THE HOLLYWOOD LEFT: CINEMATIC ART and ACTIVISM in the 1930S

THE HOLLYWOOD LEFT: CINEMATIC ART AND ACTIVISM IN THE 1930s

Sam Mithani

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A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CINEMA-TELEVISION—CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2007

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EPIGRAPH

When Arjuna observed the vast armies assembled on the battlefield of Kuruksetra, full of great and valiant fighters, he was full of fear. And when he saw that arrayed before him were his fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, grandfathers and uncles, whom he must fight to achieve victory, his apprehension grew vastly. Seeing them all filled him with compassion and he declared to Lord Krsna “I do not see how any good can come from killing my own kinsmen in this battle, nor can I, my dear Krsna, desire any subsequent victory, kingdom, or happiness.” Arjuna, having thus spoken on the battlefield, cast aside his bow and arrows and sat down on the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief. But Lord Krsna told him to perform his prescribed duty, take up his weapons and to go forth into the battle of life for “action is better than inaction…the doubts which have arisen in your heart out of ignorance should be slashed by the weapon of knowledge.”

--adapted from The Bhagavad Gita

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DEDICATION

I wish to express my keenest appreciation for and gratitude to Frank Capra (Caltech,

1918), whose life and work inspired me, while a student at Caltech, to become first a cineaste and then a cinema studies scholar. This work is dedicated to all artists, past, present and future, with a passionate and “critical” vision.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor Curtis Marez, and Marsha Kinder, Andrei Simic,

Anne Friedberg and Paul Knoll for seeing this dissertation to its successful completion. Immense thanks, and a vote of gratitude, to my family who have been wonderfully supportive of my creative work and my advanced studies. And a very special thanks to my good friend and colleague, Denise Lugo.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph ii

Dedication iii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract vi

Chapter One: Dissertation premise, method and organization 1

Chapter Two: The “Red Decade” and its Influence on American Cinema, Literature and Culture 14

Chapter Three: A “Marxist” Cinema in Hollywood? Leftist cultural productions in their Social, Political and Cultural Contexts 78

Chapter Four: Antifascism, the Hollywood Left and the transformation of the social-problem film 155

Chapter Five: Leftist anti-Nazism, Warner Bros. studios and the further transformation of the social-problem film 222

Chapter Six: Further research on Leftist studies of the Thirties 283

Epilogue 291

Bibliography 292

Filmography 307

ABSTRACT

The dissertation re-examines the Thirties in its artistic, cultural and political specificity to place leftist cultural productions in their complex contexts, particularly the ideological. It concentrates on radical/proletarian fiction and Hollywood leftist cinema as expressions of prevalent “crisis” conditions, such the Great Depression and the New Deal, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, labor unionism, racism in the

South, and the rise of fascism/Nazism. It demonstrates how the leftist favored genres in literature (proletarian fiction) and cinema (the social-problem film) underwent transformations in response to the changing national and global conditions, leftist political positions and debates on the inter-relations between art, ideology and culture. Working in the tradition of American social criticism, the Hollywood Left responded productively to the challenges by creating a vibrant cinematic counter- discourse. Leftists strived to create a “popular Marxism” and a “leftist populism” by interpellating their critique within popular Hollywood genres, albeit subject to the commercial mandate of the studio system and its heavy-handed censorship apparatus. This contentious and creative engagement produced some of the most memorable “critical” works of Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Fury and Dust Be My Destiny. The dissertation critically examines these films, compares them to the mainstream “populist cinema” of Frank

Capra, and argues that the Hollywood Left creatively reworked this populism to vii

fashion a far more critical, even abrasive, cinema, giving rise to the foundational works of American film noir. The dissertation also frames leftist cinema as a committed response to the remarkable changes in race, class, gender and ideology taking places within American culture. In particular, the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Nazism presented grave challenges to democracy. The Hollywood Left led the filmic battle against these forces and produced energetic cinematic propaganda in films like Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939) and Confessions of a Nazi

Spy (1939), which are the focus of this work. In essence the dissertation calls for a re-evaluation of the “Red Decade” as one of great cultural and artistic renaissance for

American culture and the Left rather than one of disappointment, disillusion and disenchantment as has been popularized by conservative critics.

CHAPTER ONE

DISSERTATION PREMISE, METHOD AND ORGANIZATION

The beginning of the 1930s was the defining artistic, political and cultural period for the emerging generation of Hollywood leftists who would incorporate the ideal of social, cultural and political criticism in their filmic and literary output during the

“Golden Age” of Hollywood (1930s to 1950s, to take a broad span). They strived to create a socially and politically conscious cinema both within the studio system, particularly at Warner Bros. studios, and via independent efforts such as Walter

Wanger Productions. The leftist generation of the “Red Decade” authored some of the finest socially-critical works of American cinema and literature during the

Thirties.

This dissertation engages with leftist art and activism in their multivalent contexts and critically examines the degree to which these were instrumental in shaping the history of our nation—a contribution which, as if by a conjuring trick of cultural amnesia—been almost completely erased from our national consciousness.

The Old Left was committed to the creation of an intellectual as well as a popular front that would agitate and “uplift” the masses as well as the socially and politically uncommitted. Hollywood leftists argued for a “Marxist cinema” whose discourse would operate in tandem with similar productions in literature, theatre, public art and political activism. The narratives they wrote, and the cultural contexts in which they performed their activism, were in this vein and for this purpose. Most believed that 2

their life and works had purpose and meaning beyond the critical acclaim and success that motivated them as artists and intellectuals.

Prominent Hollywood leftist Walter Bernstein recalls how he and his “comrades,” who were shaped intellectually and ideologically by World War I and the Great

Depression, met to discuss issues of social and political relevance:

Our meetings mostly concerned such subjects as the entertainment unions, how we could help actors or writers or musicians, how we could mobilize them for political purposes. Also on the agenda were racial and sex discrimination, veterans’ rights, poverty, unemployment, the issues of the day. There were talks on Marxism- Leninism…American Communists had led the struggle for the unemployed during the Depression, had helped form the CIO, had led fights for Negro rights all over the country. It was something to be proud of. We were serious and dedicated and concerned about what we perceived as social injustice. 1

Communists such as John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz were instrumental in placing the Hollywood Left on a firm footing vis-à-vis the entertainment industry and the studio system. Together they co-founded the Screen

Writers Guild in 1933, and Lawson served as its first president. According to Gary

Carr, for Lawson “the Writers Guild was a logical preparation for Marxist commitment. Marxism satisfied both the visionary and the pragmatist, in that it presented a program of action through which all society could be reborn.”2 Perhaps this moment could be regarded as the founding event for the Hollywood Left, which would be pre-eminent in activist filmmaking during Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”

1 Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Blacklist (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 134-35.

2 Gary Carr, The Left Side of Paradise: the Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 93.

HUAC investigations, and the consequent Hollywood Blacklist (fully formalized by

1952), could be regarded as the other decisive events, wherein prominent leftists were ousted from key positions in the industry, exiled from Hollywood and blacklisted. My present research concerns these decades of ideological ferment, plagued as it was with rivalries and contentions.

This dissertation, however, only addresses the first decade of the engagement between the Hollywood Left, the motion-picture industry and national culture. This span covers the Rooseveltian era, the contentious co-existence of “alternative” ideologies such as Marxism, socialism and communism along with American democratic capitalism; the establishment of the Popular Front and the “laboring” of

American culture; the political and cultural influence of the Communist Party of the

USA, particularly in Hollywood; and the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe.

Despite these, or perhaps because of these, the era gave birth to some of the best, most interesting “critical” works of American cinema.

Although I present detailed discussions on other leftist artistic expressions of the

1930s, particularly proletarian/radical literature, in order to trace inter-connections between them and leftist film productions, as a cinema studies scholar my concerns center primarily on the Hollywood Left and the contextual examination of their cinematic works. The Hollywood Left undertook the mission of creating a true amalgam of “Marxist” and “American” cinemas and in the process faced heady challenges: accusations of inserting communist propaganda in film; anti-Semitism 4

both within the industry and in the larger culture; severe censorship pressures from the PCA, the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, and rightwing and conservative organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and the Ku Klux Klan; and the national and global ideological crises engendered by the rising tide of Fascism and

Nazism.

Artistically as well as ideologically, the obscured, forgotten or suppressed works of the Hollywood Left raise disturbing questions about the politically-invested process of naming “great works,” cinematic and literary traditions and the selective construction of cannons. The questions become doubly disturbing when one considers them in the context of the open, liberal democratic ethos of the United

States. It is high time that these works that shaped the pluralistic consciousness of our nation in times of its gravest crises be explored, re-examined and re-inserted into the history of American cinematic and literary production—particularly in the histories of Hollywood.

The Art and Activism of the Hollywood Left in its Contexts Great cultural, socio-economic and ideological crises pervaded the Thirties. The most significant among them were the Great Depression, the rising tide of Fascism at home and abroad and the aggressive challenges presented by German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism. The Hollywood Left was pre-eminent in facing these challenges and produced works combining social criticism and political propaganda that influenced national and global public opinion and helped shape U.S. domestic and foreign policy. The Hollywood Left was impelled to filmic battle 5

against these forces, and the malaise they engendered, on philosophical, socio- economic and ideological grounds.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of the Hollywood Left, questioned the prevailing historical models that attempted but failed to adequately explain the apparent contradiction between theory and practice, social life and politics, progressive changes and returns to “barbarism” that characterized twentieth century life. Speaking on the subject of German Fascism, he declared,

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. 3

In this view, Fascism was not an “aberration” of the ever-progressive human condition but a sign pointing to the re-emergence of conditions obtained when particular socio-economic, ideological, cultural, philosophical and historical forces

“congealed” in formations such as the nation-state. Fascism, as a manifestation of

“barbarism,” is a kind of “return of the repressed” in humanity’s archive of experience and action.

3 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 257. 6

To the left, capitalism, fascism and Nazism were perhaps equally “barbaric” exploitative systems that reduced humanity to abjection. These had to be continually challenged both by cinematic propaganda and by political activism. For the left, if the Depression was the sine qua non of the failure of capitalism, then racism, imperialism, colonialism and genocide were the products of nativism, fascism and

Nazism that had to be contained and curtailed. Leftist cinematic efforts were perhaps best demonstrated at Warner Bros. studios with the production of socially-critical and the antifascist/anti-Nazi propaganda films. Consequently, the dissertation also offers close textual and contextual analysis of typical 1930s social-problem films and full case studies of the antifascist/anti-Nazi films, Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).

Dissertation Methodology and Organization An implicit goal of the project is to examine American culture and cinema and their intersections with the history and politics of the American left. In the post 9/11 era, in an environment of political conservativism at home and military imperialism abroad, there is an altogether urgent need to examine, and critically place, the current polarization of the American Left/Right dialectic within the larger national history of their ideological differences, and the prototypical historical conditions that have provided the arena for their political, cultural, economic and artistic battles.

As Hayden White has emphatically stated, “every representation of the past has specifiable ideological implications.” The dissertation takes a leftist/Marxist ideological position in its critique and analysis of leftist productions and the contexts 7

in which these were produced. If “history is what hurts,” if history is a “history of barbarisms,” as Benjamin declared, we must be ever vigilant of the manipulative erasure of this sorrow. We must not forget the complex struggles and rivalries out of which history is created, and from the ashes of which the future of our nation is constantly re-constructed. By this re-sensitization, I hope that my dissertation will make a committed leftist intervention in the present politically conservative climate.

The dissertation draws upon the “facts” as well as the cultural “myths” of the era for the engaged researcher “must draw upon a fund of cultural mythoi in order to constitute the facts as figuring a story of a particular kind,” according to White, “just as he must appeal to the same fund of mythoi in the minds of his readers to endow his account of the past with the odor of meaning or significance.” 4 Following

White’s methodology, I present my examination, analysis and critique under the rubrics of plot, paradigm and ideology.

The left tried to change not only the existing socio-political system to its more progressive alternatives but also to change human consciousness that seemed forever trapped in the falsities of arbitrarily codified but rigidly enforced concepts of race, class, ethnicity, gender, religious belief and ideological conditioning. The dissertation, therefore, address the critical need, in the contemporary multicultural context, of examining issues of race, class, ethnicity and gender that leftists of the era strived to use as potent socially-critical tropes—and in powerfully educational

4 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 60. 8

ways—within the genres of radical fiction and in mainstream, commercial

Hollywood genres.

The organization and presentation of the dissertation follow both a linear chronology, in terms of historical time-line and cultural production, and “leftist mythos,” the evolution and transformation of leftist consciousness over the same period that influenced these productions. In keeping with this, I incorporate a significant amount of discussion on the kinds of debates that engaged leftists during the era on the relationship between art, ideology and culture. In order to provide both a wide contextual framework and to anchor the work in discursive specificity, I

“contain” the dissertation within different areas of established academic scholarship: historiography, American socio-cultural history, 1930-1939, film genres and stylistics, radical American literature, the Hollywood studio system and, archival research (at USC’s Warner Bros. Archive). The choice of particular novels and films is governed by the desire to engage with works I personally admire and which particularly resonate with the themes and arguments of the dissertation.

The dissertation consists of four main chapters, which I refer to as 1 (one) through

4 (four) henceforth, each of which elaborates on a particular aspect of leftist art and activism in the 1930s, as follows:

In chapter one, “The ‘Red Decade’ and its Influence on American Cinema,

Literature and Culture,” I re-examine the Thirties in its artistic, cultural and political specificity in order to place leftist cultural productions in their contexts. I particularly 9

concentrate on radical/proletarian fiction as an expression of the conditions in

Depression-era America and discuss how the genre underwent transformations in response to the changing socio-cultural conditions, leftist political positions, and leftist debates on the inter-relationship between art, ideology and culture. The chapter argues that radical literature influenced leftist films of the period, both in terms of content and ideology, and that leftist expression in cinema and literature operated in alliance with a wide-ranging “leftist internationalism.” The chapter ends with a re-evaluation of the “Red Decade” as one of great cultural renaissance rather than one of disappointment and disenchantment as has been popularized by conservative critics.

In chapter two, “A ‘Marxist’ Cinema in Hollywood? Leftist cinematic critique in its social, political and cultural contexts,” I examine how the Hollywood Left did their best to bring their socially-critical sensibility and political ideology to create a

“popular Marxism” and a “leftist populism” within established Hollywood cinema.

Their efforts gave shape and meaning to a vibrant “counter” cinematic discourse embedded in popular narratives and codified Hollywood genres, particularly the social-problem film. In this genre popular ideas and concepts relating to law, justice, the democratic-capitalistic system, fascism, issues of private property, crime, delinquency, racism, sexism, unionism, human rights, and a gamut of other

“concerns” were examined and critiqued. Leftist films operated in consonance with

“populist cinema” at which Frank Capra excelled as no other Hollywood director. I 10

argue that Capraesque cinema provides a point of comparison and contrast with leftist films in their critique of corrupt state power but that Hollywood Left cinema went a step further in demonstrating the effects of such corruption at the grass-roots level. Whereas Capra puts his political faith in “the people,” leftist films diagnosed the dangers of popular fascism in the U.S. and implicitly linked it to the dangers of fascism in other parts of the world.

The African-American context is also important to my analysis of leftist filmmaking during this period because, even though blacks did not get to make many films in the 1930s, race politics nonetheless informs several of the films I discuss at length here, including I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Fury (1936) and

They Won’t Forget (1937). Race politics thus was used as a powerful counter- discursive strategy by the Hollywood Left, subject, of course, to the limitations and challenges censorship posed. I also argue that “Marxist cinema” operated in tandem with larger leftist cultural discourse on the New Deal, and efforts to liberalize, unionize and organize working-class “Hollywood” as well as the national culture.

I begin chapter three, “Antifascism, the Hollywood Left and the transformation of the social-problem film,” with a discussion of the idea of fascism, and the ways in which the left understood it and responded to it. Antifascism became a rallying call for national culture in the second half of the decade and people from a variety of ideological positions, including the CPUSA and the popular front, gathered together under the pro-democratic, antifascist program. The Hollywood Left spearheaded pro- 11

democratic, antifascist cinematic propaganda and produced films such as Blockade

(1938) and Juarez (1939), the former an antifascist allegory on the Spanish civil war and the latter a big-budget historical epic/revolutionary film about Mexico’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule. The chapter offers detailed case studies of these films and examines how they retain distinct leftist generic, stylistic and ideological signatures associated with the leftist social-problem films. I argue that

Blockade and Juarez represent a generic transformation in the social-problem film genre wherein antifascist discourse was seamlessly amalgamated with social, cultural and political criticism typical of the 1930s socially-critical films.

Chapter four, “Leftist anti-Nazism, Warner Bros. studios, Confessions of a Nazi

Spy (1939) and the further transformation of the social problem film” begins with a discussion of how the motion-picture industry organized for filmic battle against

Nazism under such groups as the Anti-Nazi League. Hollywood leftists, centering themselves at Warner Bros., pushed for stepping-up cinematic propaganda against the Nazis as Hitler’s power and position grew in Europe. Their efforts were best represented by the production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the most intensely propagandistic anti-Nazi film to emerge from the Hollywood studios prior to World

War II. The film elicited strong responses both at home and abroad. Although highly nationalistic, it contained enough of a critical edge to elicit virulent red-baiting and accusations of “commie” and “Jewish” propaganda. The chapter offers a detailed case study of the film and the debates and controversies surrounding its production 12

and reception. The film, despite its greatly debated merits and demerits, paved the way for the production of anti-Nazi films in a variety of genres, such as the spy thriller (for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent [1940]) and other leftist social-problem films dealing with Nazism as a social and political malaise

(such as John Howard Lawson’s Four Sons [1940]). I argue that Confessions represents a further generic transformation in the leftist social-problem film genre by incorporating anti-Nazi propaganda.

Generic transformations of the social-problem film under the paradigm of antifascism and anti-Nazism would make way for the hybridized combat films of

World War II in which leftist had a significant degree of authorship and production control. In essence, then, chapters 3 and 4 together demonstrate how the social- problem film genre “opened up” to accommodate leftist discourse on changing social, political and cultural conditions, and how it allowed leftist art and ideology to be inscribed cinematically and transported into the wartime era. In essence, the films discussed in these chapters indicate that left filmmakers muted or dispensed altogether with the critique of U.S. state power and of homegrown fascism in order to focus on “foreign fascism.” Although this limited the left’s radical critique of state power and its corruptions within the U.S. context, this refocusing on fascism/Nazism as an “external threat” did continue to promulgate the notion that “foreign” fascism/Nazism, emanating primarily from Europe, had dire social, political and cultural influences at home. Leftist antifascist/anti-Nazi films challenged right wing 13

isolationist responses to the European situation and helped to mobilize an antifascist/anti-Nazi movement both in the United States and internationally as the

Allied and Axis powers edged towards the looming World War.

In sum, the dissertation aims to re-acquaint the critical studies community with pivotal issues addressed in leftist art and activism of the 1930s, the contexts in which these works were conceived, distributed, exhibited and received, and the effects they had at the critical as well as the popular level, both nationally and globally. Due to its use of an inter-disciplinary methodology, the dissertation provides interesting new materials in fields such as Cinema studies, American studies, cultural studies and

American history and literature. I hope the present work will inspire further research, studies and writings on the Old Left and its cinematic manifestation, the Hollywood

Left.

The past is not just a jumble of “facts” that informs the present. It is, rather, a living presence that can pave the way to a future where the unrealized dreams and hopes of the past can evoke possibilities we can consciously work toward. Even if the past can never be fully comprehended or accepted, and its complexities and pluralities resist easy “lessons,” we, as intellectuals and critics, have a responsibility to an engaged understanding of the past so as to make informed political and moral choices for the future. It is imperative, I believe, to connect our own histories, our works and our future socio-political, cultural, artistic and intellectual aspirations to the larger “collective history” of the United States. 14

CHAPTER TWO

THE “RED DECADE” AND ITS INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN CINEMA, LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Challenging the bourgeois-fostered misconceptions of communism, the proletariat is creating great culture; it is by its historic nature a cultural class. As it advances in the struggle against capitalism and develops class-consciousness, the proletariat brings forward intellectual forces from its own sons and daughters...Against the sumptuous universities there arise workers’ schools and study circles to arm the men of labor with the science of socialist transformation. Against the press of the monopolies there is published, with the pennies of the dispossessed for its sole endowment, the humanly purposive, wholesome workers’ press. Against the statesmen, publicists and professional embellishers of the dying capitalist order arise propagandists of the people’s advance and their emancipation; class-conscious scientists, educators, authors and artists—all the self-sacrificing and steadfast Communist intellectuals.5

--V.J. Jerome, CPUSA theoretician and editor of The Communist

Introduction In this chapter I re-examine the Thirties in its artistic, cultural and political specificity in order to place leftist cultural productions in their contexts. I particularly concentrate on radical/proletarian fiction as an expression of conditions in

Depression-era America, and demonstrate how the genre underwent transformations in response to the changing socio-cultural conditions, leftist political positions and debates on the inter-relationship between art, ideology and culture. The chapter also elucidates a relationship between radical literature, racial discourse and leftist films of the period, both in terms of content and ideology, and frames leftist expression in cinema and literature as part of a wide-ranging “leftist internationalism.” I argue that

5 V.J. Jerome, Intellectuals and the War (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1940), 63. 15

leftist cinema was heavily influenced by the literary genre of radical/proletarian fiction and relied on the latter’s narrative tropes, characterizations, conventions, iconographies and the “leftist mythos” that guided it. The chapter ends with a re- evaluation of the “Red Decade” as one of great cultural renaissance rather than one of disappointment and disenchantment as has been popularized by conservative critics.

The “Red Decade”—the need for a new historicism The term “The Red Decade” was made particularly famous by the publication of a book by Eugene Lyons bearing that title. This tendentious and virulently anticommunist work, called The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America

(1941), pictures American writers and intellectuals as dupes of communism and of the Soviet Union. They are imagined by Lyons as spoiled, unreflecting, idealistic personalities who unwittingly played into the hands of the literary and cinematic

“commie commissars” and produced questionable work that was of little or no significance to American culture. The title of the work foregrounds the idea of

“penetration,” as of a virus infecting a healthy body. In Lyon’s view, the “commie conspiracy” (as it was often referred to in popular parlance) misled America’s nascent artistic talent, fed them obscene lies, entrapped them emotionally, ideologically and artistically and “forced” them to produce propagandistic works to

“penetrate” the minds of the American people. According to this view, then, the intellectuals, writers and artists abandoned the Communist Party, and many abandoned the Left, after they discovered that they had been “hoodwinked.” 16

Not only is this an over-simplified view but, more disturbingly, bears a particular malice and an ideological agenda. Lyons’ cynicism may have been prompted by his own negative experiences with the Soviet Union and with the CPUSA. He was a good friend of the communist Joseph Freeman, and in the 1920s worked for the

Soviet news agency Tass. When the Sacco and Venzetti case became a CPUSA rallying call, Lyons answered and worked for the campaign fervently. In 1927, he went to the Soviet Union as a correspondent for the United Press. He spent six years there. His direct experience of the socio-political and cultural realities of the USSR, however, left him disillusioned. Upon his return to the United States, he authored two works, Moscow Carrousel, 1935 and Assignment in Utopia, 1937, in which he presented his negative experiences. Mercilessly attacked by CPUSA party members and smeared in leftist publications, he became even more disenchanted and disillusioned with the American Left, and about the role of communism in American life. His disenchantment with communism, the USSR, and with the Left in general, slowly but surely turned into a passionate anticommunism.6

The Red Decade is an angry book by a disenchanted former radical. Lyons’ cynicism as regards leftwing writers, artists and intellectuals is perhaps best captured

6 Prior to the publication of The Red Decade, Lyons published several articles denouncing communism and the Soviet Union in vitriolic articles such as, “The Terror in Russia: An Open Letter to Upton Sinclair” (New York, 1938); “Stalin: Czar of All Russias” (New York, 1940); and, “Stalin’s Counter-Revolution,” in Inside Story, ed. Robert Spiers Benjamin (NY: Prentice Hall, 1940).

by the following passage from his book, in which he speaks of the “Red generation” disparagingly, declaring:

Many of them had been through fashionable types of exhibitionism in the previous decade—dadaism, surrealism, symbolism, lost generation antics and what not. They had climbed into ivory towers fitted out with bars and seductive couches and looked down only to sneer at the madding crowd. They had defied the bourgeoisie with lower-case letters, stuttering sentences and chopped-up female torsos scattered on canvases. All of them now sensed the dissonance between their gin-drinking self- indulgence and the grim Depression world. Besides, mostly they could no longer afford that sort of existence; the bill collectors found them in the loftiest Ivory tower. So, singly and in packs they migrated from the Left Bank of Paris to the political Left of Moscow. They abandoned prosperity bohemianism for proletarian bohemianism. With the egocentric yowling of their species, they rushed into intellectual slumming as heatedly as they had gone in for slummy intellectualism. A lot of humdrum novelists and academic grinds joined the general migration. Newton Arvin, Granville Hicks and other college instructors “discovered” the sociological approach to culture, though the approach had long been routine procedure on the Left. A lot of budding and a few overripe novel writers suddenly became interested in the plain people, and got all puffed up over their new virtue, as though Upton Sinclair, Jack London, William Dean Howells and a lot of others had never written. And, above all, Prolecult beckoned to droves of third-rate writers, singers, dancers, and critics who recognized the drift as a short cut to recognition and ready-made audiences. Mediocrity for once seemed very like a special artistic merit. 7

In his anticommunist vehemence, Lyons deliberately oversimplified the issue of the era’s artistic and cultural production vis-à-vis the communist party, and his barbs against American leftist writers, artists and intellectuals did much to hurt the positioning of the Thirties as a decade of great cultural renaissance which engendered the flowering of a “people’s culture” and the “laboring” of America.

In the Thirties, radicals like Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, and even Eugene

Lyons were attracted to communism as a panacea for what Daniel Aaron has called the “aberrations of society,” and not simply as a healing ideology for their own

7 Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1941), 129.

(bourgeois fostered) “individual aberrations.” Not only did the example of Soviet

Union provide them with utopian ideals realized, but in America, the Great

Depression and the prevalent abject conditions gave meaning and shape to their lives and struggles, and inspired some of their finest works.

It is true that many of these radicals did eventually leave the Party, and many even turned anticommunist, but their reasons were varied and complex and should be examined contextually, particularly in view of rising Fascism in Germany and Italy, the military imperialism and colonialism of Japan, the brief but disturbing interlinking of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in a non-Aggression Pact, and the challenges these presented to both communism and democracy. Perhaps the crucial event that severed established leftist loyalties was the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939). By presenting a kaleidoscopic view of cultural politics of the period and by offering some case studies of “typical” 1930s leftist literary and cinematic productions, I wish to negate conservative (and simplistic) views represented by critics following Lyon’s logic, and argue for a new historicism of the “Red Decade” as a moment of

American (laborist) cultural renaissance—albeit one full of contentions—in which the American left played a vital role.

