-ins and covert surveillance), 128, 237 n53; “blind memoranda” given to HUAC, 129 –130, 237 n55; conversations, monitoring, 152, 154 –156; criticism of, Hoover reaction to, 61; direct investigations, denial of existence, 63, 225 n82; filmography of suspect movies, 197–208, 246 n1; first red scare and surveillance of Hollywood, 5, 11–20, 44; guidelines for agents, 13; guilt by association, 53, 57–58, 97–98, 222–223 nn60,61; illegal wiretaps, 145; insecurity of, 12, 42, 52, 145; leaks to the press, 167; and new federalism, 11; private screening of films, 153 –154; propaganda campaign (1946), 167–168; propaganda initiative proposed, 125; and public opinion, shaping of, 52, 125; relationships with film executives, 153 –154; relationship with HUAC, 5, 6 –7, 106 –107, 123 –130, 147–149, 236 n46; reports, format of, 215 n31; reports of 1943, 44 – 45, 48– 49, 63, 223 n61; review of films by agents, 63 –66, 150 –151; scholarship on, 5; Screen Guide as manual for, 6, 8, 96 –97, 99 –105; script monitoring, 151, 152–154, 232 n83. See also Hooverism; Hoover, J. Edgar FBI Story, The, 8, 179 –180 Federal Theatre Project, 75, 121 Ferguson, Otis, 28, 29 Ferrer, Jose, 200 film: as leading form of mass culture, 6, 9 –10; and mass movement, building of, 15; as most powerful medium for education, 14 Film in the Battle of Ideas (Lawson), 90, 147, 191

250

INDEX

Flanagan, Hallie, 121 Fonda, Henry, 33 Force of Evil, 90, 154 –156, 155, 200 Ford, Henry, 9 –10 foreign infiltration theme, 44 – 45, 219 n15 Foreman, Carl, 188, 201 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 71, 112, 234 n17 Foster, William Z., 17, 46, 88–89, 223 –224 n70 Fountainhead, The (film), 8, 161–162, 164; and altruism, 162, 166; as anticollectivist, 162, 163 –166; atheism and, 159, 166, 242 n18; the common man and, 164 –165; control of Rand over, 162–163; as critical and commercial failure, 162, 165–166, 181, 242 nn16 –18; gender stereotypes in, 163, 174; individualism and, 159, 162; and PCA, 162, 242 n18; sexuality and, 162 Fountainhead, The (Rand, novel), 161, 162 “friendly” witnesses: clearance of, 149, 158, 186; closed session hearings of 1947, 113, 115–123; cooperative but not collaborative, 7, 133 –136; as mainly MPA affiliated, 7, 107, 113, 133 front arrangements, 187–188 Frontier Films, 17 “front” organizations, 45– 46, 113 –114 Fuller, Samuel, 183, 245 n70 Gallup poll on HUAC hearings, 140 –141 Garfield, John, 85, 142, 154, 155, 185, 245 n5 gender roles and stereotypes: anti-Communist film and, 179, 243 –244 n45; CP and, 226 –227 n12; Hooverism and, 174 –175; proSoviet film and, 52; Rand and, 163; rise of film and, 9; WWII films and, 73 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 68, 82, 144, 152, 200 –201 Gershwin, Ira, 141 Gibbons, Cedric, 226 n7, 232 n86 Ginsberg, Henry, 118–119, 120 Gold, Mike, 31, 87 Goldwyn, Samuel, 32, 98, 99, 100, 104, 118, 140 Graham, Billy, 177 grand alliance: and criticism by CP, 86; FBI distrust of, 4, 6, 41– 42, 47, 54, 220 n25; MPA discomfort with, 71; postwar, 43, 64; proSoviet films made to support, 4, 50 –51, 194; renewed Popular Front and, 68, 70 Grapes of Wrath, The, 39, 104, 126, 192, 195 Great Dictator, The, 38, 39, 49 Griffith, D. W., 16 Hammerstein, Oscar, 32 Hangmen Also Die, 57

