Scores of new veterans’ groups had sprouted up around the country and were trying to peddle some of the same venom of fascist bigotry that we had just defeated in the war.
In Hollywood, as I’ve often said, if you don’t sing or dance, you end up as an after-dinner speaker. And almost before I knew it, I was speaking out against the rise of neofascism in America.
I joined just about any organization I could find that guaranteed to save the world, like the United World Federalists and American Veterans Committee, which got me with their slogan: “A Citizen First, a Veteran Afterward.” I really wanted a better world and I think I thought what I was saying would help bring it about.
One day after giving one of my speeches to the men’s club at the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church where I worshiped, our pastor came up to me and said he agreed with what I’d said about the rise of neofascism. But he said: “I think your speech would be even better if you also mentioned that if Communism ever looked like a threat, you’d be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism.”
Well, during the war, the Russians had been our allies, and I’d dismissed the people after the war who had started to denounce them as foolish and paranoid.
I told the minister I hadn’t given much thought to the threat of Communism but the suggestion seemed like a good one and that I’d begin saying if the day came when it also posed a threat to American values, I’d be just as strongly opposed to it as I was to fascism.
Not long afterward, I was asked to give a speech to a local citizens’ organization. I made my usual speech defending American values against the new fascism that seemed to be abroad in the land and was applauded after almost every paragraph. I was a smash. Then I finished up with my new line at the end: “I’ve talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world, but there’s another ‘ism,’ Communism, and if I ever find evidence that Communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against Communism as I have fascism.” Then I walked off the stage—to a dead silence.
A few days later, I received a letter from a woman who said she’d been in the audience that night. “I have been disturbed for quite some time,” she said, “suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don’t like.” Then she added: “I’m sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned Communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for Communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day.”
Thanks to my minister and that lady, I began to wake up to the real world and what was going on in my own business, the motion picture industry.
There were then forty-three labor unions in the picture business. A few were independents but most were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The Screen Actors Guild was one of the latter, as was the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees—better known as the stagehands’ union or by its initials, IATSE.
During the absence of so many of us during the war something new had come into being. Some of the unions had gotten together to organize what they called the “Conference of Studio Unions,” also known as CSU.
The IATSE had recovered from a prewar crisis in which Chicago mobsters had taken it over and extorted under-the-table payoffs from studio officials while also trying to create an actors’ union in opposition to the Screen Actors Guild. This was before my time but I learned about it from the actors who had met the challenge and succeeded in getting the AFL to oust the mobsters.
Now there was another problem. The rump CSU group was run by a man named Herb Sorrell, head of the studio painters’ union, who set out with a plan to gain jurisdictional control over a group of workers within an IATSE branch called the Set Erectors. There were only about 350 set erectors in the whole industry but the CSU called a strike demanding that the studios recognize it as their exclusive bargaining agent.
The IATSE told its members to cross the CSU picket lines and war broke out. Naturally, actors and actresses came to the officers of the Guild, asking us what they should do.
At a meeting of Guild directors, I proposed that we try to set up a meeting between the management of the studios, the CSU leaders, and the leaders of IATSE to determine what was going on. The studio executives were a little reluctant at first, but we assured them that the Guild, as a neutral party, would be there to referee and make sure there weren’t any shenanigans.
When we held the meeting, it was obvious that the CSU strike was a phony. It wasn’t meant to improve the wages and working conditions of its members, but to grab something from another union that was rightfully theirs.
The actors were in a key position: If we refused to cross the CSU picket lines, the industry would be shut down. If we crossed the lines, it could stay open and make movies.
Those of us who had attended the meeting reported to the Guild’s Board of Directors that we thought it was not a legitimate strike but a jurisdictional dispute between two unions and recommended that the actors cross the picket lines.
The directors called a meeting of the full membership of the Guild at the Hollywood boxing stadium the following week, at which I was assigned to present our findings and recommend that we cross the lines and keep on working.
Two or three days before the meeting at the fight stadium, I was making a movie on location out at the beach when I was called to a telephone at a nearby oil station. The caller wouldn’t identify himself but said that if I made the speech, a squad of people would be waiting for me.
“Your face will never be in pictures again,” the voice said.
I reported the call to the director of the picture when I got back on the set, and when we closed for the day and went back to the studio, I was met by officers of the Burbank police force who hung a gun and a shoulder holster under my arm that I wore for the next seven months. They also put a twenty-four-hour guard on my house.
I later found out the plan was to throw acid in my face, which would have indeed ended my career in pictures.