Thirties leftist cinema emerged in tandem with other leftist expressions such as

Marxist agit-prop theatre, radical fiction, muckraking journalism, popular music, and 19

revolutionary painting and graphic design.8 These artistic productions went hand-in- hand with activism, such as in the laborist arena. Leftists such as Lawson, Maltz,

Hellman and Cole, often began their careers in other enclaves before joining the

Hollywood Left community as cinematic artists and activists. Maltz, for example, wrote agit-prop plays and proletarian fiction in New York before coming to

Hollywood as a screenwriter. These various influences on Thirties leftist cinema determined its shape and form both as cinematic art and as leftist discourse. My primary concern, however, in this and the following chapters is in tracing interconnections between 1930s Hollywood leftist cinema and proletarian fiction in terms of characterization, narrative, genre, style, methodology and ideology. I concentrate on leftist literary and cinematic debates in the 1930s and the socio- economic, political and cultural influences on the “Marxist” cinema that emerged as response to these conditions.

Proletarian Literature and the Left The cultural program directly or indirectly supported by the CPUSA was intimately tied to communist ideology and radical writers, artists and intellectuals produced the era’s most memorable “muckraking” journalism and proletarian fiction.

While a fair number of writers were directly associated with the CPUSA—such as

Michael Gold, Howard Fast, Waldo Frank and Abe Magil, who was a journalist and pamphleteer on the staff of the Daily Worker—many simply remained in the

8 For a good discussion on American culture and its “laborist” expressions, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (NY: Verso, 1997). 20

leftwing orbit as sympathizers or “fellow travelers,” such as Ella Winter and James

Baldwin. Most, such as Richard Wright and Nora Zeale Hurston, followed and favored some brand of “Marxism” throughout their careers.

Wright, in fact, was part of the radical black communist enclave. Early in his career he penned numerous literary pieces extolling communism and railing against class-based capitalism, racism, nativism, xenophobia, labor exploitation, the penal system and ghettoization that blacks faced, especially in the South. Some prominent works from the period include “A Red Love Note,” in Left Front (January-February,

1934), “Strength,” in The Anvil, (March-April, 1934), “I Have Seen Black Hands,” in

The New Masses (June 26, 1936) and “I Am a Red Slogan,” in International

Literature (April, 1935). He also penned essays like “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in New Challenge (Fall 1937) and “Portrait of Harlem,” in New York Panorama

(1938), and fiction such as Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of four novellas that has an arc of rising militancy against racial discrimination.9 Ralph

Ellison, another African-American writer, who would go on to pen the (in)famous

Invisible Man (1952), was a close friend of Wright’s, became associated with the

Federal Theatre Project, and published short stories and articles in leftist magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses, such as “A Congress Jim Crow Didn’t

Attend,” in New Masses (May, 1940).

9 Wright eventually broke with the CPUSA and announced his “official” disassociation in an essay entitled “I Tried to be a Communist” published in the Atlantic Monthly (August, 1944). 21

The two standard criticisms of leftwing literature of the 1930s intimately connect its subject of inquiry, radical literature, and its quintessential form, proletarian fiction, to leftist politics. Walter B. Rideout’s Radical Literature in the United States

(1956) ties proletarian fiction to CPUSA’s “cultural agenda” and to the literary debates, controversies and ideological frameworks encouraged by the Party to its practicing artists and writers. Rideout maps a teleology that presents proletarian literature as closely following the arc of CPUSA’s own radical politics, agendas and self-positioning within the American cultural and ideological scene. In Rideout’s history, the revolutionary, radical line of the CPUSA became subsumed and contained by the broad-based working-class ideology of the Popular Front, especially in the post-1935 era, resulting in the “demise” of proletarian cultural production.

Further, with the Moscow Purge Trials, the “loss” of Spain to the Fascists and the

Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), CPUSA’s revolutionary line for the United States became increasingly untenable, and it aligned with other liberal and leftwing groups such as the Anti-Nazi League, under the overarching umbrella of antifascism. In Rideout’s view, leftwing art gradually became subjugated to unstable, shifting politics and the proletarian literary movement “died” with the CPUSA’s more centrist move towards an alignment with democratic-capitalism in the closing years of the 1930s.

The other canonical critical work, Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left: Episodes in

American Literary Communism (1961), is a more culturally-contextual approach to radical literature. Like Rideout, Aaron sees proletarian fiction as a subset of radical 22

American literature and constructs it as having a tight historical span. Aaron concurs that the proletarian movement was led by leftwingers, particularly communists and

Marxists. However, he interestingly takes up the question of why the more socially- concerned intellectual writers turned so sharply to the left in the 1930s, why they joined leftwing organizations and especially the CPUSA, why their stay was full of turmoil and their relationship to their “cultural sponsors” so fraught with creative insecurity and angst, and why they left the CPUSA and its associated organizations

(such as the League of American Writers) so abruptly. In the following discussion, I take up these issues and Rideout and Aaron’s arguments to bring together social, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts to bear upon these complex questions.

Rideout and Aaron both agree that while many intellectuals joined the Party out of a desire for social and political reform, as a response to the Depression, as an expression of idealistic fraternity with the “great social experiment” of the Soviet

Union, and as a way to obtain sponsorship and support, they failed to hold onto the

Party through the political quicksand of the times. One reason they advance is the artists’ perception of the Party as being a primarily a political organization most interested in grass-roots level agitation and not in artistic creativity. This misperception on part of leftist artists and writers was the result of a dissonance between the Party’s need to mobilize art for its activist purposes, the artists’ own ideas of their “personal” visions, and what they considered to be the holistic

“integrity” of the works created under the Party’s aegis. 23

The League of American Writers, the pre-eminent leftist radical organization for writers, was established in New York, in 1935, at the initiative of cultural workers allied with the Communist Party. Its purpose was to mobilize writers against war and reaction, and it promoted a general revolutionary orientation. Aaron particularly faults the Party for its heavy-handed and bureaucratic methods of dealing with writers, artists and their works, for its shifting political line and the consequent shifting cultural program. Even though the overall rhetoric of the Party and its program for intellectuals and writers remained remarkably uniform on the surface, in actual practice there was often considerable divergence because of the instability of the political scene. Individual writers and artists felt that little, if not scant, attention was paid to them and their efforts. What was unacceptable in a given political context suddenly became acceptable as the context shifted and as the CPUSA’s top brass swerved the Party line to accommodate themselves to the new conditions.

Perhaps the most visible—and disturbing—example of this was the Party “zig- zag” over the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Under the Popular Front banner, the CPUSA had formed a successful coalition with unions, New Deal liberals and the Roosevelt administration in the mid-1930s. This had brought the Party into the “centrist” mainstream and made it more “democratic,” conforming to CPUSA Chairman Earl

Browder’s slogan that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” However, when the Soviets allied with Nazi Germany in 1939, the CPUSA immediately abandoned the coalition. With the violation of the Pact and Germany’s attack on the USSR, the 24

CPUSA reversed itself again, coming to the defense of the Soviet Union and re- aligning itself with “centrist” forces against Nazism/fascism.

Aaron is particularly harsh in his critique and asserts that writers and artists were always made to serve Party ends and there was little understanding or communication between the politicos and the intellectuals. For Aaron, the Party’s failure to hold onto intellectuals, writers and artists is intimately tied to the failure of communist ideology in America. In Aaron’s simplistic view Browder may have tried to implement the “Communism as Americanism” ideal at the level of unions, guilds, community alliances and the like, and by sustaining a grass-roots, working-class proletarian culture, but the CPUSA failed to hold onto its intellectual base by neglecting the promotion of artistic experimentation and creativity in a larger cultural sense.

In my opinion Aaron under-estimates the value of debate and contention—even dissension— between the Party and its intellectual and artistic workers. Leftist writers also regularly engaged in the practice of “self-critique” in order to examine their own limitations as writers, artists, intellectuals and activists. Censorship, and sincere “self-critique,” pushes the emerging work through a complex “filter” that can give it greater depth and finesse, provided, of course, that this censorship is measured, responsible and non-coercive.10 As I demonstrate in the following

10 Doris Lessing gives a brilliant description of this experience in her novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which deals with the creative, emotional and psychological experiences of a young feminist writer, Anna Wulf. 25

chapters, leftist auteurs produced interesting and significant works because they were often stretched out between the conflicting requirements of art and ideology, and the cataclysmic changes in political and cultural conditions under which they practiced, both nationally and globally.

Proletarian Fiction as leftist response to cultural conditions Writing in A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), James T. Farrell, citing Philip

Rahv, editor of the radical leftist journal The Partisan Review & Anvil, declared,

“Proletarian literature must be an advance on bourgeois literature by changing the world. It must be constant with the Marxian dictum that word and deed, theory and action correspond. Proletarian literature must therefore be a literature of action.” 11

Joseph Freeman, a communist writer with a revolutionary bent, fostered similar sentiments and believed that the proletarian consciousness that artists express must come directly from life but that this experience should be informed by appropriate knowledge grounded in Marxist theory. He stated that “the feelings of the proletarian writer are molded by his experience, just as the bourgeois writer’s feelings are molded by his experiences and the class theories which rationalize them.” 12 For him, social and documentary realism were strongly wedded to true class-conscious work, and he called upon his generation of artists to see “the world through the illuminating concepts of revolutionary science.” From this viewpoint, leftist radical literature was

11 James T. Farrell, A Note On Literary Criticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 32.

12 Quoted in Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900-1954: Some inter- relations of Literature and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 19. 26

a direct political response to American capitalism and the cultural conditions it engendered in early twentieth-century. In its more mainstream or “centrist” formulation, proletarian art was an expression of democratic populism and cultural, racial, ethnic and gender pluralism in the United States.

Proletarian fiction’s generic and stylistic tropes may also be traced to the ghetto pastoral—whether the Jewish ghetto of urban New York ala Mike Gold’s Jews

Without Money (1930) or the working-class/immigrant mining ghetto of a “company town” epitomized by Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and Jack Conroy’s The

Disinherited (1933). The radical writer of the 1930s not only imagined him or herself as plunging into proletarian life and circumstances, but also often did exactly that.

The work of Jack Conroy, Jack London and Sinclair Lewis, for example, emerges directly from their daily experience as members of the “lower depths” of the

American working-class. Jack Conroy, in fact, founded the proletarian/leftist magazine Anvil (1933-35), which published the early works of such proletarian writers as Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, and Richard Wright.

The ghetto pastoral and the proletarian novel had much in common regarding themes, styles, characterizations and mis-en-scene even if ideological content differed—the proletarian novels were generally socialistic, Marxist or communistic in their formal ideology while the ghetto pastoral tended toward socialism or a reformist democracy. In both forms, protagonists struggled in tenements, sweatshops 27

and factories, and enjoyed respite from mind-numbing work in arenas of cheap, mass entertainments, and in communal parks. The proletarian form extended these spaces of working-class struggles into back alleys, gin mills, speakeasys, union meetings, and CIO or IWW gatherings. The characters of these novels spoke in ethnic or

“vernacular American” accents, moved in and out of ethnic, working-class enclaves into the mainstream, wondered about “America” and their misplaced lives within the

American Dream. They labored, loved, lost and kept moving towards some kind of redemption, and, often, found it in the rosy vision of the proletarian paradise promised by revolutionary movements such as socialism or communism.

Taken as a whole, proletarian art (literature/fiction, WPA works, theatre, journalism) was an expression of the “cultural front” of the 1930s and was the result, according to Michael Denning, of the “laboring” of American culture, which was

largely the result of a remarkable expansion of what is usually called mass culture: on the one hand, secondary and higher education: and on the other, the industries of entertainment and amusement.[The] children from working-class families grew up to become artists in the culture industries, and American workers became the primary audience for those industries. 13

This front was a terrain of cultural struggle that encompassed a politics of form and an aesthetic ideology formulated by popular revolutionary symbols of labor feminism, racial integration, multiculturalism, environmentalism, labor unionism, education, civil rights, and, later, antifascism. The various styles and genres used by the fervently committed leftist writers, artists and intellectuals fomented debates, stirred up controversies, challenged established traditions and helped sustain a

13 Denning, “introduction” in The Cultural Front, xvii and xx. 28

working-class “people’s culture” predicated on new ways of seeing and judging canons of value. The proletarian novel, in this sense, worked in conjunction with other art forms with the proviso that its radical form was associated directly with communistic/Marxist ideology. Countering capitalism was, in essence, the fundamental and foundational premise of radical proletarian art.

Proletarian Fiction as a foundational model for Hollywood Leftist Cinema Although proletarian fiction bridged a wide span, it could be theorized as a “leftist genre” on the basis of typical myths, conventions and iconographies that it shared with other leftist artistic expressions and with leftist discourse in general. Here, I only provide a general discussion of the tropes shared by most proletarian novels in order to construct a context for viewing the cinematic case studies of Hollywood leftist films presented in the following chapters.

Soviet “social realism” was a significant influence on U.S. Left cultural production, albeit with a transformation of this method into the American context.

Although the Soviet Union was publicly revered by the left in the 1920s and early

1930s as the “greatest social experiment in human history,” there was virtually no large-scale “official” cultural exchange between Soviet artists, writers and intellectuals and American “Reds” working on popular cultural forms. Rightwing charges that American leftist writers and artists who were Marxists and communists were “Bolsheviks” or “commie propagandists” who unthinkingly translated the

Soviet context to the American one is untenable. True, most radical leftist writers and artists were either associated directly with the CPUSA or were “fellow 29

travelers,” but it would be difficult to support the contention that the Party single- handedly encouraged the efflorescence of proletarian culture with “Moscow Gold.”

American leftists soon realized that any Marxist aesthetic needed to be translated into the specific context of the United States. Only then could it be received, understood and internalized by the American “masses.” 14 Thus, communist/Marxist enclaves like the Group Theatre of New York would present Marxist agit-prop plays using working-class American characters struggling under capitalist conditions specific to the United States, such as New York City taxi drivers or college instructors. Proletarian fiction followed a similar path and, in turn, influenced activist filmmaking in Hollywood. In a similar fashion, the documentaries and actualities of the Film and Photo League and Nykino used footage of strikes, police actions, industrial accidents, and so forth, and presented them using principles of dialectical montage and ideological shock cuts to raise the American proletarian consciousness to the specific conditions of American capitalism—another example of how the

“theory” of aesthetics flourishing in the Soviet Union was adapted to American ends.

The primary stylistic tropes of proletarian fiction are documentary and social realism combined with a variety of devices to enhance the dramatic function of the narratives. These include shock cuts, montage, dialectically opposed sections, diffuse

14 For good examples of such debates see Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist Years (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Earl Browder, “Communism and Literature,” in The American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (NY: International Publishers, 1935), and Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930-1942 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978).

stream-of-consciousness passages, a heavy emphasis on vernacular language, detailed characterization of “the people” of proletarian milieus (hoboes, industrial workers, escaped convicts, former slaves, union activists, and so forth) and of their environmental conditions (the slums, the factories, the mines, the ghettos, the freight trains and stations, and so forth) and on their movements through a “diseased”

American landscape (physical, emotional, psychological, cultural and ideological).

The presentation varies from the taut and sparse to the loquaciously loose. In these narratives, the influence of naturalism, environmentalism, laborism, class- stratification, racism, (lack of) education, social injustice, and so forth are presented in a highly charged dramatic but “realist” fashion. All these factors are theorized to effect character, personality, socio-economic mobility, mental enhancement, political ideology, the development of human potential and cultural achievements.

These leftist literary productions contain both an implicit and explicit critique of social institutions and authority figures. These are shown to be corrupt and inhumane. The institutions are shown to be guided by amoral personalities, driven by base desires, who violate, in spirit and letter, the most essential codes of human rights and democratic ideology. Thus, prisons are shown to be not institutions of reform but breeding grounds of criminality. Lawyers and judges are “in the graft” and insidiously racist. The tenements are either overly romanticized sites of

“goodness” or represented as inhuman colonies that produce countless dispossessed and criminals. Factories, mines and industrial towns are shown to be unkempt, 31

oppressive, lacking in sanitation and health facilities. They are full of disease and death. The managers, foremen and bosses are living on bribes, practicing nepotism, involved in blacklisting or firing “subversives,” “Reds” or any other brand of

“troublemakers.”

The proletariat in these novels is imagined as living under onerous work and living conditions and suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction, terminal illnesses, industrial injuries, lack of education, joblessness, personal and familial dysfunctionality. In response to such conditions, they are often given to crime, violence, rebellion, fatalism, stagnation, depression and suicide out of sheer frustration. Contrariwise, they are romanticized as sons and daughters of the soil, producers of “real” material, noble and cultured creatures given to Christian humanism, or communist/Marxist socialist or democratic idealism (as the case may be). They are often depicted as being enslaved by bureaucratic, exploitative systems in which the capitalists have all the advantages—the “law” is always on the side of the “owners” and “managers” and is used mercilessly to obtain collusion and consent from their enslaved or oppressed “producers.”

In the more ideologically provocative and agitational works, capitalism finds democracy to be a tool in its inexorable march towards greater and greater profits with larger and larger human costs. Democratic law and the established legal system is used cynically by the “haves” against the “have nots” to protect their property and the material rights of the “owners of the means of production.” The workers are 32

mostly in debt or overwhelmed by surmounting obligations that they can never meet.

Strikes and calls for labor unionism are met with brutality, firings, blacklisting, violence and even murder. To all these injustices the workers have little or no recourse. In these Marxist/communist narratives, the primary determining factor in the characterization of the personalities peopling the novels is socio-economic. Class forms character, determines one’s place in the capitalist hierarchy and limits one’s current and future growth and mobility. The Great Depression functions as the sine qua non of the abject failure of capitalism and as the dark underside of the (false) promises of the American Dream.

The authors exhibit a committed class-consciousness in their oeuvre. Their characters, too, are defined by their class-consciousness: their philosophy and psychology are suffused with it. This predilection of proletarian novelists led James

T. Farell to wryly comment that, “One of the fundamental mistakes in various

‘leftist’ tendencies has been the treatment of the class struggle either as a fixed absolute or else as an article of sentimental faith.”15 For example, in Thomas Boyd’s

In Time of Peace (1935), which followed his extremely bitter war novel, Through the

Wheat (also 1935), protagonist William Hicks is an average American working-class

Joe—sincere, moralistic and hardworking, looking to move up from his blue-collar job so that he could marry and raise a family. Hicks has his “fall” from the American

Dream, drifts from job to job, situation to situation, always a victim of “the system.”

15 James T. Farrell, A Note On Literary Criticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 126.

When he finally gets another steady job at Victory Motors, he becomes involved with the “commie” agitators and gets wounded in a worker’s confrontation with the police. He comes to the realization that, even in times of peace, there was a perpetual class war on:

Lying on the pavement, he gasped from sheer disbelief. He was an American citizen protesting against intolerable conditions into which he had found himself being forced. No, more than that…he had been clipped by a machine gun bullet when there was no chance of his fighting back.…He had that same sense of mute horror now [as during war]…by God! Back of the guards stood the police, back of the police the politicians, the Libbys, and behind them all the sacred name of Property. In the name of property men could be starved to death, and if they even so much as raised their heads, there was war…He at least had something to fight for now.16

A high degree of class-consciousness, and deep humanistic sympathy for the working-class, is therefore necessary in reading these novels. This was, perhaps, the greatest limitation of the form, and latter-day audiences, reading the novels long after the era’s social, cultural and political specificities had passed, find it hard to evaluate the artistic merits of these works. The critical contexts are missing.

The conditions presented in these novels are ripe for a “man of the people,” a member of the proletariat, to rebel against the unrepentant system, often at the instigation of a communist agitator, a Marxist comrade-in-arms, a union man, or a disaffected worker. His call to conscience is often equated with ideological conversion to Marxism, socialism or communism, or, at the very least, some form of reformist “democratic” activism. This action typically results in the formation of a

16 Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace (NY: Minton, Balch and Co, 1935), 309. 34

union, a special labor group, and the obtaining of necessary rights and privileges for the implementation of reforms and just policies.

Implicit in the narrative arc of much proletarian fiction is the unquestioned assumption that man is destined for higher evolution, for a brotherhood-of-man, for a rosy future of classlessness and an end to exploitation. This optimistic vision, at the popular level, is often equated with the revolutionary radicalism of the Communist

Party. This is particularly evident in the novels of the 1920s and early 1930s, such as

Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited. Other variants tell a dramatic tale of mistreatment and disenfranchisement, only implicitly calling for conversion. For example, in

Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935) documentary realism is stylistically wedded to communist polemics. The novel is written in classic documentary and socially-realist style and concerns the exploits of Cass McKay, a poor and inconsequential homeless boy from Texas. As he flits through life, “somebody in boots” is always around to destroy his moments of respite from the harshness of life.

Even if McKay’s disenfranchisement does not lead him directly to his communist saviors, the novel’s tone elicits a strongly counter-cultural and anticapitalist response. That the novel is unambiguously communistic in intent is made clear at the head of each section, which contains epigraphs from the Communist Manifesto.

In novels that are less explicitly associated with ideological conversion, a relentless narrative of exploitation, exile, injustice and humiliation leads to ideological agitation in the readers, who, the writer hopes, would then be urged onto 35

reformist attitudes and actions that are in keeping with the foundational ideals of democracy. The protagonists of these novels are hopeless; they get nothing but

“lousy breaks” and struggle with failure in all their endeavors to better themselves, or even to find solace in personal, communal or vagabonding life.

In Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1930), protagonist Lorry Lewis encounters mistreatment in an orphanage, drifts from job to job, hops freights as a hobo, associates with the “bottom dogs” of society but finds no haven. Slogans and calls for revolution are irrelevant in his hopeless condition: he sees no possibility of redemption. Even if only through his bitter experiences, Lorry senses that something is terribly wrong with the social system, he is unable to understand it or do anything about it. He does not have the education or knowledge or power or even willingness to effect any positive change; he is so beaten down. In his moments of alienation and despair, he ponders fatalistically the terrible injustice of a system in which someone

“regular” like him could ever better himself:

A fellow had to have connections; that was all there was to it, unless he was one of those grinding wheels. Those fellows who worked themselves up—up to what? Well, he didn’t know what he would ever do; he wasn’t the kind that would ever amount to anything. He could sure see that…He didn’t know whether the country owed him a living; he didn’t go in much for politics or socialism, whatever they called it. He had read some of Jack London a little, once tried “The Dream of Debs,” but didn’t quite get it.17

At the end of the novel, Lorry senses that “something had to happen; and he knew nothing would.” Bottom Dogs takes a satirical devil’s advocate point-of-view and,

17 Edward Dahlberg, Bottom Dogs (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 206-207.

indirectly but forcefully, proffers the view that a life without a proper (Marxist) education and political commitment is a life of frustration, futility and exile.

In a similar vein, Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! (originally written in 1934-5), centers around the fruitlessly rebellious life of Jake Jackson, a technically “free” black man who had fled the racist South to live in dissatisfied hopelessness as a

Chicago postal worker. In the “enlightened” North, Jake finds a subtle, and therefore far more dangerous, form of racism, one disguised as paternalism. He is consumed by self-pity and frustration at the fact that even in the “free” North, far and away from the lacerating South, racism is rampant, and, in a racial and cultural sense, the black man is no more emancipated here, even if his socio-economic conditon is somewhat better. Unable to defend against his racial emasculation, he has fits of anger and constantly engages his black friends in brawls and arguments. In one scene

Jake and his friends stand around ruminating on the cultural conditions, discussing the agency and mobility that whites enjoy but blacks do not:

“They don’t never set down and take things easy.” “Hell, naw,” said Al. “They figgering on how to get up in the world.” “They rush about like bees.” “Yeah, but ain’t no use of a black man rushing.” “Naw, ‘cause we ain’t going nowhere.”18

Underneath their (often drunken) masculinsit bravado, Jake and his black comrades are deeply pessimistic about their future as “Americans” and feel their ouster from the promises of the “just” society keenly. They hoplessly continue their fruitless lives

18 Richard Wright, “Lawd Today!” in Works, vol. 1 (NY: Library of America, 1991), 118.

as existential outcasts in the land of “milk and honey.” In setting this tale of futility in Chicago, rather than in the rural plantations of the Deep South, Wright raises disturbing questions about the viability of democratic capitalism and the failure, in a practical sense, of a multicultural, mulitracial society in the post-Civil War industrial era. Blacks were used as indentured and bonded laboreres in the factories and service industries of the North as exploitatively as they were on the plantations of the South.

Wright’s dark, existential and wry novel agitates for a commitment to “real change” for the African-American in “democratic” America by painting a hopeless picture of the current scene.

The protagonist of Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935) drifts around the country, hopping trains, avoiding authority, hoping for some opportunity that would lift him out of his misery. On his travels he meets a variety of dispossessed and dispirited characters from across the nation. All of them have one thing in common: the Depression has reduced them to ghosts of their former selves and left them with no hope. With futile abandon, they sense the unfair and exploitative machinations of monopoly capitalism:

“He says you can live on nothin’ but wheat,” this hunchback says. “He says this depression is nothin’ to get excited about. People will not starve. There is plenty of wheat. If a guy says he is hungry, give him a bushel of wheat.” “Where is the wheat?” this old stiff says. “When I come through Kansas, they was burnin’ the goddam stuff in the stoves because it was cheaper than coal. Out here they stand in line for hours for a stale loaf of bread. Where is the wheat, is what I want to know.” 38

“Try and get it,” this stiff says, “just try and get it. They will throw you in so fast your head will swim.” 19

Among the many radical works authored by leftist women writers, two deserve special mention. Pity Is Not Enough (1933), the first volume of Josephine Herbst’s

“Texler Trilogy,” is an expression of the author’s faith in communism during the height of the Great Depression. Although the Marxist-feminism of the novel is deeply personal, it serves as a potent allegory for the conditions of feminist laborism under capitalism. In Pity the female characters continually suppress and repress their own desires, wants, needs, hopes and dreams in order to help the male members of their family, and the larger community, achieve theirs. The efforts of the Texler sisters are always aimed at ensuring the economic success and social mobility of their brothers.

The family matriarch, Mem, exemplifies the overburdening weight of traditionalism that reduces women to worn-out crusts, crushed by a demanding life to the lowest levels of human aspirations. Mem wonders about the few possessions she could claim as her own at the end of a hard, laboring life: a few pieces of silver and carved wood that she hoards away, wanting to give it away as an endowment to her girls before she passes on. As she reminisces about her difficult life, she wonders if, for the poor and dispossessed to hope for a better future, is a gesture of divine futility:

19 Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing and other Writings (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 119-120. 39

Her girlhood had been saving, and she had worked hard. She had been apprenticed after her father died to a sewing establishment. Joshua Texler had taken her from the shop to marry her and yet she couldn’t say she had not learned a lesson during those years, to save, to be patient, to wait. She hadn’t cried her eyes out or moped around, she had worked and waited and Joshua had come along. What did the Lord intend that she should learn by losing first a good father and then a husband and both before their allotted time? Wasn’t it patience and hard work she must always depend on? Hard work had followed each loss, from a carefree girl she had become a sewing apprentice, from a sewing apprentice, a wife, from a wife, a widow with six children to support. Where had her husband’s restless hopes carried him except to the grave? 20

Pity is rooted in the new radical womanhood of early twentieth century. It is loosely autobiographical and chronicles how the lives of the members of the Texler family are mentally and financially impacted by the tensions of domesticity, community and capitalism during the era of the South’s Reconstruction. The novel is a remarkable confluence of aesthetic form, political ideology and gender consciousness, and was released at a time when radical American women writers were struggling to define a literary form that would integrate class-consciousness, racial critique and gendered writing. As such it prefigures latter day experimentation in “feminist Marxism” that centered gendered discourses in the New Left radicalism of the 1960s.