Harding, Warren G., 12, 216 n41 Harris, Mildred, 18, 215 n34 Hays Office (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, MPPDA): and Black Fury, 26, 27, 217 nn58,60–62; calls to loosen code, 36; Chaplin and, 19 –20; and Communist propaganda, 34, 50, 126 –127; and creation of Production Code Administration, 22–23, 50; dissatisfaction with Hays’ leadership, 35, 221 n29; establishment of, 19, 21; Hood proposal for FBI collaboration with, 61; HUAC testimony of Johnston, 126 –127; report to Subcommittee on War Propaganda, 39 Hays, Will H., 12, 19; and code adoption, 22, 23, 50; as head of Hays Office, 19 –20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 35, 39, 217 n58, 221 n29; and Studio Relations Committee, 21. See also Hays Office Hearst, William Randolph, 224 n76 Hedlund, Guy, 14, 16, 214 n18 Hellman, Lillian, 60, 86, 101–102, 208 Hemingway, Ernest, 71 High Noon, 201 Holliday, Judy, 203 Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL), 32–34, 45, 218 n75 Hollywood Democratic Committee, 53, 113, 114 Hollywood Independent Citizen’s Committee of the Arts, Science and Professions (HICCASP), 233 –234 n15 Hollywood on Trial (Kahn), 144, 145 Hollywood Quarterly, 58, 62, 222–223 n60, 224 n76 Hollywood Ten. See HUAC Hollywood Ten Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization (HWM), 53, 60, 61–63, 113, 224 n76 Home of the Brave, 147, 157 Hood, Richard B.: Brewer and, 109; and conversations, monitoring of, 154, 156; and film reviews by G-men, 63–65, 150–151; and foreign infiltration theme, 45; and investigation of Hollywood, 76, 97–98, 127, 148, 238n8; offered Screen Writers Guild records, 135; proposal to collaborate with OWI and Hays Office, 61; and relationship of FBI and HUAC, 129; and script monitoring, 151, 152–154 Hook, Sidney, 55 Hooverism, 8; criminality of CP, 168; defined, 5, 214 n12; disease and contagion metaphors, 13, 14, 172–174; eternal vigilance as defense, 175–178; FBI as necessary to lead, 180; government as threatened, 172; hypoc-

INDEX

risy of CP, 170; Mission to Moscow as motivating, 42, 50, 52–53, 56 –57; race-baiting, 171–172; and social institutions, 8, 173 –179. See also anti-Communist films Hoover, J. Edgar: background of, 11, 13, 20; broad social definition of Communist threat, 159 –160; and censorship, sensitivity to charges of, 5, 144, 153, 154, 157, 185; continued ire at picture industry, 157; and criticism of FBI, 61; film content, ordering analysis of, 99, 125; and film reviews by FBI agents, 150 –151; as ghostwritten author, 125, 167; HUAC testimony by, 121–123, 122, 125–126; irritated by films about FBI, 170, 183, 245 n70; management style of, 13, 61; Masters of Deceit, 167, 168, 171–172, 175; as odd man, 13 –14, 214 n17; and Palmer raids, 12; racism of, 60, 171–172; and relationship with HUAC, 123, 125, 127–128, 129, 130, 147, 149; and suspected blacklisting of antiCommunists, 150. See also FBI; Hooverism Hopkins, A. A., 17, 18–19, 215 nn31,35 Hopper, Hedda, 128, 206, 226 n7 House I Live In, The, 85 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): “$64 question,” 132–133, 157–158; 1947 closed session hearings, 112–113, 115–123, 125–126; 1947 public hearings (see HUAC Hollywood Ten); 1951 hearings (see HUAC hearings [1951–1953]); and antiCommunist films, call for, 7, 120 –121, 139, 159; and “art as a weapon,” 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 120; and Big Jim McLain, 169; and content of films, 7–8; corruption and, 148–149; early talk of investigating film, 63; and entertainment function of film, 120; establishment of, 115, 123; members of, 115; relationship with FBI, 5, 6 –7, 106 –107, 123 –130, 147–149, 236 n46; relationship with MPA, 115, 117; Republican control of, 115; Screen Guide as standard for, 115–116, 117; and social criticism as un-American, 116 –117, 235 n28. See also Dies committee; “friendly” witnesses; loyalty oaths; “unfriendly” witnesses HUAC hearings (1951–1953): content of films avoided in, 139, 157–158, 184, 185; and decline of CP, 187; as “degradation ceremonies,” 184; MPA report on, 185–186; and social problem films, death of, 188, 194; televising of, 186; testimonies, 170, 178, 182, 191; and use of the $64 question, 157–158 HUAC Hollywood Ten hearings: closing of, 139, 148, 237 n3; contempt charges and appeal of, 139, 144, 145–146; defense of the

