From the Masses to the Mainstream: The Hollywood Left and the Movement for Social Democracy

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Notes

1. Ella Winter, “Hollywood Wakes Up,” The New Republic 93 (12 January 1938): 276‐77. For the importance of Ella Winter as practitioner of the politics of “labor defense” and as a labor reporter and chronicler of the experience of women in the Soviet Union, see Michael Dennis, “Women in Defense of Workers: Ella Winter, the Literary Left, and Labor Journalism in California,” Women's History Review 26 (Fall 2017): 857‐879.

2. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930‐1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Jennifer Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); see also Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Thom Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” in Peter Stanfield et al., eds., Un‐American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 184‐97.

3. This interpretation challenges Judy Kutuals’ assertion that “Front politics was never mass politics” and that “so long as the fronts concentrated on fascism and, particularly, the Loyalist fight, progressives did not feel the tensions they felt elsewhere.” See Judy Kutuals, The Long War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti‐Stalinism, 1930‐1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 105. In fact, progressives from across the ideological spectrum supported the labor movement that linked Hollywood to Los Angeles and the migratory worker struggles in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys.

4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso Press, 1998), 13, xviii.

5. Ella Winter to Sam Darcy, 18 July, n.d., box 15, folder titled “Unsorted Correspondence, 1911‐1946,” Donald Ogden Stewart and Ella Winter Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, hereafter cited as Stewart and Winter papers.

6. Ella Winter, “Progressive Hollywood,” 1‐2, box 29, folder titled “Film Notes/My Book,” Stewart and Winter papers.

7. “We Use Our Buying Power for Social Justice”; “Mrs. Eckerson Council Candidate”; “Hollywood Actresses Appear for Mrs. Eckerson”; “Should Married Women Work?”; “National League Testifies at NLRB Hearings in Washington,” The Woman Shopper 1 (April 1939): 1‐3.

8. “We Use Our Buying Power for Social Justice.” On the importance of the League in the tradition of twentieth century consumer activism and as a cross‐class, grass‐roots organization that wielded considerable influence in the social democratic movement of the 1930s and '40s, see Landon Storrs, “Left‐Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States, 1935‐1960,” Journal of Women's History 18 (Fall 2006): 40‐67, particularly 41‐44.

9. “Let's Have Democracy in Our Industry”; “Let U.S. Boycott Japanese Silk”; “Cast of ‘Pins and Needles’ to be Guests of League”; “Newspaper Guild Wins Courier Strike,” in The Woman Shopper 2 (July 1938): 1, 4, box 29, folder titled “Labor Strikes,” Stewart and Winter papers.

10. Michael Furmanovsky, “Cocktail Picket Party: The Hollywood Citizen‐News Strike, The Newspaper Guild, and the Popularization of the ‘Democratic Front’ in Los Angeles,” UCLA Historical Journal 5 (1984): 35.

11. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 209.

12. David Welky, The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 137.

13. Ibid., 2‐4; MPDC “Secretary's Report,” n.d., box 43, folder titled “MPDC,” Stewart and Winter papers.

14. Gerald Horne notes that John Garfield, Rex Ingram, Dalton Trumbo, and John Howard Lawson functioned as observers at the studio picket lines supported by thousands of craft workers as well as UCLA students, students from other local colleges, and union supporters. Other celebrities, including Ring Lardner Jr. and Bette Davis, would contribute their time and financial or moral support to the pickets and to the rallies held to generate solidarity. See Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930‐1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 187‐89.

15. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 148‐49.

16. Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 207‐8; Joseph Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943‐1957 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 32‐33; M.J. Heale, “Red Scare Politics: California's Campaign Against Un‐American Activities, 1940‐1970,” Journal of American Studies 20 (1986): 10‐11.

17. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 78.

18. Brian Neve, “Red Hollywood in Transition: The Case of Robert Rossen,” in Stanfield et al., Un‐American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, 188; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 190; Denning, The Cultural Front, 417‐420; as Eric Smoodin writes, the editors “hoped that the journal might become a forum for advancing a politicized, socially responsible cinema, one freed from what their editorial statement called the ‘pure entertainment’ myth,” which had only rationalized social indifference. According to Smoodin, the editors believed that “film needed to teach, to enlighten, to persuade.” See Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin, eds., Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945‐1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xiv. It was out of the HWM that the sophisticated Hollywood Quarterly journal would emerge, providing further evidence of the synergy between political commitment and artistic innovation.

19. George Pepper to Jay Gorney, 17 November 1943, in box 1, folder titled “History,” Hollywood Democratic Committee Records, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, University of Wisconsin, hereafter cited as HDC papers.

20. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 228.

21. Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist, 170‐71.

22. Hollywood Democratic Committee, “Statement of Aims,” n.d., box 1, folder titled “Constitutions,” HDC papers.

23. Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 56‐58.

24. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942‐1945,” Journal of American History 64 (June 1977): 104‐5; Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 141‐42; Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Propaganda, and Profits Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 146‐54. As Koppes and Black explain of the 1943 MGM film An American Romance, “Under the watchful eye of the Bureau of Motion Pictures, An American Romance had been transformed from a paean to rugged individualism into a celebration of management‐labor cooperation” (154). New Deal corporatism had replaced American individualism and class conflict.

25. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 93‐94.

26. “Hollywood Democratic Committee—Background,” 4; “Hollywood Democratic Committee Activities and Accomplishments,” n.d., box 1, folder titled “History,” HDC papers; Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home, 93‐94.

27. “Hollywood Democratic Committee—Background,” 8‐9.

28. “Hollywood Democratic Committee—Background,” 10‐11, 20; “Hollywood Democratic Committee, Minutes of Membership Meeting, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Jan. 12, ‘44,” box 1, folder titled “Membership Meetings 1944”: “What Can We Do to Stop This?”, Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee 1 (December 1943): 2, HDC papers.

29. “Hollywood Democratic Committee—Background,” 9; Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee 1 (25 July 1943): 2, in box 8, folder titled “HDC‐Target for Tomorrow, 1943‐44,” HDC Papers.

30. Hollywood Democratic Committee, Minutes of the Executive Board Meeting, 13 October 1943, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

31. Hollywood Democratic Committee, Minutes of Membership Meeting, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 12 January 1944, box 1, folder titled “Membership Meetings 1944,” HDC papers.

32. Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee (October 1943): 1.

33. NCPAC, “This is Our Plan,” 6 January 1945, box 18, folder titled “NCPAC 1945,” Baldwin papers; Clark Foreman, “Statement of the National Citizens Political Action Committee,” The Antioch Review 4 (Autumn 1944): 475.

34. Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee (October 1943): 1.

35. Ibid.

36. “Back the Attack on the Homefront,” Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee 1 (October 1943): 2.

37. Pepper to O'Connell, 17 February 1944, box 8, folder titled “Wallace, Henry, 1943‐1946,” HDC papers.

38. As Michael Denning explains, “since the Popular Front was in many ways a community‐based social movement—epitomized perhaps in the citywide general strikes of 1934 and 1946—the key community organizers were often women,” all of which certainly held for the Hollywood popular front. See Denning, The Cultural Front, 32.

39. Talent organized by the Hollywood Democratic Committee attended hundreds of local meetings, penned dozens of campaign articles, and delivered countless speeches in support of Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms. The Actors Division dispatched high‐profile names to appearances from San Diego and Long Beach to Pasadena, Wilmington, and San Bernardino. Throughout the campaign, the unit of junior actors performed skits for organizations and rallies throughout Southern California. The Radio Division recorded 162 advertisements for congressional candidates, 45 for local candidates, and spots targeted specifically at “Spanish American and Negro voters.” For more, see “Hollywood Democratic Committee: Background,” 23‐24, box 1, folder titled “History,” HDC papers. Minutes, Hollywood Democratic Committee, Executive Board Meeting, 16 June 1944.

40. Untitled Speech, “Mr. Chairman and Friends,” 26(?) July 1944, Minutes of Membership Meetings, box 1, folder titled “Membership Meetings 1944," HDC papers.

41. “Vote for Your Life and Your Country's Future Next Tuesday, May 16!,” Target for Today: Bulletin of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, May 1944, box 8, folder titled “HDC‐Target for Today, 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

42. Minutes, Executive Board Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 7 July 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board, 1943‐44,” HDC papers; Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 510. It would seem that this was the final result of a script written by fellow Communist Party members Paul Jarrico and Paul Trivers titled “Over Here.” See Executive Board meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 7 July, 1 August, and 4 August 1944, 1, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

43. Minutes, Executive Board Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 4 and 18 August 1944.

44. Executive Board Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 18 August 1944; “Hollywood Democratic Committee—Background,” 25, box 1, folder titled “History,” HDC papers.

45. Untitled Speech, “Mr. Chairman and Friends,” 26(?) July 1944, Minutes of Membership Meetings, box 1, folder titled “Membership Meetings 1944," HDC papers.

