Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Nye was not actually part of the five-man committee, which had been stacked four-to-one with isolationists, but he was granted the opportunity to give testimony as the first day’s only witness. Before Nye spoke, Willkie opened strongly, saying he could save the committee plenty of time since he was willing to admit up front that the studios “make no pretense of friendliness to Nazi Germany nor to the objectives and goals of this ruthless dictatorship. We abhor everything that Hitler represents.” Of eleven hundred Hollywood movies produced since the start of the war in Europe, he claimed only fifty had war-related themes (the reality was closer to 140); however, he stood behind all of them and dismissed the charge that Roosevelt was pressuring Hollywood to make interventionist pictures, by saying, “Frankly, the motion-picture industry would be ashamed if it were not doing voluntarily what it is now doing in this patriotic cause.”

  With Willkie already threatening to dominate the proceedings, the committee shut him down by telling him that he would not be allowed to question their witnesses. (Democratic senator Ernest McFarland—the panel’s only interventionist—objected in disgusted dissent.) They then gave Nye the floor for the rest of the day. The senator began by woundedly refuting the now-public charges of anti-Semitism against him (“I have splendid Jewish friends in and out of the moving-picture business”) and then called the heads of Hollywood’s movie studios “the most potent and dangerous ‘fifth column’ in our country.” He inveighed against a spate of movies that had recently portrayed the British “as a nation of people suffering and standing courageously . . . against the violent bombardment by a hideous enemy,” explaining that “the people of Germany or of Italy . . . are also suffering . . . their blood is red too.” He cited a Wall Street study of Hollywood’s profits abroad to suggest that the studios were supporting England only to protect a major foreign market for their product. And he attacked Fox chief Darryl Zanuck for urging his employees to attend an anti-Nazi rally.

  Then Willkie saw an opening. Nye listed a dozen films he wanted investigated, and despite the rules barring him from engaging with a witness, Willkie jumped in to ask Nye if he had seen any of them—Convoy or Flight Command or That Hamilton Woman or Man Hunt or The Great Dictator or Sergeant York. Nye hedged, eventually admitting that he hadn’t seen “all of them.” Willkie offered to set up screenings for the committee at their convenience.

  After Nye finished his testimony, some journalists who were present wrote pieces mocking the hearings as a show trial that was designed only to give the isolationists a chance to score points against Hollywood, not to elicit new information or launch any kind of serious-minded investigation. Day two only confirmed their suspicions; it was devoted entirely to the testimony of Senator Bennett Clark. Clark complained that “the motion-picture industry is . . . controlled by half a dozen men, and . . . most of those men are . . . determined, in order to wreak vengeance on Adolf Hitler, a ferocious beast, to plunge this nation into war on behalf of another ferocious beast” (meaning Stalin). He attacked “20th Century Fox, of which Mr. Joseph Schenck was chairman until he was sent to the penitentiary, and of which Mr. Darryl Zanuck is now head,” and also went after producer Alexander Korda and Charlie Chaplin, “who has lived in this country for thirty years and never thought well enough of the United States to become a citizen.” And he said darkly that “if the industry does not end this propaganda for war and return to its normal function of entertainment, I shall do everything in my power to bring about at once and forever the utter destruction of the monopolistic grasp of this little handful of men on the screen.”

  By the following evening, momentum began to turn decisively against the isolationists. That was in part due to a day of testimony that descended, or perhaps ascended, into farce. The day’s star witness was John C. Flynn, a journalist who was then serving as chairman of America First. By this point, Senator McFarland had grown so weary of the proceedings that he suggested they just cancel all further testimony and screen Sergeant York instead. When he mentioned the movie, Senator Charles Tobey, a New Hampshire Republican who had remained almost completely silent for three days, suddenly stirred with interest. “It was a good picture!” he exclaimed.

  Willkie jumped in. “Let’s discontinue the bunk and look at the pictures! . . . The old monopoly humbug is being dragged out again to divert momentarily attention from the real object of the investigation—the sabotage of the country’s foreign policy.”