251

Ten, 141–146; firing of the Ten, 139 –141; list of the Ten, 133, 237 n3; opening of, 131–132; sentences, 146; and specifics, lack of, 136 –139; and spectacle, 131, 133; success of, FBI perspective on, 147–149. See also “friendly witnesses”; “unfriendly witnesses” Hughes, Howard, 22, 149, 181 Hughes, Rupert, 31, 32, 71, 111, 226 n7 Hunter, Ian McClellan, 187, 205 Huston, John, 141, 142, 191 Huston, Walter, 53, 208 Hynes, William F., 16, 17 Idle Class, The, 18 I Married a Communist, 139, 175, 181 Immigrant, The, 18 independent filmmakers, 14 –17, 186, 191 individualism: and the MPA, 75; and Rand’s Americanism, 92–93, 96 informants: confidential, 20, 216 n42; from MPA, 76 –77, 227 n17; redacted names, 2, 227 n17; studio employees, 101; T-10 (see Reagan, Ronald); within the CP, 128 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), 107, 109, 110, 111, 186, 227–228 n19, 232 n83, 233 n2 Intruder in the Dust, 147, 189, 190 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 173 Iron Curtain, The, 139, 180, 181 It’s a Wonderful Life, 1–2, 101, 201–202 I Was a Communist for the F.B.I, 8, 139, 168, 169 –171, 173 –174, 178–179, 182 Jarrico, Paul, 46, 47, 186, 187, 219 n9, 223 –224 n70 Jerome, Victor J., 30, 45, 90, 147, 188–190, 192 Johnston, Eric, 126 –127, 133 –134, 136, 137, 140 Jones, Dorothy B., 58, 59, 67, 193 –194, 195, 222–223 n60, 245 n65 Kahn, Gordon, 119, 144, 145, 237 n, 3, 55 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 234 n21 Katz, Otto, 32 Kazan, Elia, 45, 178, 182, 189 –190, 191, 245 n68 Keeper of the Flame, 101, 202 Kelly, Gene, 142, 237 n55 Kenny, Robert, 141 Khrushchev, Nikita, 187 Kibre, Jeff, 110 Kid, The, 215 n23 Koch, Howard, 53, 62, 100, 119, 221–222 nn39, 42, 237 nn3,55 Koerner, Charles, 72, 76