I made the report to our members on schedule and said the CSU strike was a phony. They voted 2,748 to 509 in favor of going through the picket lines.
The gates of the studios soon became a bloody battleground of daily clashes between the people who wanted to work and the strikers and outside agitators brought in to help them. A union of waterfront workers headquartered in San Francisco suspected of having Communist affiliations sent mass pickets to aid the CSU strikers. Homes and cars were bombed and many people were seriously injured on the picket lines; workers trying to drive into a studio would be surrounded by pickets who’d pull open their car door or roll down a window and yank the worker’s arm until they broke it, then say, “Go on, go to work, see how much you get done today.”
We began traveling to the studios in caravans and rented buses. At midnight actors who were scheduled to work the next day would get a telephone call telling them where to rendezvous with the bus in the morning. One day I arrived at our meeting place and found our bus going up in flames, the target of a fire bombing.
While this was going on, Guild officers continued to meet with strike leaders in the CSU to see if we could help bring about a reasonable settlement. The meetings went on for months on an almost daily basis.
Some days I’d go home after hours of negotiations and think we’d made some progress toward a settlement. But the next morning we’d meet again and the strikers would walk into the room with their lawyers and twenty-seven new demands we’d never discussed before, which they said had to be settled before they’d call off the strike.
In the end, we beat ‘em. The strike collapsed in February 1947. The decision by the Guild and several other unions to ignore the picket lines ultimately destroyed not only the strike but the Conference of Studio Unions.
Later, several members of the Communist Party in Hollywood who had been involved in the attempted ta
keover went public and described in intimate detail how Moscow was trying to take over the picture business. The California Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, after a lengthy inquiry, confirmed that the strike was part of a Soviet effort to gain control over Hollywood and the content of its films. Although the principal leader of the strike told Congress that he had never been a Communist, investigators produced evidence that they said proved he was a secret member of the party, and a year later, national leaders of his union concluded he had “willfully and knowingly associated with groups subservient to the Communist Party.”
American movies occupied seventy percent of all the playing time on the world’s movie screens in those first years after World War II, and, as was to become more and more apparent to me, Joseph Stalin had set out to make Hollywood an instrument of propaganda for his program of Soviet expansionism aimed at communizing the world.
So the fight to gain control over Hollywood continued even after the strike. For a long while, I believed the best way to beat the Communists was through the forces of liberal democracy, which had just defeated Hitler’s brand of totalitarianism: liberal Democrats believed it is up to the people to decide what is best for them, not—as the Communists, Nazis, and other fascists believed—the few determining what is good for the rest of us.
But I was to discover that a lot of “liberals” just couldn’t accept the notion that Moscow had bad intentions or wanted to take over Hollywood and many other American industries through subversion, or that Stalin was a murderous gangster. To them, fighting totalitarianism was “witch hunting” and “red baiting.”
15
ONE NIGHT JUST BEFORE BEDTIME, during the strike, there was a knock at my front door. I peeked through a little hole in the door and saw two men holding up the credentials of FBI agents. I opened the door and they asked me if they could come in to ask some questions. I invited them in but inquired what I could possibly know that the FBI didn’t know already. One of them answered, “Anybody that the Communists hate as much as they do you must know something that can help us.” Well, that got my attention and I asked him what he meant.
He said my name had come up during a meeting of the American Communist Party in downtown Los Angeles a few nights before (of course, this meant someone representing the FBI had been present at the meeting). During the meeting, he said, one of the Party members had said: “What the hell are we going to do about that son-of-a-bitching bastard Reagan?”
They confided in me that FBI investigations had shown the Party was attempting not only to gain control of the Hollywood work force but striving to influence the content of movies through the work of several prominent film writers and actors who were party members or party sympathizers. They asked if they could meet with me periodically to discuss some of the things that were going on in Hollywood. I said of course they could.
Not long after that, I accepted an invitation to fill a vacancy on the board of directors of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. The group, known to everybody by its initials, HICCASP, had come into being as a support group for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was a respected and prestigious liberal organization that had attracted some of the best-known names in Hollywood.
Like a number of other groups I had joined, it was pledged to fighting fascism and safeguarding our national freedoms, and I was greatly honored by the invitation to be on its board of directors and looked forward to my first meeting.
There were about sixty board members at the meeting, many of whom I didn’t recognize, particularly the members of the executive committee, who were seated at a table facing the board members.
As the meeting got under way, I became slightly annoyed at how it was conducted: An item of business would come up for discussion and one of the officers would say, “Well, there’s no need to take this up with the entire board. The executive committee can take care of it.” It also bothered me when FDR’s son, Jimmy Roosevelt, whom I knew, came under brutal personal attack from a couple of well-known Hollywood writers after he said groups such as ours needed to be vigilant against being used by Communist sympathizers.