  Undeterred, Flynn spent the day waging an uphill battle to build a case against Jack Warner by suggesting sinister intent behind Warner’s 1939 comment that films could be used to promote “Americanism.” Flynn offered up his own list of forty-nine movies he thought were propaganda; unlike the first two witnesses, he had actually seen many of them and was able to quote lines that sounded to him like “a regular 1941 war speech.” He wasn’t wrong about the pro-war message of the movies, but just as Nye and Clark had been, he was hopelessly ensnared by the certainty that the studios had been taking their orders from Roosevelt.

  Then McFarland began to question him. If Washington had so much authority over Hollywood’s output, he asked, how could a film as unflattering to elected officials as Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ever have been made? “After all,” said McFarland, “don’t you think that people recognize propaganda when they see it?”

  “Certainly not, Senator,” Flynn replied.

  “You think you have a great deal more ability than the average person to recognize it?” McFarland said.

  “I have been a newspaperman all my life,” Flynn said, “and I have been looking at propaganda in eruption and I have read books on propaganda. Senator, you better look out, if you don’t think you should protect yourself against it. Look out. Somebody is going to sell you something some day.”

  McFarland didn’t miss a beat. “I have been listening to you here for several hours trying to sell me something,” he said.

  The room exploded in laughter.

  The next morning, many papers reprinted that exchange, but the headlines were dominated by something far more shocking. While that day’s hearings had unfolded, Charles Lindbergh had made a speech at an America First rally in Des Moines at which he denounced three groups of “war agitators”—“the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” He was especially incensed about one of those groups, and in the inflammatory climax of his remarks, he warned that American Jews who advocated for military intervention “will be among the first to feel its consequences.” Citing the “danger to our country . . . in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” he concluded that Jews, “for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. . . . We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

  Over the last year, as he had become more outspoken, Lindbergh had turned himself into a hero of the isolationist movement—crowds at America First rallies would sometimes greet him with shouts of “Our next president!” But his advocacy of racial purity, his open awe at the size and strength of Hitler’s army, and his chilly lack of sympathy for Jews had alienated much of the rest of the country; in April, he had resigned his air force commission in anger after Roosevelt publicly compared him to a Civil War “copperhead.” After Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, who had urged him to use more restrained language, listened to his speech on the radio, she wrote in her diary that she felt “black gloom. . . . No matter what his intentions were, he has lit the match. I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism.”

  Those were among the kindest words the speech provoked. Even Lindbergh’s natural allies turned on him: The isolationist and anti-Roosevelt Hearst newspapers ran a national front-page editorial denouncing him as “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” The condemnation was so unanimous and devastating that it all but ended the isolationist movement in America overnight; America First even considered disbanding, real
izing that their shining light had become, in his own wife’s words, “the symbol of anti-Semitism in this country.”

  Two days later, Alvin York stepped into the fray with a speech of his own in which he became the first public figure to yoke Lindbergh and Nye together. The two men, he said, “ought to be shut up by throwing them square in jail—today, not tomorrow. . . . They’re either looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or they’re downright Nazi-inclined, and one is about as dangerous as the other.

  “I’m anti-Nazi and proud of it,” York continued. “And I’ll be glad to tell that to the Senate committee investigating what they call ‘war propaganda’ in Hollywood.”