252

INDEX

Korean War, 184, 191 Kruse, William F., 16, 17, 215 n25 Labor Film Service (LFS), 14 –16, 17, 214 –215 n18, 23 labor unions: and content of films, 112, 234 n17; cultural front and, 15; Disney cartoonists strike, 108–109; Hollywood Ten and, 143 –144; labor-capital film genre, 24 –30, 186, 216 n53, 217 nn57–58,60–62, 67; MPA as anti-labor, 78–79; Popular Front and, 31; strikes, and violence of 1945, 106, 107–113, 233 nn1–2 Ladd, D. Milton, 60, 65, 124, 125, 129, 144, 145, 150 Laemmle, Carl, 32 La Follette, Suzanne, 55, 56 Lang, Fritz, 32 Lardner, Ring Jr., 32, 98, 119, 133, 143, 146, 237 n5, 55 Lavery, Emmet G., 7, 119, 133, 134 –136, 237 n55, 238 n8 Lawrence, Stanley, 30 Lawson, John Howard, 62, 110, 113 –114; and antifascism, 33, 191–192, 231 n69; and antiracism, 59; and Communist Party, 30 –31, 124; and democratic modernism, 146, 147, 188, 190 –191; and democratization of art under capitalism, lack of, 147, 188, 190 –192; FBI material on, 147, 237 n55; fired by Warner, 119; and guilt by association, 58, 222–223 n60; as Hollywood Ten member, 136, 144, 145–146, 190; HUAC testimony of, 132–133, 147; and Maltz affair, 88, 89 –90 League of American Writers (LAW), 53 Lee, Canada, 185, 245 n5 Lees, Robert, 46, 187 Legion of Decency, 23, 34, 144 Leroy, Mervyn, 161–162 Levine, Isaac Don, 100, 101 Levitas, Sol, 228 n28 Leyda, Jay, 53, 222 n39 Little Foxes, The, 101–102, 116 Litvak, Anatole, 49 Litvinov, Maxim, 36, 53 Lord, Daniel, 21–22, 23, 35 Los Angeles Police Department, 16 –17 Losey, Joseph, 181 Lost Boundaries, 147 Lost Weekend, The, 68, 82, 97 loyalty oaths, 149, 244 n55 Maltz affair: and anti-Communist misreading of events, 91–92; as example of CP disci-

pline, 82; and rejection of cultural front by CP, 82, 85–92, 188, 190 Maltz, Albert, 2, 27, 28, 82–89, 119, 169, 205, 229 n46, 231 n69, 232 n78, 237 n55; as Hollywood Ten member, 84, 98, 136. See also Maltz affair Manchurian Candidate, The, 244 n48 Mankiewicz, Herman, 32 Man on a Tightrope, 241 n1 March, Frederic, 32, 75, 142, 231–232 n76, 237 n55 Margolis, Ben, 141 masculinity, 65, 165, 175, 179, 225 n86 Master Race, The, 64 –65, 76, 203 Masters of Deceit (Hoover), 167, 168, 171–172, 175 Matthews, Blaney F., 119 Matthews, J. B., 123, 224 n76 Mayer, Louis B., 134, 137, 148, 149 McCall, Mary Jr., 77–78 McCarey, Leo, 116 McCarran, Pat, 167, 184, 202 McCarthyism, 5, 214 n12, 6, 184 McCarthy, Joseph R., 167, 184 McDonald, Dwight, 55 McDowell, John, 115, 120 McFarland, Ernest, 38 McGuinness, James K., 31, 71, 78, 99, 104, 118, 120, 149, 226 nn4,7,228 n28 McNutt, Paul, 134, 137 Medal for Benny, A, 117 Menjou, Adolphe, 118, 150, 154 Milestone, Lewis, 33, 45, 98, 237 nn3,55 Miller, Arthur, 151–152, 205, 245 n68 Mission to Moscow, 51; aims of, 50 –52, 55, 56, 194, 235; deemed unacceptable, 113, 203; Hooverism motivated by, 42, 50, 52–53, 56 –57; MPA testimony on, 235; and New Deal red-baiting, 49 –50; OWI approval of, 50; reception of, 53 –57, 222 n56; shift away from style of, 57; and surveillance of film industry, 6, 43 Moffitt, Jack, 69 –70, 116 –117, 118, 120, 127, 129, 136 –137, 150, 227 n17 momism, 175, 244 n48 Monsieur Verdoux, 120, 152, 153, 204 Montgomery, Robert, 131 moral subversion: anti-Semitism and, 9 –10; film as synonymous with, 10 Morley, Karen, 111, 237 n55 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA): backlash against (Hollywood Guilds and Unions), 77–82, 227–228 nn19,28; and blacklisting of anti-

