by Paul Kengor
Reagan managed to keep his poise and was remarkably effective, to judge from those in attendance. As Hayden later put it, Reagan coolly “showed up and took over and ground me into a pulp.… He dominated the whole thing.” Overall, said Hayden, Reagan was “very vocal and clear-thinking.”102
Historians Ronald and Allis Radosh, who have written a book on the Communist movement in Hollywood, have shown this incident to be a seminal moment in helping to end the “golden era” of Hollywood Communists. Reagan had pulled off quite a coup. The Communists were foiled in their bid to try to hijack the unions.103
Reagan, Eleanor, and the DPs
Many liberals now began to wake up, from Hollywood to Washington. Even Eleanor Roosevelt smelled the coffee, which was no small switch.
Consider that as recently as March 1946, when a bold Winston Churchill came to America to warn of an “Iron Curtain” descending across the European landscape, Mrs. Roosevelt was among the most dubious.
The former British prime minister had spoken the truth about the creeping Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. In response, Stalin blasted him: “To all intents and purposes, Mr. Churchill now takes his stand among the warmongers.”104 Churchill was not surprised by Stalin's reaction, nor would he have been taken aback at how CPUSA immediately pilloried his plans to launch “a new world war.”105 He was, however, struck to see that Mrs. Roosevelt agreed with Stalin and the Reds.106 She accused the courageous Englishman of “desecrating the ideals for which my husband gave his life.” She took direct aim at Churchill, with a personal swipe: “Perhaps it's just as well that he [FDR] is not alive today to see how you have turned against his principles.”107 As columnist Drew Pearson put it, “What she said was not friendly” and “was definitely critical” of Churchill.108
In short order, however, Mrs. Roosevelt received a series of wake-up calls. The first came when she took up the cause of the so-called Displaced Persons (DPs) of Eastern Europe. The DPs dominated world headlines in 1947. Initially survivors of Nazism, they included a very large number of displaced European Jews, including those longing for a homeland in “Palestine,” which had not yet been partitioned into Israeli and Palestinian states. But the list of designated DPs mushroomed to 1.5 million as Stalin's Red Army moved into Central and Eastern Europe and people desperately fled from Soviet-occupied areas. The Eastern Europeans, the New York Times reported, would “dare not go back [to their native lands] … because they will not submit to the arbitrary governments which have been imposed on their homelands [by the USSR].”109
The United States attempted to come to the DPs’ rescue, housing them in makeshift camps in Europe.110 In response, the Soviets and the international Communist movement ramped up the agitprop, contending that these humanitarian centers were really a form of imperialistic “concentration camps.” As unjust and ridiculous as these charges were—the United States spent at least $100 million annually to protect these displaced foreigners—the Communists had learned many times that they could count on a certain number of duped liberals to buy into their absurd allegations.
One liberal not biting was Eleanor Roosevelt. When Soviet officials insisted that the United States was holding the DPs as a source of semi-slave labor—a natural thought to Moscow, given the Soviet way of doing things—Mrs. Roosevelt fired back immediately, dismissing the accusation as “utterly untrue.”111
The Kremlin upped the ante, demanding that the DPs be forcibly repatriated to Eastern Europe—the territories newly “liberated” by the USSR. The Truman administration did not back down: Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who would be criticized by many Republicans for major losses in the Communist world—including “losing China”—adamantly rejected the Soviet demand.112 Leading Democrats, from Marshall to President Truman to former first lady Roosevelt, held firm, as did a politically active liberal actor named Ronald Reagan.
Reagan and Mrs. Roosevelt—both former dupes—publicly supported congressional legislation to permit entry of 400,000 DPs into the United States.113 This legislation, introduced by Congressman William G. Stratton (Illinois Republican), faced opposition in Congress.114 To the thirty-six-year-old Reagan, this opposition was immoral; these people needed to be saved from the clutches of Soviet Communism. As head of SAG, he took up the torch for the DPs. On May 7, 1947, through the New York–based Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons, he released a statement urging passage of the Stratton bill.115
The episode involving the DPs represented a bridge from Reagan's frequent wartime denunciations of Nazism to the opening of his longtime opposition to Communism, the new totalitarian threat facing Uncle Sam. This was Ronald Reagan's first open campaign against the Kremlin. It marked an important public turning point for Reagan, one missed by his biographers.116 From here on he would be persona non grata in Red Square, and among certain impolite company in Hollywood. He would be duped no more. And he could count on Mrs. Roosevelt, duped often in the past, to join in standing up to the Communists—at least in this case.