Radical feminist-communist Grace Lumpkin penned To Make My Bread in 1932, when the Depression had reached its pinnacle. The story is set around the (in)famous

Gastonia Textile Mills Strike of 1929. The Gastonia strike was a major battle-ground for communist agitation at the grass-roots, labor-union level, and ended in the murder of local organizer Ella May Wiggins. Although the strike eventually failed, its debates in the press, particularly the discussions in the Party’s Daily Worker,

20 Josephine Herbst, Pity is Not Enough (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 140. 40

aimed to transform national consciousness about communism, labor feminism, racial segregation in the work environment, and the dialectic between Northern and

Southern labor conditions.

In Bread Bonnie is a young, assiduous female laborer working in a textile mill in

Gastonia. Like the prototypical male laborers that work their lives away in capitalist- controlled agrarian fields, mines and factories of much radical fiction, Bonnie slaves away at the looms while struggling to feed and clothe her children, keep her family together and to better her conditions, only to realize that the machines have been designed to exploit her unconditionally and to keep her servile as long as she keeps producing for the benefit of the capitalist class. Bonnie’s ideological awakening occurs slowly but inexorably, with the increasing burden of keeping the boss in the factory and the “boss at home” equally happy. Her class-consciousness emerges not from “education” by the factory males or by the family patriarch but by her own persistent reasoning:

One day at the looms she was wondering where the money for cloth to cover the almost naked young ones would come from. And she thought, “Hit costs ten cents a yard. How much do I need?” She counted that up. Then another thought came. “I work at my looms and am paid fifty cents for making sixty yards of cloth. And today at the store I’m a-going t’pay ten cents a yard for the same cloth. The cloth I make for fifty cents is sold for six dollars…” “Somewhere in between, it seems that somebody makes five dollars and fifty cents,” she said. “Well, it seems so,” John Stevens answered, looking at her and smiling a little. “But you see the owners, they figure that some money must be added to that cloth to pay for wear and tear on their machines and their buildings and such like.” “They pay themselves for wear and tear on the machines,” Bonnie spoke. “But hit seems I don’t get paid for wear and tear on myself.” 21

21 Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 319.

The novel firmly connects the oppression of women by a “backward” society with the exploitation of the working class by capitalism. Bonnie’s Marxist awakening frees her psychologically both from gendered and class ideologies and enables her to express herself with greater creativity. Bonnie also recognizes the ingrained racism that permeates the factory and the humiliation, beatings and lynching to which dissenting blacks are subjected. For her, the psychological pain of gendered oppression and the racial discrimination and exploitation of African-Americans are equally misguided expressions of capitalist control. Towards the end of the novel,

Lumpkin pronounces inter-racial harmony, equality and solidarity—particularly between black and white women workers—as being the necessary alliance across race and class barriers in order to assure the survival of all.

The novel is an outstanding example of pro-active labor feminism and foregrounds the relationship between traditional female roles, labor exploitation, and capitalist “greed.” It is a call to action, to awaken “slumbering” labor to the rosy vision proffered by communist ideology. Bread was a significant contribution to

American literary social realism, women’s radical fiction and the literature of social protest. The book was hailed by critics such as Robert Cantwell of The Nation as an excellent example of proletarian/radical fiction that broke new ground in expressions of Marxist gendered consciousness.22 Excerpts appeared a year after the novel’s

22 Robert Cantwell, “Effective Propaganda,” Nation, Oct. 19, 1932, 372.

publication in Working Woman, the CPUSA magazine aimed at feminist proletarianism, and parts were adapted by Albert Bein in a 1935 play, entitled Let

Freedom Ring, that opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City.23

Communist writers such as Albert Maltz, Lillian Hellman, Alvah Bessie, John

Howard Lawson et al, who became prominent members of the Hollywood Left, and black radicals like Richard Wright, developed, in the mid- to late 1930s period, a strong documentary- and socially-realist brand of proletarian fiction in tandem with

“Marxist” theatre. Their works were angry calls for attention to the experiences of the downtrodden and dispossessed Americans who were exiles from the promises of the American Dream. Victims of the Depression, of racism, of industrial accidents, of legal fumbling and moral injustices, the protagonists of these novellas, agit-prop pieces, novels and plays, struggle against social forces that often reduce them to naught. These writers continued the radical tradition of the 1920s foregrounded by the likes of Jack Conroy, Mike Gold, Anzia Yezierska, Sherwood Anderson, Clifford

Odets, Samuel Ornitz and John Dos Passos, but shifted the focus from the entirely personal to the largely socio-cultural.

23 Working Woman Magazine, January 30, 1934. The magazine’s appealing role for working-class women and emerging feminist writers of the 1930s in discussed in Barbara Foley, “Women and the Left in the 1930s,” American Literary History, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 150-169. Albert Bein’s Let Freedom Ring opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in Manhattan on November 6, 1935 and ran for 108 performances before closing in February, 1936. [database on-line]; available from Internet Broadway Database, http://www.ibdb.com/. The play was favorably reviewed in “New Plays in Manhattan,” Time Magazine, November 18, 1935. [article on-line]; available from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755342,00.html 43

Emerging leftist literary talents joined established virtuosos in the League of

American Writers and investigated new themes and experimented with bold new invigorating styles. As my analysis in the following chapters demonstrates, leftist literary radicalism, of which proletarian fiction, muckraking journalism, and Marxist

(agit-prop) theatre were primary expressions, fed directly into the cinematic art and activism of the Hollywood Left in their socially-critical filmmaking of the 1930s, although the roots of this creative and ideological union germinated in the Silent era.

I argue that Hollywood Leftist cinema worked in ideological consonance with established leftist forms such as proletarian fiction. This cinema was “Marxist” in its essential orientation, and was a particularly influential form of leftist discourse, albeit subject to the political-economy and censorship restrictions of the commercial studio system.

Debates over Leftist Art and Activism: Radicalism, Ideology and Culture The League of American Writers was perhaps the most visible and organized group of communists, Marxists and “fellow traveling” leftists, and in the 1930s their literary, theatrical and cinematic efforts (in the sense of generic, stylistic and ideological influence on Hollywood Left productions) would lead to some of the most authentic working-class cultural expressions. Even the overly-critical Daniel

Aaron allows that although “much of the so-called ‘proletarian’ writing violated almost every literary canon, and if, to many, it positively reeked of the Depression, the best of it managed to objectify the social forces as they operated in the lives of 44

real people.”24 Communists and Marxists were also extremely active in the American

Newspaper Guild, the American Artists’ Congress and the American Writer’s Union, the National Lawyer’s Guild, the Physicians’ Forum, and the Teacher’s Union.

These groups worked in ideological fraternity, if also with professional and artistic differences and contentions, with other well-organized groups that represented the Hollywood Left in action, such the American League Against War and Fascism, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Screen Writers’ Guild, the Radio

Writers’ Guild and the Dramatists’ Guild. There were also communist and Marxist

“locals” (organized or sub-surface) in the Hollywood studio system. To give a very typical example, albeit from the 1940s, while he was at Paramount studios, Abraham

Polonsky helped found a local communist unit—consisting of two writers, one actor and two backlot workers—a humble beginning, to be sure, but one that indicates the extent to which he was a practicing radical even while employed in a lowly capacity at a Hollywood studio.

The Party’s ideology and its dedication to racial integration, gender liberation, class-consciousness and its hopes for fusing intellectual and proletarian cultural formations attracted many young, idealistic writers who eventually became prominent members of the Hollywood Left, such as Albert Maltz, Clifford Odets,

Lillian Hellman, Samuel Ornitz, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson and Alvah

24 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 23.

Bessie. However, these intellectuals found co-existence in the CPUSA’s essentially grass-roots projects hardly free from artistic frustration and social alienation. As

Rideout expresses it, “Being writers rather than economists, [these] novelists ultimately came to grips with capitalism less on the economic grounds that it is inadequate than on the moral grounds that it is unjust. They were less concerned with analyzing the theory of surplus value than in showing what they considered to be its results.”25 This was due, in part, to the fact that “muckraking” journalism and fiction were concerned primarily with swaying mass public opinion. Such works were not concerned with accumulating hard data, proffering refined economic analysis or academic theories for sober Congressional debate. That, at least in the immediate term, was a fruitless goal, considering the enormous power of what was euphemistically called “the establishment” and the degree to which it could control counter-cultural discourse. Rideout’s critique also gives the impression that leftist artists were only intellectually engaged with their works. This clearly contradicts the fact that many left writers and artists were social, political and cultural activists in addition to being cultural producers of leftwing discourse.

A good case in point is provided by Theodore Dreiser, who upon returning to

America from his 1931 Soviet trip, had flatly declared that his solution for the predicament of the prevalent world conditions, especially in America, was

25 Rideout, 80.

communism.26 Dreiser did not stop there. He became increasingly visible and voluble in pointing out the shortcomings of the exploitative conditions that stoked the fires of

American society. The CPUSA sponsored his investigative trips to industrial

Pittsburgh, where he experienced labor conditions firsthand. He also teamed up with other writers, such as John Dos Passos, Charles Rumford Walker, Samuel Ornitz,

Lester Cohen (aka Lester Cole), and Melvin P. Levy, to form the “Dreiser

Committee” under the communist-supported National Committee for the Defense of

Political Prisoners. They went down to Harlan County, Kentucky, and observed socio-economic and political oppression in full swing—crimes and abuses against the striking miners, and the entire gamut of privation and suffering that was the lot of

“Americans” there.27

Dreiser and his committee complained, agitated and published the results of their investigations in Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal

Fields, which appeared in the hunger-ridden days of November 1931. The committee members were subsequently indicted by the Bell County Grand Jury for criminal syndicalism, and a warrant was issued for Dreiser’s arrest. Franklin D. Roosevelt,

26 Dreiser’s critical stance towards capitalism and his valorization of communism are obvious in articles and interviews by him around this time. See for example, “Theodore Dreiser Denounces Campaign Against Communists,” Progressive 2 (5 September, 1931): 1–2; “America and Her Communists,” Time and Tide 12 (31 October, 1931): 1247–48; “Mankind’s Future Hangs on Russia- Theodore Dreiser,” Progressive 2 (21 November, 1931): 1; and, “Capitalism Fails, Says Dreiser,” New York Times, 5 July, 1932, 18.

27 For details see, Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields (Members of the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners, 1932; reprint, NY: DaCapo Press, 1970). 47

Governor of New York at the time, stepped in and agreed to give Dreiser an open hearing. Due to widespread publicity the case was eventually dropped and the charges dismissed.

In a similar vein, Dreiser’s trips to the coal mining sites of Pennsylvania and

Kentucky resulted in the publication of the documentary- and social-realist, Tragic

America (1932), a deeply felt indictment of American socio-economic system.

Dreiser’s censure at the hands of the vested interests only spurred him onto further

“muckraking” aimed at exposing not only the abject conditions of laborism but the power and machinations of the enfranchised classes that perpetrated and perpetuated these conditions. The point I wish to convey by using Dreiser as an emblematic example is that art and activism went hand in hand for radical leftists, particularly those who were members of the CPUSA, or were “fellow travelers.”

As an important aside, it should be noted that when Sergei Eisenstein, the celebrated Soviet director of Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), visited

Hollywood in 1930, one of his first projects was to film Dreiser’s An American

Tragedy (1925). Eisenstein’s proposal languished at Paramount studios, subject to many objections, re-writes and revisions, and finally to be shelved. Eisenstein’s production of Dreiser’s socially-critical novel at one of the Big Five studios in

Hollywood would, perhaps, have generated other interesting projects in cooperative

Russian-American cinematic ventures. This idea of a productive US-Soviet exchange was undoubtedly viewed by studio moguls with anxiety and suspicion bordering on 48

paranoia. Red-baiting attacks on the studio system always brought up accusations of communist infiltration of, and influence in, the motion-picture industry, and called for investigations into studio affairs. Both (the Soviet) Eisenstein and the (American)

Dreiser were, of course, confirmed and committed communists. A version of An

American Tragedy was produced at Paramount in 1931, directed by Joseph Von

Sternberg, but Dreiser strongly disapproved of this film.

Unlike the Party’s generally well-thought out agendas and programs on issues of racial equality, trade unionism, equal opportunity in employment, and so forth, the cultural program for writers and artists was less well-defined. Most issues regarding the connection between creative production and (communist/Marxist) ideology were vehemently and contentiously debated, although the Party outwardly claimed that leftist writers had full creative freedom. At the First Congress of the League of

American Writers, in 1935, Earl Browder, newly elected leader of the CPUSA, denied the charge that the Party wished to influence the art and literature produced by its members and sympathizers. He declared that,

Our Party claims to give political guidance directly to its members, in all fields of work, including the arts. How strong such leadership can be exerted upon non-party peoples depends upon the quality of the work of our members…That means that the first demand of the Party upon its writer-members is that they shall be good writers, constantly better writers, for only so can they really serve the party. We do not want to take good writers and make bad strike leaders of them. The Party has such a leading role as its members can win for it by the quality of their work. From this flows the conclusion, that the method of our work in this field cannot be one of Party resolutions giving judgment upon artistic, aesthetic questions. There is no fixed ‘Party line’ by which works of art can be automatically separated into sheep and goats… 49

We therefore reassure all those who feel there is some truth in the stories about Communists that we want to ‘control’ you, put you in ‘uniform.’ 28 (emphasis added)

Browder’s declarations did little to assuage the concerns of the writers and artists who struggled with the difficult task of always having to conform their work to what they perceived to be the Party’s heavy-handed ideological imperative. Henri

Lefebvre argues that “Marxism always was and remains racked by internal as well as external contradictions.”29 Leftist writers and intellectuals were perhaps just as much divided among themselves on the question of artistic form and content and their relationship to Marxist/communist ideology. Partisanship (with particular views within the Party, and the left in general) thus often marked the inter-relationships between these “cultural workers.”

Regardless of Browder’s fraternal assurances, leftist writers, artists and intellectuals often found themselves at odds with the Party line in their cultural productions. They struggled to fit form to function—a particularly difficult task for up-and-coming talent. The constant need to perform as Party functionaries, as its agit-prop shock troops, as writers of petitions, protests, and manifestos, tended to

28 Earl Browder, “Communism and Literature” in The American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (NY: International Publishers, 1935), 66-70.

29 Henri Lefebvre, “Towards a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 76.

overshadow the writers’ own deeply felt concern for their craft. A continual negotiation between art and ideology was a hallmark of their careers.

Here, I use “ideology” in the sense that Marsha Kinder speaks of, in her seminal study of Spanish Cinema and its relationship to culture, Blood Cinema. Taking both an Althusserian and Gramscian approach, Kinder argues that ideology is

a system of representations (ideas, images and action) through which persons experience the material conditions of existence in which they find themselves. Since ideology in this sense functions at the level of structures rather than at the level of consciously held opinions, it is largely unconscious and is transmitted, perpetuated, and naturalized primarily through nonrepressive ideological state apparatuses (such as popular culture, art, literature, education, religion and family) and their respective discursive practices. Even within a hermetically sealed culture such as Francoist Spain, the dominant ideology could never be totally monolithic; its hegemony was also being contested and negotiated by conflicting historical forces and by alternative ideologies.30

The logics of ideological systems are thus pluralistic: “polyvocal” and

“multiaccentual” in character. Kinder’s formulation applies as much to “democratic”

America as to “Francoist” Spain, in my opinion. In the 1930s, popular cultural forms such as commercial, genre films and proletarian literature were seen as vital in such ideological interpellation, contestation and negotiation at a mass level. As Stuart Hall reminds us,

The fact that a position of ideological authority and leadership—of intellectual and moral ascendancy—constructed by harnessing the lines of force and opinion in the apparently “free space” of civil society has a remarkable durability, depth and staying power because the adhesion it wins among the people is not coerced, as it

30 Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 19-20.

might be if the state were directly involved, but appears to be produced freely and spontaneously as the popular consent to power. 31

Leftist critique was, then, also aimed at exposing the workings of “hegemony” at the level of “structures” (institutions), at the level of “common sense” beliefs, and also at the level of daily social practices. This was achieved by means of popular cultural expressions, albeit subject to highly controlled and codified authorial modes.

The “artistic” writer often felt alienated in his or her role as a “Party journalist” rather than a poet and novelist creating art that “moved people” by wedding ideological polemics to artistic form and style. The more intellectual, educated and experienced of the leftist writers, artists and filmmakers intuitively realized James T.

Farrell’s dictum that,

the effect of living literature on its reader is not the same as the effect of an advertising slogan upon a prospective customer. It cuts much deeper into the human consciousness. It cuts beneath stereotyped feelings and crystallized thoughts, furnishing the material from which extended feelings and added thought are developed. It is one of the agents serving to work out within the individual consciousness the twin processes of growth and decay in a way corresponding to the objective working-out of these processes in society. It destroys old faiths and ideals, and creates new ones, or at least lays the basis for their creation. What is important in such literature is its content, and that content is not to be taken as merely synonymous with formal ideology, generalized themes, and the explicitly stated ideas of its writers. 32

Thus, even at the First Writers’ Congress at the formation of the League of American

Writers, in 1935, Waldo Frank expressed concern over art completely devoted to ideological formalism. He blamed the revolutionary writers for having a “sterile

31 Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 48.

32 Farrell, 215.

philosophy” and for creating works that suffered from a variety of negative symptoms, such as,

Disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art; in its integral place as art in the organic growth of man and specifically in the revolutionary movement. This self- distrust makes the writer capitulate as artist, leads him to take orders, as artist, from political leaders—much to the dismay of the more intelligent of said political leaders…the servile or passive concept of revolutionary literature as primarily ‘informational’, ‘reflective’ ‘propaganda’… Here are some of its results: Novels aiming to reveal…revolutionary portent…stuffed with stereotypes…Proletarian tales and poems which portray the workers as half-dead people devoid of imagination…Laborious essays in criticism and literary history in which organic bodies of works of the poets and prose-men are mangled and flattened to become mere wall-papering for the structure of a political argument. 33

Frank emphasized that “the term ‘proletarian’ . . . should be a qualitative, not quantitative, term. A story of middle-class or intellectual life, or even of mythological figures, if it is alight with revolutionary vision, is more effective proletarian art . . . than a shelf-full of dull novels about stereotypical workers.”34

Jack Conroy, celebrated author of The Disinherited (1933), concurred with this general trend, adding that, “the works of too many contemporary writers are imbued with a false conception of working class life and what really matters to the worker. . .

As Michael Gold has pointed out [in his opening address at the Congress], American proletarian fiction must of necessity deal with prophesy, with hopes, with the decay of society and the manifestations of such decay in the lives of people.” 35 The uneasy

33 Farrell, 131.

34 Waldo Frank, “Values of the Revolutionary Writer,” in The American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (NY: International Publishers, 1935), 71-78.

35 Jack Conroy, “The Worker As Writer” in The American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (NY: International Publishers, 1935), 83-86.

relationship between the creative artists (and those they perceived to be, or accused of being, “hacks”), the intellectuals, and the Party continued its uneasy alliance primarily due to a guiding belief that eventually the CPUSA would define and support a vibrant cultural and artistic program, and writers and artists would be given full creative freedom and sponsorship.

The political climate, however, was never stable enough for a clear-cut and extensive plan, and the Party’s response to the shifting conditions was to shift alliances and, consequently, its cultural agenda. For example, in roughly the second half of the 1930s, the Party politically and culturally amalgamated with more

“centrist” elements so that the emphasis in cultural productions shifted away from revolutionary discourse and towards a more nuanced pro-democratic approach.

Edwin Seaver, writing in the Daily Worker on the eve of Second congress of the

League of American Writers, June 4-6, 1937, declared that, “The road ahead is clear for widespread organization for the field of American writing. The presence of

Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Walter

Duranty on the same platform at Carnegie Hall is an indication of what lies ahead…for the National League of American Writers.” 36 This was perhaps the most significant change in that the League, in consonance with the Party, was broadening its ideological base, and strengthening its antifascist stance.

36 Edwin Seaver, “Writers Lead Defense of American Culture,” The Daily Worker, 9 June, 1937, 7.

With Nazism gaining victories and spreading to other European countries, there was an increased centering of antifascism in liberal-left discourse. In fact, the left, center and right were slowly, but uneasily, aligning under the antifascist paradigm.

By the time of the Second Congress, 1937, a remarkable amalgamation of diverse talent was gathering under antifascism, so that non-partisan writers of the caliber of

Ernest Hemingway could share the platform with avowed communists like Joseph

Freeman. All in all, it was a congress on “democracy” rather than “radicalism” or

“communism” and one in which liberals, communists, Marxists, socialists and even open-minded non-partisans could make a united declaration against the rising tide of fascism. At the Second Congress, the most socially significant works selected for honor ran the gamut from radically Marxist to “democratic” and “populist,” and included John Dos Passos’ The Big Money, Joseph Freeman’s An American

Testament, Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes!, John Howard Lawson’s Marching

Song and Van Wyck Brooks’ The Flowering of New England.

The Party’s centering maneuvers allowed greater leeway in creative expressions but did not permit writers to venture too far from established ground. The CP top echelon perhaps instinctively realized that literature and fiction do not bring about immediate transformations, but work on individuals in slow and diffuse, often unpredictable ways. This was in stark contrast to grass-roots agitational activities led by strike leaders, agit-prop writers and unionized workers, where action brought about a relatively swift (and often desirable) reaction. This fact was also recognized 55

by writers and critics, such as James T. Farrell for whom “works of literature are, generally, not quickly enough assimilated to become instruments of propaganda leading to the choice of immediate courses of action. The social scene, particularly in unstable times like the present, is too shifting, too changing, to permit literature to frequently act toward the immediate solution of social problems.” 37 However, the

Party clearly recognized that good writers could help in bridging the gap between the

CPUSA and its intended audiences, and cultivated their creative talent. To the question, “Does the Party want to politicize the writers by imposing on them preconceived ideas of subject matter, treatment and form?” Browder answered,

We would desire…to arouse consciousness among all writers of the political problems of the day, and trace out the relationship of these political problems to the problems of literature. We believe that the overwhelming bulk of fine writing has political significance. We would like to see all writers conscious of this, therefore able to control and direct the political results of their work. By no means do we think this can be achieved by imposing any preconceived patterns upon the writer. On the contrary, we believe that fine literature must arise directly out of life…The Party wants to help…to bring to writers a great new wealth of material. 38

Browder certainly realized that the League contained many promising writers who were not as yet Party members. He wished to present the CP’s ideas of literature and culture in a nurturing, positive light, perhaps hoping to attract more members and keep “fellow travelers” in the Party orbit.

To this end he declared that intellectuals and writers, in their proletarian stance against capitalism and fascism, would find the CP a “worker’s party” that fostered

37 Farrell, 148.

38 Earl Browder, “Communism and Literature” in The American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart (NY: International publishers, 1935), 66-70. 56

proletarian consciousness, and that good writers could help in bridging the gap between the CP and its intended audiences. In this view, writers fulfilled the CP’s social and political function as “cultural workers” rather than auteurs—which was a bourgeois notion, in any case, according to communist ideology. This ideal and

“mission,” however, did little to ameliorate the leftist artists’ creative frustrations in practice. Thus the on-going battles between aesthetic form, political function and cycles of discursive stability kept the cultural workers in constant contention with the

Party. Despite these conflicts, communist and Marxists writers and artists produced a rich variety of works in literature, theatre, journalism, criticism and the visual arts.

Communism and the Question of Race in the 1930s—the experience of African-American Leftists Radicalism and activism, based on African-American racial, ethnic and cultural identity, and their lowly socio-economic status, was another hallmark of leftist literary and journalistic productions and also influenced, albeit in a highly nuanced fashion, leftist-authored Hollywood films of the 1930s. The discussion in this section seeks to address the experience of black communists, particularly writers, intellectuals and critics who worked in cross-race alliance with their white cohorts in the 1930s. It also aims to provide a cultural context for examining how “race” and

“racial discourse” was used as a powerful socially-critical and, often, anticapitalist and antifascist, discursive strategy in leftist cultural productions, including

Hollywood Left films.

Communism as a philosophy, an ideology and a social system had tremendous appeal for the disenfranchised races, particularly those in the grips of entrenched 57

traditions and subject relations to dominant power groups. This was true globally, of course. Yet cultural traditions and entrenched beliefs systems also made it very difficult for communism to easily and successfully implant itself in the consciousness of the oppressed. For example, it was almost always framed as a

“godless” religion of totalitarian automatons by nearly every major religion. But because it promised fraternal equality among the world’s gender-divided, racially- and ethnically-diverse populations, it did succeed in making inroads into the hearts and minds of the “colonized.” Within the 1930s American context, therefore, communism had special appeal to African-Americans, even if moderated by concerns over its atheism and its “revolutionary” disregard for traditions and established practices. According to Anna Everett, the CPUSA “had a powerful impact on the lives of the urban black masses because the few black intellectuals who joined the Party or who were considered ‘fellow travelers’ wielded tremendous sociocultural influence.” Everett traces the influences of Marcus Garvey’s United

Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Cyril Briggs’ African Blood

Brotherhood (ABB) as providing grass-roots level agitation that “gained a powerful influence …over an impressive throng of black factory workers, artists and intellectuals.”39

39 Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 233-234.

Both African-American men and women gravitated towards the nascent promise that communism held for racial and gender enfranchisement. Since the CPUSA held to a revolutionary line in the 1920s which was also linked to an international movement, African-Americans felt that the Party had to offer something decisively new, a radical alternative to their continuing disenfranchisement in America. The example of the Soviet Union as a “classless” society based on racial fraternity was tremendously appealing to African-American intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois, Paul

Robeson, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, all of whom visited the USSR and tried to promote a cross-Atlantic solidarity, with active encouragement from the

Soviet leadership. As Kate Baldwin puts it,

Captive to nationalist ressentiment, Russia was neither “European” nor was she removed from the intellectual genealogy of Lenin, whose Marxist-derived theory of internationalism became the launching pad for a Soviet directive intended to entice black Americans to renounce the color line for a communist one.40

The CPUSA’s position on racial issues was in favor of full civil and human rights for

African-Americans and for racial integration at all levels of American life—a policy that brought it into direct, and often violent, conflict with the conservative forces, particularly in the Deep South.

Communists sought to enlist blacks, particularly poor rural and urban blacks, in states such as Alabama to their cause and to “educate” them to the international dimensions of class—and by extension, race—struggle within a global context.

Paramount in such educational efforts was the communists’ desire to induce in their

40 Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 10. 59

“black brotherhood” a kind of critical Marxist “awakening” into the dynamics of capitalist socio-economics and its relationship to the roots of poverty, propertied wealth and institutionalized forms of racism, sexism and ethnicization/ghettoization.

The American Negro Labor Congress was established as early as 1925 for the purpose of advancing the “Negro cause.” In meetings and pedagogical discussions, issues of racism, slavery, lynching, segregation and other “Jim Crow” practices were freely discussed. The organization re-named itself The League of Struggle for Negro

Rights in 1930 and was particularly active in the agitation in defense of the

Scottsboro boys. Under the new agenda, the League, in study groups and meetings, instilled ideas pertaining to unionism and worker’s rights in the largely agrarian black members. It also sought to mobilize them in the campaign against rising fascism. The radical black writer and poet Langston Hughes served as the League’s president in 1934, indicating, once again, how art and activism were pursued with equal fervor by the leftist intelligentsia.