INDEX

Communists, 149 –150; and clearance of friendly witnesses, 158; and Disney strike, 109; establishment of, 70 –71, 226 nn6–7, 228 n28; FBI collaboration with, 98–99, 104; “friendly” HUAC witnesses as members of, 7, 107, 113, 115, 133; and Maltz affair, 91; members as main informants to FBI, 76 –77, 227 n17; and “political blindness” of producers, 70, 93, 96, 104, 116, 118; protest against, by producers, 99; Statement of Principles of, 71–72, 75, 79, 161, 226 n7; vigilance recommended by, 185–186. See also Screen Guide for Americans Motion Picture Artists’ Committee, 32, 45 Motion Picture Council, 102–103 Motion Picture Democratic Committee, 32, 45 Motion Picture Herald, 21, 34, 35, 36 Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC), 149, 158, 244 n55 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, 30. See also Hays Office Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 2, 101, 192, 204 Mundt, Karl E., 115, 167 Muni, Paul, 22, 24, 28, 216 n53 Munzenberg, Willi, 32 My Son John, 8, 139, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181–182 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 12, 59 –60, 224 n72 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 31, 78, 108–109 Negro in Hollywood Films, The (Jerome), 90, 147, 188–190 New Deal: antitrust violations and, 235 n23; Dies committee as anti, 113, 114, 123; The Fountainhead as weapon against, 161; opposition to, and anti-Communism, 114, 161, 194, 225 n23; red-baiting of, 38, 49 –50, 75, 121 Niblo, Fred, 150, 226 n7 Nichols, Louis B., 75–76, 77, 128, 130, 150 Ninotchka, 52, 243 –244 n45 Nixon, Richard, 7, 115, 139, 159, 167 North Star, The, 76, 102, 204, 232 n81, 235 n28 Nye, Gerald P., 37–38, 49, 78 Odets, Clifford, 29, 33, 119, 161, 232 n78, 237 n55 Office of War Information (OWI): as advocate of pro-Soviet films, 4, 50 –51; control over content of films, 48, 67–68, 223 n66; FBI distrust of, 60, 61–63, 221 n29, 222–223 n60; Hood proposal to collaborate with, 61; and

253

HWM, cooperation with, 61–63; infiltration by Communists, FBI fear of, 48, 61, 221 n37, 222–223 n60; and The Master Race, 64; and Mission to Moscow, 50; and power of film, 42; and Sahara, 58–59, 223 n66 On the Waterfront, 8, 178, 182, 205, 245 n68 Ornitz, Samuel, 133, 237 n55 Oxbow Incident, 192 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 12 Parker, Dorothy, 32, 232 n78 Parks, Larry, 237 nn3,55 Parsons, Louella, 27 Pearson, Drew, 167 Pegler, Westbrook, 148, 167 People’s Educational Center (PEC), 113 –114 Pichel, Irving, 117 Pickup on South Street, 183 Pinky, 147, 189 –190 Polonsky, Abraham, 90 –91, 103, 154 –156, 241 nn49,50 Popper, Martin, 145 Popular Front: antifascism and, 3, 31–34, 36, 45– 46; antiracism and, 3; Cold War supplanting, 8; defined, 3, 31, 62; grand alliance and renewal of, 70; HWM as part of, 62; Nazi-Soviet pact and end of, 31, 32–33, 46, 47; and social realism, 3 – 4, 36; and unionism, 31. See also cultural front Pride of the Marines, 85, 90, 101, 144, 192, 205 producers: and corruption, 108, 233 n2; CP support for, 47– 48, 221 n29; monopolistic practices, 115, 235 n23; responsibility for Communist propaganda in film, 6, 70, 76, 93, 96, 98–99, 104, 107, 116, 118, 119 –120, 149 –150; suspected of purge of antiCommunists, 149 –150. See also blacklisting Production Code Administration (PCA): and Black Fury, 25–30, 217 nn57–8,60–2; and Blockade, 33 –34; and “compensating moral values,” 23 –24, 28; establishment of, 5–6, 21, 22–23, 35; failure of censorship by, 11, 30, 33 –34, 35, 39; and The Fountainhead, 162–163, 242 n18; and “industry policy,” 23, 216 n49; as self-regulating censor for industry, 24, 77 propaganda: criteria for identification of, 193 –194; determined by political affiliations of workers, 57–58; difficulty of detection of, 57; hypodermic needle theory, 96; potential of film for, 126; Rand’s contradiction on, 96. See also anti-Communist film pro-Soviet films, 4, 50 –51, 102, 194, 235 n28. See also Mission to Moscow; North Star, The

