The Guardian 17 October, 2007
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Are you now or have you ever been...?
On October 23, 1947, Judge J Parnell Thomas banged the gavel to open hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) "investigating" alleged Communist infiltration into the US motion picture business.
Most people are familiar to some extent with the major points of this period: the blacklisting of actors, filmmakers and writers, the destruction of careers, the eradication of progressive ideas from Hollywood films for years and the studios’ enthusiastic recruitment into the Cold War.
Most however do not know that the main inducement for the studio bosses to join in the anti-Communist crusade was the prospect of removing the progressive, militant leadership of the major film-industry unions, to be replaced by employer-friendly union leaders like Ronald Reagan.
Some studio heads, like Walt Disney, were innately reactionary and anti-Communist. Most just followed their class interest. The result was the same.
The attack on "Reds" in the leadership of unions was not confined to the film industry — it was general across America. Helped by a reactionary national leadership in the US labour movement, the ruling class was able to inject the Cold War into every union in the country.
A climate of fear and suspicion — mixed with hatred for the former wartime ally Russia — was carefully fostered with the active help of the monopoly media and the State Department.
Nowhere was that climate of fear more apparent than in the Hollywood hearings. Careers, livelihoods, reputations were at stake. Threats, overt and covert pressure, innuendo, smearing, they were all used. Many quailed before the menace of the anti-Communist campaign.
The mother of film star Ginger Rogers, possibly seeing her meal ticket about to vanish before her eyes, "persuaded" her daughter to appear before the Committee as a "friendly" witness, identifying others as the "communists" who had misled her for their evil propaganda purposes.
Rogers, a popular comedienne and dancer, who was making a reputation for herself as a serious actress, had starred in the pro-worker drama Tender Comrade and the anti-Nazi comedy-drama Once Upon A Honeymoon.
In the latter film, she pushes her Nazi husband off an ocean liner in mid-Atlantic. "It was him or me, and suddenly I decided it was him", she tells boyfriend Cary Grant. When they report the incident to the captain he orders the ship turned around and says confidently that it will take a little while to bring the ship about but "if he’s a good swimmer we should be able to pick him up OK".
"Oh, he can’t swim", says Ginger. Grant and the skipper exchange looks, everyone gives a mental shrug, and the ship resumes course. No one wept for Nazis in these "Commie-influenced" Hollywood films.
The ignominious spectacle of once-respected filmmakers and performers "naming names" of colleagues as Reds for the benefit of the Committee, while more principled or courageous artists went to jail rather than testify, is one of the darkest pages in the history of the USA.
However, HUAC’s slimy trail did not begin in 1947, but a decade earlier. The Special Congressional Committee to investigate un-American activities had been set up in August 1938, just before Munich. It was assumed at the time of its establishment that the Committee would seek to uncover Axis intrigue in the US, especially pro-Nazi groups operating within the German and Italian migrant communities.
However, Congress appointed as the Chairman of the Committee, Representative Martin Dies, a rabidly anti-Soviet Congressman from Texas. Dies got on famously with anti-Communist Nazi agents.
While the German-American Bund, the clerical fascist Christian Front and the brazenly Nazi-adulators the Silver Legion (better known as the Silver Shirts) were holding huge rallies in support of fascism in the USA (and against the "Jewish-Communist conspiracy"), Dies was warning Americans against the danger of Stalin invading the USA "at the head of 150 divisions of uniformed Soviet troops".
Dies opposed sending any aid to Russia even after the Nazis had invaded that country and continued his anti-Soviet propaganda campaign after the USA and USSR had become military allies.
In March 1942, Henry Wallace, the US Vice-President, declared: "If we were at peace, these tactics could be overlooked as the product of a witchcraft mind.
"We are not at peace, however. We are at war, and the doubts and anger which this and similar statements of Mr Dies tend to arouse in the public mind might as well come from Goebbels himself as far as their practical effect is concerned.
"As a matter of fact, the effect on our morale would be less damaging if Mr Dies were on the Hitler payroll."
Wallace was, of course, a New Dealer and in the late ’40s and early ’50s, US capitalism was busily trying to eradicate all traces of Roosevelt’s policies. The New Deal had helped the US to overcome some of the worst effects of the Great Depression, and it was an open secret that the Communist Party had written major parts of Roosevelt’s social program.
Stomping heavily on the movie industry was a high profile way of re-asserting capitalism’s ideology and power over the American people.