  Suddenly the hearings seemed less urgent—including to the senators who had demanded them. After several postponements, the Nye Committee reconvened in late September to hear testimony for the defense from some of the movie industry’s top executives. The day began with an elegant rebuke from California’s Democratic senator Sheridan Downey, who told his colleagues, “If propaganda be stretched, as it all too often is, to mean the strong expression of one’s views, with the hope of convincing one’s fellows, then we are all guilty of it 10 times a day.” Downey then asked, “Should we expect Hollywood to turn its back upon the reality of our world and plunge into an unrelieved mist of fantasy? Should it ignore the chaos and the strife and the tragedy of the world we now live in, and devote itself exclusively to musical comedy, boy-meets-girl plots, and horse operas? Heaven knows that is a sufficiently prevalent tendency not to need encouragement from the United States Senate. . . . Frankly, gentlemen, it strikes me that the subcommittee is focusing its inquiry in the wrong direction. The world is on fire, and because a few pale shadows of its conflagration flicker for a moment or two on the screen . . . you seek to throw cold water on California. You pursue an illusion. The blaze is in Europe and Asia, not in my state; the propaganda you seek for is history itself.”

  Over the next week, Hollywood rewrote its reputation in each day’s dispatches from the hearings. Men who had been dismissed as outsiders, immigrants, and agitators were now before the committee as patriots; it was the loyalty and integrity of the isolationists that suddenly seemed to be on trial. Harry Warner, who had carefully prepared his testimony in advance after consulting with his studio’s lawyers, now felt confident enough to tell the senators, “I am ready to give myself and all my personal resources to aid in the defeat of the Nazi menace to the American people,” and added, “I have always been in accord with President Roosevelt’s foreign policy. . . . I am unequivocally in favor of giving England and her allies all supplies which our country can spare. . . . In truth, the only sin of which Warner Bros. is guilty is that of accurately recording on the screen the world as it is or as it has been.” Point by point, he took on the committee’s charges, explaining that Warner Bros. scrupulously researched its movies and had been “producing pictures for over 20 years. . . . Our present policies are no different than before there was a Hitler menace.” And he refuted the charge that propaganda films were being produced even in the face of public indifference by pointing to Sergeant York, “which I believe will gross more money for our company than any picture we have made in recent years.” (He was right; by the end of its run two years later, the movie was the most profitable in the studio’s history.)

  The senators didn’t give up without a fight, but they sounded more cornered with every exchange. That afternoon, Warner got into a testy exchange with Idaho isolationist senator D. Worth Clark, who accused him of wanting to make pictures that “inflame the American mind to hatred for Germany.”

  “I say it will not incite you,” Warner replied. “It will only portray to you what actually exists. You will see, for one thing, what you have kind of missed, my dear Senator.”

  “I am asking questions,” snapped Clark. “I will take care of what I missed. . . . I am asking you whether when the ordinary American family goes in the evening to [the movies] the tendency would be to come out . . . hating the German people and wanting to go to war with them.”

  “I can’t talk for the rest of the world,” said Warner. “I think in America, we have our own minds and we use them.”

  The applause that broke out might have ended the hearings, but they continued for one more day, with testimony from Darryl F. Zanuck that helped reposition Hollywood, for so long condemned by moral watchdogs as a repository of subversive anti-Americanism, as the country’s most reliable bastion of patriotic values. Introducing himself to the committee, with sly and charming self-deprecation, as a Methodist, a midwesterner with roots in Nebraska, and a World War I veteran who never made it past private first class, Zanuck started by saying, “When I first read and heard of this proposed investigation or inquiry I was deeply resentful, naturally. After a while, in thinking it over, my anger cooled a bit. It gives me an opportunity to say what I am going to say now. I am proud to be a part of the moving picture business.”

  He then took the senators on a warmly nostalgic tour through thirty years of movie history, shrewdly citing the films that were then held in high esteem as classics—The Birth of a Nation, The Big Parade, The Jazz Singer, Disraeli, and his own recent success, Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, whose “We’re the people” speech he took the opportunity to recite to the assembled senators. “I look back and recall picture after picture, pictures so strong and powerful that they sold the American way of life not only to America but to the entire world. They sold it so strongly that when dictators took over Italy and Germany, what did Hitler and his flunky Mussolini do? The first thing they did was to ban our pictures, throw us out. They wanted no part of the American way of life.”

