The Communists have developed one of the greatest propaganda machines the world has ever known. They have been able to penetrate and infiltrate many respectable and reputable public opinion mediums . . . 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 . . . What can we do? And what should be our course of action? The best antidote to Communism is vigorous, intelligent, old-fashioned Americanism with eternal vigilance.
J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, testifying before HUAC, 26 March 19471
His family loved him dearly but knew there was something wrong with John (played by Robert Walker). Perhaps it was because he had ‘more degrees than a thermometer’, and had grown apart intellectually from his simple, well-meaning parents. Maybe it was because he spent too long away from their small home town, in Washington, DC, where he was mysteriously working for the government.
Dan and Lucille Jefferson (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) had recently grown to tolerate their son’s effete and snobbish manner. But his failure to return home in time to see his clean-cut younger brothers depart for combat in Korea was unforgivable. For John then to ridicule his father’s patriotism and mock his mother’s devotion to Christianity was the last straw. Little wonder Mr Jefferson, a member of the American Legion, tries to knock some sense into his snide son by belting him with a Bible. Who can blame his anxious mother for trailing John to the nation’s capital, only to have her suspicions that he is a Soviet agent confirmed? Having failed to extract a confession from her favourite offspring, Lucille Jefferson knows it is her duty to turn him over to the FBI.
John calls the Bureau’s bluff, but finally realises his moral corruption when confronted by the effects his treachery is having on his mother’s health.
Seeking redemption, John rushes to cleanse himself by offering to help the FBI – only to be tragically gunned down gangland-style by his comrades in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Hollywood’s favourite symbol of American
democracy.2Fortunately, John had taped a speech he expected to deliver to a college graduating class at his alma mater, detailing his disillusionment with communism and warning of the party’s subversive threat. In the final scene, the stunned students listen to John’s disembodied voice: ‘I am a traitor, I am a native. American. Communist. Spy. And may God have mercy on my soul.’
Leo McCarey’s My Son John, which debuted in 1952, is a familiar exhibit in studies of America’s domestic Cold War. Though the film initially met with a mixed reception politically (the American Legion praised it, while some Catholics thought it slanderous),3it was soon well on its way to becoming the most notorious of all the Red-baiting pictures produced during the McCarthy era, if not the whole Cold War. Historians have recently cited the film as evi-dence of the homophobic, anti-feminist and anti-intellectual dimensions of America’s Second Red Scare.4
However, what few commentators have looked at fully are the motives that lay behind the making of My Son John and the scores of other overtly anti-communist films produced by Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s. Those who have glanced behind the films’ scenes have tended, for good reason, to emphasise the political pressures that filmmakers were subjected to during the
The enemy within 43
A family at war: John’s sideways glance at his dad and impertinence to Father O’Dowd are early pointers to the tragedy about to strike the humble Jeffersons. Helen Hayes, Frank McHugh, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger in a scene from My Son John (1952). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.
early Cold War years, and to argue that the movies were political sops designed to placate those who charged the studios with ideologically suspect output.5 Yet the fact is Leo McCarey wrote, produced and directed My Son John for Paramount not because he was being blackmailed by HUAC, but principally because he was an ardent Catholic who believed communism presented a genuine threat to American national security.6Other filmmakers voluntarily contributed to the anti-Red onslaught for more complex reasons. Some did so partly because of their strong links with the state.
To understand the potential that existed for producers, writers and direc-tors to project their own personal visions of the communist menace, it is necessary to reassess Hollywood’s part in the institutionalisation of the Cold War between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s. This was a critical period: when Americans were urged to swap one foreign enemy (fascism) for another (Soviet communism); when the anxieties, values and beliefs which most people would carry throughout the conflict were first established; when cinema was still at or near the peak of its drawing power in the United States;7 and when the state-film network in the United States was rapidly evolving to take account of the exigencies of a full-blown Cold War. As we shall see, America in the 1940s and 1950s was marked by idealism and creativity as much as fear and risk, motives that mingled in an unprecedented expansion of gov-ernmental activity and private initiative and which began to blur the lines between state and civil society. As the Cold War proper started, so the US gov-ernment’s propaganda apparatus developed to pressurise, guide and sharpen the media’s anti-Soviet messages. This included agencies like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that ostensibly concentrated purely on surveillance and security, but which in reality played a significant role in mobilising the American people to act as ‘citizen warriors’ in the nation’s fight against communism.
