The Roots of Post-Racial Neoliberalism in Blacklist Era Hollywood A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Andrew Paul IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Lary May, Tracey Deutsch March 2014 © Andrew Paul 2014 Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of countless others. First, I acknowledge the generosity of my dissertation committee. My advisors, Lary May and Tracey Deutsch offered enthusiastic guidance, criticism, and support. Lary’s own contributions to the historiography of the blacklist were second in value only to his personal attention to my work, and his questions yielded important research leads. Tracey helped me to think across sub-fields and pushed me to improve my writing. Both of them encouraged me to take intellectual risks and to make bold claims and interventions. Elaine Tyler May, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Malinda Lindquist all shaped my development as a scholar as well. With thoughtful and critical attention to my writing, they challenged me to clarify my ideas and helped me to see how my work was entering different conversations, and how it might stand to enter others. It was a privilege to be able to discuss my ideas with this committee. I was awarded generous financial sums from the University of Minnesota’s Harold Leonard Memorial Film Studies Fellowship and the University of Minnesota Foundation, which allowed me travel to archives in California, Wisconsin, and New York. In these locales, at the Charles Young Research Library at the University of California Los Angeles, the Margaret Herrick Library and the Paley Center for Media, both located in Beverly Hills, the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, and at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, numerous archivists assisted me in my work., and for this I owe them my gratitude. At the University of Minnesota, I was fortunate to find friends that not only provided camaraderie, but also guided my thinking in most considerable ways. Close friends Joseph Haker, Michael Wise, Seth Epstein, and Boyd Cothran were invaluable both as companions and as intellectual interlocutors. Other friends at the university, too many to enumerate, offered support and much needed moments of joy. My family was, as always, most supportive during the years of my graduate study. My brother Matthew, his partner Aileen, and her mother Carmen deserve a special thank you for housing me during an extended research trip to Los Angeles. Finally, my parents, Robin and Gerald Paul, were not only indefatigable cheerleaders, but useful sounding boards for my thoughts as well. To them I extend my greatest thanks. i Abstract “The Roots of Post-Racial Neoliberalism in Blacklist Era Hollywood” explores the ways that the red scare in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s helped to transform the politics and culture of American liberalism. By analyzing the discourse of filmmakers, their critics, and that of the industry’s films themselves, it argues that political contests surrounding the meanings of race, ethnicity, class, communism, and Americanness fostered the growth of a new libertarian discourse in the film industry. This libertarian language allowed victims of the entertainment industry blacklist to fight their marginalization by invoking the First Amendment, but it also helped to bring about a “post-racial,” individualistic turn in postwar culture. This dissertation contributes new insights to the history of liberalism – how ideas about freedom were imagined and pursued – in the second half of the twentieth century. It contends that liberalism, as it was articulated in popular discourse, moved from a language centered around ideas of civil rights to one that centered around ideas of civil liberties. In the film industry in the 1950s, men and women who understood themselves to be on opposite sides of a culture war worked together to shape a common language of freedom. Hollywood thus became a key site in which a larger shift in liberal discourse took place. ii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Bogey’s Choice: The Collapse of Hollywood’s Second Popular Front and the Decline of American Anti-Fascist Discourse ........................................................................ 28 Chapter Two: Dore Schary’s Hollywood: Anti-Communism and Racial Liberalism, 1948-1956 ................................................................................................................................................. 85 Chapter Three: Civil Libertarianism in Blacklist Era Television ...................................... 166 Chapter Four: Making the Blacklist White: The Hollywood Red Scare in Popular Memory ..................................................................................................................................................... 225 Epilogue: The Banality of Freedom ............................................................................................... 270 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................ 280 iii Introduction During the wartime 1940s in the United States, an unprecedented mobilization of Hollywood film industry writers, directors, producers, and actors worked as a sounding board for New Deal liberalism and its more radical fellow traveling ideologies. Famous names from every major studio organized under the pro-Roosevelt Hollywood Democratic Committee (HDC) including Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, William Wyler, Lena Horne, John Huston, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, and Orson Welles. These men and women lobbied politicians, threw lavish fundraisers and large public rallies, and published pamphlets in order to fight for the cause of “domestic antifascism.” Hollywood’s activists borrowed the language of domestic antifascism from the larger political movement known as the Popular Front, a loose nationwide coalition of liberals, socialists, and communists. As its name suggests, this rhetoric capitalized upon the wartime environment to make the case for social democratic policy at home. Hollywood’s left-liberals argued for full employment, state protections against discrimination in hiring, and the rights of striking laborers. The language of domestic antifascism was notable not only for its advocacy of central economic planning and welfare programs, but also for its civil rights platform and for its use of the symbols of race and ethnicity. Understanding matters of race and class to be connected, members of the HDC (later renamed the 1 Hollywood Independent Citizens Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions) frequently called for federal anti-lynching legislation, the continuation of the wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission, and often spoke of solidarity among working people, blacks, and Jews. Whereas the most successful cultural products of left-liberals in the thirties elided matters of race and ethnicity, domestic antifascism called for redefining Americanness using racial and ethnic minorities as symbols for cosmopolitan or progressive politics. In films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Body and Soul (1947), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), left-liberals in Hollywood made slow but steady progress in bringing the symbols of domestic antifascism to the screen. Then came the era of the blacklist.1 Anticommunist sentiment had been growing across American society since prior to the war’s end, and in Hollywood, it was facilitated by labor strikes at the studios. In 1947, the House Un-American Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began investigating alleged communist infiltration of the film industry. In response the heads of the motion picture industry declared that they would not employ known communists. Taking to the radio, director William Wyler warned Americans that films like his own The Best Years of Our Lives would no longer be made under such a political climate.2 And the NAACP civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall issued a statement declaring that 1 Like other historians of the film industry in the United States, I will employ the shorthand “blacklist” when referring to that of the film industry. For other blacklists of the time, see: Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1998). 2 “HLYD FIGHTS BACK - (FINAL) - SPOT 27 LIVE,” radio script, Oct. 26, 1947, Box 46 f. 596, William Wyler Papers, MHL. 2 the pressure of the red scare would lead to an end to positive portrayals of African Americans on film.3 Over the next five years, hundreds of film industry workers found that they were unable to work. And the phenomenon of the Hollywood blacklist was echoed in similar campaigns in television, radio, theater, and book publishing. A select few of those blacklisted were able to return the good graces of those policing their respective industries by publicly “naming names.” They delivered the identities of former friends or colleagues that were allegedly involved with supposed “un-American” organizations in order to salvage their own careers. For all of the personal and political destruction wrought by the blacklist, by the late fifties, liberalism as men and women understood it was back in style. HUAC became a punchline of movies from Storm Center (1956) to Bell, Book, and Candle (1958).