  When Zanuck was done speaking, Senator McFarland told him he wished his statement could “go throughout the world. . . . I think it . . . is one of the best I’ve ever heard.” And even Worth Clark conceded the battle. “You are not only a creative artist, Mr. Zanuck,” he said. “You are a rather skilled salesman. Maybe I will see those pictures!”

  Even the senators knew that, as Senator McFarland put it, if they brought any of these issues before the full Senate, they “would not get 18 votes.” (The issue of monopoly, a potential economic catastrophe for the studios, had been all but abandoned, and would not be successfully reapproached until 1948.) With McFarland now threatening an investigation of his own to ferret out who was responsible for the lie that the U.S. government controlled the content of Hollywood pictures, the committee hastily adjourned. Several dates to reconvene were set, then postponed. In late October, a new schedule for the resumption of hearings was announced: January 1942.

  The committee never met again. It disbanded on Monday, December 8, 1941.

  SIX

  “Do I Have to Wait for Orders?”

  HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND HAWAII, DECEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  On the morning of December 7, 1941, Catholic churches across the United States resounded with a denunciation of the Greta Garbo comedy Two-Faced Woman. Thanks to an organized campaign by the National Legion of Decency, the church’s censorious watchdog group, stern condemnations of the movie’s depravity rang from every pulpit. Even by the standards of the time, MGM’s light romance was hardly scandalous—it contained nothing more risqué than the line “I like older men; they’re so grateful”—but parishioners were warned to shun the picture and to tell their friends and families to do the same.

  It was the last moment of its kind for quite some time. While Pearl Harbor’s initial effect on Hollywood was by no means uniform or even unifying, news of the bombing did have at least one immediate consequence for Hollywood: The war temporarily halted a cultural crusade led by guardians of morality who had long regarded movies as easy targets. The abortive campaign against Two-Faced Woman came to stand as a symbol not of an uprising against big-screen smut but of misdirected hysteria; those who once made news by vilifying a movie now risked looking like silly scolds with little more to contribute to a serious moment than irrelevant finger-wagging. For th
e moment, no politician, demagogue, columnist, or church had anything to gain by railing against the putative “indecency” of the movie business. Overnight, the denigration of Hollywood as a subculture of filth had lost its currency. Instead, the film business would swiftly come to be viewed as the country’s chief exponent and manufacturer of what Jack Warner had called Americanism, a nebulously defined product that many in both Hollywood and Washington nonetheless hoped could materially contribute to an Allied victory.

  Within the industry itself, the reaction to Pearl Harbor was an uneasy combination of ardent patriotism, head-in-the-sand solipsism, and bottom-line pragmatism. The morning after the attack, studio chiefs awoke to a banner headline in the Hollywood Reporter that read “War Wallops Boxoffice.” Sunday’s gloomy revenue reports had already been cabled to the studios from around the country, and movie attendance was down between 15 and 50 percent, with the worst numbers coming from the West Coast, where the populace was in a near panic about air raids. Industry reporters fretted that Americans would continue to stay home, glued to what was then Hollywood’s only real rival for entertainment consumers, the radio. It was with a palpable sense of relief that three weeks later, the paper announced that ticket sales had bounced back over the Christmas holiday. Just a week after the end of America’s first extended engagement of the war, the brutal and unsuccessful battle against Japan for control of the North Pacific atoll Wake Island, the public was apparently ready to go to the movies again in order to “forget jitters” and “seek joy.”

  “Hollywood! Jump Out of It!” barked a front-page Reporter editorial. “Stir yourself out of your depression. The making of motion pictures is just as important in the conduct of this war as is the production of ammunition, planes or boats. . . . Our warring nation must be entertained.” But what that entertainment should be, and how much Hollywood’s “war effort” should be reflected in the movies it made, was still an open question. Some pushed for a business-as-usual approach that would have required no greater effort than encouraging the sale of defense bonds in movie theaters, but they were soon outnumbered by those who advocated a new emphasis on “morale movies”—the very propaganda that had just a few months earlier placed the studios under suspicion.