Black intellectuals like Du Bois in various journalistic articles debated the merits of communism for the black community. They tried to devise a Marxist critique of

African-American slavery and to formulate radical responses to the sociocultural conditions. Du Bois, for example, ran several articles in the NAACP’s magazine The

Crisis, such as “Karl Marx and the Negro,” and “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” in which Marxist philosophy was examined for its relevance to black oppression in

America. Robin Kelley reports that “Far from being a slumbering mass waiting for 60

Communist direction, black working people entered the movement with a rich culture of opposition that sometimes contradicted, sometimes reinforced the Left’s vision of class struggle” and that black leftists “created an atmosphere in which ordinary [black] people could analyze, discuss and criticize the society in which they lived.”41

Although African-Americans enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy and agency within the Party’s agendas and programs for “uplift” and education, on the whole the

African-American position within the Party was unstable, contentious and fraught with “white chauvinism” against which the black Party members rebelled. There was a fundamental cultural conflict between the white communists and their black enlistees. Racial oppression of the subject black population, particularly in the South, tended to be subsumed under the CPUSA’s “class oppression” paradigm, and

African-Americans were understandably unhappy with the Party leadership’s overall, perhaps exclusive, emphasis on “class difference.”

For African-Americans of this era, most of whom were relegated to an exilic status based on the politics of skin color, “race” rather than “class” was the driving issue that colored their entire existence, for, as Stuart Hall maintains, some individuals and groups experience their class identity primarily as their race identity.

As Hall further explains,

41 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 93.

Meaning is what gives us a sense of our own identity, of who we are and with whom we ‘belong’—so it is tied up with questions of how culture is used to mark out and maintain identity within, and difference between, groups. 42

Even if “meaning” is a contested issue, culture and identity is based on this sense of shared meaning, which, according to Hall is “constantly being produced and exchanged in every personal and social interaction.” For white communist leaders and their black comrades, this shared meaning may have extended to the idealized promise of communism, but culturally, racially and class-wise, they had little in common.

Such inter-cultural, inter-racial and class differences were also apparent in the practice of agitational politics and the production of activist art and literature by

African-Americans littérateurs like Chester Himes and Richard Wright. Both of these radical black writers had “problems” with the CPUSA on a number of inter- related issues: the CPUSA’s shifting racial politics; “white chauvinism” within Party ranks; literary radicalism and the shape and form of “allowed” discourse; and the kinds of support that African-American activists hoped for, but often did not get, in terms of jobs, unionization benefits and other “citizen’s rights.”

The fact that “Negro Work” was upheld by the Comintern and the CPUSA as a high priority item was contravened by the kinds of moral, political and financial support the CPUSA upper echelon was willing to put up. African-American communist leaders and activists wanted appropriate recognition for their efforts, their

42 Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London: Open University Press, 1997), 3. 62

positions and their agendas that the CPUSA’s policies on racial politics (and particularly black politics within the U.S. context) failed to provide on a sustained and committed basis. The ground was far too unstable and the forces of reaction— the conservative black middle classes and the American rightwing—often impeded the Party’s good intentions.

This kind of contentious instability is well-illustrated by the experience that communists had in Alabama, where their efforts to empower the poor and downtrodden rural and urban blacks brought it into direct conflict with the more educated, enfranchised and politically conservative African-Americans—those black elites who were called the “better class Negroes” whose privileges were based on their acceptance of the status quo and their economically-profitable relationship with the white community. Kelley confirms that for the black petit bourgeois

“maintaining the color line was as much a concern …as it was for the entire white community” in order to maintain “friendly” (that is, profitable business) relations.”43

This class believed in negotiated (if slow) progress by expanding the African-

American business sector. They epitomized the “progressive” ethos and committed work ethic of Booker T. Washington and his National Negro Business League. The

Party’s bold moves at grass-roots level education and activism created an oppositional black anticommunist block among the more privileged African-

43 Kelley, 109.

Americans whose “anticommunist rhetoric was sometimes indistinguishable from the utterances of white Southern liberals and mild racists,” according to Kelley.44

As the Party moved away from its revolutionary line from 1935 onwards, its racial politics also became more “progressive” rather than “radical.” Thus, creative and political differences between the CPUSA and its cadre of radical black intelligentsia crossed racial lines, and disenchanted black writers and intellectuals slowly became more and more alienated from the Party, so that, eventually, many left. They viewed the CPUSA as surrendering the racialist agenda as it aligned with more “centrist” elements and with nationalist ideologies as antifascism/anti-Nazism began to command greater focus and attention.

As the NAACP became more “centrist” and “institutional” radical black leaders such as W.E. B Du Bois, who favored African-American separatism, became increasingly at odds with Walter White, the NAACP secretary, and began to question what he considered to be the organization’s opposition to racial segregation.

Radical blacks saw the NAACP as increasingly turning away from the idea of black nationhood within America. In 1934, after penning two critical essays in the

NAACP masthead publication The Crisis, Du Bois left the magazine’s editorship and returned to teaching at Atlanta University. Anna Everett observes that, “The resulting marginalization of black radical intellectuals created a leadership void in the black cultural arena that was rapidly filled by the more moderate black intelligentsia, now

44 Ibid. 64

led in large part by Walter White, the executive secretary for the NAACP.” 45 Radical black critique of the 1930s became, like its “white” leftist/communist counterpart, generally moderated. Strident opposition to non-progressive mainstream discourse on issues of race and class, such as exhibited in entertaining fare from Hollywood, became nuanced and contained under a new alliance between Walter White and

Hollywood in the late 1930s as America edged closer to the World War.

With the imminence of direct combat against the Axis powers, national unification had become an implicit priority. It was necessary to bring African-

Americans under the patriotic umbrella and enlist their participation and support, both at the war front and the home front, in the oncoming conflict. NAACP’s alliance with Hollywood, and the containment of radical racial discourse in cultural productions, including popular films, became necessary to this aim.

Leftist cinematic critique in the Thirties Within the cinematic domain, Hollywood Leftists struggled with the same contradictions that faced left writers but, being committed to working in an entertainment and commercially-oriented popular cultural form, their concerns were perhaps less with radicalizing “artistic form” and “creative content” than with ideological interpellation within allowable limits.

Working with popular film genres, such as the male melodrama, the crime film, the Woman’s Picture, the sports/boxing story, the war film, and so forth, Hollywood

45 Everett, 270.

Leftists struggled to insert meaningful “social content” into popular narratives. The social problem film is the hallmark of Hollywood leftist critical discourse in the

1930s. Within this generic mold, they tried to emplace “progressive” and “humanist” ideas, often by hybridizing genres within the social-problem structure, experimenting with film style, and pushing the boundaries of racial and gender representation.

In the following chapter I analyze and critique leftist cinema in its contexts and present case studies of prototypical leftwing films of the period. I pay particular attention to the discursive strategies employed by these films, the generic, stylistic and narrative tropes they utilized, and their ideological positioning within Hollywood commercial cinema. Leftist cinema was heavily influenced by the literary genre of radical/proletarian fiction and relied on the latter’s narrative tropes, characterizations, conventions, iconographies and the “leftist mythos” that guided it.

The more radical leftists, such as John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz and

Samuel Ornitz, strived for a “popular Marxism” in cinema, and sought to utilize the cinematic apparatus as both a pedagogical and a propagandistic apparatus in the service of communist/Marxist ideology. In addition to being subject to the same social, political, cultural and historical forces that writers working directly under

CPUSA sponsorship experienced, they had to contend with the politics of their producers and managers, the ideology of the studio they worked for, the machinations of the unions and guilds they belonged to, the studio’s self-censorship 66

apparatus, the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, and (after 1934) the heavy- handed script examination and evaluation by the Production Code Administration.

While Hollywood Marxists and communists hoped to use cinema for a global

“critical awakening,” the restrictions and restraint put upon them not only by

“Hollywood” but also by the larger culture found their efforts compromised at every level. In general, then, their radical Marxist/communist art was heavily constrained and challenged, and their activist efforts severely contained, by the very arena on which they had placed so much hope for “uplift,” “education” and “emancipation”— the Hollywood studio system. They did seek the dissemination of leftist discourse outside the establishment through quasi-independent productions but this was by and large subject to the politics of distribution and exhibition, the bulk of which was implemented and controlled by the studio system. Independent production, distribution and exhibition was perhaps most successful via documentary filmmaking, exemplified by Nykino and Frontier Films Group, both of which were supported directly (but also indirectly) by the CPUSA.

The following chapters present a detailed examination and analysis of leftist filmmaking in Hollywood in the 1930s—from the establishment of the studio system to the onset of World War II—and traces interconnections between Hollywood

Left’s “Marxist” cinema, proletarian art and the prevalent cultural, political and social conditions.

Red Decade Redux The decade of the Thirties has been painted by critics such as Walter B. Rideout,

Eugene Lyons and Daniel Aaron as one of disenchantment for Marxist and communists writers, artists and intellectuals—particularly for those who worked under the auspices of the CPUSA as members, sympathizers or as “fellow travelers.”

Towards the end of the 1930s, in Rideout’s words, “in anger or sorrow, or sometimes with a sense of relief, the writer quietly slipped away from the Party or noisily took his leave. Some waited to be thrown out for intellectual deviations, refusing at the last moment to yield or to recant.”46 Included in this general migration to a moderate,

“centrist” position were the once impassioned, revered leftist figures of Joseph

Freeman, Granville Hicks, Max Eastman, V. F. Calverton, Malcolm Cowley and

John Dos Passos. Their works, as those of many others, have often been obscured by their “politics of disassociation.” Yet, even separated from their formal ideology, the archive of leftist production in the Thirties has left an enduring legacy.

How should the contributions of the Marxist and communist writers, filmmakers, artists and intellectuals in the Thirties be judged? To what extent did they contribute to the enrichment of American cinema, literature and culture at a crucial moment in its history? And, finally, is the CPUSA deserving of any credit in this effort? These are very complex questions, variations on the topic of the inter-relationships of art, society and politics. I do not intend to suppose any over-riding authority in these

46 Rideout, 288. 68

matters. I do argue, however, that despite the contentions I have discussed above,

American leftist writers, artists, filmmakers and intellectuals succeeded in producing high-caliber creative works. To committed leftists such as Lawson, the political instability and constant productive struggle provided the kind of fertile ground in which to practice their art at the highest level of commitment and integrity. Judged from a leftist viewpoint as it relates to debates in art, literature and cinema in the

“Red Decade,” and the ethos that, in my view, inspired the leftists of the Thirties, I would like to advance the following arguments.

The democratic ethos promulgates the notion that art and artists must be “free” from the constraints of politics—particularly censorship—in order to express themselves most fully and deeply, and to connect with audiences in the most meaningful way. Communism, popularly imagined in America as a doctrinaire belief, would seem to be antithetical to such requirements. The discussions above should provide ample room for thought on the “creative differences” between Party officials—who tended to equate art with propaganda for immediate ends—and the creative personalities who argued and fought for nuanced and a dramatically interesting blending of ideology, content and style. To be sure, even the anticommunist leftists promulgated the notion that Communism, like Fascism, was anathema to art and that it reduced creative artists to political “stool pigeons.”

From the committed writers, artists and intellectuals’ Marxist viewpoint, however, it is Capitalism that reduces art to the status of a commodity and places an 69

exchange value on it based on profit as the “bottom line.” Art, in this view, is reduced to aesthetic beggary and caters to the lowest common intellectual denominator. Art is “free” but free to “sell” in “the market,” not to ideologically awaken citizens lulled by the phantasmagorias of capitalistic commercial- commodification.

Walter Benjamin, of course, spoke of the “loss of aura” in art due to its mechanical reproduction but noted that that due to the very possibilities mechanical reproduction allowed, art has the capacity to be “democratic” and to be available to large segments of the population and inspire them. Here the crucial difference between “democracy” and “democratic-capitalism” is important and should be noted.

“Democracy” is the foundational ideology that inspired the creation of the United

States as a prototypical nation where liberty, fraternity, equality and equal opportunity to attain satisfaction and happiness for all races, classes and creeds were guaranteed. On the other hand, “democratic capitalism” is the chosen socio- economic system under which the United States has always operated, one in which— certainly in the estimation of Marxists and communists of the 1930s—the foundational ideals of “democracy,” as emancipatory ideology, are compromised at every level.

In Benjamin’s view, through mechanical reproduction, art becomes a mimetic force in the lives of “the masses,” or to use a more “democratic” term, “the people.”

While it obliterates the spiritual quality of the work (“the sacred in art”) it elevates 70

immediate experience by virtue of technology and makes broad-based access possible. Consequently, it presents challenging new possibilities for “correct” propaganda—the kind that is not predicated on apathetic reception and does not sedate citizens into satiation. On the contrary, it critically informs the citizenry, elicits their political awareness and enthusiastic activism in service of humanistic ideals.

Contrariwise, Benjamin also voiced concerns that art, reduced to mechanical reproduction and circulated in society, could become a tool of Fascism. Benjamin is ever aware of such “wrong” uses of mechanical reproduction and the “incorrect” propaganda it can be utilized for. He foregrounds the idea of correct propaganda— without ever calling it so—in the sense of art’s educative, socially progressive function, for, undoubtedly, its dark side is fascism.

Fascism aestheticizes politics, whereas Communism politicizes aesthetics.

Fascism “seduces” the populace into consent by elevating politics to the spectacular, whereas Communism “critically awakens” citizens by utilizing aesthetic styles embedded in dialectics. Therefore, in keeping with the enlightened vision of

Marxism, Benjamin urged practitioners of new technological arts (such as cinema) to become “teachers” for “the people” in addition to being intellectuals, writers and artists in the best progressive sense of the term. Asserted Benjamin,

It is also necessary for the writer to have a teacher’s attitude. And today this is more than ever an essential demand. A writer who does not teach other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point, therefore, is that a writer’s production must have the 71

character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their production and, secondly, it must be able to place an improved apparatus at their disposal. 47

Thus, for leftists it was doubly imperative under the prevalent social, political and cultural conditions, both nationally and globally, that art be aligned with humanism, with enlightenment ideals, and with progressive politics. In the view of the more radical leftists, this interlinking had to extend to communist ideology, which, in their minds, stood for the most elevated form of social, political, economic and cultural organization of human society.

For “true” Marxist writers and artists, art is education, art is politics. Art emerges from the very conditions and experiences of life, and through an ever-vigilant class

(and by extension, race, gender and ethnic) consciousness. Art emerges from a constant struggle with the dialectical forces that rule society. A committed artist is one who “rides the waves” of these conflicts and creates “true” art that expresses the

“real” and not the fantasies proffered by capitalism. Art, then, implicitly or explicitly, is ideology. Art, at its core, must be motivated by, and propagate, this ideology, enlightening and educating all who receive it. This was the visionary dream leftists aspired to, even if its realization brought them into often irreconcilable differences with their CPUSA advisors and sponsors. This “strategic essentialism” also drove Hollywood leftists just as much as it did leftist writers, artists and intellectuals of Thirties America. This is, at root, what they struggled for—whether

47 Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 794-818.

as “Marxists or “Communists” or “fellow travelers”—and what they were blacklisted and exiled for during the cold war era.

What I hope the arguments and discussions of this and the following chapters will demonstrate is that leftists did make a significant contribution to the art and culture of the United States. Whether working under CPUSA support and sponsorship (as in the production of proletarian literature, agit-prop journalism,

Marxist theatre and radical documentaries), or engaged in individual auteurist efforts at odds with the Party (as in the case of John Dos Passos), or creatively pushing the stylistic, narrative and representational boundaries of cinema as part of a larger liberal-left filmmaking community in the Hollywood studio system, leftists engaged with the critical issues and debates of the era and produced innovative works that have withstood the test of time.

Many radical leftists, such as Albert Maltz, John Howard Lawson, Paul Robeson,

Richard Wright et al were selfless in their dedication to their ideal and in their struggle for a more open, tolerant and just society. They were commitment to the social and political transformation of American society, to demonstrate Marxism as a

“living theory” and to use its methods for “critically awakening” their audiences to the complexities both of history and of contemporary life. The cultural productions of the communists/Marxists/leftists legitimated socially-conscious art, supported a

“laboring” audience and provided sites for cultural articulations that normally would 73

have been either ignored or squelched in mainstream channels (such as issues of racism and labor feminism).

The Party’s closer alignment with the “centrist” Popular Front was perhaps a necessary and astute maneuver in the shifting and unstable political climate and, as

Rideout acknowledges, “It brought Communism, if not Marxism, as closely into the mainstream of American development as Socialism had been brought in the years just before the World War I.” 48 This alignment provided impetus for social, political and economic reform to laborist America even if attacks from the right continued to endanger progressivism. Rideout sees this moment in the late 1930s as the critical point at which radical fiction, embedded in Marxist thought, vanished. I argue that it is more fruitful to see radicalism and radical productions as being malleable, as

“productive responses” to the times and conditions, and to trace their transformations through periods of social, cultural and political upheavals. Following American leftist politics, leftist cultural productions became “reformist,” “progressive,” and

“democratic,” and shifted away from radicalism and revolutionary expressions.

Radical critique was now aimed primarily at Nazism/fascism.

With the Thirties coming to an end with major crises—Nazism parading through

Europe, Fascism in full-swing in Italy, Japan implementing military moves in the

Pacific, the “loss” of Spain to the Fascists, and, perhaps the worst ideological insult of all to leftists, the formation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939—Marxist and

48 Rideout, 248-249. 74

communist in the United States became increasingly fragmented on virtually every issue. Inevitably, the CPUSA itself became hot-bed of factionalism between radical leftists, moderate “Marxists” and “democratic” Communists. Earl Browder,

CPUSA’s reformist leader was under attack by hard-line communists for his

“revisionist” democratic-communism. By 1940, he was very unpopular, maintaining his leadership by a narrow margin. Also in 1940 he was arrested by the FBI on charges of “passport irregularities” and imprisoned.

Mass defections from CPUSA became the rule after Pearl Harbor, although the alliance of the Soviet Union with the United States against Nazi Germany did maintain a fragile truce between U.S. communists and the government during the war years. Browder was released from prison after serving only fourteen months of his four-year-term. He embraced the Popular Front even more deeply and led the

CPUSA’s enthusiastic support for FDR. By this time, however, many former radical leftists had shifted political ground and embraced some form of “centrist” ideological position, many had distanced themselves from leftist politics entirely and a number had become visibly “patriotic” in the most obviously nationalistic sense. The shifting radicals publicly and, and often noisily, dissociated themselves from their leftist/Marxist/communist past.

It cannot be denied, however, that before the crises of the late 1930s claimed the best leftist talents and their loyalties, for radicals like Mike Gold, Marxism as ideology and philosophy, and the CPUSA as a supportive “parental” organization, 75

helped define American identity in the 1930s. It helped writers, artists, filmmakers and intellectuals formulate their concerns, hopes and their cultural angst, and channeled them into memorable works that added significantly to the archive of

American cultural productions, socio-political activism and societal reforms.

Marxism, in this view, stabilized and restored the American democratic tradition. For radicals of Gold’s persuasion, it was clear that,

Marxism is the heir to all the democratic traditions of mankind, and was intended to arm the people with modern weapons against the new and terrible weapons of modern finance capitalism. If it was able to influence American writers so widely during the depression, this can only mean that Marxism was really able to help...And the fact that there was present a living core of Marxist thought in America, ready to shape the thought of the intellectuals, is due to the presence of a mature and firm Communist movement...the legitimate child of American parents and grandparents such as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Jack London and Walt Whitman.49

The CPUSA’s role both as an organization supporting a laborist culture and as an artistic sponsor that financed and sustained artistic expressions became increasingly untenable in the political quicksand of the late 1930s. Leftist writers, artists and intellectuals who had enjoyed sponsorship and support while moving in the party’s orbit became increasingly alienated from the CPUSA. Undeniably many leftist writers abandoned the League of American Writers, the Communist Party and a host of liberal and left organizations, and many leftist cineastes sought alliance with mainstream Hollywood and its patriotic agendas. However, it is also true that many

49 Mike Gold’s speech to the Fourth Congress of American Writers entitled “The Second American Renaissance,” in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Mike Folsom (NY: International Publishers, 1972), 249.

stayed committed to the CPUSA, either as members or as “fellow travelers.” Their continued work shows clear evidence that even if communism as radical ideology went sub-surface in American culture, the hopes, dreams and revolutionary spirit fostered by it persisted stronger than ever, and continued to inform the art and activism of the Hollywood Left in decades to follow.

In the Thirties, American leftist writers, filmmakers, artists and intellectuals wrote novels, made films, created poems, plays, criticism, manifestos and journalistic reports that dealt powerfully with the most urgent social, political and cultural issues of the times. The Party provided an established conduit through which revolutionary ideology, and radical cultural productions, was piped through to the greater culture. It initially consisted of party organs such as the John Reed Clubs,

The New Masses and The Daily Worker but expanded to include leftist journals, labor magazines, the liberal-left press, “independent” documentary units and enclaves within the Hollywood studio system. Marxist ideology allowed the

American leftist intellectual, artist and writer to exhibit ideological solidarity with the proletariat and its hopes for a society that strove to create a new infrastructure against the dictates of capitalist Fordism, Taylorism, bonded labor and the boom-bust economic cycles they engendered. It also enabled the writer and artist to join “the people” in its hopes for a classless and enlightened industrial society of the future.

If these leftist visionaries started the decade with idealistic hopes and dreams and ended the decade in anger, sorrow and disenchantment, it was not because they 77

found themselves lacking, or solely because the Communist Party could not provide the creative nourishment to keep them interested. Their disillusion and disenchantment were due to the dissonance between their idealism and the realities of a politically divided, war-torn world.

Ultimately, it is narrow-minded to think of their efforts as “failures” for they responded productively to the challenges of the times with unwavering energy and fervor. They are to be emulated and admired for their dedication to their art and activism, and for their indomitable revolutionary spirit. It is, perhaps, rather more appropriate to lay the blame for their disappointments on a hostile culture that could no longer sustain their fondest dreams for an “America” of their imaginations.

CHAPTER THREE

A “MARXIST” CINEMA IN HOLLYWOOD?

LEFTIST CINEMATIC CRITIQUE IN ITS SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The struggle against the corrupting influence of the commercial film must be combined with the struggle for an independent motion picture art, genuinely free from Wall Street control. 50

--John Howard Lawson, blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten

[These artists] faced up to the very real economic, social, and political problems of their times—the growth of corporate industry, the centralization of finance, the tremendous rate of urbanization, the changing status of women, the flood of immigration, the development of the city boss and the nationwide pressure group, the domination of government by business, the struggles of the middle class to be politically effective, of labor to organize, of radicalism to create a power base in American society…On the whole [they] attempted to see these problems honestly, not through the eyes of the many whose needs and desires the socioeconomic system did partially or wholly satisfy, but through the eyes of the many more on whose failure the success and well-being of the others rested. 51

--Walter B. Rideout, cultural critic

Introduction In this chapter I critically examine 1930s Capraesque populist cinema and argue that it provided Hollywood leftists with a cinematic yardstick to compare and contrast with their “Marxist” efforts. I discuss how the social problem film, which amalgamated social, political and cultural critique within its generic elements, was

50 John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas, (NY: Masses and Mainstream Publications, 1953), 91.

51 Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900-1954: Some Inter-Relations of Literature and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 86. 79

utilized to great instructive effect by the Hollywood Left to create a “leftist populism.” I also examine the inter-relationship between leftist cinema and several significant social, political and cultural conditions: the remarkable changes taking places within American culture in terms of race, class, gender and ideology; leftist views on capitalism, U. S. militarism and colonialism; the growth of “Marxist” cinema as a response to the Great Depression; and, the rise of fascism and Nazism.

In terms of discursive and artistic influences I trace the inter-connections between leftist “Marxist” cinema and radical/proletarian fiction and other prevalent discourses, such as African-American racial discourse. I also engage with black radical debates—such as those foregrounded by W. E. B Du Bois—on the issue of the relevance of Marxism for African-Americans under capitalism, and how

Hollywood screen representation could be made more progressive. Leftist films, too, were challenged by black radicals, who, together with their white ideological cohorts, pushed for a truly racially, politically and culturally progressive Hollywood cinema.

Leftist-populist cinema As I mentioned in the previous chapter, in response to the prevalent political and cultural conditions, leftists working in the Hollywood studio system, just like their comrades in literature, journalism, theatre and various laborist arenas, struggled to use cinema to address vital issues of the day. They did their best to bring their socially-critical sensibility and political ideology to create a “popular Marxism” within Hollywood cinema and a “leftist populism” within American culture. Their 80

efforts gave shape and meaning to an energetic counter-hegemonic cinematic discourse embedded in popular narratives and Hollywood genres.

Leftist films provided American cinema with an engaging artistic form and hybridized generic formulation in the shape of the social-problem film, in which popular ideas and concepts relating to law, justice, the democratic-capitalistic system, fascism, issues of private property, crime, delinquency, racism, sexism, unionism, human rights, and a gamut of other “concerns” were examined and critiqued. However, working within the studio system, leftists found their activism challenged and contained by the censorship guilds, the studio system’s need to generate profits, political lobby groups within the motion-picture industry and their own (often) unstable position as filmmakers. The revolutionary fervor and radicalism of the early years of the Thirties was tempered as the decade wore on, as

Nazism/Fascism presented ideological threats to democracy, and as the World War loomed large. Towards the end of the 1930s Hollywood leftists, like their compatriots in other arenas of cultural productions, looked increasingly to popular

“democratic” rather than “radical” forms in order to carry on their activism, particularly in their anti-Nazism/antifascism.

While most leftist films were enfolded in depressive scenarios and followed a dark bildungsroman—creating what I refer to below as the foundational texts of

American film noir—cinematic populism, with its upbeat, fairy-tale formulations, exemplified by the populist works of Frank Capra, provided an aesthetic, ideological 81

and popular appeal that Hollywood leftists aspired to, which they tried to emulate for the purpose of creating a vibrant “socially-critical” presence within Hollywood, and which they hoped to use in the service of their activism.52 While it is true that Capra was not a “leftist” but more of a “liberal centrist,” he was the de facto auteur of

1930s populist cinema. It was, indeed, Frank Capra who helped mobilize a mainstream audience for the genre.

The Cinematic Populism of Frank Capra (1897-1991) I would sing the songs of the working stiffs, of the short-changed Joes, the born poor, the afflicted. I would gamble with the long-shot players who light candles in the wind, and resent with the pushed around because of race or birth. Above all, I would fight for their causes on the screens of the world. 53

–Frank Capra

As I have demonstrated in my discussions in Chapter 1, there was an alignment in the 1930s between liberals, centrists, populists, communists, Marxists, socialists and

“progressives” from the mainstream under the Popular Front banner. Capra, in fact, worked harmoniously with a variety of leftists during this period under Hollywood’s politically pluralist environment. Capra worked under the pro-democratic paradigm that praised the inherent correctness of the American system. His cinematic discourse was aimed at keeping the system grounded in its foundational, perhaps idealistic, roots. Capra’s appeal to Hollywood Leftists lay, I would argue, in his garnering Academy Awards, having agency within the industry, power and prestige

52 For a good discussion on this issue, see Paul Buhle and David Wagner, A Most Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

53 Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title (NY: The Macmillan Co., 1971), 240.

in Hollywood and in creating an entertaining, non-doctrinaire cinema that would increase audiences’ political awareness of the corruptions of state power and monopoly capitalism, and encourage their activism in the service of “democracy.”