254

INDEX

Quigley, Martin, 21–22, 23, 34 –37, 39 racism: of Hoover, 60, 171–172; MPA and, 80, 81; of Sorrell, 110; as subject in films, FBI and, 59 –61, 100, 103 –104, 186, 188; used to divide the masses, 143, 171, 188–190. See also antiracism Rains, Claude, 121 Rand, Ayn: and All My Sons, 151–152; anticollectivism of, 161, 170, 172, 232 n79; atheism/ materialism of, 159, 166, 230 n63, 242 n18; background of, 160 –161; HUAC testimony of, 137–138, 138, 235 n25; individualism and, 92–93, 159; influence on content of films, 166; and the MPA, 6, 71, 92, 161, 226 n7, 231 n75, 241 n6; and Song of Russia, 7, 137–138. See also Fountainhead, The; Screen Guide for Americans Randolph, A. Philip, 47, 55 Rankin, John E., 115, 123 –124 Ray, Nicholas, 181 Reagan, Ronald, 7, 111–112, 121, 133 –134, 135, 136, 149; as informant T-10, 111, 227 n17, 233 –234 n15 Red Badge of Courage, The, 191 Red Channels, 167 Red Danube, The, 139, 241 n1 Red Menace, The, 8, 139, 168–169, 170 –171, 172, 179, 181, 182 Red Pawn (Rand), 160 Reis, Meta, 62 religion: and anti-Communist films, 178–179; church membership, 177; and Hoover’s Communist threat, 159, 167, 177–178; Rand’s lack of, 159, 166, 230 n63, 242 n18 Revere, Ann, 97, 237 n55 Rice, Elmer, 80 –81, 228 n27 Rickenbacker, Eddie, 224 n72, 234 n17 Riesel, Victor, 181–182 Rinaldo, Fred, 102 Riskin, Robert, 62–63, 224 n62–3, 237 n55 Rivkin, Allen, 62 RKO, investigation into, 76 Roberts, Bob, 154 Robeson, Paul, 120, 204 Robinson, Edward G., 142, 237 n55 Rogers, Ginger, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76 Rogers, Howard Emmett, 31, 71, 78, 79, 99, 104, 118, 148, 226 n7, 232 n86, 234 n17 Rogers, Lela E., 6, 71, 72–77, 78–79, 99, 113, 115–116, 118, 226 n7, 227 nn14,17,232 n86 Roman Holiday, 187, 205 Roosevelt, Franklin D., and administration, 109; and Depression economics, 30; and