HOLLYWOOD ON TRIAL
Hollywood was treated as one of the ‘enemies within’ by counter-subversives in the United States during the early Cold War years. Once the clash between Washington and Moscow became direct and overt with the articulation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, domestic communism was transformed from a matter of political controversy to a subject that dominated national security. If anti-communism had been confined to the relative margins of American politics at the time of Ninotchka’s production in the late 1930s, it now moved to the ideological centre. Anyone even suspected of harbouring communist sympathies faced the prospect of being labelled ‘Un-American’.
Those in influential positions – in government, education, labour unions, the media – were subjected to intense scrutiny from the state and the public.
44 Hollywood’s Cold War
As was the case in the Soviet Union, those working in the film industry in the United States in the late 1940s were put under unprecedented political pressure to act in ‘the national interest’. Whereas cultural vigilance in the Soviet Union was organised from the centre through a single department (the Ministry of Cinematography), in the United States it was implemented via a loose amalgamation of old and new organisations and legislation. The US Aliens Registration Act, for instance, which made it an offence to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the American government and was used to pros-ecute communists in the late 1940s, had been passed by Congress in 1940. In the Soviet Union, this cultural authoritarianism (or ‘Zhdanovism’) caused film production to fall to dramatically low levels, meaning that the Russian people’s diet of fully fledged Cold War movies was meagre.8However, in the United States the effect was the opposite, as Hollywood went into Cold War film production overdrive.
The CPUSA had made the film industry a special organising target in 1936, a move that reflected Lenin’s and Stalin’s belief in the power of cinema.
Proclaiming that movies were ‘the weapon of mass culture’, the party organ-isers urged their recruits at least to ‘keep anti-Soviet agitprop’ out of the movies they worked on.9 HUAC began hearings on the alleged communist penetration of the motion picture industry in 1938, due largely to the number of screenwriters professing support for the Popular Front. The committee’s then chairman, Martin Dies, also believed Hollywood’s Anti-Nazi League to be a front for the Communist party (which, after August 1939, it was).10 HUAC’s more concerted efforts to ‘trace the footprints of Karl Marx in movieland’ a decade later, first in 1947 and again in 1951–2, 1953 and 1955–8, guaranteed the committee maximum publicity for its counter-subversion investigations elsewhere. At the same time, these efforts were part of a fero-cious if uncoordinated campaign fought by conservative forces inside and outside government designed to draft the media into the Cold War.11They were also allied to a genuine (if misplaced) belief on many conservatives’ part that Hollywood’s alleged Russophilia during the Second World War, combined with the post-war flurry of film-industry strikes and liberal ‘message’ pictures raising such issues as home-grown racism, was evidence of growing commu-nist influence behind and on the screen.
HUAC’s seminal nine-day inquiry in Hollywood in October 1947 was a peculiarly American marriage of show business and politics, and likened to a
‘Roman circus’ by RKO’s liberal head, Dore Schary.12 Despite the inquiry’s failure (repeated later) to uncover any hard proof of communist infiltration or Marxism on celluloid, it ended with chairman J. Parnell Thomas calling on the industry to ‘clean its own house’. The infamous ‘Waldorf Statement’
was issued by Hollywood’s moguls soon afterwards, amounting to a tacit
The enemy within 45
agreement to form a blacklist of real and suspected communists. This spread like a ‘tapeworm’ throughout the film industry in the years ahead; by 1960 the studios had black- and grey-listed over two thousand people, ruining many careers in the process.13
A culture of fear prevailed throughout the film industry during the late 1940s and 1950s, augmented by the policing roles of several key organisations.
