Dupes
Page 24
Warner later told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that his motives for making the film were patriotic, to get behind the war effort to stop Hitler.76 Moreover, he figured he could accept Ambassador Davies at his word. This was a completely reasonable assumption. After all, here was a highly accomplished political figure who had been the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. He had spent years on the scene in Russia—certainly far more than had Jack Warner. Why should Warner doubt Davies?
For that matter, the president of the United States yearned for the film, and was briefed throughout its production cycle. Roosevelt surely had been briefed on Russia far more than had Warner. Why should Warner doubt Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
John Dewey's Ongoing Redemption
One unlikely hero in this Hollywood saga was erstwhile dupe John Dewey, proving again that dupery does not have to be a permanent condition, and that political life offers many opportunities for redemption.
Mission to Moscow set Dr. Dewey seething. The philosopher-educator, who had gotten the wake-up call with Stalin's purges and show trials, denounced the film in a letter to the New York Times. He wrote the letter with editor and scholar Suzanne La Follette, cousin of the famous progressive Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Their lengthy dispatch, published in its entirety, ran in the May 9, 1943, edition of the Times, two weeks before the movie hit the theaters, suggesting that Dewey and La Follette had seen a special preview.
The letter was smoking in its channeled indignation. It began: “The film ‘Mission to Moscow’ is the first instance in our country of totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption—a propaganda which falsifies history through distortion, omission or pure invention of facts, and whose effect can only be to confuse the public in its thought and its loyalties.” Dewey and La Follette noted that even in a fictional film such misrepresentations “would be disturbing,” but they were particularly “alarming” in a movie sold as nonfiction, using a documentary style.77
Drawing on his expertise from chairing the Trotsky Commission, Dewey dismantled the movie's incorrect claims about the purge trials. The professor and La Follette made a devastating case, juxtaposing quotations from letters and official reports that Davies wrote while ambassador with scenes from the film, many of which did not square up. The letter condemned “the make-believe Russia of the film,” which was “gay, even festive.” “Wherever Mr. Davies goes,” Dewey and La Follette wrote, “he encounters a happy confidence in the regime.”
The letter also attacked Mission to Moscow for suggesting that Stalin had been “driven into Hitler's arms” because the dictator had been unfairly slighted by the French and British. In fact, as Dewey and La Follette noted, the Allies had made a “desperate effort” to form a defensive alliance with Stalin early in the summer of 1939, prior to the August 1939 signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. There was even “an Allied military mission vainly waiting to confer with the Soviet General Staff at the very time when the Stalin-Hitler pact was announced.” (If only Dewey and La Follette had known the full truth, which is even worse: Stalin and his hack Marshal Voroshilov cynically delayed and rebuffed the Anglo-French delegation because they were hoping for a better deal with the Nazis—a hideous deal that would have appalled the British and French, as the Nazis and the USSR divvied up much of Europe.)78
Dewey and La Follette pointed out an egregious omission in the film: “Hitler's armies are shown invading Poland, but not Stalin's.” Yes, the faux documentary neglected to note that the Red Army invaded Poland just two and a half weeks after the Germans did, in compliance with the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. How could that utterly crucial fact be omitted? Hitler and Stalin together launched World War II.
In a brilliant parting shot, Dewey and La Follette called Mission to Moscow a “major defeat for the democratic cause,” adding that it “sabotaged” the Allied cause and “assailed the very foundations of freedom” by making “skillful use of the Hitler technique.” The movie, they said, conveyed a false impression “that Soviet Russia is our ally in the same degree as Great Britain.” It was a form of appeasement, a “gross misrepresentation,” and an example of “moral callousness.” More than that, the film was “anti-British, anti-Congress, anti-democratic and anti-truth.” Mission to Moscow, Dewey and La Follette concluded, created a “moral callousness in our public mind” that was “profoundly un-American.”
Think about that: these renowned liberals/progressives had declared this film, championed by the Democratic president and by his administration, to be un-American propaganda.
Of course, Dewey's motives were not totally without suspicion, as Jack Warner noted. When informed that Dewey had been disgusted by his studio's film, Warner shot back, “From what I read and heard, [Dewey] was a Trotskyite and they were the ones who objected mostly.”79
Warner was right: The Trotsky movement objected strongly to the film, especially because Mission to Moscow defended Stalin's side in Leon Trotsky's show trial. It was also true that the American Trotskyist movement had grown powerful—the largest of the Trotskyist movements in existence. In sheer propaganda alone, the American movement was the most advanced of all world Trotskyist parties; in organizing and maintaining the world movement, it was second only to the French Trotskyist party.80
Had the Trotskyites trotted out Professor Dewey to do their bidding? Was the father of modern public education being duped yet again? Was he secretly a Trotsky follower? As always with John Dewey, there was a myriad of legitimate questions.
The fact remains, however, that Dewey was exactly right in his criticisms of Mission to Moscow, which had gone well beyond the show trials and anything to do with Trotsky. And Trotskyites were not alone in condemning the movie, which critics aptly slammed as Submission to Moscow. Ultimately, the film found itself blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a group Dewey (on other occasions) deemed “hysterical.”