Dies committee, 114 –115; and Hoover/ FBI, 20, 123; infiltration by Communists, FBI fear of, 221 n37; involved with Mission to Moscow, 50; and Nazi-Soviet pact, 46; and New Deal red-baiting, 38; reelection of 1944, 114, 115, 228 n28; and World War II, 32, 41 Rossen, Robert, 32, 62, 98, 119, 237 n3, 55 Russia and Germany: A Tale of Two Republics, 16 –17 Russia in Overalls, 215 n25 Ryskind, Morrie, 31, 71, 80 –81, 99, 150, 161, 226 nn4,7,228 n28 Sahara, 58–59, 90, 192, 223 nn66,67 Salt of the Earth, 186, 187, 206 Salt, Waldo, 202, 237 nn3,55 Schary, Dore, 133, 136, 149, 232 n86 Schenck, Joseph, 22, 233 n2 Schenck, Nicholas, 38, 140 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 82, 91 schools as threatened, 173 –174, 176 science fiction, 173, 243 n38 Scott, Adrian, 104, 138, 192–193, 195, 231 n69 Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 30, 111, 134, 227–228 n19 Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG), 108–109 Screen Directors Guild (SDG), 244 n55 Screen Guide for Americans (Rand): authorship of, 92, 99, 161, 231 n75; based on Rand’s work, 161, 163; and danger of criticizing Americanism, 94 –95, 100 –102, 103 –104, 116 –117; and danger of praising collectivist values, 95–96, 102–103, 164 –165; and danger of producing political films, 94, 100; education of producers, 93 –94; education of public, 116; as FBI manual, 6, 8, 96 –97, 99 –105; as HUAC standard, 115–116, 117; media coverage of, 166, 242 n19; as model for anti-Communist films, 8; and propaganda, contradiction on, 96, 231 n66 Screen Playwrights (SP), 31, 77–78 Screen Writers Guild (SWG): clashes with Screen Playwrights, 31, 77–78; and collectivism, fear of, 31; and Communists, 30 –31, 98, 113, 187; and Council on Hollywood Guilds and Unions, 227–228 n19; and CSU strike, 111; formation of, 30 –31; and HUAC testimony of Lavery, 7, 133, 134 –136 scripts: monitoring by FBI, 151, 152–154, 232 n83; submission to PCA, 23 secrecy and FBI: affiliation with HUAC, 127–128, 129 –130; agents reviewing films, 150 –151; culture of, 43, 66, 219 nn9,11

INDEX

self-censorship by film industry, 155–156. See also Hays Office; Production Code Administration Selznick, David, 98 Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, 37–39, 49 Sergeant York, 38, 39 sex and violence, in films, 191–192 sexuality, Hooverism and, 174 –175 Sherwood, Robert E., 100 Sillen, Samuel, 87 Sinatra, Frank, 85, 142 Sinclair, Upton, 30, 215 n25 Skouras, Spyros, 140 Slayton, John W., 15–16, 215 n25 Smith, Gerald L. K., 79 Smith, H. Allen, 129, 130 social problem films: contradictory arguments against, 37; critical recognition of merits of, 85; decline of, 68, 82, 185, 188, 192–193, 194, 195; early postwar era boom in, 68, 82; entertainment function of film vs., 39, 120, 152, 194; HUAC attack on, 120, 139, 142–143, 152 Sokolsky, George, 123, 148, 167, 202 Song of Russia, 7, 137–138, 235 n28 Song to Remember, A, 101, 206 Sorrell, Herbert K., 79, 80, 108–109, 110, 111, 234 n17, 237 n55 sound, advent of, 44, 45 Soviet Union: cultural front and admiration for, 15; goodwill towards, 41, 53 –54; invasion by Germany, 46; Nazi-Soviet pact, 31, 32–33, 37–38, 46, 47, 51, 86, 124, 141; widespread distrust for, 166. See also Cold War; grand alliance Spanish Civil War, 31, 33, 34, 71 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 177 Stalin, Joseph, 34, 46, 50 –51, 51, 52, 55, 166, 187, 235 n33; as Time man of the year, 53 –54 Stander, Lionel, 47 Steedman, James H., 113 –114, 129, 234 n21 Steinbeck, John, 86, 161 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 32, 237 n55 Stewart, James, 1, 49, 101, 179 Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The, 98, 117 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 191, 207 Stripling, Robert E., 114 –115, 118, 120, 129, 234 n21; as HUAC investigator, 117, 119, 130, 132–133, 134 –136, 147 Studio Relations Committee (SRC), 21 studio system, 17, 24, 39, 67, 193, 210 n2. See also producers Sullivan, Ed, 182 Swerling, Jo, 32