Hollywood Leftists, such as Abraham Polonsky, looked upon Capra with some degree of admiration.

Hollywood Leftists sought to work in conjunction with Capraesque cinema in critiquing “big” capitalism, native fascism and the effects of corrupt state power at the grass-roots level. They sought to re-formulate the Capraesque genre for their

“dark critique” in order to instill a “leftist populism” in the citizenry. In my estimation, Hollywood leftists were guided by their admiration for Capra and his ability to mobilize audience sympathies on issues of social and political concern. The hopes implicitly directing leftist cinema were: If only “Marxist cinema” could match

“Populist cinema,” and leftists match Capra’s stature within the studio system and his appeal in the larger American culture; if only Capra’s formula could be envisioned and revisioned by the Hollywood Left in terms of amalgamating Marxism with popular genres and commercial success. In order to better appreciate what the populist (and very popular) Capra represented to the leftists working within the

Hollywood system, it is instructive to examine, even if briefly, this populist auteur of the 1930s and his very successful films of the period. 83

Capra’s cinema is the embodiment of the ideal of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of

Happiness within the promise of the American Dream.54 In the Populism honored by

Capra, money was not to be despised in and for itself. On the contrary, it was in its role as the agent of big business, a corrupt and meddlesome government, and an unproductive leisure class that basked in privilege and influence for its own self- indulgence that made money evil.

In the 1930s this simple, idealistic and optimistic viewpoint appeared congenial.

It helped audiences survive the Great Depression of 1929-33. To the national degradation caused by the unprecedented downturn, Capra’s sentimental, romantic, idealistic humanism provided a strong antidote, at least in cinematic space. The view also survived the continual political maneuvers in Washington that eventually led to

The New Deal (implemented in 1933 onwards). The reason for its endurance in the popular imagination was that it upheld the idealistic roots of (pop) Americanism as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Capra’s populism was, in essence, a stance of defense—of individualism against the forces of organization, of Christian humanism against the forces of moral corruption, of community against the greedy “Big Capitalists.” In essence, Capra’s critique was aimed at America’s revered social and political institutions and on

54 My research on Capra was considerably enhanced by the Frank Capra Film Festival held at The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, in January, 2003. The festival was organized by Profs. Robert Rosenstone and Catherine Jurca of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. Capra, in fact, graduated from Caltech in 1918 with a degree in Chemical Engineering. Throughout his life, he credited Caltech with providing him—the Italian-immigrant boy—the defining educational experience that helped him achieve the “rags to riches” American Dream. 84

established offices of authority. These, charged with the mission of steering America according to an enlightened and just vision, are shown to be wavering precariously between corrupt capitalism and mass-minded fascism engineered by self-interested politicos.

Capra’s films idealize the self-made individual who, by dint of hard work, talent, honesty and thrift is able to rise, like an underwater buoy to the ocean’s surface, from the unfavorable and antagonistic circumstances in which he finds himself into success and the respectful admiration of the community. This (often) heroic journey of self-fulfillment happens by virtue of the American free enterprise system. Anyone, of whatever race, class or ethnic background, is welcomed into the great “melting pot,” and, aided by the “fundamentally sound” American capitalism, is capable of success (moderated, of course, by human virtues such as good neighborliness and goodwill). The great populist struggle was in making sure that the system continuously provided this “equality of opportunity.”

Where Capra is to be faulted is in his ambivalence towards a committed race and class politics, an issue that the Hollywood Left embraced and tackled head-on in their cinematic discourse, even if subject to the censorship regulations of the studio system. Capra’s definition of the “common man” is more-or-less exclusively limited to “white,” and his ethnic-racial representation barely extended beyond what constituted the Euro-American mainstream. It should be recognized that the dream of

“equality” was an ideal of the “Lincoln Republic.” Populist cinema, at which Frank 85

Capra excelled as no other, advanced the notion of these Lincoln ideals in principle even while it managed to dodge critical issues with regards to racial, class, ethnic and gender enfranchisement. The social force behind the popular front and populist cinema was, as George Lipsitz reiterates, “a masculinist vision that glossed over feminist possibilities for realizing social change.”55 I argue that Capra’s exclusion of racial, ethnic and gender discourse was rather more on the side of caution than neglect. His status as auteur, his prestige and his box-office success lay in his appeal primarily to liberal white proletarian audiences. A committed engagement with racial/ethnic discourse in the 1930s was not without its dangers, subject as it was to red-baiting and both political and commercial censure of films.

In terms of representational politics, Capra’s brand of populism is hardly pluralistic; none of his films even remotely address the darker racial underside of

America. Instead, he elevates a kind of “fairy tale America” of liberal and patriotic white citizens where the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the ideal of tolerance for all races, classes and religions are shown to be a palpable reality—one, however, that is compromised, perhaps even in a state of moral decadence. The implementation of reform is encouraged by a pious belief in

Christianity and a benign form of capitalism with individual effort, initiative and intelligence to ensure success. Capra’s ideal America peopled by model citizens

55 George Lipsitz, “Sent For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today: Who Needs the Thirties?” in George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 86

following humble dreams and noble ideals is, perhaps, ultimately a vision that could only exist on the screen. As John Cassavettes is noted to have said, “Perhaps there really was no America, perhaps there was only Frank Capra.”

Capra’s rise as populist-cinematic articulator was tied to the great crises of the

1930s, namely the Great Depression, Hitlerism/Nazism, the threat of Fascism at home and abroad, the rise of Communism and its influence on American intellectuals and artists, and a reinvigorated American democratic-nationalism in the face of these

“threats.” Capra is not simply a “system propagandist” but one whose ultimate loyalty belongs to the “good” people that have defined the ideals of American society. He puts “the man before the dollar” just as he puts the individual before the organization. The Capra quartet of films from the period, comprising American

Madness (1932), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take it With You

(1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), illustrate these themes and concerns.

American Madness, produced, in 1932, is regarded as one of the most committed films of the Depression years. Its message was clear: with optimism and faith in the system, American society will pull out of the slump. According to Capra, the film’s theory was that “money is something you can’t eat, wear or plant, but you can put it to work. And the harder the times, the harder it must work.”56

56 Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title (NY: The Macmillan Co., 1971), 137. 87

In American Madness, bank president Thomas Dickson, played by Walter

Huston, convinces his ultraconservative board to make loans to small businessmen on the basis of their character rather than firm collaterals. However, when the bank is robbed by an indebted cashier, the idea fails. Rumors exaggerate the amount of loss from $100,000 to $5,000,000, and a run on the bank follows. It is saved only when the businessmen in whom the president had put his trust rush to the mobbed bank and deposit their available cash. The implication of a joint community-based effort to save the system is clear—if “ordinary businessmen” supporting local banks lend their support, the system as a whole would somehow pull through. In terms of popular, mythical symbols, “ordinary businessmen” represent the economic

“workers” of the system while the bank functions as the economic unit of capitalism that enables the day-to-day functioning of the business cycle.

The fact that rumor plays such an important role in breaking the system down also appears to downplay the economic hysteria ruling the Depression-besieged nation.

The film, then, is an allegory for the essential goodness and soundness of the democratic system, albeit one that seems dangerously susceptible to “the people’s” actions and reactions (and thus in need of self-control and regulation by the citizens rather than the state). Capra, with quintessential folksy wisdom, seemed to be declaring, “It ain’t such a big deal folks, people are just scared. Hang in there and have faith.” 88

The populist hero of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Longfellow Deeds, played by Gary Cooper, asserts that in society there will always be leaders and followers, and it is up to the leaders to give the followers a hand, foregrounding the populist ideal of “good neighborliness.” Opposing him in a moving scene is the lawyer John

Cedar, who speaks with the voice of the New Deal. He says that government should control everything, as private schemes are likely to end up in revolutions. In this instance, Capra exhibits a critical stance towards New Deal policies that could, potentially, result in state power and control undermining the individual efforts of small businessmen.

Deeds obviously personifies the successful individual entrepreneur working outside organized capitalism: he earns a living from composing Christmas rhymes and owns a tallow works. He is personally and financially comfortable, with no reason for the relentless pursuit of money. Even inheriting $20 million from a dead relative does not corrupt him and his down-to-earth ideals; in fact, it enables him to do charitable works and help farmers willing to improve their lot by self-help. He sets up a foundation for this purpose, a move that propels him to “insanity” hearings initiated by his lawyer. The judge, however, declares Deeds to be one of the sanest men alive. Deeds walks out of the courtroom triumphantly, no doubt to continue his role as country-bumpkin turned Santa Claus for the nation’s suffering good and noble citizens. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was nominated for four Academy Awards, and won Frank Capra his second Oscar (out of three in his career) as Best Director. 89

Deeds also won the coveted Best Film of 1937 title awarded by the New York Film

Critics Circle.

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Jimmy Stewart plays the protagonist

Jefferson Smith, an unmistakable allusion to one of the nation’s founding fathers.

Smith is an honest, upright, small-town American individualist, complete with homespun philosophy and folksy wisdom. Naturally enough, he is the leader of the state’s Boy Rangers group. The film opens with the death of Senator Samuel Foley in an automobile accident and the resulting press, media and political back-room clamor. Senator Joseph Paine, the state’s senior senator, played by Claude Rains, puts in a call to Governor Hubert “Happy” Hopper reporting the news. Hopper then calls powerful media magnate Jim Taylor, who controls the state politics. Thus,

Capra establishes the link between politicians and the press skillfully, and exposes the infrastructure of the established coterie of the “old boys” in Washington and their friends in the states, against whom Jefferson Smith, the symbol of the un-spoilt

“common man” of decency and forthright values, will and must clash.

Such depictions of corrupt politicians and their control and manipulations of public offices are also echoed in leftist films of the period, such as Fury (1936) and

They Won’t Forget (1937), indicating, once again, the consonance between concerns addressed by both populist and leftist cinemas and the ways in which they mobilized audiences against conservative forces. Since the “big boys” and their cronies are involved in whisking deals under the nose of the law, they must look for a man who 90

“can’t ask any questions or talk out of turn.” After a wide-ranging search, Smith is selected, primarily because he is an innocent who idolizes Jefferson and Lincoln.

In Washington, Smith’s country-bred idealism is perceived as the buffoonery of a simpleton, and he is humiliated by the press, whereupon Smith decides to resign.

This, of course, threatens to upset the plans of Senator Paine et al; consequently, the latter persuades him to stay and work on a bill for a national boys camp. Clarissa

Saunders, played by Jean Arthur, is a politically-savvy and experienced Washington secretary who is assigned to appease Smith and to guide and mold him according to the dictates of the vested interests. Smith prepares to introduce his boys camp bill to the Senate. Unfortunately for Smith, the site coincides with the location of a proposed dam at Willets Creek. The dam is a pet project of Senators Taylor and

Paine, and has been set up for graft. They force Smith to drop his camp idea. Smith realizes the corruption underfoot and attempts to expose the “big people” involved, including Paine. However, the latter publicly accuses Smith of stealing money from the boy rangers—in other words, Smith, too, is shown to be “in the graft.”

Defeated, Smith is ready to depart Washington, but Saunders, swayed by Smith’s idealism, pleads with him to stay and fight. Pumped full of optimism, he returns to the Senate chambers and, while Taylor musters the forces to destroy him, engages the members in a non-stop filibuster. “I’ve got a few things I want to say to this body. I tried to say them once before and I got stopped colder than a mackerel. Well, 91

I’d like to get them said this time, sir. And as a matter of fact, I’m not gonna leave this body until I do get them said,” announces Smith.

The film ends with Paine confessing to his underhanded maneuvers and attempting to shoot himself. The cynical governing body in Washington is roused from its corrupt slumber and re-energized with the passion of upholding the ideals of

America, as laid down by the great forefathers. Thus, Smith’s “Capracorn” idealism triumphs in “fallen” Washington, D.C. Appropriate to Hollywood melodrama, Smith and the femme bon Saunders unite in conjugal and ideological bliss at the end of the film. The film was nominated for a resounding twelve Academy Awards, but won only one—for Best Original Story. However, it once again captured the Best Picture and Best Film awards for Frank Capra by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Capra may have been more geared to commercial success than Hollywood leftists, but it is undeniable that during the decade of the 1930s and the early 1940, he was the most consistent socially-conscious Hollywood “liberal” filmmaker. His ideological position was clearly “centrist,” “progressive” and unabashedly pro- democratic and nationalist. Arguably, however, Capra’s films are implicitly pro- capitalist and his populism tends towards a (liberal) “capitalist populism.” His personal politics also tended toward a “liberal Republicanism” and he could hardly be positioned of as a leftist sympathizer. However, in the 1930s, his cinematic populism was in general alignment with the FDR administration and the politically- pluralist popular front, which, as I have already pointed out, was a remarkable 92

amalgamation of Marxists, communists, liberals, noncommunist leftists and democrats under a common “Americanist” platform.

During this progressive era of cultural renaissance Capra worked closely with many Marxists and communists in creative collaboration. In fact, in his heyday,

Capra was rumored to be “working with half the Commies in Hollywood,” as actor

Ian Hunter has asserted. Perhaps the most interesting and fruitful of his collaboration was with Robert Riskin, a “Hollywood Red” who wrote the screenplays for Capra’s

The Miracle Woman (1931), Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932),

Lady for a Day (1933), It Happened One Night (1934) (which won Riskin an Oscar),

Broadway Bill (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937) and

You Can’t Take It With You (1938). The partnership ended with the failure of their joint venture, Liberty Films, and the critically-acclaimed but financially-disastrous

Meet John Doe (released in1941).

With the collapse of Liberty Films, Capra and Riskin parted creative company, perhaps for complex reasons. Riskin did harbor directorial ambitions and was also unhappy with Capra collecting all the credit and glory in Hollywood for their collaborative projects. These “creative differences,” while strong enough to put a wedge between them and their careers, further exacerbated their relationship with rising anticommunism within the studio system, and redbaiting and anti-Semitism 93

rising proportionately in the larger culture.57 Riskin eventually ended up on the blacklist in the 1950s, suffered ill-health and loss of career before his death from cardiac problems and accompanying neurological illness. Capra’s career underwent a temporary upsurge in the postwar period with the success of Arsenic and Old Lace

(1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and State of the Union (1948) but, by and large,

Capra’s Hollywood career was over by the early 1950s.

The Hollywood Left and the social problem film As I have stated, Capra consistently avoided the most contentious issues of the day that Hollywood leftists struggled to deal with in popular genre films. While they found his “ambivalent” politics un-inspiring, they did admire him for the populist

“magic formula” that enabled him to influence America’s movie-going public while also garnering critical acclaim, Academy nominations and awards, commercial success, studio system power and prestige, and agency in creating auteurist works.

Like Capra and the populists, Hollywood leftists hoped to create a popular “Marxist” cinema—sans Capraesque sentimentality—in the service of their ideals and their activism, and strived to amalgamate Marxist ideology with popular entertainment cinema. For this they looked to successful Hollywood directors like John Ford,

Busby Berkeley, Howard Hawks and George Cukor, in addition to Frank Capra, who were noted for producing entertaining and excitingly stylized narratives with a

“message.” The more leftist films shared with Capra a critique of corrupt state

57 For a good discussion on the volatile relationship between Capra and Riskin see, Ian Scott, In Capra’s Shadow: the Life and Career of screenwriter Robert Riskin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 94

power, “big” capitalism, nativism and fascism. Whereas Capra focused on elected officials, leftist films focused on an unjust criminal justice system and abusive police. At the same time, whereas Capra put his political faith in “the people,” leftist films diagnosed the dangers of popular fascism in the U.S. and implicitly linked it to the dangers of fascism in other parts of the world.

Populist cinema therefore provides a historical, cultural, ideological and formal basis for comparison with the work of Hollywood leftists including, for example, screenwriters Abraham Polonsky, Lillian Hellman, Albert Maltz, Robert Rossen,

Herbert Biberman, Paul Jarrico and John Howard Lawson. These writers worked with liberal and left-leaning directors such as William Wellman, Mervyn Le Roy,

Lewis Seiler, Anatole Litvak, Fritz Lang, Lewis Milestone et al. Particularly under the patronage of Jack and Harry Warner at Warner Bros. studios, leftist social problem films challenged prevailing representations, generic codifications and social, political and cultural beliefs based on race, class, gender and ideology, by enfolding their critique in popular genres that “mainstream” Hollywood directors like Capra, Cukor, Ford and Hawks excelled in. The leading acting talents at the center of these left-authored social-problem films were also liberal-left, if not

Marxists and perhaps even “fellow traveling” communists, such as John Garfield,

Paul Muni, Henry Fonda, Claude Rains, Sylvia Sydney and Spencer Tracy, among others. 95

Leftist cinematic discourse on race, class, ethnicity and gender in its cultural context America, as a melting-pot nation, has always laid claim to its un-complicated absorption of the various races, classes and creeds of people who have come here in search of the American Dream. However, in early twentieth-century United States, the stratification and ghettoization of “ethnics” in urban centers such as New York,

Chicago and Los Angeles testified (as it still does today) to exclusion of those deemed “outsiders” by mainstream white culture. In this separation, “class” as much as “race” has been the governing measure. Michael Denning, in The Cultural Front, has argued that in 1930s there were vital links between politics and culture, between the distinct ethnic consciousness and identities of its communities and a radical vision, between an ethnic/racial group’s emerging sense of being “American” and their perceptions of the larger international dimensions of their roles.

Distinct cultures and ethnicities of an international scope thereby melded into a uniquely working-class American consciousness during the Red Decade. In other words, the decade of the 1930s was a period of inclusion for those deemed to be

“minorities,” rather than exclusion, in the larger cultural field. One could count oneself as being an “insider” at many levels: ethnically and racially within one’s group, as an American, as a political participant or activist, and as an “international citizen.” The vibrant meshing of cultures and their politics of this popular front decade, then, allowed for creative heteroglossia and cultural and ethnic heterogeneity while, on the communal and national scale, it allowed for a unique American identity 96

and national homogeneity. 58 George Lipsitz, in fact, traces the inception of the academic fields of American studies and ethnic studies to this decade of efflorescence, stating that “the social movements of the 1930s were both an inspirational stimulus and an empirical site for the construction of the field…there can be no valid opposition between ethnic studies and American studies.” 59 In my opinion, Denning underscores the fact that the process of assimilation, the passage of the “ethnic” from the “outside” to the “inside” of the American perimeter engendered the unique expressions of laborist America of the Thirties, one that cannot be denied in the formation of national identity.

Although firmly conscious of melting pot America as a haven for a vast multitude of ethnicities and nationalities, Hollywood leftist were also keenly aware of the danger of Americanism, such as represented by populist “capracorn,” being extended to racial, ethnic and gender issues. One major concern was that by creating an amalgamated, “imagined nation” in which the disenfranchised race/class/ethnicity/gender enclaves were given “democratic space,” if only in popular discourse, that both the discourse and the subject of the discourse—the disenfranchised—could be co-opted for nationalist purposes. Leftist filmmakers knew of this pitfall of defining radical critique in terms of the “superiority” of

58 For a detailed discussion, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (NY: Verso, 1996).

59 George Lipsitz, “Sent For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today: Who Needs the Thirties?” in George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

American democracy, even if such positioning was vital to their anticapitalist and antifascist projects. Films elevating Americanism, without a critical positioning of democracy with regard to race, class, ethnicity and gender, suffered from the danger of inadvertently playing into conservative hands.

In this context, it is instructive to note Stuart Hall’s brilliant essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in which he demonstrates the manner in which Margaret Thatcher’s regime in Britain was able to mobilize a largely diverse and stratified population under the paradigm of “Englishness” by appealing to the great “national traditions.” Central to her appeal to the white native- born British enclaves was a construction of the immigrant and the foreigner as being antithetical to the traditions, and the prosperity, of Great Britain. Under this program,

Black Britons and Asians were subjected to xenophobia. By claiming to recreate the glory of the fallen but nevertheless great British Empire, Thatcher succeeded in creating an authoritative populism that was both implicitly and explicitly racist and imperialist. Hall demonstrates that because of the close historical relationship between British notions of democracy and populism, an antidemocratic, conservative, rightwing and reactionary government was created and sustained. Halls warns that, “Thatcherism, as a discursive formation, has remained a plurality of discourses—about the family, the economy, national identity, morality, crime, law, women, human nature. But precisely a certain unity has been constituted out of this diversity…this constituted regime of truth has been secured to certain political 98

positions.” 60 Halls cautions leftists in naively redirecting idealist discourses in progressive directions without a firm understanding of the consequences and the complexities involved. Clearly, Halls’ warnings have particular relevance and resonance in the contemporary (post-9/11) environment and the current anti- immigration hysteria sweeping our nation.

Such were the complex reasons why radical leftists like John Howard Lawson and

Albert Maltz tried insistently to maintain a critical edge in their works, particularly in regard to issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, cultural identity, religious beliefs and political orientation. Leftist cinematic discourse on capitalism and fascism and their relationship to institutionalized forms of racism, sexism and anti-laborism was perhaps the most direct form of address to emerge despite the studio system’s checks and controls. Leftist critique on these issues had to be “deeply coded,” and only indirectly suggested because of the prevailing conservatism both within the commercial studio system and the larger culture.

Thus, racial critique was employed as a “critical method,” a “discursive strategy,” if you will, and mobilized for socially-critical aims. With few exceptions, films dealing with racism, xenophobia, ethnic and gender disenfranchisement and so forth were often allegories, using, for example, racial discourse, rather than direct,

“muckraking” critiques of capitalism or fascism. The 1930s leftist social problem

60 Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 53.

films, then, negotiated these conflicting requirements in addition to other factors, such as local, national and international censorship. In consequence, leftist cinematic critique was also heavily coded via generic and stylistic tropes, such as allowed by film noir. It should be noted here that film noir as a cinematic category was not theorized as such until the post-World War II period, most particularly by French critics Borde and Chaumeton.61 However, as I argue in the following section, leftist social problem films, in fact, utilized generic and stylistic tropes that were further refined and fashioned into the “dark” films of the 1940s and 50s subsequently identified as films noir.

Unlike the positive, upbeat, system-sanctioning cinema of Capra, Hollywood leftist chose to articulate their discourse in generally negative, downbeat, system- critical genres giving rise to a noir sensibility in American cinema. For this reason, they generally favored the tragic, melodramatic version of the social problem film, a genre that Capra had inflected toward the comedic, infused with his signature entertainment “capracorn” formula, and with populist ideology. How successful leftist films were in rearticulating “democracy” as fundamental ideology distinct from “Americanism” varied considerably, as my discussions below of leftist films from the period aim to demonstrate.

61 Raymond Borde and Etinee Chaumeton, Panorama du Film Noir Americain, 1941-53 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955). For a good discussion on how these critics categorized and theorized on film noir see Rebecca House Stankowski, “Night of the Soul: American Film Noir,” Studies in Popular Culture, v. 9, no. 1 (1986): 61-83. 100

Due to the tremendous complexity of industrial, political, aesthetic, cultural, and ideological factors involved in the production of individual leftist films, it is well nigh impossible (and perhaps unfruitful) to apply any kind of “litmus test” to measure success or failure on the “leftist scale” to these films. What is far more useful to analyze, both for historical significance and as an object lesson for leftist discourse in the contemporary context, is the manner in which different representational and discursive strategies were used by the Hollywood Left in the social problem film genre to address vital social, political and cultural issues of the day from a “Marxist” viewpoint.

Dark Visions: Leftist cinema as response to cultural and political conditions The American left in the 1930s took a particularly strong “Marxist” view of prevailing global conditions vis-à-vis the role of the United States as the “policeman of the world.” The U.S. left, in general, was disillusioned with the war to “save the world for democracy” (World War I) and with the “perfection” of the capitalist machinery (as demonstrated by its failures during the Great Depression). In the view of radical leftists, America was guiltily embroiled in questionable, if not reprehensible, machinations around the world, despite the high-toned rhetoric of its politicians.

The radical left took the position that it was impossible to use the old foundational paradigms that Capra did so well, to justify the popular philosophic and moral verities that guided American culture. Howard Zinn, writing the “Marxist” A 101

People’s History of the United States, is adamant in his critique of late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. involvements internationally. He states,

[The United States] had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking [Beijing] with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years. 62

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. In virtually every continent the United States had followed an aggressive plan combining militarism, imperialism, capitalism and corporate-commercialism, led by “greedy” capitalists and politicians extending the

American empire under the “Manifest Destiny” paradigm. For example, as Zinn further reports, “By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America.”63

What particularly concerned American leftists was the unwillingness of the

United States government to address rising fascism in Europe, and that trade and

“aid” still flourished with the fascist countries. For Hollywood as well, Germany and

German-controlled markets, constituted a significant share of global revenues. With capitalist empire-building as its prerogative, the United States, in the estimation of

62 Howard Zinn, “A People’s War?” in A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (NY: Harper & Row, 1980).

63 Howard Zinn, “A People’s War?” in A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (NY: Harper & Row, 1980).

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radical leftists, seemed no different from anti-Semitic Germany and Italy and the

“Aryan” supremacist Nazis, judged according to the left’s race, gender and class liberalism: for example, there was very slow progress in the left’s (and the

CPUSA’s) desire to see desegregation in American life, an end to patriarchal sexism, and the adoption of social welfare programs for “the people.” It was also easy for dispirited African-American leftists to see the condition of blacks as being not much different from that of persecuted Jews in Germany. These attitudes hardened as the

United States entered into direct combat with the Axis powers following the

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.64

For the left, the United States had not only ignored its self-appointed role as the

“policeman of the world,” but its international policy seemed geared to aid and abate vested capitalistic interests, more or less solely. Thus, when Italy invaded Ethiopia in its colonialist war, the U.S. forbade arms sale in the interest of “peace” but supplied oil to Italy in great quantities. In Spain in 1936, when the fascists rose up against the liberal government, FDR’s administration engaged in a Neutrality Act which allowed

Germany and Italy to aid Franco. In the Pacific, the United States contended with

64 For a good discussion on black attitudes in the1930s see Robin D. G Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). A good resource on the disenfranchised condition of the African-American, from a historical perspective, is The C L R James Archives. [database on-line]; available from http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/. Wartime black attitudes are discussed in George Lipsitz, Rainbow At Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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Japan for the control of trade routes, colonialist exploitation of the Pacific Islands, and competition for army, air force and naval bases.65

On the domestic front, the left was deeply engaged in labor agitation and unionization. In an effort to improve labor conditions and negotiating power, unionization activities mounted in the 1930s, often under leftist aegis. The American

Federation of Labor (AFL), originally founded in 1868 in Columbus, Ohio, was the largest union grouping in the United States at the time. It represented a pro-capitalist approach to unionization and did not favor challenging the rights of the owning or managing classes. It suppressed labor agitation and tactical politics that supported any radical departure from its “business” alliance with capitalism. There was also an established hierarchy within the AFL between the various skilled and non-skilled professional crafts.