Here, then, were some strange bedfellows: John Dewey and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, momentarily, indirectly, uneasily, on the same team.
A Duped Liberal Named Ronald Reagan
Clearly, Hollywood in the 1940s produced some strange plots, including a political shift with profound implications for the Cold War.
Among the most interesting cases of this entire period was a fellow named Ronald Wilson Reagan. The actor would travel the road from liberal Democrat to moderate Democrat to moderate Republican to conservative Republican, from idolizing FDR to supporting Truman to voting for Eisenhower—his first vote for a Republican—and then on to Nixon and Goldwater. Eventually the actor became a politician and the very face of political conservatism and anti-Communism. Along that route, Reagan was never pro-Communist, but was once a dupe—as he openly confessed later.
Reagan was a victim of front groups during and immediately after World War II. Among them was the benignly named American Veterans Committee (AVC), which sought out Reagan for its speaking circuit. The speaking material provided to Reagan for AVC events was “hand-picked,” he later realized, as were his audiences. He ultimately recognized that he was being “steered more than a little bit.”81 And Communists were doing the “steering.” With fellow actors like Dick Powell warning him about being duped, Reagan began to suspect that AVC was a Communist front, one of the first suspect causes to which he was “awakened.”82
That was likewise the case for the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP). This innocent-sounding group was another of those that Reagan later referred to when he admitted that he had “blindly and busily” joined “every organization I could find that would guarantee to save the world.” He was “naïve,” he confessed. He “was not sharp about communism.” Reagan became “an active (though unconscious) partisan in what now and then turned out to be Communist causes.” The Communists succeeded in Hollywood, he pointed out, “by reason of deception.” The duped Reagan saw the folks at HICCASP, AVC, and similar organizations as not
hing more than “liberals,” and “being liberals ourselves,” he and many of his fellow Hollywood liberals “bedded down with” the closet Marxists.83 Reagan learned that the Reds were not under the bed, but in the bed.
Reagan came to his senses and took a bold stand at a HICCASP meeting on July 2, 1946. He had been asked to serve on the board of the group. He received a baptism by fire that hot summer day.
He teamed up with group member James Roosevelt, son of the recently deceased FDR. Like Reagan, James Roosevelt was a non-Communist liberal and a dedicated Democrat. Roosevelt had suggested a group statement repudiating Communism. At the very least, this would be a good PR move, given that HICCASP was being maligned as a suspected Communist front.
What Roosevelt and Reagan witnessed next was nothing short of a fusillade by the closet comrades. As Reagan described it, “a Kilkenny brawl” erupted. One writer (whom Reagan generously left unnamed in his account) barked that if a war broke out between the United States and the USSR he would voluntarily take up arms for Stalin. The popular musician Artie Shaw leapt up and saluted the Soviet flag, offering, on the spot, to recite the words of the Bolshevik “constitution” from memory, which, claimed Shaw, was “a lot more democratic” than the U.S. Constitution.84
Leading the assault were the interminably abusive John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, who led the peanut gallery in denouncing the young liberal actor as an “enemy of the proletariat,” “capitalist scum,” “witch-hunter,” “Red-baiter,” and that old standby of the Left—“Fascist.” Reagan recalled that Lawson got in his face, “waving a long finger under my nose and telling me off.” The atmosphere was so charged that one woman (a liberal) had a heart attack and had to be removed. The genial Reagan held firm, bravely endorsing Roosevelt's proposal amid the onslaught from his fellow “liberals.”85
Not One of “Them”: Olivia de Havilland
Joining Reagan in recognizing HICCASP's true colors was his friend Olivia de Havilland, an actress famed for many roles, including the saintly but naïve “Melanie” in the landmark Gone with the Wind. She discovered that the comrades wanted to use her as a pretty face and a mouthpiece.
A few days before the HICCASP blow-up, Dalton Trumbo handed de Havilland a speech to deliver at a rally in Seattle. The text seemed remarkably pro-Soviet, with no mention of any criticisms of Communism. On top of that, the speech vilified the Truman administration as an anti-Semitic, racist, union-busting, war-mongering, imperial regime ready for aggression against an angelic USSR.86 It was the standard Soviet-CPUSA party line.
But de Havilland refused to be a stooge for Stalin. She ditched Trumbo's text, requesting and receiving another from writer Ernest Pascal; then she delivered a stern rejection of Communism. She told the rally, “We believe in democracy, and not in Communism.” Even worse for Hollywood's apparatchiks, she warned liberals about being used by Communists, noting that secret Reds “frequently join liberal organizations” in order to prey on trusting liberals. And while such was “their right,” noted de Havilland, it was also the right of liberals “to see that they do not control us, or guide us … or represent us.”87
When Hollywood's Bolsheviks saw what de Havilland had done, they were enraged. True to form, Trumbo and Lawson launched into childish fits of hellacious name-calling.88 If the commissars had had their own mini-gulag somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles, Olivia de Havilland would have been there with shaved head, shivering in a dark cell, by morning.