Dore Schary, the head of MGM, was sitting next to me and I nudged him and said: “Where are all the people that used to be here, the heads of the other studios and so forth?”
He looked at me and then leaned over and whispered: “Stop by Olivia de Havilland’s apartment after the meeting.”
Olivia was a member of the executive committee of HICCASP. Ten of us met later that night at her apartment and I was amazed when she and others in the room said they suspected Communists were trying to take over the organization. As we talked over the situation, I turned to her and whispered: “You know, Olivia, I always thought you might be one of ‘them.’”
She laughed and said, “That’s funny. I thought you were one of them.”
I’d previously decided that as a new board member I should keep my mouth shut and listen to the others. But knowing a little about Communist tactics from my dealings with the FBI, I suggested that we propose a resolution to the executive committee with language that we knew a Communist couldn’t accept and have Olivia submit it in the next meeting the following week and see what happened.
We wrote out what was essentially an innocuous declaration of principles ending with a phrase in which HICCASP’s executive board reaffirmed its “belief in free enterprise and the Democratic system and repudiates Communism as desirable for the United States.”
The next week, we got together while Olivia attended the executive committee meeting. After an hour or so, the phone rang. It was Olivia. “They voted it down,” she said.
She joined us later and said she’d been the only one in favor of our resolution.
It was all the proof we needed: HICCASP had become a Communist front organization hiding behind a few well-intentioned Hollywood celebrities to give it credibility.
The next day, the twelve of us resigned, not only from the board, but the entire organization. We were the last front of respectability for HICCASP and within a week it was out of business—but not the people running it.
They erased the name of HICCASP from the office door but put up the title of a new group—it was the same people with the same objectives behind a new front group.
One night after I gave a speech to the Guild in which I said it was essential that Hollywood join together and beat back the Communist attempt to take over the industry, I arrived a few minutes late for a meeting of the board of the veterans’ organization I’d joined which was being held in an abandoned store that had been loaned to us for the meeting.
I started walking down the center of the room, looking for an empty seat among the folding chairs that had been set up on both sides of the aisle.
I saw an open seat and turned toward it; although it took me a moment to realize it, something had been planned: As soon as I sat down every member on the board who had been sitting on that side of the aisle got up and moved across to the other side, leaving me to sit alone.
Shortly after that, I learned the group had become another front for the Communist Party in Hollywood.
The Communists gained control of the groups through hard work and good organization—a minority of perhaps one percent moving in, coming to meetings early, and staying late and volunteering to do the hard work for the well-meaning liberals (like me) who were its members.
The strike and the efforts to gain control over HICCASP and other organizations had a profound effect on me. More than anything else, it was the Communists’ attempted takeover of Hollywood and its worldwide weekly audience of more than five hundred million people that led me to accept a nomination to serve as president of the Screen Actors Guild and, indirectly at least, set me on the road that would lead me into politics.
One of the best reviews I ever got didn’t involve a movie but came from a fellow actor testifying in court. Sterling Hayden, who’d been among those flirting with Commun
ism before later renouncing it, said: “Ronald Reagan was a one-man battalion of opposition” to the attempted Communist takeover of Hollywood during the 1946 strike.
In the end, we stopped the Communists cold in Hollywood, but there was a dark side to the battle; unfortunately, it was a story with victims as well as villains.
Some members of the House Un-American Activities Committee came to Hollywood searching more for personal publicity than they were for Communists. Many fine people were accused wrongly of being Communists simply because they were liberals.
As the news spread of Moscow’s attempted takeover of Hollywood, the glamour of the movie business and the people who worked in it made it a popular target for people in politics who wanted publicity for themselves. And some of them abused the powers of their office to get it. I was all for kicking Communists out of Hollywood, but some members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, ignoring standards of truth and fair play, ganged up on innocent people and tried to blacklist them.
Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and other good Americans were accused falsely of being Communists. Petitions landed in Hollywood from around the country signed by thousands of people who declared they would not go to a theater if—and they listed dozens of Hollywood stars—certain people were in a movie. The thing had gotten out of hand.
We faced a dilemma: Olivia de Havilland and others with whom I had become close were determined to get rid of the Communists, but we had to protect the people who were innocent. To deal with the problem, we formed an industry council to contact people in the industry who were being threatened with blacklisting—including many who didn’t know they were—and said to them: “Look, we can’t clear you, but we can help you clear yourself.”
An American Life Page 11