The Catholic National Legion of Decency, guardian of the big screen’s moral and political rectitude since the 1930s, continued to wield considerable authority in Hollywood well into the 1950s. Its leaders, like Martin Quigley, the publisher of the important trade paper Motion Picture Herald, were fervid anti-communists who were apt to detect evidence of ‘Red’ influence in films that the most zealous patriot failed to see. ‘The Legion holds the whip hand over Hollywood’, said one politically mainstream producer, Peter Rathvon, in 1949, ‘and nothing can be done about it.’14
This militantly right-wing pressure group was joined after 1944 by another, Hollywood’s own Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA). Established to vanquish ‘the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crack-pots’, the MPA was headed by, among others, Eric Johnston, who succeeded Will Hays as president of the renamed Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, formerly the MPPDA) in 1945 and was also president of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, and Roy Brewer, leader of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the most powerful film labour union.15The MPA sought, in member John Lee Martin’s words, to ‘turn off the faucets which dripped red water into film scripts’, and went on to issue regular advice to filmmakers on how they might best express their patriotism in the Cold War’s critical battle for hearts and minds. In 1946, Eric Johnston told 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 a villain.’ In 1948, the MPA published a highly influential booklet, written by novelist and ideologue of the right Ayn Rand. Entitled A Screen Guide for Americans, the booklet warned studios against smearing the free enterprise system or deify-ing ‘the common man’. The more East-West tensions increased, the more the MPA and others on the political right in Hollywood saw it as their duty, as citi-zens and opinion-formers, to support an interventionist US foreign policy as well as to guard against subversives. Eric Johnston had prophesied as early as 1944 that a commitment to military defence and worldwide economic arrangements would create a ‘utopia’ of production that would enable the United States to destroy the threat of global communism. In 1949, this former president of the US Chamber of Commerce, who had strong connections in
46 Hollywood’s Cold War
the White House and Treasury, was confidently telling the readers of Look magazine ‘How We Can Win the Cold War With Russia’.16
The American Legion acted as the third point of this triangle, on the one hand by campaigning against those identified as suspect by the Legion of Decency, the MPA, HUAC and the FBI, and on the other by organising boy-cotts of films it deemed subversive or that featured actors labelled as com-munist sympathisers (‘comsyps’ for short). With over 17,000 posts and nearly 3 million members nationwide in the 1950s, the Legion, like the numerous other established social organisations of the right such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and Knights of Columbus, carried considerable economic and political weight in the film industry. Local Legion posts terri-fied exhibitors by threatening to picket theatres showing ideologically incor-rect fare. Boasting a circulation of 3,600,000, its monthly magazine regularly ran articles on ‘communists’ in Hollywood. In December 1951, the magazine named over 50 then-current films that had ‘commie influence’. Several months later, in May 1952, it furnished industry executives with a dossier of over 300 names of ‘Reds’. The Legion’s victims included the famous and not so famous. Edward G. Robinson’s mea culpa took the form of a memoir pub-lished that October in the American Legion Magazine, entitled ‘How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me’. Alongside the executive boards in private indus-try, departmental heads and politically appointed administrators in the public sector, and the editors and publishers of key metropolitan newspapers and national magazines, the American Legion both encouraged and extended the anti-communist work of the governmental investigatory committees during the Red Scare. The relationships among these various forces were charac-terised by acknowledged, conscious, often coordinated interaction as well as agreement on the larger goals and methods of the Cold War enterprise.17
The culture of fear abated somewhat when the worst excesses of the nation’s Red Scare paranoia subsided in the mid to-late 1950s. Yet the job prospects of many blacklistees were affected well into the 1960s, and HUAC itself remained in existence until 1975. The prosecution of ‘unfriendly’ wit-nesses, the naming of names, the purging of the politically incorrect on dubious charges, the early deaths of unemployed blacklistees and the flights abroad of others, the overseas ban imposed by the MPAA on innocuous polit-ical comedies like The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947) – looking at these and many other phenomena as a whole, references to the early Cold War years being Hollywood’s ‘darkest hour’ seem entirely warranted. The wounds left by the
