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

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

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Hollywood’s Red Scare

1. A Movie Problem

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

3. Producing Hollywood’s Cold War

4. The Coalescence of a Countersubversive Network

5. The 1947 HUAC Trials

6. Rollback

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

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 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 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 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 working-class 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 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 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, 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 anti-Communist 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 anti-Communists 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 left-leaning 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 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 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 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 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 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