255

Tamm, Edward, 150 Taylor, Elizabeth, 175 Taylor, Robert, 175 Ten Commandments, 178 Tender Comrade, 72–77, 74, 113 Tennessee Johnson, 112, 221 n29, 224 n72 Tenney committee, 110, 114 Tenney, Jack B., 78, 110 “Textbook of Americanism” (Rand), 92–93 Theatre Union, 83 Them!, 173 Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 104 This Land Is Mine, 116 Thomas, J. Parnell, 115, 117, 121, 146, 148– 149; as Chair of HUAC, 131–132, 136, 139, 144, 148; and relationship with FBI, 125, 127–130, 147, 167, 236 n46 Thomas, Norman, 55, 214 –215 n23 Tobacco Road, 126 Tolson, Clyde, 150 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The, 157, 207–208 Truman, Harry S, 49, 121, 184 Trumbo, Dalton, 2, 62, 73, 75, 104, 108, 119, 124, 146; front arrangements and uncredited contributions, 187–188, 232 n78; as Hollywood Ten member, 133, 136, 144, 145–146, 200, 237 n55 Two Years before the Mast, 116 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 60 uncredited contributions, 2, 100, 104, 187, 188, 232 n78, 241 n50 Undercurrent, 116 unfriendly witnesses: “$64 question,” 132–133, 157–158; list of, 133; surveillance of lawyers for, 145. See also blacklisting; Hollywood Ten HUAC hearings United Negro Improvement Association, 59 –60 United States v. Paramount Pictures, 115 Van Deman, Ralph H., 220 n22 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 55, 144, 222 n51 Vidor, King, 163, 226 n7, 232 n86, 242 n17 Vigil, The, 91, 92, 161, 231 n75 violence: and sex in film, 191–192; and strike of 1945, 106, 107–113, 233 nn1–2 Viva Zapata!, 191 Vogel, Robert, 161, 226 n7, 232 n86 Wagner Act, 31 Waiting for Lefty (Odets, play), 29 Waldorf Statement, 139 –141, 143, 148 Wallace, Henry A., 67–68, 142–143

256

INDEX

Wanger, Walter, 32, 33, 34, 36, 77, 98, 124, 140, 142, 149 Warner Brothers, 111, 118, 119 –120, 149 Warner, Harry, 38, 98, 111, 217 n58 Warner, Jack, 25, 26, 32, 90, 98, 111, 118, 120; and anti-Communist films, 120–121, 180; HUAC testimony of, 7, 119–120, 134, 235n33 Watch on the Rhine, 86, 208 Wayne, John, 169, 171, 179, 242 n25 Welles, Orson, 161 We Were Strangers, 157, 208 Wexley, John, 98, 119, 231 n69 Wheeler, Burton K., 38, 49 White, Walter, 224 n72 Why We Fight series, 49, 67 Wilder, Billy, 97 Wilkie, Wendell, 38, 81, 221 n29 Wilson, Michael, 2, 186, 187, 188, 232 n78 Wilson, Woodrow, 49 –50 Winchell, Walter, 167 Wolfert, Ira, 154 –156

Wood, John S., 115, 148–149 Wood, Sam, 6, 70 –71, 226 n7 Workers Film and Photo League, 17 working class: cultural front and focus on, 10, 15–16; mass culture and, 40. See also class consciousness World War II: CP instructions during, 47– 48, 220 –221 nn26,28,29; and freedom vs. responsibility of film, 66 –68; perception of Hollywood during, 49 –50. See also grand alliance; Office of War Information; Popular Front; Soviet Union Writers Congress (1943), 62, 113 Wyler, William, 100, 141, 142, 149 xenophobia, 11, 18, 45, 215 n35 Young, Nedrick, 188 Zanuck, Darryl F., 38, 183 Zukor, Adolph, 71