‘Inquisition’ would be felt across the film industry for years.18
Given the film industry’s established antipathy towards communism, its tendency to bow to political pressure, and its habit of conflating government and national interest (especially in wartime), it is hardly surprising that the
The enemy within 47
content of American movies in the late 1940s and 1950s shifted decidedly to the political right. A myriad of factors helps to explain why liberal ‘message’
pictures diminished and a large number of films exalting war or imperialism and caricaturing the ‘evils’ of communism took their place. Chief among these are the industry’s nervousness about providing the anti-communist crusade against it with more ammunition; the fact that executives’ reputations were on the line due to their promise to watch out for radical propaganda; the pressure to design films in such a way as to frustrate the efforts of Soviet pro-pagandists to condemn America by its own images; the influence exerted by the MPA’s widely distributed manifesto, Screen Guide for Americans; plus a belief among some producers that sensational Red-baiting films could possibly make money and thereby help fill the industry’s dwindling coffers.19
After a detailed investigation of Hollywood’s recent output carried out in the mid-1950s, former OWI official Dorothy Jones scotched all allegations that Hollywood had for years been pedalling Marxism on screen. She noted, in the same report, that upwards of 40 films released between 1948 and 1955 had explicitly attacked communism and the Soviet Union.20Historians have since increased that figure: one has counted 48 made between 1948 and 1952, rising to a total of 107 between 1948 and 1962.21Yet even this figure fails to take into account the scores of movies set in and around the Korean War, the defining
‘hot’ conflict of the 1950s for most Americans.22It also omits the dozens of other films that focused on the communist threat more discreetly or allegor-ically. Even if it is impossible to agree on a definitive total, there is little doubt that this period represents the high point of Hollywood’s Cold War ‘agit-prop’.
DEVIANTS,HYPOCRITES AND MURDERERS
Hollywood’s depiction of communists as a clear and present danger during the late 1940s and early 1950s made political and commercial sense. In fact, there is currently a fierce debate between scholars about how real that danger was. While the ‘traditionalists’, bolstered by recently opened files, emphasise the strong links that existed between Moscow-directed espionage and the CPUSA, ‘revisionists’ tend to argue that the Soviet espionage threat was a spectre manufactured for the bureaucratic fortunes of the FBI or designed by reactionaries to smear the American political left generally.23However, even one such revisionist, Ellen Schrecker, accepts the plausibility of a communist threat given the CPUSA’s open allegiance to Moscow, its secretive nature, and the uncovering of spies in sensitive positions. This is despite the fact that the party, which at its height in the late 1930s had boasted about 88,000 members but in 1952 had a mere 9,000 (1,600 of whom were allegedly either undercover agents or paid informants), was tiny.24
48 Hollywood’s Cold War
Yet the extent to which movies portrayed this threat accurately is not the issue so much as the way they depicted indigenous communists and those asso-ciated with them. In short, ‘they’ were presented as a mixture of criminals, murderers, social misfits and sexual deviants, who were hypocritical, devious and emotionally detached, and engaged in illegal activities in order to weaken the USA and advance the Soviet cause of world domination. In contrast,
‘we’ (‘ordinary’ Americans) were presented as law-abiding, capable and self-sacrificing, as people who, though traditionally peace-loving, were at war with an implacable enemy. To stand by in such circumstances, the films warned, was either an act of dangerous naïvety or one of implicit collaboration.
Communists were shown to be undermining the USA in a variety of ways, ranging from acts of sabotage, espionage and drug-smuggling to infiltrating labour unions, university faculties and even churches in order to spread the
Communists were shown to be undermining the USA in a variety of ways, ranging from acts of sabotage, espionage and drug-smuggling to infiltrating labour unions, university faculties and even churches in order to spread the