46. Ward Coley to George Pepper, 14 June 1944, box 2, folder titled “Miscellaneous correspondence, 1943‐46,” HDC papers.

47. Minutes, Executive Board Special Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 6 February 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

48. Ibid. Executive Board Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 9 June 1944; see also Michael Dennis, “The Other Good Fight: Hollywood Talent and the Working‐Class Movement of the 1930s,” Science and Society 80 (April 2016): 172‐75. Perhaps most importantly, the HDC raised mountains of money. Through radio spots, radio skits, telephone campaigns, and targeted print advertising, George Pepper and his committee helped raise $35,000 in support of candidates that endorsed Roosevelt's policies. That paled in comparison to the $136,015 that the HDC solicited from the wallets of the Hollywood wealthy for the November campaign. See Louise Overacker, “American Government and Politics: Presidential Campaign Funds, 1944,” American Political Science Review 39 (October 1945): 902; on the extent of the committee's fundraising, see “Report for Yip Harburg,” 20 April 1945; “Hollywood Democratic Committee, Activities and Accomplishments,” 2, box 1, folder titled “History,” HDC papers; on the Great Depression as the turning point in the advancement of the social wage in France, the United States, and several Scandinavian countries, see Alvin Finkel, “Workers’ Social Wage Struggles during the Great Depression and the Era of Neoliberalism,” in Leon Fink, Joan Sangster, and Joseph A. McCartin, eds., Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), chapter six.

49. Hollywood Democratic Committee, “Activities and Accomplishments,” 2, box 1, folder titled “History,” HDC papers.

50. Minutes, Executive Board Meeting, 18 August 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

51. The growing proximity between the Hollywood organization and the Democratic Party generated considerable debate, particularly considering the group's insistence on its independent and non‐partisan status. See Minutes, Executive Board Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, “full transcript,” 15 December 1943, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board, 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

52. “Some Speech!,” n.d., 1944, Minutes of Membership Meeting, Hollywood Democratic Committee, box 1, folder titled “Membership Meetings 1944,” HDC papers.

53. Ronald Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 99‐100. The HDC's campaign for Roosevelt culminated in two radio broadcasts, one featuring Paul Muni, John Garfield, Gloria Stuart, and Edward G. Robinson, and another, on election eve, 6 November 1944, starring Humphrey Bogart and Judy Garland; the broadcast was a major victory for the Hollywood left.

54. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 91; Neve, “Red Hollywood in Transition,” 188; Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 190; Denning, The Cultural Front, 417‐420.

55. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 140‐42; Brownell, Showbiz Politics, 91‐99.

56. Brownell, Showbiz Politics, 97.

57. Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 174‐75; Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930‐1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 129; for more on Southern influence in shaping key New Deal measures, including the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the virulently anti‐labor Taft‐Hartley Act, see, for example, Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson,“The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 19 (Spring 2005): 1‐30. Elsewhere, Katznelson makes the case for the South's growing intransigence on labor and progressive legislation, of which Wallace had become the administration symbol, and Roosevelt's allegedly impossible political dilemma. See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth‐Century America (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2005), particularly chapters 4 and 5.

58. See Minutes of the Executive Board, Hollywood Democratic Committee, 18 August 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board, 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

59. Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left‐Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 186; “Statement of Policy, Morris Cohn,” 18 August 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers.

60. For example, HDC secretary George Pepper insisted at an executive board meeting in January 1944 that organized labor accept President Roosevelt's call for national service legislation. Failing to do so, he insisted, would encourage “reactionary legislation.” According to Pepper's party‐driven reasoning, “HDC's ultimate position on the [Roosevelt] program [should] be based on whether it is good for the country as a whole, whether it will aid prosecution of the war, whether it is good for morale on the home front, what it will do for the soldiers, and what it will do for economic condition of the country.” The measure threatened to reduce labor's already limited power, the result of the no‐strike pledge, while legitimizing highly authoritarian measures that fell on the shoulders of working people. That Pepper's urgent determination for labor to support this “fifth point” left little doubt that Communist Party interests exercised considerable though not unilateral influence within the Hollywood Democratic Committee. See Hollywood Democratic Committee, Executive Board Meeting—19 March 1943, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44,” HDC papers; “The President's Five Point Program,” in Hollywood Democratic Committee, Minutes of the Executive Board, 19 January 1944, box 1, folder titled “Executive Board 1943‐44”; untitled address, “We are in a state of motion between two great campaigns…,” July 1944. HDC papers.

61. Mike Davis, “The Barren Marriage of Labour and the Democratic Party,” New Left Review 124 (November‐December 1980): 66‐67.

62. See Brownell, Showbiz Politics, 114‐15.

63. Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 170‐71; Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 246‐47; Larry May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago, IL: University Press of Chicago, 2000) 190.

64. Indeed, as Donald T. Critchlow writes in a sympathetic treatment of the MPA and the rise of the right in Hollywood, “the issue of communism in the film industry was a labor issue. It was not about pro‐Soviet films.” See Donald T. Critchlow, When Hollywood was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63.

65. May, The Big Tomorrow, 189‐91, quotation on 190.

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Michael Dennis

Michael Dennis is a professor of history at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and the author of The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial Democracy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). He is currently finishing a book on the movement for full employment in the postwar era.