Hollywood's Comrades
The threat from Berlin may have been vanquished, but, as more and more Americans were noticing by the mid-1940s, the threat from Moscow was growing. The commendable case of Ronald Reagan and Eleanor Roosevelt showed that the Hollywood Left and the Washington Left could join forces to resist the Soviet menace.
At the same time, that menace was alive and well in certain precincts in Hollywood, as the political class in Washington had become well aware. To confront that threat, Congress would summon the nation's movie stars, writers, and producers, friendly and unfriendly, for a dramatic series of hearings in the nation's capital.
11
OCTOBER 1947:
HOLLYWOOD V. “HUAC”
Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.
The conflagration that ensued has long been a subject of heated debate, with conservatives perceiving the hearings as a long-overdue investigation of a genuine domestic threat, and with liberals portraying it as an intolerant infringement on American civil liberties, resulting in an infamous blacklist and ruined reputations among the accused. It was here that the House Committee on Un-American Activities became a liberal bogeyman—an anti-Communist menace long before Senator Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene.1
This congressional panel would be forever etched in liberal lore, and language, as “HUAC”—an incorrectly reordered acronym which not so subtly claimed that the committee's activities were “un-American.” It is difficult to say who first coined “HUAC,” but it is clear that CPUSA delighted in the pejorative, adopting (if not starting) it as the Communists’ de facto name for the committee. CPUSA's organ, the Daily Worker, which put the word “communists” in quotes when referring to actual Communists fingered by the House committee, did not place the “HUAC” acronym in quotes, even though it was inaccurate and, in effect, slang. Sometimes the Left, both liberals and Communists, used the term “the Un-American Committee”—a pejorative found in Communist organs ranging from the Daily Worker to the Chicago Star.2 The comrades had their talking points laid out neatly: the anti-Communists were un-American; the American Communists in CPUSA—those pledged to the Soviet Comintern—were the real Americans.
Ironically, the Communists ultimately found the House committee's hearings useful for bringing liberals to their defense and for unifying the Left in ganging up on anti-Communism. They were shrewd as ever, knowing precisely which buttons to push to enlist liberals in their protection, all the while carefully avoiding Congress's central questions: Were they Communists? Which of them were Communists? Were they seeking to manipulate movies with Communist messages? Were they loyal to Moscow over America? Were they pro-Stalin? Did Stalin's stand dictate their stand?
For one week in late October 1947, both “friendly” and “unfriendly” Hollywood witnesses, f
rom actors to producers to writers, filled hearing rooms in the Capitol building, where they engaged in riveting, at times blistering, exchanges. The whole scene was a spectacle, from the gaveling chairman of the committee, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (New Jersey Republican), to the gaveled likes of John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo; from stars like Gary Cooper, ogled by young girls outside the hearing room, to the oddest unforeseen development of them all: sitting in that room were two most unlikely future presidents—a freshman congressman named Richard Nixon and a young actor named Ronald Reagan.
These hearings were not just a major news story or fascinating political theater; they were major history.
Reagan and the Friendlies
Ronald Reagan was one of several actors called as friendly witnesses, along with leading men Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, and Robert Montgomery.3 Reagan testified on October 25, 1947. Referring to Hollywood Communists, the thirty-six-year-old head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) told Congress:
We have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well organized minority.
So that fundamentally I would say in opposing those people that the best thing to do is to make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake.
Whether the [Communist] Party should be outlawed, I agree with the gentlemen that preceded me that that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a power, a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter.
I do not know whether I have answered your question or not. I, like Mr. [Robert] Montgomery, would like at this moment to say I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work; I happen to very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight [against Communism]. I do not believe the communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology. I think that will continue as long as the people in Hollywood continue as they are, which is alert, conscious of it, and fighting.…
I abhor their [Communist] philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.4
It is difficult to argue with Reagan's assessment. He simultaneously championed civil liberties and condemned Communism. The committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, unhesitatingly told the young actor: “We agree with that. Thank you very much.” Reagan was not gaveled or shouted down.