The less technically skilled workers balked at the exclusive unionization of the

AFL and their lowly positions within that organization. They, and their craft unions, were gathered together under the wider umbrella of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO) in 1938 in an effort to keep them organized under more open union rules. The formation of the CIO was led by leftists and communists and it fostered a more aggressive, even militant, attitude among its members on the issue of labor rights, wage scales, benefits and the like. Unlike the AFL, the CIO operated on

65 See the discussions on these events in the context of WW II history in John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: World War II and the Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publications, 1996), and Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993). 104

a cross-race platform and welcomed African-Americans. It was also a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.66

Such grass-roots mobilizations, led by leftists and communists, were aimed at creating mass solidarity among the working-classes in their struggle to better the conditions of life at both the individual and communal levels. Walkouts, sit-down strikes, mass picketing, labor violence, and mass firings became the rule in the work place.67 In response, the government set up the National Labor Relations Board to deal with labor activism (which then tended to open rebellion), and for establishing rapport with the unions in order to implement internal controls. The fight was on for setting minimum wage (won finally in 1938, with the U.S readying itself for war on

Nazism/Fascism), decent housing, education, work hours and schedules, and so forth. Progress on all these issues dragged on at a snail’s pace, while agitational politics and grass-roots activism, encouraged and (often) instigated by CPUSA in association with labor unions, “fellow traveling” political organizations, activist groups and individuals, pushed for reform.68

66 Walter Galenson, The CIO challenge to the AFL: a history of the American labor movement, 1935- 1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

67 In 1936 there were forty-eight sitdown strikes. In 1937 there were 477: electrical workers in St. Louis; shirt workers in Pulaski, Tennessee; broom workers in Pueblo, Colorado; trash collectors in Bridgeport, Connecticut; and even thirty members of a National Guard Company who had not been paid. For further details, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (NY: Harper & Row, 1980).

68 Judith Stepan-Norris, Left out: Reds and America’s industrial unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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The slow progress and calculated delays on these and other inter-related issues were perceived and imaged by the CPUSA and the left in terms of the manipulations of the socio-economic system by the “greedy” capitalists ensnaring the consciousness of the masses in illusions of (commodified) capitalism. As Stuart Hall puts it,

The popular classes…have been ideologically duped by the dominant classes, using what The German Ideology calls their ‘monopoly over the means of mental production.’ The masses, therefore, have been temporarily ensnared, against their real material interests and position in the structure of social relations, to live their relation to their real conditions of material existence through an imposed but ‘false’ structure of illusions. The traditional expectation on the Left, founded on this premise, would therefore be that, as real material factors begin once more to exert their effect, the cobwebs of illusion would be dispelled.69

Hall, however, admonishes that discourse by itself is insufficient to mobilize sentiment for reform, that it must exist in tandem with action; simply to reveal the workings of “hegemony” to “the masses” is hardly a practical solution. Thus, the

Hollywood Left involved itself in progressive struggles on all fronts by combining art and activism—agitating for minority and women’s rights, countering rising anti-

Semitism and red-baiting nationally and internationally, promoting racial equality, and access to opportunities, education and socio-economic mobility for “all

Americans.” Leftist films of the period, as art and as cultural discourse, are an expression, and part and parcel, of this activism.

69 Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 43.

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It was in line with these agendas that the Hollywood Left chose to foreground the

“dark visions” of a “fallen society” by authoring films such as I am a Fugitive from a

Chain Gang, Fury, You Only Live Once, Black Fury and They Won’t Forget that depicted crime, racism, bonded laborism, lynching, exploitation, fascistic (mob) psychology, the disenfranchisement of the poor, the uneducated and the dispossessed.

In these, such aspects of life under capitalism were constructed as features of a system that was subject to the manipulations of propertied elites, corrupt politicos, racist (and socially un-progressive) mentalities, and supporters of the pre-Civil War economic system that condoned forms of neo-slavery and neo-colonialism. The authority figures in these films unleashed social, economic and moral degradations upon American citizens, who were shown to be victims of an unenlightened form of exploitative “democracy,” one dangerously close to nativism and homespun fascism.

Other films, such as Blockade, Four Sons, Juarez and Confessions of a Nazi Spy focused on external threats to democracy, and addressed and critiqued antifascism/anti-Nazism internationally, particularly in Europe and Latin America.

The literary, cinematic and ideological basis of leftist social problem films From the time that commercial sound films came into prominence,70 socially conscious filmmakers often turned to proletarian fiction, agit-prop (Marxist) plays and novels, and muckraking journalism for inspiration, and adapted them into

70 The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first commercial Hollywood sound film that successfully combined dubbed-in and “live” sounds. Its financial success ushered in the “talkie” era in motion-pictures.

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dialogue-driven scenarios. They also excavated reputable literary and theatrical sources that formed the core of the great American literary tradition, represented by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James,

Herman Melville, Harriett Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Jack London,

Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, Jack London, John

Steinbeck, and Edith Wharton.

The Hollywood Left struggled to import prevalent cultural and political debates, challenge representations, suggest positions and formulate responses to the cultural conditions in social problem films. As I have previously mentioned, this activist enthusiasm was contained by studio self-censorship involved in positioning the film so as to minimize politically-motivated attacks and to maximize the film’s popularity. Any socially- and politically-critical film had to negotiate the often conflicting requirements of studio politics and ideology, the censorship apparatus, high artistic merit, a socially-conscious narrative, extension of stereotypical representations, and commercial success.

The leftist films I discuss below are progressive in their intent even if “dark” in their critique. Their ideological position is generally “liberal-leftist.” These films proceed with their critique and “Marxist” analyses of the particular situation under examination. In my opinion, the ideological orientations of the filmmakers—and here I include not only directors but also writers, producers, actors and other above- the-line talent—are reflected in their art, albeit sometimes deeply coded with 108

generic, stylistic, narrative and representational strategies. Given the commercial, entertainment-based ethos of Hollywood cinema, and the political scrutiny its products were subject to, such coding was imperative. The best of the leftist films functioned simultaneously as dramatically exciting, commercially successful narratives and counter-hegemonic critiques. In this sense, the films represent particular leftist articulations and do not necessarily conform to the idea of the director as sole auteur—a concept that was antithetical to the “collective”

Marxist/communist credo of the coalition of creative leftist talents involved in the production of any given social problem film.

It is, then, perhaps more fruitful to theorize the Hollywood Left as “collective” auteur. In other words, individual films should not be seen simply as the artistic expression of an individual director or writer, but should be viewed as a “leftist expression,” as part of prevalent leftist discourse on whatever subject matter the film was dealing with (fascism, racism, corruptions of state power, and so forth). I should clarify, however, that in keeping with cinema studies tradition, I often do refer to individual leftist writers and filmmakers as auteurs in this dissertation.

In these “Marxist” films, the dark underside of American life was exposed and held up for examination. In muckraking journalism and fiction, William Dean

Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair had already presented American life with its moral purity filtered out (Sinclair’s The Jungle, 1906 and Dreiser’s The

Financier, 1912, An American Tragedy, 1925, and Tragic America, 1931, are of 109

special note). I argue that in comparison with Capraesque cinema’s concern with corruptions of state power at the level of public institutions, leftist films in their critique went a step further in demonstrating the effects of such corruption at the grass-roots level, by showing how the “common man” suffered immeasurably, even tragically, under an unjust and unfair socio-economic system.

In contrast to the tales of redemption-under-capitalism proffered by Capra, leftist films implicitly and explicitly declared that in Thirties America, survival was enough of a problem to make irrelevant the moral clichés of the past. Rather than a Norman

Rockwell America of enduring national traditions and citizens dedicated to its foundational democratic ideals, leftist films depicted an America suffering from a virtually hopeless malaise in which “redemption” was not generally possible. The

Great Depression was perhaps the most potent synecdoche for this malaise: an insufferable condition possessed the nation and its citizens in the grip of a dark fate.

Cultural and socio-economic conditions during this period spurred Hollywood leftists to enwrap their critique in the stark look and darker themes of what I argue constituted the foundational texts of American film noir. For this they turned to the literary genre of the roman noir, typified by the oeuvre of the likes of Edgar Allen

Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne that had influenced much “dark” proletarian fiction of the 1920s and 30s. Such films were interventionist in intent and calculated to shock and scandalize their audiences, to awaken an uninformed public to the conditions of contemporary life, and to elicit an activist response. These films descended upon an 110

entertainment- (and from a leftist perspective, capitalist-) sedated populace with the sudden awareness of Adam-after-the-Fall about the perfidy of the serpent in the

Garden, to use a biblical metaphor.

I argue that socially-critical works authored in this period by Hollywood Left within—and the radical American documentarians without—the studio system exhibit creative experimentation in content and form that speak of their talent and artistry, influenced by American literary and cinematic traditions, Soviet cinematic formalism and the European avant-garde. Above all, Soviet films enjoyed a privileged ideological place on the cultural left and provided alternative aesthetic, generic and narrative norms that the radical left both admired and strove to transform into popular cinematic prototypes for Hollywood production and distribution.

The revolutionary and stylistically innovative films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin,

Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov were perennial favorites among Hollywood leftists.

Such films were regularly exhibited, examined and closely analyzed for ideology, stylistics, propagandistic tropes and narrative construction with the hope that these could be transformed into “radical,” “revolutionary” or, at the very least,

“progressive” American cinema. Emblematic Soviet films well-regarded by the left were: Eisenstein’s Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927), The

General Line (1929) and Que Viva Mexico! (1932); Vertov’s Kino Pravda (1922),

Three Songs of Lenin (1924), The Sixth Part of the World (1926), Man With A Movie

Camera (1929) and Enthusiasm (1931); Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), The End of St. 111

Petersburg (1927), Storm Over Asia (1928), and The Deserter (1934); Dovzhenko’s

Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930), Ivan (1932) and Aerograd (1935).

These were held up by Hollywood Left leaders like John Howard Lawson as potent examples of the fruitful union of art, politics, propaganda and pedagogy.71

Interestingly, African American audiences were also introduced to the alternative cinematic praxis of Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Vertov through journalistic articles in leftist publications such as the Liberator. The editors were socialist, Marxist or communist in their orientation and they sought to create a platform for debates on the socialist transformation of America into a truly classless and multicultural society. Soviet cinema, with its revolutionary ideology and creative stylization, was aesthetically, philosophically and ideologically appealing and formed a distinct contrast to the seductive but politically conservative entertainments of Hollywood. As Anna Everett asserts, “imported Soviet films became the flip side of the mainstream black press’ promotional discourse for dominant cinematic productions.” 72 Soviet films represented a progressive alternative to typical (racist)

Hollywood fare and radical black journalists recognized the authenticity of revolutionary Soviet cultural productions. They strove to communicate this sense of

71 Gary Carr, The Left Side of Paradise: the Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). Also see, John Howard Lawson, Film: the creative process; the search for an audio-visual language and structure (NY: Hill and Wang, 1964), and Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

72 Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 261.

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political engagement and authenticity to their black audiences so that “emancipatory discourses might proceed unimpeded,” according to Everett.

Within the American context, Hollywood leftists creatively used formal stylization and the contentious issues of race, class, ethnicity and gender as potent socially-critical tropes—and in powerfully educational ways—within mainstream, commercial Hollywood genres. Their efforts were aimed both within the Hollywood community and the national and global venues at large. Below I analyze and offer critiques on some typical examples of 1930s films in which Hollywood leftists had controlling authorial presence in a variety of capacities: screenwriter, director, producer or actor. A significant number of the more memorable films emerged from

Warner Bros. studio, the quintessentially liberal-left/working class studio of the decade.

Most of the films discussed belong to particular hybridized generic formulation of the melodramatic social problem film. Hollywood leftists recognized that melodrama was the dominant Hollywood generic form, that it interpellated virtually every popular genre, from the musical to the war film, and that it allowed both dramatic and stylistic “excess” that at once allowed socially-critical content and a wide margin of interpretation.73 Melodrama was particularly suitable for racial discourse for, as Linda Williams states, “There’s a long history of racial melodrama

73 For an excellent discussion on the genre of melodrama, albeit in its literary form, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

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that has been played out in American culture that has probably been the most powerful and influential story that America has told itself.” 74 Leftists sought to amalgamate melodrama into the social problem film, in order to create a subversive cinema by deeply-coding socio-political critique in genre conventions. In these films, through the agency of (cinematic) melodramatic discourse, the narratives of individual dramatic conflicts functioned as symbolic cultural dramas in the public sphere and, in the larger political context, operated as anti-hegemonic national allegories.

In discursive terms, Hollywood leftists understood the Foucauldian dictum that discourse is agency and power and that it could be used strategically against repressive or stagnant systems. Thus, they approached genre-encoded narratives as

“discursive strategies.” In other words, racial, ethnic, gendered or class criticism, amalgamated within personal melodramatic narratives, were an indirect but potent form of anticapitalist critique that showed how individual or closely knit groups of people suffered unjustly and often humiliatingly under the current system; how their basic inalienable human rights were usurped by corrupt authority figures; how their well-meaning efforts to gain social mobility were frustrated; how their contributions to society were “criminally” ignored; and how they failed to obtain proper redress or

74 Linda Williams, “Color Correction: Image and Race in the American Consciousness,” Framing the Question, vol. 5. [magazine on-line] (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California); available from http://ls.berkeley.edu/art-hum/framing/index.html. For a good discussion on racial discourse in the melodramatic genre, see also Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 114

“due process” when held accountable for infringements that were accidental or for which they were unjustly blamed. This was, indeed, “popular Marxism” in action, albeit heavily contained by the studio system’s self-policing methods and by local and national censorship boards.

In order to obtain circulation, by necessity this activist cinematic discourse had to maintain alliances with larger national agendas and priorities, such as FDR’s New

Deal, and be responsive to local as well as global conditions, such as fascism in

Europe, Japanese aggression in the Pacific, nativism, xenophobia and racism at home, and so forth. Leftist films were, then, also an amalgamation of these prevalent discourses and promulgated leftist political positions on these various matters.

Further, in order to demonstrate some form of coherence of articulation, leftist films had to maintain an element of consistency in content and style and have a recognizable authorial/ideological signature. Since these films were produced at different Hollywood studios, there was always a negotiation between studio style and

“leftist signature.” However, by and large the films I discuss exhibit a strong sense of inter-textuality, mostly due to (1) the choice of dark and downbeat narratives framed within the genre of melodrama/social problem film, and (2) an agreed-upon, if informal, coherence of method and style followed by leftists working in Hollywood, albeit at different studios. In other words, a leftist socially-critical film emanating from Warner Bros., Paramount or RKO, for example, would exhibit generic, stylistic, and narrative similarities and had “coded” ideological “linkages.” 115

Marxist critique in social problem films of the 1930s The Thirties started with a resoundingly dark antiwar film by director Lewis

Milestone, entitled All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The story concerns a group of friends who join the German army during World War I and are assigned to the western front, where their innocent and naïve idealism is quickly turned to horror by the harsh realities of combat. In one key politically-critical scene, Paul, played by

Lew Ayres, a young soldier on furlough visits the professor who had initially filled him with the enthusiasm to enlist. The professor urges Paul to fire the nationalistic passions of a new group of adolescents. Paul, however, has seen too much of the brutality and the senseless killings, and is cynical of the patriotism and nationalist heroism revered by society. “We live in the trenches and we fight, we try not to be killed, that’s all,” he says.

In the ironic final scene of the film, Paul is killed by a sniper’s bullet; at that moment he had been reaching for a butterfly, indicating his heightened sense of beauty and knowledge of the essential fragility of life. The war, in fact, had already ended the morning of the day Paul was shot. Milestone underscores the futility of war, of killing and dying for the questionable ideals of nationalism, by this tragic ending. He had initially intended to make the antiwar message even more critical and resonant and had considered several dramatic (perhaps) over-the-top endings, such as showing all the armies of the world marching toward a common grave, but he was constrained by the producers to stay within margins of popular acceptability. All

Quiet on the Western Front provides good illustration of how studio system 116

censorship reined in social and political criticism in order to make films less controversial and more profitable.

Interestingly, when the Einsteins visited the United States in 1930, they came to

Hollywood, and a special screening of the film was arranged for them because of

Albert Einstein’s pacifist stand as a leftist, 75 indicating again how Hollywood leftists were aware of, and working in tandem with, a “leftist internationalism.” The film was accorded critical acclaim and also did well at the box office. It won the Best

Picture Oscar at the1930 Academy Awards, and Lewis Milestone won the Academy for Best Director.76

Instead of the ideological reconfirmations offered by populist cinema,

Hollywood leftist cinema offered an unrepentant vision of the flaws of the American democratic system, in which even honest, moral men, seeking redress for wrongs

75 For good historical background on Einstein’s visit to California, see Marsha Kinder, Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California (Los Angeles: Annenberg Center for Communication, USC, 2005). DVD-ROM. This is an excellent resource for Einstein’s stay at the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s, and was featured at the Einstein exhibition held from September 14, 2004 to May 29, 2005 at The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles in collaboration with Caltech, USC and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

76 Special thanks to Professor Marsha Kinder for pointing out that All Quiet on the Western Front was re-released several times, with leftist antiwar rhetoric enhanced by added scenes. Initially, the film was made in both silent and sound versions since not every theater had adopted the new technology by 1930. There was also a 1934 re-release that was 90 minutes long, 45 minutes shorter than the original. Very significantly, a 1939 release added an extra reel of news footage at the beginning and end, with a narrator decrying the rise of Nazism, a move entirely in alliance with leftist antifascism and anti-Nazism that would culminate in the overtly anti-Nazi propaganda film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939, Warner Bros.). In 1950, there was a cold war version, with swing music added at the end, indicating the extent to which virulent critique could be re-visioned, re-contextualized, commodified and even ideologically co-opted, by the editing process, under different regimes. This process has been referred to as “cultural and ideological reinscription” by Kinder, a process whereby the political reality of the left or right is validated or reinscribed within culture by creative manipulation of filmic process and language.

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done them by society are denied due process. They are, instead, spiritually crushed and relegated to exile in the “land of their birth.”

In this vein Mervyn Leroy directed I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1932, the story of an out-of-work veteran who has great difficulties adjusting to the harsh economic realities of the post-WW I America. Although the film in set in the 1920s, it had particular resonance in the early 1930s at the onset of the Great Depression.

The veteran, James Allen, played by Paul Muni, has dreams of being an architect but cannot even pawn of his Congressional Medal of Honor—a cynical comment on how society had turned its back on its heroes. The pawn-broker humiliatingly demonstrates this by showing Jim a big pile of discarded war medals in a large bin.

Reduced to a life as a hobo, Jim rolls from job to job. In one town, he is tricked by a fellow-hobo into becoming an accomplice in a lunch-wagon robbery; at gunpoint,

Jim is forced by the robber to clean out the cash register. The police arrive at this juncture and the robber is killed in the shoot-out while Jim is arrested. His defense, however, holds no water with the law. Sentenced to serve time in jail, he finds himself in a Georgia chain gang.

Although the state’s location is left ambiguous in the film, the scenery clearly evokes the imagery of the Deep South. In a grim depiction of the southern penal system, Allen is subjected to the cruelty of the jailers and cynical indifference of the authorities. The film promulgates the notion that the entire chain gang system has been created to squeeze out every bit of useful work from the felons while keeping 118

them barely alive at subsistence levels—a modus operandi of the slave labor camps of ancient empires such as Rome. Ironically, such chain gangs were conceived by southern gentry as providing a useful social and humanitarian function, that of putting itinerant workers, convicted felons and, particularly, unemployed or “no good Negroes” to useful work that would keep personal frustrations in check while contributing to the political economy of the southern states. However, as Alex

Lichtenstein argues,

Perhaps southern “Progressivism” “reformed” the convict lease system, but the nature of this reform raises important questions about the role of the state in coercing black labor for economic development. While humanitarian motives should not be dismissed altogether, the class interests that backed this new use of convicts had their own notions about the relationship between penal systems and economic development. The chain gang which built the roads of the 20th century South became an enduring symbol of southern backwardness, brutality and racism; in fact, they were [privileged as] the embodiment of Progressive ideals of southern modernization, penal reform, and racial moderation. In this duality the southern chain gang replicated the most significant feature of the convict lease system it had superseded. 77

In the leftist estimation, the humanitarian reasons given for what really amounted to the socio-economic manipulations of entrenched capitalism in keeping the black population enslaved and productive, were untenable. This kind of “slavery” was, in fact, tantamount to “fascism.” In a searing condemnation of brutal and sadistic disciplinary measures in the southern prison camp, the film emphasizes the lashings, enforced solitude in sweat boxes, and the ever-binding chains that dehumanize prisoners, foregrounding the documentary- and socially-realist tropes of naturalist fiction and leftist cinematic film style.

77 Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: the Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996), 16. 119

After five years, Allen escapes, most likely living as a hobo and thieving his way to Chicago. Here, through hard work and intelligence, he manages to builds a new career under a pseudonym. When he becomes a full partner in a successful bridge- building company, his landlady finds out about his “dark past” and forces him into marriage. When Allen falls in love with another woman, he asks his former landlady

(and current wife) for a divorce. She responds by exposing him and turning him into the hands of the authorities. Jim once again becomes a fugitive but turns himself in voluntarily back to the southern chain gang—displaying his intrinsic faith in

American justice—on condition that he will be released after a couple of months. In what is clearly a critique of judicial process and of political corruption in the South,

Jim’s “due process” is denied and his petitions are rejected. No authoritative body anywhere can negotiate his release.

In desperation, he escapes—significantly, with the aid of a fellow black prisoner.

This important, albeit brief, opportunistic linking of the black and white against a de- humanizing penal system (symbol of the authoritarian anti-segregationist, racist and

“un-democratic” enclaves of America) is perhaps a cynical comment on the fate of a

“fallen” white man reduced to the status of the black and subjected to the kinds of disenfranchised and humiliating existence that constituted the latter’s existence. Jim spends the rest of his days as a fugitive, an existential exile from the very society he had so dedicatedly contributed to. 120

The film’s relentless documentary stylization and socially-realist mis-en-scene heightens its sense of authenticity. Not at all patronizing, the film teeters on the edge of social revolt and existential rebellion not only against the unjust socio-economic system, revered social and political institutions and cruel, narrow-minded authority figures, but, ultimately, against the very conditions of human life that reduce a well- meaning, compliant, moralistic human being to the lowest form of exiled existence— epitomized by the status of the black man in America.

Although a film adamant in its stand against the human degradation in chain gangs, Fugitive played into the public’s willingness to actively listen to social protest against entrenched “native fascism” in the American context, albeit one confined to the Old South and contained by the more progressive rhetoric of the North. In the leftist ideological, interpretive framework, the South, as depicted in Fugitive, functions as the metaphoric old, traditional, corrupt underside of America, urgently in need of reform—a fascistic seedbed of violence, racism, classicism and exploitation, all in the service of the privileged elites who keep their stranglehold over the “masses” by cynically controlling the sanctioned institutions of law and justice. Capitalism, and its manipulated workings, is shown to be allied with this

“naturalized” form of fascism. The film’s leftist critique clearly links its discourse on anticapitalism with its stance on antifascism. Fugitive was nominated for Best

Picture at the 1932 Academy Award, although it did not win. However, Paul Muni did win the Best Actor award for the film. 121

The degradation of the homeless and the unemployed at the hands of the

“paternalistic” capitalistic system responsible for their ouster from the American

Dream was aptly dramatized in Frank Borzage’s A Man’s Castle (1933). Borzage had just directed the critically acclaimed war-time romance melodrama A Farewell to Arms (1932). This film, based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, was set in the

Spanish Civil War, a topic that incited great activist passion in Hollywood’s leftist/Marxist/communist enclaves. The fact that Arms won five Academy nominations, including Best Picture, and had one win—for Best Cinematography— testifies to the power, prestige and influence leftist filmmaking had in the 1930s.

In the years immediately following the great crash of 1929, during President

Herbert Hoover’s term in office, many Americans lost their jobs, homes and savings.

Many took to the road where they congregated with others in similar desperate straits to create shanty towns by the sides of rivers, highways, under bridges, on the outskirts of big towns or in other out-of-the-way places. These ramshackle homes, made from wood, tin or metal or tent materials, had little in the way of basic amenities and also posed health hazards for the occupants. Since the Depression occurred during Hoover’s term in presidency, he was often blamed for the economic malaise, particularly during FDR’s presidential campaign. These shantytowns were therefore derisively called “Hoovervilles.” In the Presidential Election of 1932,

Hoover’s campaign to the tune of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” seemed a farcical gesture against Roosevelt’s “Blue Skies Are Here Again.” Roosevelt won a 122

landslide victory and ushered in a new era of liberal idealism—a “New Deal” the country was ready to receive.

Castle is an unsentimental view of the hardships of the Great Depression, and was quite a daring leftist broadside for the period. In this film a young woman, Trina, played by Loretta Young, victimized by the Depression-era malaise, moves into a shantytown called Hoover Flats. Here, she hooks up with a local thug, Bill, played by Spenser Tracy, and together they scrape by in a hovel. The neighborhood consists of other desperadoes who sink into crime and alcoholism while struggling to maintain themselves at subsistence levels. While Bill flirts with a local showgirl, devising plans to ditch his lover, Trina becomes pregnant. This out-of-wedlock (and

“illegal”) pregnancy vitiates against any social welfare programs designed to help the couple. In desperation, Bill plans a robbery to help save his home and raise his family, with dire consequences—he is shot and wounded with even less prospects for survival. The film induces the notion that the unsympathetic “system” rather than

“fate” is what sends well-meaning Americans, desperate for an even break, reeling down the spiral of degeneration.

The film’s themes of economic determinism, naturalism and environmentalism, coupled with a stark realist stylization, caused a protest from the censors in New

York City. The producers were forced to cut the more disturbing, objectionable scenes, replacing them with more acceptable and less shocking material. The film’s gloomy assessment, in showing the sub-human level to which “honest Joes and 123

Janes” of the “greatest nation on earth” sink in their desperate travail to survive, leveled the accusative finger at the socio-economic policies followed by the conservative Hoover administration. The implication was clear that FDR’s regime would face these issues and live up to the responsibilities of the Presidency.

Arguably, the film functioned both as cultural critique and propaganda for the

Rooseveltian “liberal” social-welfare policies.

Heroes for Sale (1933), directed by William Wellman, was another Marxist broadside in the vein of Fugitive, and dramatically explored the issue of war veteran re-integration into peacetime society. Using a rigorously documentary-realist style, the film unsentimentally shows the breadlines, the Hoovervilles, the soup kitchens, the strikes and riots of the period, and contrasts this with the self-satisfactions of the capitalist class. In the film Richard Barthelmess plays Tom Holmes, an injured and shell-shocked war veteran who is addicted to morphine. This affliction makes him a

“basket case” unable to hold down a job or relate to people in any meaningful way.

Tom receives little sympathy and practically no help, and becomes a social outcast, an exile in his own country.

The film clearly lays the blame on the social system that denies the contributions of those who suffered for their country in time of war. Leonard Maltin has called

Heroes an example of “Forbidden Hollywood” as it depicts taboo subjects—labor agitators, communists, unionists and radicals and a host of “sleazy” characters who seem to be motivated only by self-interest and greed. For example, Tom’s 124

housemate, and later confidant, is a communist agitator who only too easily switches his loyalties when he discovers that he can not only succeed but prosper under capitalism.