De Havilland was onto the Reds. And so after Reagan and James Roosevelt experienced the Lawson-Trumbo tirade at the HICCASP board meeting, Dore Schary, a non-Communist liberal and RKO executive, quietly invited them to a small gathering at de Havilland's apartment. When Reagan and Roosevelt arrived, a relieved Reagan told de Havilland that he had figured she was one of “them.” She smiled and said she was not.
All three were ready to resign from HICCASP, but Reagan went back once more a few nights later. He offered a group statement that affirmed American free enterprise and repudiated Communism. John Howard Lawson went ballistic, leveling his finger and raising his voice at Reagan: “Never!”
Reagan stepped down that evening, with others soon following.
Reagan's Awakening
This was a serious awakening for Ronald Reagan. Something was not quite right in the “liberal” camp. The proud, self-proclaimed “FDR Democrat” was troubled.
That same year, 1946, Reagan got still more evidence that something was amiss. By then a popular after-dinner speaker in Hollywood, he mixed movies with politics in his talks. The politics focused mainly on the dangers of fascism, the totalitarian monster of the recent past.89
After one such speech to the men's club at his church, the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, Reagan was gingerly approached by his pastor, the Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer. Dr. Kleihauer was not known to be a liberal or a conservative. He had common sense, and as a man of the cloth, he knew that there were few more ferocious foes of religion, and Christianity in particular, than Soviet Communism. The pastor thanked his church member for his impassioned attack on the Nazis and fascism, and then counseled: “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.”90
Good point, Reagan thought. He did seem to be falling a little behind the times. He began working some new material into his speech text—a little something on Stalin and the threat posed by Moscow. Who could possibly object?
The next speech Reagan gave, the audience whooped nearly every time he blasted the defeated Nazis. “In a forty-minute talk,” Reagan later wrote, “I got riotous applause more than twenty times.”
But then he condemned Soviet Communism.
The response? Dead silence. It was “ghastly,” Reagan remembered. His fellow “liberals” glared at him.
Before Reagan spoke out against Communism, liberals had liked him and praised him as smart and articulate. Suddenly, with the choice he had made, they viewed him as a loathsome “reactionary,” a “fascist,” and stupid, to boot.91 This was the beginning of an odd metamorphosis Reagan would undergo in the unforgiving eyes of the Left.92
After this incident and the HICCASP showdown, Reagan became more suspicious, more vigilant—and much less gullible. He also became more aggressive, as was evident in another confrontation a few months later, recalled at length by fellow actor Sterling Hayden.
Hayden is remembered for an unforgettable role as the Air Force general who launched nuclear war in Dr. Strangelove. His personal politics zigged and zagged, including his views on Communism.93 As a young man, he had run away to sea, where he sailed the world several times—a man's man, much like the characters he played. As a Marine in World War II he parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia, and was decorated for his actions. While manifestly pro-American, he was also pro-Soviet, and after the war, in 1946, he joined the Communist Party.94 (Reagan said of Hayden: “It bothered me a great deal to see him on that side. Here was a man with a magnificent war record.”)95
This Communist sympathizer had his encounter with Ronald Reagan one evening in the fall of 1946. At that point, Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Along with prominent actor and fellow anti-Communist William Holden, Reagan decided to crash an important meeting convened by Hollywood Communists at the home of actress Ida Lupino. There the Communists and their fellow travelers planned to make a final push to organize the film industry, specifically through the thuggish Herb Sorrell's Red-dominated Conference of Studio Unions (CSU).
Reagan had had enough with the “large,” “muscular,” and “aggressive” Sorrell.96 As head of SAG he had a responsibility to keep the union from being hijacked by Communists. Moreover, Sorrell's thugs had been harassing Reagan personally. They had threatened to throw acid in his face and to hurt his children, who now needed police protection. In one instance, the bus that Reagan was scheduled to ride through studio picket lines was bombed and burned jus
t before he boarded.97 He began carrying and sleeping with a Smith & Wesson.98
The word was out on the importance of the gathering at Lupino's place, which Sterling Hayden had been tasked to spearhead. Now more than seventy-five leftists assembled, including Communists like Howard Da Silva as well as good-hearted liberals like John Garfield, who was constantly being tugged and tormented by Reds at home (his wife) and at work. This crowd, Reagan later recalled, was “astonished and miffed” when he and Holden strolled into the room.99
Reagan had quickly become the enemy. Not only had he started criticizing Communism, but now he was openly fighting the Communists who were trying to hijack the unions. In a SAG report he had been preparing, he concluded that a looming major actors’ strike was “jurisdictional” rather than over wages and hours—a position unwelcomed by Hollywood's Reds, and especially Herb Sorrell's CSU, who tried to frame the strike as the fault of fat-cat studio bosses.100 Reagan was bucking the party line.
While the crowd at Ida Lupino's fixed them with icy stares, Reagan and Holden calmly took seats on the floor. Reagan politely waited for the right moment before rising to ask whether he could have the microphone. He proceeded to give a forty-minute presentation that was constantly booed and interrupted. Certain members of the audience, such as Garfield, defended Reagan's right to speak. At least some in the crowd actually believed in civility and free discourse.101