His testimony was widely reported as the best of the hearings. James Loeb, the executive secretary of the liberal lobby group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), called Reagan's testimony “by all odds, the most honest and forthright from a decent liberal point of view.” Loeb described Reagan as “the hero” of the hearings and summed up Reagan's closing statement as “really magnificent.”5
Escaping notice at the time, and later by historians as well, was the Daily Worker’s response to Reagan's testimony. Remarkably, the Communist Party organ did not denounce the actor with its usual over-the-top rants. Actually, though it didn't praise Reagan, the paper was fairly content with his statement. The Daily Worker seemed impressed that he “proved a reluctant witness, refusing to parrot back to chairman J. Parnell Thomas his suggestion that outlawing the Communist Party was desirable.”6 That was no small thing, as Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou both favored banning the party.7
The one item of Reagan's statement that the Daily Worker highlighted was his quote from Thomas Jefferson and the remarks on making “democracy” work. From the beginning the Communists had cynically used terms like “democracy” to lure in the unsuspecting. In this case, Ronald Reagan's respect for America's genuine democratic traditions led him to resist a call for an outright ban on CPUSA—a stance the comrades applauded, obviously.
Yet Reagan had added a caveat that the Daily Worker did not quote: “If it is proven that an organization is an agent of a power, a foreign power … then that is another matter.”
“Agent” is a loaded word. It can, and often does, imply outright spying. No doubt, most members of CPUSA were not spying as paid agents of the Kremlin, although some were, especially in the leadership. If that is what Reagan meant by “agent,” then the Daily Worker was right to express satisfaction with his statement; in that case, Reagan was still struggling to connect the dots. But if by “agent” Reagan meant an instrument serving Soviet interests, then CPUSA unquestionably was an agent of the USSR, a foreign power. The party had been from the outset. It had saluted the dictates of the Comintern from the beginning.
Although the Daily Worker cited Reagan's testimony approvingly, the young actor may have already figured out the Communists’ modus operandi. In his statement he included a crucial aside after saying, “If it is proven that an organization is an agent of a power, a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party …”: “… and I think the government is capable of proving that.”
Ronald Reagan, the former dupe, may have been a quicker study than the Communists realized.
While Reagan earned a hat tip from the Daily Worker, he went on to receive lavish praise from his fellow actors for his work as SAG president, which included a systematic, extremely effective campaign to purge Hollywood of Communist influence—a “fight,” said Reagan, “hand-to-hand combat.”8 Reagan's learning curve continued; he remained ever vigilant not to be duped again, and warned fellow liberals not to be duped.9 And when he got it, he really got it.
“The Communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple,” Reagan later explained. “It was merely to take over the motion picture business … [as] a grand world-wide propaganda base.” In those days before TV and mass production of foreign films, said Reagan, American movies dominated 95 percent of the world's movie screens, with an audience of “500,000,000 souls” around the globe. “Takeover of this enormous plant and its gradual transformation into a Communist gristmill was a grandiose idea. It would have been a magnificent coup for our enemies.”10
In Reagan's view, that was what was at stake, with the “master scheme” including a careful strategy “to line up big-name dupes to collect money and create prestige.”11 Liberals needed to wake up. They needed to follow the learning curve that Reagan had, as did the rest of America.
Just Like Bogie and Bacall
While Ronald Reagan was making amends for past dupery, other Hollywood liberals were about to be publicly embarrassed that week in October 1947. That pool of suckers was deep. And among the more prominent were two of the biggest stars of the era, the hot Hollywood couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
A brief comparison of Bogart to Reagan is telling.12 Reagan reportedly had been the first actor offered the part of “Rick” in the classic Casablanca. He turned down the role to take another in King's Row, an acclaimed film that became one of Reagan's best-known, though it lost to Casablanca—with Bogart in the lead role—at the Academy Awards.13 (One of the primary contributors to the Casablanca script was Howard Koch, the “Comrade Koch” of Mission to Moscow infamy.)14
Reagan and Bogart appeared to know each o
ther pretty well. They were close enough that Bogart was one of only fifteen “honorary members” of the official Ronald Reagan Fan Club,15 one of the largest fan clubs in all of Hollywood in the 1940s, as Reagan was among the top five box-office draws at Warner Brothers. Bogart was the club's headliner male name; the lead female member was Bette Davis.16
Bogart and Reagan also shared a passion for politics. Originally men of the Left, both would move to the right, though Bogie only slightly—he always stayed in the Democrat camp. That shift, however, came later. In the 1940s Bogart shared something else with Reagan: he was duped, and badly so.
First Amendment Crusaders
After World War II, Bogart and Reagan were committed liberals, with brooding Communists desperate to find ways to use the two actors. By October 1947, however, Reagan had been burned once too often, and he went to the House Committee on Un-American Activities a chastened liberal. Hollywood's Reds knew he was long gone; he had chosen the other side. The liberal Democrat was now, according to the standard lexicon of the Reds, a “fascist” and “capitalist scum.”