In the final scene, Tom is reunited with his best friend from army days, Roger. It was Roger who had falsely claimed credit for Tom’s bravery against the Germans and found a rosy road to success in business and banking after the war—until the

Depression brought him down, that is. His desire to help Tom in his hour of need seemed to be prompted more by fear of exposure than any true feeling of friendship.

Although Tom suffers inordinately at the hands of an unsympathetic society he nevertheless retains a strong faith in the future and in Roosevelt. Referring to the conditions under the Depression, Tom declares that “it’s not the end of America. In a few years it’ll go on bigger and stronger than ever…That’s not optimism…just common horse-sense. Did you read President Roosevelt’s inaugural address?”

Russell Campbell states that the lesson of the film is “clearly the counter- revolutionary one—that the workings of society are beyond the control of the common man: one has to have faith in a benevolent, paternalistic, president as one has faith in God. More specifically, violent revolt is senseless and doomed to failure.” 78 The film, agitational and socially-critical in intent, turns rather didactic at the end with a salute to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

78 Russell Campbell, “Warners, the Depression, and FDR,” in Velvet Light Trap, no.4 (Spring 1972). 125

Wild Boys of the Road (1933), another William Wellman film, also graphically depicted the socio-economic degradation of people affected by the Depression, although this film, too, ends optimistically with overt New Deal inspired moralisms in consonance with Rooseveltian programs and agendas. In the film, Eddie Smith, played by Frankie Darro, is the leader of a group of freight-train-hopping hoboes, fleeing from homes, families, debts and the police. When a hobo girl is raped by a brakeman, the boys respond by killing him, setting off a chase. In Ohio, they are forced off the train. Here, they build their own private shantytown of equally dispossessed desperadoes—another “Hooverville.” More hoboes arrive and tensions build. Lying, cheating and thievery grow and the authorities are forced to break up the town and its disagreeable community. Expelled, the group resumes its trek toward New York. After many trials and tribulations only three make it and join a gang of local thieves in order to survive. When finally caught they are sent to a kindly judge who fills them with the New Deal hope that they need to go on.

This final scene of Wild Boys announces a Christian paternalism toward the exiled and dispossessed of society and provides an optimistic counterpoint to virulently critical and tragic films such as I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and (the later)

They Won’t Forget. Against the generically and stylistically coded anticapitalism of much leftist filmmaking, this film foregrounds law as the benevolent guardian of

(humanistic) social justice and progressive social polices. Perhaps most importantly, it aligns law and justice with a liberal-left Rooseveltian ideology in service of the 126

“common man.” This linkage is implied to be in vast contrast to the alignment between elitist capitalist classes and their power-brokering machinations of the previous administration (of President Hoover).

The subject of lynching, mob-psychology and “native fascism” was elucidated in the early Hollywood films of the brilliant noir director, Fritz Lang, the German

émigré filmmaker who had created such masterpieces as Metropolis (1927) and M

(1931) in Germany. According to Lang, the artistic success of M had so impressed the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, that in 1933 he had offered Lang the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Leni Riefenstahl (who subsequently created Victory of the Faith, 1933 and Triumph of the Will, 1934, elevating Hitler and Nazism). After a brief stint in French cinema, Lang had eventually settled in

Hollywood. Once safely ensconced in the United States, Lang asserted that Goebbels had wished to enlist his talent in creating masterful propaganda for Hitler and the

Nazi enterprise while he was still in Germany. Lang claimed that instead of serving the Nazis he had chosen to flee Germany. This colorful account, however, has recently lost its credibility.79

In 1936 Lang directed Fury in Hollywood, an outspoken film dealing with the mania of a lawless mob—perhaps Lang’s political allegory on the German fascistic condition or perhaps a reflection of his realization that in America, “the land of liberty,” dark fascistic shadows also abounded. I argue that Fury is an excellent

79 See Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang—Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: bfi publishing, 2000) for a good discussion of this Langian “myth.” 127

example of Lang’s artistic and ideological alliance with the Hollywood Left. This alliance was instrumental in his bourgeoning Hollywood career and is reflected in his early American films of the 1930s. At this time, Lang belonged in the liberal-left enclaves of Hollywood, and directed leftist crime/noir films such as Fury (1936) and

You Only Live Once (1937).

Hailing from the German Expressionist tradition, Lang was drawn to the exploration and examination of humanity at its lowest ebb. His noir sensibility reflected an obsessive and fatalistic world populated by psychologically strange and twisted characters, often the victims, sometimes the purveyors, of despair, isolation, exile and helplessness. Lang’s bold visuality, fetishistic chiaroscuro technique, strange characterization and warped narrative plots make him one of the eminent founders of film noir. During his early American period his obsessive, dark existentialism became conjoined with leftist antifascist socio-political critique in films such as Fury.

His other related film such as You Only Live Once (1937) closely follow the tradition of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), depicting how “fate” sends a man careening down the dark alleys of life. In conjoining leftist critique with existentialist motifs, these films indirectly lay blame for the “dark fate” of its protagonists on the xenophobia, pettiness and violence practiced by the (fascist) representatives of law and justice. In other words, these films promulgate the notion that “fate” of the disaffected is, in fact, only “dark” because of the inhumanity and 128

greed of the power elites, and that under enlightened leadership, both a socio- economic and a spiritual redemption is possible.

Lang’s Fury critiques native fascism in the American Midwest as opposed to the

Deep South, bringing the un-democratic specter of xenophobia, nativism, racism and paranoia closer to the more “enlightened” East and West coasts. Fury is set in small town where, Joe, played by Spenser Tracy, and Katherine, played by Sylvia Sidney, is an average white American couple with dreams of getting married and setting up a decent business. Joe is characterized in the film as the typical honest-to-goodness son-of-the-soil (white) American, a Capraesque character, and Katherine, the devoted femme. He is a decent and hard-working man, happily dreaming of the day when he can own a gas station and settle into conjugal and communal bliss.

Early on in the film, Katherine decides to take up a job in another city to earn money, leaving Joe behind. A year passes and Joe, now the proud owner of an automobile, decides to visit Katherine to fix up the marriage date. While driving through a small town, he is stopped by a deputy sheriff toting a shotgun. Apparently, there has been a kidnapping and the sheriff arrests Joe on thin circumstantial evidence (Joe has peanuts in his pockets, somehow linking him to the crime).

Through mass-psychological rumor, the town’s gossipers convert Joe into a hardened criminal and “judge” him guilty. Soon a lynch mob forms and heads toward the jail, where Joe awaits “due process.” The mob storms the jail, overcomes the sheriff and his deputies, and sets the building afire, while the governor refuses to send in the 129

troops—a politically-expedient judgment by the coterie of the “big boys” controlling the state. The film thus highlights the violation of the inalienable democratic rights of the “small” citizen: the innocent “common man” is reduced to the status of a

“criminal” without due process, simply because his case and his life are judged

“unimportant.” As in Fugitive, the film critiques the corruptions of state power and the degrading effect that this has on the lives of ordinary citizens.

The vengeful, euphoric mob thinks that Joe has been burned to death. Joe, however, does manage to escape the inferno, if barely. “I could smell myself burning,” he recounts later. When order finally prevails, the mob leaders are brought to trial for the “murder” and Joe, hearing the report of the trial of the twenty-two vigilantes on the radio, keeps his silence; he actually enjoys this ironic vengeance.

Director Lang thus resists the temptation of painting a simple and innocent picture of

Joe, and shows, in the enjoyment he obtains, that he too is a morally complex creature, capable of dark revenge and murder, albeit with righteous cause. Initially, the script had proposed a scene in which a group of African-Americans were to be shown sitting in a broken-down Ford listening to the radio reports of the lynching trial. As they hear the district attorney summarize the many lynchings that take place in America each year, an old “Negro” nods his head knowingly. This scene, directly linking lynching to the state of the subject black population of the South was, however, excised by the producing studio, MGM. 130

When the defending attorney displays the presence and participation of the twenty-two men judged guilty of murder on the scene of the crime, he does so by utilizing the documentary-realist ethos of film—an on-site cameraman had captured the mob action and the town’s “leading citizen” participants on the occasion of the burning of the jail. The jury, unable to deny this evidence—predicated on documentary film’s undeniable indexical relationship to reality—condemns several of the twenty-two men with the charge of “guilty of murder.” At this pivotal moment, a reformed Joe, encouraged by Katherine, enters the hushed courtroom, and delivers his socially-critical speech:

The law doesn’t know that a lot of things that were important to me, silly things maybe, like a belief in justice and an idea that men were civilized, and a feeling of pride that this country of mine was different from all the others…The law doesn’t know that all those things were burned to death within me that night.

The requisite final screen kiss reunites a renewed and returned Joe with his “girl”

Katherine and domesticates Joe’s rebellion against an unjust society.

The film’s gloomy critique against nativism clearly foregrounds the limitations of the legal system and theorizes how the legal due process could be circumvented by a small-town, small-minded, xenophobic “junta” ready to engage in “ritual murder” of a stranger to satisfy their baser instincts. Their intra-communal alliances seem to be sufficient proof of their innocence while the common man, Joe, a stranger, is relegated to the status of a criminal simply by accusation. Perhaps the most interesting cinematic device utilized in the film is the use of the documentary footage as admissible evidence. It is film in its evidentiary legal status that pronounces the 131

guilt of the lynch-mob by capturing “reality” and showing the individuals caught by the camera in the actions they had so vehemently denied. Film, and by extension the cinematic apparatus, are then constructed as instruments of “truth” and progressive politics.

From a counter-propagandistic viewpoint, the film’s critique is strengthened by avoiding the obvious moralistic and politically-motivated speech for the sensitized and susceptible masses at the conclusion. The close-up screen-kiss re-unites the exiled native son with the now-repentant and re-awakened society. Both the individual and society are redeemed and realigned with Rooseveltian progressivism in this moralistic, cautionary tale without the aid of the typical Capraesque filibuster.

Although the film only garnered one Academy Award nomination for 1936—for

Best Original Story—it succeeded in winning the Best Picture of 1936 award by the

New York Film Critics Circle, which also nominated Lang for Best Film and Best

Direction.

Fritz Lang followed up his darkly paranoid vision in Fury (1936) with a relentless, existential tragedy, You Only Live Once (1937), the story of another “born loser.” In the film, Eddie Taylor, played by Henry Fonda, is an ex-convict who is serving his third prison term for felony. It is made patently clear to him that any further infractions would land him in prison for the rest of his life. Eddie does have good intentions of going completely straight; he dreams of marriage, a decent job and a happy family. He marries his girlfriend, Jo, played by Sylvia Sydney, and tries 132

to settle down. Soon he is framed for a murder rap, being “at the wrong place at the wrong time”—a fatal shooting during a bank robbery. At the very moment his innocence is established and a pardon granted, he, not being privy to this development, escapes from prison. However, in doing so he kills the prison chaplain.

Ironically, in trying to gain his freedom, he becomes a real murderer, sealing his future in tragedy. Eddie and Jo become fugitives from the law and resort to degrading measures to survive: stealing food, medicine, and gas. Adding greater irony to their doom, Jo gives birth to their baby in a backwoods shack, like some degraded criminal without recourse to any sanitized medical environment. The police close in and choke them in a dragnet, shooting them down like escaped convicts.

Finding no escape, they die in each other’s arms, leaving a parentless child in an irredeemably ugly, uncaring world. In this overwrought finale the film raises a cry of protest against a mean-spirited system that pursues the misunderstood and the powerless of society with relentless force in order to exact punishment for what it deems to be “crimes,” whether proven or otherwise. Although regarded as a Langian masterpiece, You Only Live Once, echoing the hopelessness of such films as I Was a

Fugitive from a Chain Gang, did not get the critical acclaim at the time of its release, although it has been praised lavishly in latter-day filmic criticism that has recognized

Lang as one of the progenitors of film noir.80

80 See, for example, Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang—Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: bfi publishing, 2000) and Reynold Humphries, Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in his American Films (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 133

Langian existentialism—predicated on no redemption and no solutions to the human condition—proffered a bleak vision of life in the prevalent cultural conditions and was in contrast to the typical Hollywood Leftists strategy worked into their social-problem genre of the late 1930s, the one with solutions, namely activism and agitation for progressive change under the Rooseveltian New Deal programs. This philosophic conflict, between historically-determined futility and committed agency, would inform leftist cinematic productions of 1930s through the 1950s, and would synthesize into a potent hybridized genre—that of the social-problem/socially- critical film noir in the 1940s—also under leftist authorship.

Agitational leftist films also aimed at exposing the exploitative, unsanitary and menial conditions in capitalist factories, mines, warehouses, agricultural fields, and other laborist sites. Numerous works of proletarian fiction were set in mines and fields and used labor conditions as a critique of “inhuman” and “greedy” capitalism

(for example, Upton Sinclair’s King Coal, 1912). Turbulence in the coal-mining areas was also frequently reported in the daily newspapers and was a favorite

“muckraking” topic. One sensational story, from 1929, concerned the murder of

Mike Shemanski, a coal miner beaten to death by the company police at Imperial,

Pennsylvania. Michael Musmanno, one of the prosecutors in the trial of the three policemen charged with murder, later wrote an account.

Henry R. Irving adapted the story into a stage play, Bohunk. This title came from an ethnic slur referring to a working-class (usually Catholic) Slavic immigrant but 134

was also used as a derogatory term referring to generally poor Eastern European

Caucasians, or any anyone of bohemian descent. Irving’s agitational “Marxist” play, then, follows the socialist critique of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), in which another down-and-out Slav, Jurgis, slaves away in the slaughter houses of the

Chicago stockyards. Slavics, although “white,” were nevertheless considered an underclass in much the same fashion as the Irish were during the large wave of Irish immigration to the United States in the mid-1800s. These “whites” (Irish, Slavics,

Italians, Greeks and so forth) were then not part of the established mainstream, but were gradually absorbed into it over the following decades after the first wave of immigration. Irving’s play and the original “muckraking” article both served as the basis of the screenplay of Black Fury (1935), written by Carl Erickson and Abem

Finkel, and directed by Michael Curtiz.

Paul Muni, perhaps the actor most identified with the “message” film of the

1930s, played Joe Radeck, an illiterate coal miner, happily mining away in a company-town until he is deserted by his girlfriend for a policeman, signaling how irresponsible representatives of law and order usurp the fundamental right to happiness of the workers—an allegorical and elliptical critique of the social and political system. Joe’s subsequent loud outbursts, coupled with his rapport with his fellow workers, win him the leadership of the new miner’s union. However, as union boss he is held responsible by his comrades when the company locks out the striking miners and brings in scabs to take their place. 135

Seeking vengeance, Joe kidnaps the head company goon and takes him down into the mine shaft with sticks of dynamite. There he threatens to blow up everything unless the management and the union come to an agreement. The owners capitulate and Joe becomes the honored, laboring hero of the hour. In the film version, the producers softened the edges of the characters involved, making the management less reprehensible and less guilty of perpetuating the conditions that lead to such dark violence. The guilt is conveniently shifted to the irascible hired detectives who are shown to be in the employ of a double-dealing crook. Still, the film advances the notion that extremism on the part of two opposed sides—labor and management— only leads to explosive emotional violence and no workable solutions. The film, although tempered in its critique by the studio system, does urge responsible labor unionism to join with enlightened management in seeking mutually beneficial solutions. Black Fury was a calmer, reformist vision that was perhaps more acceptable to the wider movie-going public, and obviated heavy objections from local and national censors.

Mervyn Leroy went on to direct They Won’t Forget (1937), also at Warner Bros.

This film, like Fury, is as condemnatory of mass-minded “fascistic” psychopathology and ingrained anti-Semitism, as Fugitive was of the brutish existence in a chain gang. The story was based on the Leo M. Frank-Mary Phagan case of 1915, which Robert Rossen and Aben Kendel turned into a screenplay. The

Rossen-Kendal screenplay was more directly adapted from Aben Kendal’s novel, 136

Death in the Deep South, in which he had dramatized the actual occurrence of adolescent murder in the South. The real incident, on the basis of which the film’s story was fictionalized, concerned Mary Phagan, a fourteen-year-old pencil-factory worker who had been found murdered. The “evidence” at the time had pointed to a black janitor, signifying the ease with which racist (white) society finds convenient victims among the already-oppressed African-Americans of the “Ole South.”

However, Tom Watson, an Atlanta newspaper publisher, decided to frame Leo

Frank, a Jew from the North, for the purpose of gaining publicity and prestige for his political career—illustrating, again, how entrenched Southern anti-Semitism could be manipulated for political advantage. Watson is alleged to have said, “We can lynch a nigger any time but when do we get a chance to hang a Yankee Jew?”

Watson gave Frank plenty of bad publicity and, thanks to a cooperative solicitor general, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death.

However, Georgia Governor John M. Slaton remained unconvinced and changed the death sentence to life imprisonment. Watson, publisher of The

Jeffersonian, wrote scathing articles against the governor’s decision. He applauded lynch mobs as “defenders of liberty” and called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses. Perhaps as a direct result of this xenophobic and anti-Semitic campaign,

Frank was kidnapped on the way to prison by a mob, lynched and hung, an incident that boosted the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan. 137

For the Hollywood Left, this real event, and the racist, anti-Semitic context surrounding it, functioned as a clear signal that racism in America was not confined to discrimination against blacks. It extended to other ethnic/racial groups that were not part of the enfranchised white classes protected in their vested interests by a collusive system of legitimation by social and political institutions. The film adaptation was intended to demonstrate that anti-Semitism and racism were institutionalized in America, especially in the “backward” South where democratic- enlightenment philosophy had failed to activate progressive societal changes. The

Jewish context, however, was not foregrounded in the approved film script. It is only implied in character representation, testifying once again to the political squeamishness and commercial-mindedness of Hollywood. The racial/ethnic white- washing of the central character perhaps illustrates the producing studio’s fear that the film would be labeled “Jewish propaganda” by conservatives. By not foregrounding the Jewish angle too specifically the film also positioned itself for mainstream consumption, as well as hoped-for critical and commercial success on a broader scale.

In Mervyn LeRoy’s film version of the Rossen-Kendal script, Mary Clay, played by Lana Turner, is a flirtatious teen-aged typing school student who is also a provocative dresser. A recently arrived schoolteacher of nondescript religious affiliations but of somewhat darker complexion, Hale, while leaving the premises one day, finds Mary dead, a victim of murder. The school’s black janitor is the prime 138

suspect in the case, but the politically-ambitious district attorney, Andrew Griffin, played by Claude Rains, believes Hale to be guilty. A conviction against Hale—a

Northerner and an outsider to the Southern culture—would offer Griffin the most politically expedient opportunity of his career. Griffin uses the press to successfully exploit sectional bigotry by initiating a sustained “headline campaign” of Hale’s guilt. Hale is convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a one-sided court trial.

However, the sentence is commuted to life-imprisonment, as in the novel. To escape the ravenous lynch mob, Hale is immediately dispatched to another city by train. Meanwhile, the mob is mad with vengeance; mob members board the train, pull off Hale and hang him. Having depicted the single-minded fury of the enraged crowd, and the unthinking violence of which it is capable, Le Roy ends the film on far more cynical view of those proto-fascists who perpetrate such racist/xenophobic state of affairs. At the end of the film a reporter poses the rhetorical question, “Now that it’s over, I wonder if Hale really did it?” The prosecutor gazes out the window and says nonchalantly, “I wonder.” A grim non-concern surrounds them, perhaps underscored with a kind of satiation in having achieved, through the mob psychology of a maddened, uncritical crowd, the violent murder of an “undesirable” ethnic/racial

“Other” to achieve their (hidden) agendas and political aims.

Hollywood leftist critique was once again aimed, low and hard, at the control of law and justice at the hands of the managers of the enfranchised capitalist classes, in which group violence and entrenched racism is the condoned weapon of choice, 139

cynically encouraged to achieve desired results in favor of the empowered.

Interestingly, mob action in They Won’t Forget seem to suggest that “the people”— that cornerstone of “democracy” that Capraesque populism elevated—are not de facto good and honorable citizens, that they can revert to “fascism” and, unless critically informed and awakened to the machinations of state power, can willingly play into the hands of corrupt leaders. Predictably, this overwrought and tragic film bypassed the attention of the Academy but did succeed in winning the Best Picture nomination from the 1937 National Film Board of Review.

I argue that in Fury, Black Fury, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and They

Won’t Forget, the “white” protagonist, subject to the hateful violence of the lynching, burning, hanging mob, and the oppressive terrorism of hired militiamen by a corrupt and controlling capitalist management, signals the “black” by the latter’s physical absence (but historically-determined presence). These films promote socio- political outrage at the prospect of a “white” man reduced to the “fallen” status of a

“black” man—the ultimate horror in the eyes of the white American mainstream, the principal audience of these “progressive” films.

Lewis Lautier, writing in favor of recently produced “mixed cast” films by

Hollywood such as One Mile from Heaven (1937) and They Won’t Forget (1937), lauded these films for their racial liberalism and for allowing blacks to assume a more prominent place in the generally white cast. As evidence he included, in his article, a publicity-still from Forget showing the black actor Clinton Rosemond 140

prominently featured as a would-be lynched victim of southern whites. Lautier applauded the fact that Rosemond had secured a featured role in the film, and that, although “his character is a stock menial type, his centrality to, and high visibility in, the narrative represents a significant departure from most entertainment films featuring African-American characters.”81

Towards the end of the decade of the 1930s, Hollywood leftist actor John

Garfield was working at the forefront of films at Warner Bros. that gave the criminal a characterization different from the run-of-the-mill gangsters as the “tragic heroes” of Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931). Garfield’s characters were not criminal by choice or design and they did not seek gratification by violence, gang warfare or material gain. They typified Americans embittered by the Depression and alienated from society because they just could not get an “even break” no matter what good intentions drove them, or what positive steps they consciously strove to implement in their lives. Garfield’s early films are in the tradition of “Hooverville” critiques of the early 1930s, with the variation that individual melodramas are centralized in the vein of Heroes for Sale and the protagonist is welcomed back to a new life of hope via Rooseveltian progressivism. Dust Be My Destiny (1939) and

They Made Me a Criminal (1939), both early Garfield vehicles, centered him as a leftist cinematic icon in the 1930s.

81 Lewis Lautier, “Courier Critic Pre-views Mixed Cast Film: Lautier Says ‘One Mile From Heaven’ Opens New Field,” The New Age Dispatch, 28 August, 1937. 141

In Dust Be My Destiny (1939), directed by Lewis Seiler at Warner Bros.,

Garfield plays Joe Bell, a societal outcast who has had “nothing but lousy breaks.”

No sooner has he obtained his release from prison, where he had landed for a crime he had not committed, that he is promptly arrested as a vagrant and sent to a work farm. This “white slavery” (paying dues to make amends for a non-existent crime) does get him a benefit, though—he falls in love with Mabel, played by Priscilla

Lane, the stepdaughter of the farm’s alcoholic foreman, a man of low morality.

Mabel is kindly and non-judgmental, attributes that enable Joe to drop his defensive, cynical stance. Eventually, he relents to Mabel’s charms and they fall in love. Joe does not consider Mabel to be just a love-playmate; his intentions toward her are honorable, and he hopes to share his life with her. One day the drunken foreman discovers the two kissing. Angrily, he eggs Joe on to a fight in which the foreman dies due to a heart attack. Joe and Mabel, fearing that no one would believe their version of the story, flee from the scene.

As in Lang’s You Only Live Once, the conjoined lovers become fugitives, hiding in decrepit apartments while the police close in the dragnet. Tiring of the endless chase, Mabel decides to put her trust in the judicial process, turning Joe in to the police with the hope that justice will prevail. Joe, however, is accused of, and tried for, murder. This ironic “twist of fate” sends Joe back into prison. The vicious cycle is set in motion again. Joe, the “existential outcast” is once again in the clutches of his irredeemable fate and destined for a life of destitution and degradation. It seems 142

as if the “lousy breaks” will continue to plague him. Fortunately, a compassionate attorney adamantly defends Joe and his condition, laying the blame on the shoulders of an indifferent and uncaring society for criminalizing him on the basis of value judgments and established social standards. The film, in this positive finale, upholds the essential decency of the “common man.” Although the work farm is hardly the field of vigilance, violence and exploitation that characterizes a Southern chain gang camp, the film nevertheless raises issues about proper management of public institutions and their unfortunate denizens, and the responsibilities of those charged with their maintenance.

This film again exemplifies the socially-progressive Rooseveltian rhetoric and an amalgam of leftist and “Capraesque”/populist ideologies of the times in that it promotes the notion of man as essentially good, noble and redeemable, no matter what lowly status he may have fallen to due to circumstances, “lousy breaks” or lack of “due process.” As in Wild Boys of the Road and Fury, the paternalism of the system welcomes back the hurt and injured innocents, outcasts and exiles of society and reclaims them as socially viable citizens. While the film does uphold

“Americanism,” it clearly shows the shortcomings of the socio-economic system that relegates the “Joe Does” to a life of hopelessness and stagnation, and advances the notion that progressive policies and enlightened leadership are necessary to the maintenance of this Americanism. 143

They Made Me A Criminal (1939), another Garfield vehicle at Warner Bros., was directed by none other than Busby Berkeley, the most prominent director of

Hollywood musicals in the 1930s. Towards the end of the decade musicals were becoming passé and Berkeley attempted this socially-critical dramatic piece.

Criminal was a remake of the earlier The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933, dir. Archie

Mayo). The story centers on Johnny Bradfield, played by John Garfield, a boxing champion haunted by the belief that he has killed another man in a drunken brawl.

He has, in fact, been framed by his corrupt manager, the real killer. The manager blackmails Johnny for all his valuables, including his watch, then escapes, but he is killed and his body burned in a freak car accident. The real criminal thus takes the secret of the murder with him to the grave. The authorities, noting the watch on the manager’s burnt hand, think that it is in fact the boxer who has been killed. In this strange fateful turn of events, Johnny becomes a non-entity in society, symbolically dead and forgotten.

Bradfield journeys west to escape the law and lie low, ending up at a communal farm in Arizona. His encounters with a series of kids escaping from various personal, economic or societal dissatisfactions, act as a device for his own self-examination.

He is enlightened as to his own dark nature and moves towards self-redemption.

Bradfield’s move is then from opportunistic self-obsession as a he-man boxer to his spiritualization, aided by the “maiden with the heart of gold,” Peggy, whom he meets there. When the farm is in fiscal trouble, Bradfield takes to the ring again to earn 144

cash in order to save the farm from ruin, highlighting, symbolically, personal contribution to communal social-welfare programs.

Bradfield, however, had been under the shadow of a trailing police detective who was never convinced of his death in the car crash. Bradfield’s revived career as a good boxer transports him into the spotlight and, consequently, brings him close to apprehension by the law. The soft-hearted detective lets him go when he realizes the noble, socially-uplifting enterprise the boxer has devoted himself to. Johnny now fights for the “common good” rather than for his own selfish needs, and uses his talents for socially-relevant ends. The film lays stress on social responsibility and self-reflection in order to find a “personal solution” to the communal and cultural malaise, in addition to the one offered by enlightened society and its institutions. The

“micro,” (the personal and private) and the “macro,” (progressive institutional policies and enlightened leadership) go hand and hand, the film’s rhetoric declares.

Leftist social problem films of the 1930s helped define a mood, tone and style that would characterize emblematic films noir of 1940s Hollywood cinema. The social misfits of films like You Only Live Once, Dust Be My Destiny and They Made

Me a Criminal carry in their souls a deep despondency and sadness. Their spirits are ruled by a sense of fatalistic defeat. They are characterized as the perennial existential outcasts of society that nothing seemed to cure. Garfield’s films are good illustrations of how existentialist motifs—the overweening despair and angst, and a sense of futility that noir cinema proffered—were creatively and powerfully utilized 145

by Hollywood leftists in their social critique. This socially-critical existentialism would reach its creative apogee with leftist films noir of the immediate postwar period, exemplified by Abraham Polonsky’s Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil

(1948), both of which starred Garfield as the protagonist.

Race Politics: Black radical critique of Hollywood’s “progressivism” Starting in the 1920s, radical critique of Hollywood’s depiction of race and class issues began appearing in leftist magazine such as the New Masses, the Daily

Worker, and Sight and Sound. These publications attacked Hollywood’s non- progressive depiction of black stereotypes as uncle toms, coons, mammies and bucks. Although blacks often chafed at the decidedly “Orientalist” discourse used to position them as “romantic savages” by white leftist writers such as Harry Potamkin, they understood the essential ethos that motivated such positioning. It was a calculated attempt by the left to force Hollywood to create an African-American cinema in which established black talents—such as singers and dancers—could be given positive representations and command their own audience following. This would be a gateway to creating parts for blacks in mainstream films where they would enjoy the power of expressivity and agency. They would eventually graduate, so to speak, from romantic and sentimental musicals to powerful melodramas in which their racially and culturally specific cinematic presence could abide.

Black radicals recognized the sincerity of the support offered by the CPUSA and other “white” liberal-left groups but were guarded in their adulation. In their view, the depiction of blacks as “ethnographic primitives” singing devotional songs, 146

dancing in whisky joints or belting out blues at songfests, even if circulated as “art,” was a dodge against real issues such as peonage, lynching, share cropping, enforced prostitution and the like. In mainstream circles, the discussion or depiction of these was often considered “black propaganda” encouraged at the behest of the

Communist Party.

In the early 1930s, black intellectuals such as W.E. B Du Bois penned several influential essays on the subject of communism and the African-American (discussed in the previous chapter). In tandem with this radical critique in journalism, littérateurs such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, and cineastes such as

Oscar Micheaux and Paul Robeson, pushed the envelope of racial discourse and

Hollywood film representation for blacks. NAACP’s journal The Crisis ran several radically influential articles critiquing race relations in the United States, comparing it to conditions in the Soviet Union, contrasting Hollywood with Soviet cinema, and criticizing prevalent representational tropes with which blacks were delimited in

Hollywood films. These articles included Louise Thompson’s “The Soviet Film”

(February 1933), Langston Hughes’ “Going South in Russia” (June 1934), Loren

Miller’s “Uncle Tom in Hollywood” (November 1934) and “Hollywood’s New

Negro Films” (June 1938).

Black radical critique was promulgated by African-American communists and was aligned with the racial-enfranchisement agenda of the CPUSA. These articles in

The Crisis, then, were in alliance and alignment with leftist discourse on the subject 147

evidenced in such publications as the New Masses, the Daily Worker and the

Liberator. The articles by radical black critics found little to cheer about in

Hollywood’s mainstream entertainment fare that featured blacks in the typically demeaning roles of servants, minstrels, dancing buffoons or the like. Miller’s articles, for example, denied that black roles in such leftist films as They Won’t

Forget and Fury were any better than the normal depictions or that these films were politically progressive, since they decry the fate of righteous white citizens reduced to the status of oppressed blacks but do not confront the “black problem” head-on.

Black critics felt that progressive films should offer radical critiques of black lives, not whites reduced to “blackness.” She encouraged Hollywood to face the issue of race-relations head on instead of offering “white allegories” of black disenfranchisement.

Miller also faulted these films for perpetuating the miscast role of black social life and cultural traditions in twentieth century America. For Miller, black audiences were mistaken in their enthusiasm for embracing black-cast films that catered to the lowest common denominator—crass commercialism—and was used by Hollywood producers to exhort for black racial pride in the hope of expanding their markets to

African-Americans. Miller did not entirely dismiss the efforts of Hollywood leftists, white liberals and independent black producers but, rather, called for a re-imaging of the black cultural agenda by filmmakers. She also appealed to black audiences for

“critical spectatorship” of Hollywood films that engaged with the most urgent issues 148

in the lives of African-Americans. Slavery, lynching, racism, xenophobia, lack of basic human rights and political representation—from a black perspective—should be critically examined in films, asserted Miller, if Hollywood cinema is to fulfill its claimed role and mission as socially, culturally and politically progressive.

Essentially, the concerns expressed by black radical critique were that in

Hollywood films, as Anna Everett states, “ ‘endless lies’ replace the lived realities that they purport to represent, and in the absence of truer depictions of black lives on the screen, the corrective process of mythological disarticulation becomes increasingly remote.” 82 In critiquing Warner Bros.’ I Am a Fugitive From a Chain

Gang (1932), Dave Platt, writing in the Harlem Liberator, pointed out that the censors eliminated the prolog to the film in an attempt to “white wash” the film’s radical critique of racial conditions in the South.

The prolog, attributed to the brother of the film’s ill-fated protagonist, read, in part, “The scenes in ‘I Am a Fugitive’ which depict life in a chain gang are authentic, being based upon my brother’s experiences.” 83 In removing this implicating statement, the film industry compromised the film’s politics for commercial success and dodged objections by censorship boards, particularly in the southern states, that would seek the film’s suppression. Platt complained of the “scissors” that worked so well to debunk the film’s sense of authenticity. In essence, radical black critics felt

82 Everett, 247.

83 Dave Platt, “Drama-Movie: Movie Snapshots,” Harlem Liberator, 18 November, 1933. 149

that censorship worked surreptitiously to deflate the anticapitalist and antiracist critique embedded in any socially-critical film’s discourse. Clearly, from their perspective, “enlightened” and “progressive” cinema, even from the radical “white” left, becomes compromised and de-limited when subject to the industry’s censorship apparatus. They also felt that in achievement-oriented Hollywood, progressive racial alliances, such as those between radical blacks, whites and Jews, were also compromised by the ethic of personal success, career opportunism and financial remuneration superseding ideological alignments and personal, affirmative relationships.

Black radicalism was reined in with the end of the Great Depression, and as

FDR’s politically-progressive New Deal gained force in mainstream circles. Added to black radicals defection from the CPUSA and radical leftist politics in general in the late 1930s, was NAACP’s alignment with FDR, the military, and the Hollywood studio system under the patriotic antifascist, and later anti-Nazi, agenda. Antiracism became subsumed into larger national programs and was more in the vein of politically-inspired propaganda then a committed issue in mainstream circles. Given the global political conditions, this retrenchment by radical blacks further weakened the CPUSA’s appeal to its black constituents. This, inevitably, also affected

Hollywood leftist filmmaking practice, which was then aimed at amalgamating race politics with antifascism/anti-Nazism. 150

Leftist filmmaking as discursive counter-strategies The point I argue, in presenting a survey of typical leftwing “Marxist” filmmaking form the 1930s, is that Hollywood leftist such as Maltz, Lawson,

Hellman, Rossen, Cole, Garfield, were creating a vibrantly creative, socially and politically-critical, aesthetically innovative and culturally popular filmic dialogue in tandem with the discourse of the American Left. Many of these filmmakers were either members of the CPUSA or “fellow travelers,” and were Marxist in orientation.

Leftist cinema utilized racial and gendered discourse in effectively pedagogical and critical ways to “awaken” the citizenry to the disturbing relationship between capitalism, crime, corruption and depressive cultural conditions. While racial discourse was heavily contained and moderated by censorship, gendered critique often proved more successful in creating the mimetic effects that “Marxist cinema” desired. As Paul Buhle attests,

Some of the keenest critics have suggested that conflicts over gender had best suited leftwing films from the earliest treatments (like John Bright’s depiction f the psychologically troubled gangster in Public Enemy)…[This was] both because Hollywood allowed the widest latitude in the politics of the personal and because the breakdown of patriarchal authority was the most effective metaphor of larger struggles in society. 84

The successful amalgam of leftist social criticism with gendered discourse is well exemplified by two films by Lillian Hellman: These Three (1936), directed by

William Wyler, which was adapted for the screen by Hellman from her successful

84 Paul Buhle, “The Hollywood Imagination and the Left,” Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Ethnicity and Race Relations Series (Washington: Washington State University, Department of Comparative American Cultures, 2000).

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Broadway play, The Children’s Hour, and Dead End (1937), also screen-written by

Hellman and directed by Wyler.

The CP’s perspective on capitalism, racism, sexism, fascism, colonialism, slavery, militarism, imperialism, “war profiteering” and so forth deeply influenced leftist productions, albeit far more heavily tempered through the studio system’s censorship apparatus. In their dark critique the Hollywood left experimented with

“social content,” political activism and stylistic flourishes that, I would argue, provided the foundations for American film noir. This is particularly true in the sense that many of the films discussed above dealt with crime, questionable morality, corrupt authority figures, exploitation, manipulation and disenfranchisement of

(essentially good and noble) human beings. These films tackled the contentious issues of the day and attacked social, political and cultural institutions for their conservative and narrow-minded methods and for their links to entrenched

(capitalist) power-blocs.

It should, however, be clarified that the primary difference between the prototypical film noir and these 1930s leftist social problem films lies in the blame the latter place on socio-economics, race politics, and legitimated social, political and cultural institutions (such as law and justice) for the failures of both the system and its citizens.85 For example, films such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,

Fury, Black Fury and They Won’t Forget suggest a disturbing relationship between

85 Classical film noir tends to emphasize the psycho-sexual obsessions of its male anti- or non-hero and the ways in which this “fatal flaw” leads to his doom. 152

fascism, crime, racism (concentrating on the oppression and victimization of

African-Americans in particular), manipulations of law and justice, and capitalism.

Crime, in these films, is an expression of utter frustration, an understandable response to the inequities of capitalism that declares itself to be “democratic” but is controlled by the propertied and wealthy elites who menacingly exploit, or criminally ignore, the basic human rights of their “slaves.” Indeed, these films en masse posit that American democracy has been made consistent with slavery and other forms of institutionalized racism and exploitation. Law and justice, in these films, are the guardians of the exploiters, and their elected and sanctioned authority figures who operate as the racist, xenophobic, un-intelligent managers of the

“machine.”

These leftist films contain a remarkable flavor of “muckraking” that was missing from the mainstream genre-bound entertaining fare of the times. Hollywood leftist activism and creative effort was in the vein of producing a true social and political cinema that reflected, to a degree, “popular Marxism” in action as an anti-hegemonic strategy. Aesthetically, their experimentation in content and form pushed American cinema to its modernist expression. Leftist socially-critical filmmaking flourished because key political and artistic alliances between generally divergent groups congealed, and left-oriented personalities enjoyed expressive agency and industry power to sustain the discourse. These alliances, which extended from grass-roots activists groups to the press and media, the military, censorship agencies (such as the 153

PCA), labor organizations (such as the CIO) and political lobby groups in

Washington, and all the way up to the Rooseveltian government, provided a contentious, shifting, highly charged and creatively inductive environment where activist counter-discourse could circulate and provide a stabilizing influence in both national and international policy decisions during this era of increasing American influence in world affairs. After WW II, when national policy dictated a hard right- turn, leftists were generally ousted from key positions. Leftist expressions were severely repressed and, most unfortunately, the left’s enormous contributions to

American culture and politics became relegated to national amnesia. Predictably, many, if not most, motion-picture leftists involved in activist, critical filmmaking in the 1930s ended up on the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s.

In the following chapters I more fully discuss the Hollywood Left’s committed antifascism/anti-Nazism during the late 1930s, culminating in the production of

Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). These three seminal films by the Hollywood Left represent significant turning points in leftist cinematic discourse vis-à-vis fascism and Nazism. In Hollywood cinema, they represent the generic transformation of the leftist social problem film under the paradigm of “democracy under crisis.” Blockade was designed to agitate for U.S. intervention in fascist-threatened Spain, and was an amalgam of the social problem film, romantic melodrama, spy thriller and (to a lesser extent) the revolutionary film;

Juarez addressed fascism in Latin America and amalgamated antifascism into a 154

creative generic hybridization of the social problem film, the political/revolutionary film, and the historical epic. Confessions was the first commercial, mainstream, uncompromisingly anti-Nazi film to emerge from the Hollywood studios and amalgamated anti-Nazism into a hybridization of the social problem film/spy thriller and the detective/policier genres.

These films represented radical challenges to Nazism/fascism and were influential in shaping public opinion both nationally and internationally about the need to engage head-on with the rising power of these misguided ideologies. They also provide a marked point of contrast with the films discussed in this chapter and clearly indicate how leftist critique was undergoing transformation in the late 1930s.

Leftist antifascist/anti-Nazi films toward the end of the decade greatly muted their critique of fascism at home and focused on fascism as an “external threat,” but with the implication that these had links to, and effects on, the conditions within the

United States. Consequently, leftist critique of state power and its corruptions are overshadowed by an urgent concern with the larger malaise of fascism/Nazism as totalitarian ideologies menacing democracy on a global scale. I take up this discussion in the following two chapters.

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CHAPTER FOUR

ANTI-FASCISM, THE HOLLYWOOD LEFT AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL-PROBLEM FILM

The critique of the film culture of imperialism is only the beginning of our task. We who have experience in writing and producing films have an obligation to create material which genuinely reflects the aspirations and national interests of the people of our country. 86

--John Howard Lawson, member of the Hollywood Ten

Introduction I begin this chapter with a discussion on the idea of fascism and the ways in which the left understood it and responded to. Antifascism had became a rallying call for national culture in the second half of the decade and people from a variety of ideological positions, including the CPUSA and the popular front, gathered together under the pro-democratic, antifascist program under organizations such as the

League Against War and Fascism. The antifascist movement organized and sustained by the left, helped spark the anti-war movement and maintain global peace in the interim period before it became necessary to counter Nazism/fascism head-on on a global scale.

The Hollywood Left spearheaded cinematic antifascism and started interpellating antifascist discourse, particularly in the post-1935 period, into Hollywood productions in which the left had a degree of authorial power. Their politically-

86 John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses and Mainstream Publications, 1953), 82. 156

committed efforts culminated in the production of films such as Blockade (1938) and

Juarez (1939), the former an antifascist allegory of the Spanish civil war and the latter a big-budget historical epic/revolutionary film about Mexico’s struggle to free itself from French colonial rule in the 1860s. The chapter offers detailed case studies of these films, including their contentious reception, and examines the ways in which they retain distinct leftist generic, stylistic and ideological signatures associated with the leftist social-problem film. I argue that Blockade and Juarez represent a transformation of the social-problem film genre wherein antifascist discourse was seamlessly amalgamated with social and political criticism typical of the 1930s socially-critical films. This transformation would undergo further, far more radical change under the impetus of leftist anti-Nazism.

In contrast with the films discussed in chapter 2, in this chapter I argue that, in response to a number of forces (red-baiting, the appeal of the New Deal, the threat of

European fascism, the demands of censorship, and so forth), left filmmakers muted or dispensed altogether with the critique of U.S. state power and of homegrown fascism in order to focus on foreign fascism. While this shift significantly limited the reach of radical critique, it nonetheless enabled left filmmakers to make important critiques of fascism that challenged right wing isolationist responses to the European situation. I conclude the chapter with a discussion on how leftist antifascism, including propaganda films, helped create a pro-democratic popular front and a 157

united national response against the rising tide of this totalitarian ideology and how it paved the way for direct propaganda against Nazism as the decade came to a close.

Leftist Antifascism in its contexts Before a discussion of leftist antifascism is presented, it would be appropriate to have some discussion of fascism as a twentieth-century phenomenon. What, in fact, was “fascism”? How was it understood by American leftists? How was it depicted and critiqued in the antifascist propaganda films authored by the Hollywood Left?

What was the CPUSA’s analysis of fascism? Did it have a specific cultural program aimed at countering specific forms of fascism? How did this program influence antifascist films authored by the Hollywood Left working under the mandate of the studio system? It would be unwise to claim that the brief discussion presented here could adequately answer these complex political, cultural and aesthetic questions.

What I aim to do is to provide a sufficiently broad context for fascism as it was understood by Hollywood leftists as a method for positioning my analysis of leftist antifascist cultural productions, particularly the antifascist propaganda films.

Without going into an elaborate discussion of the ideology, movements and methods that constituted fascism, it should be understood that no two historians or critics are likely to agree on what constituted fascism in all of its variants. Even the most commonly known varieties—Spanish, Italian and German—differed markedly in their doctrines, and the specific social, historical and cultural contexts in which they arose and gained force. Fascism was, therefore, an inexact label but was generally understood by American leftists to be any popular movement that featured 158

a dictatorial, charismatic leader supported by a paramilitary organization. It utilized over-determined propaganda to foment hatred among disenchanted, dissatisfied and disaffected groups and towards those it positioned as “Others” of different class/race/ethnic backgrounds or national origins. It typically had a strong populist base and utilized the most blatant methods of appeal to mobilize popular sentiment in favor of its pogroms in the name of promised enfranchisement and “will to power.”

Fascism tended to combine ideas of racial and national superiority, anti-liberalism, anti-Marxism and anticommunism. It also generally set itself up in opposition to democratic capitalist society and the ethos of entrenched bourgeois classes. It promised the creation of a new world order based on its doctrines of moral purity combined with supremist ideology. Spanish repression under Franco, Italian fascism under Mussolini and German Nazism under Hitler were generally understood and recognized as de facto fascist regimes.87 Later, Japanese imperialism—which was essentially a revival of the samurai or bushido spirit—as evidenced by its militarism in the Pacific and its aggressive coalition with Germany and Japan was also accepted as “fascist,” and the Japanese were conjoined to this group. Japanese fascism was perhaps only generically so for “both in structure and ideas or ethos it specifically

87 For a good discussion on the subject see “What do we mean by Fascism?” in Stanley Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).

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differed from European fascism,”88 as Stanley Paine declares. Several Latin

American nations, including Argentina and Brazil, were also susceptible to an admixture of nationalism and fascism, the latter of both the homegrown variety and of European influence.

Antifascism, in the global context, was then understood to encompass political movements designed to counter these four variants. Leftist antifascism in its foundational form was bound up on its discourse on the Spanish civil war; the Italian invasion of Ethiopia; Nazism in Germany and its accompanying anti-Semitic rhetoric and race politics; and the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, its aggression against

China and its military occupation of key Pacific outposts. In the American leftist context, fascism was also equated with nativism, xenophobia, exploitative monopoly capitalism and its relationship to forms of institutionalized racism and socio- economic subjugation of minority groups especially African-Americans, Mexican-

Americans and Asian-Americans. The Deep South was the very epitome of “native fascism” in the leftist estimation and leftist discourse constructed it as “uncivilized” and “undemocratic”: here, slavery, lynching, labor exploitation, racism, violence, legalism, discrimination, xenophobia and all forms of savage brutality reigned.

In general, the CPUSA’s analysis of fascism in its variant forms tended to be

“malleable” because of shifting political conditions, both in Europe and globally. Not

88 Stanley Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 164. See also Ernesto Laclau, “Fascism and Ideology” in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso, 1977). 160

all dictatorial regimes were necessarily anticommunist or even anti-leftist. Fascism in the less developed European countries such as Spain and Italy had initially been a

“populist” movement, closer to communism in its stance against entrenched, traditional socio-political power systems. It took on a highly aesthecized, politically revolutionary form under Mussolini and Hitler and became less and less of a grass- roots movement.89 Position reversals and policy changes by the CPUSA in regard to what was considered “fascist” were not uncommon. However, in regards to Spanish,

Italian and German fascism, the Party’s stance was clearly antifascist and its rhetoric was generally stable in regard to these. American Marxists, communists, liberals and non-communist leftists also tended to agree, more or less, in their antifascism against those regimes and against U.S. nativism.

In leftist cultural productions, such as proletarian literature and socially-critical

Hollywood filmmaking, the U.S. native fascism was the one generally addressed, typified by films such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Fury (1936) and They Won’t Forget (1937), while antifascism against international movements was carried on in the overtly propaganda film such as Heart of Spain (1937),

Blockade (1938) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). The commercial nature of

Hollywood film production, the studio system-controlled distribution and exhibition network, and the local and national censorship apparatus made it difficult to target

89 Some excellent historical background on the roots of fascism can also be found in Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) and, on the Spanish context, his Fascism in Spain, 1923-1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).

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any specific group because of its race, ethnicity, ideology, religious belief system or national origin; allegories were then the rule in the left’s socio-political critique.

Clearly the PCA ethos was meant to ensure maximal commercial distribution and minimal political controversy.

The clearest expression of the Hollywood Left’s antifascism is to be found in the pre-World War II propaganda films such as Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939),

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), and Four Sons (1940), and in wartime combat films against Germany and Japan, such as Destination Tokyo (1943) and Action in the North Atlantic (1943), among many others. Leftist antifascism was an organized response to the threats posed to “democracy.” Although aligned with nationalist ideology, it maintained its critical edge towards capitalism and critiqued totalitarian ideologies on moral and humanistic grounds. Leftist antifascism maintained its

(nuanced) Marxist critique and its socially- and politically-critical tone by appealing to the movie audiences’ sensitivity to issues of human rights and, simultaneously,

“agitating” them onto active political participation.

Leftist Antifascism and the US Peace Movement In the early years of the 1930s, the CPUSA was the progenitor of popular movements combining two of its allied causes: antifascism and global peace. The rising tide of fascism in Europe enabled antifascist alliances between ideologically divergent groups in the United States and engendered the largest and most effective peace movement in the nation. Since fascist propaganda was being steadily directed 162

against the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, the CPUSA’s antifascist rhetoric tended to combine anticapitalism, antifascism, global peace and the defense of the USSR.

The Party supported antifascist art and activism and built front organizations such as the American League Against War and Fascism (founded in 1933). Its antifascist manifesto, adopted at the First U.S. Congress Against War, in New York City, Sept.

29-Oct. 1, 1933, declared:

The rapid rise of Fascism is closely related to the increasing war danger. Fascism means forced labor, militarization, lower standards of living, and the accentuation of national hatred and chauvinist incitements as instruments for the “moral” preparation for war. It sets the people of one country against the people of another, and exploits the internal racial and national groups within each country in order to prevent them from uniting in joint action to solve their common problems.90

The manifesto warned against the machinations of capitalists and exploitative colonial powers to re-divide world markets to enhance their power and profits. A united front must be created, declared the manifesto, “to form committees of action against war and fascism in every important center and industry, particularly in the basic war industries; to secure the support for this program of all organizations seeking to prevent war, paying special attention to labor, veteran, unemployed, and farmer organizations.”91

The American League Against War and Fascism had a stellar cast of supporting members, including Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Sidney

Hook, Sherwood Anderson and Malcolm Cowley. It succeeded in building

90 “Manifesto and Program of the League Against War and Fascism,” Daily Worker v. 11, n. 156 (30 June, 1934): 4.

91 ibid.

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antifascist coalitions with leading noncommunist groups as well, including the

American Civil Liberties Union, the Women’s International League for Peace and

Freedom and the NAACP. It became the largest antifascist organization in the United

States so that by 1939 it had over 20,000 dues paying members and over 1,000 affiliated organizations. It published a monthly propaganda magazine called The

Fight Against War and Fascism and organized conferences, demonstrations, petitions and also funded antifascist publications and productions. The League was perhaps one of the more successful and stable organizations supported by the

CPUSA, fellow travelers and antifascists of a variety of ideological persuasions during this “Red Decade” of political and cultural ferment.92

The American League Against War and Fascism, because of its power and presence, and its well-funded and well-distributed activist literature, perhaps indirectly also encouraged student activism against war. It had repeatedly warned against the dangers of global conflict based on capitalist and colonialist interests that controlled global finance and trade, enforcing its ideology by militarism. The League continually defended the Soviet Union as the only truly peace-loving nation, a classless society where the “basic cause of war had been removed,” since no classes could benefit singly from war-mongering.

92 For good background information on the political, cultural, aesthetic and ideological debates regarding fascism and leftist cultural production, see Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, days of Hope: a Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937-1942 (Niwot, CO : University Press of Colorado,1994), and Donald Ogden Stewart, Fighting Words (NY: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1940).

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The student anti-war movement gained force in the early 1930s in tandem with

CPUSA’s activism so that antiwar committees were founded and sustained in over ninety campuses throughout the United States. There were also social-democratic, communist and liberal antifascist and antiwar coalitions of student organizations, including The Socialist League for Industrial Democracy, the National Student

League, the National Student Federation of America and the American Youth

Congress. These united in their antiwar strikes on campuses. So powerful and effective was this movement that Eleanor Roosevelt gave a keynote address at the

National Conference of Students in Politics in Washington, D.C., in December 1933, and spoke persuasively in favor of trade-unionism, educational reforms at colleges and universities, and against war, fascism and racism. Building upon his antifascist alliance with the CPUSA, Upton Sinclair in California started his campaign to build a new social order in America founded on “democratic” principles so as to effectively counter home-grown fascism. His efforts resulted in the End Poverty in

California (EPIC) program. 93 Sinclair used EPIC as his platform to obtain the

Democratic nomination and ran for office in the California gubernatorial race of

1934, albeit unsuccessfully.

In essence, antifascism enabled a united response from generally politically divergent enclaves in the United States. It brought together socialists, communists,

93For details of the program, see Upton Sinclair, EPIC Answers: how to end poverty in California (Los Angeles: End Poverty League, Inc., 1934) and John Duke, The Prophet in Politics: a study of the Upton Sinclair EPIC campaign for Governor of California (Los Angeles: 1953). 165

“centrists,” liberals and mainstream patriots together. The alliance was both politically expedient and self-serving, but also a necessary means of encountering the global threat. The coalition was unstable and there were differences and disputes on ways and means by which antifascism could be made most effective. Despite the fact that the label of fascism was applied with differing degrees of emphasis and rigor to its multifarious variants, the united front did prosper and enabled some remarkable cultural productions, including Hollywood Leftist antifascist propaganda films.

Antifascism vs. Anticommunism The CPUSA had, of course, been the target of continuous and unabated conservative and right-wing attacks from its very inception. “Reds,” “Subversives,”

“Terrorists,” “Pinkos” and “Stoolies” were excoriated in the anticommunist, mainstream and rightwing media, as well as bashed by the rising anticommunist left.

Earl Browder and the CP leadership may have correctly surmised that “antifascism” and alliances with the liberal factions, rather than the revolution-bound radical leftists, would provide the only haven in the political quicksand of the late 1930s.

Slowly but inexorably, the CPUSA moved away from an outright defense of the

Soviet Union, tried to define itself in Americanist terms, made more “centrist” alliances and became more “progressive” rather than “revolutionary.”

The Party’s moderate, pro-democratic political theme of the post-1935 period was reflected in Earl Browder’s slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”

Writing in The Communist of April 4, 1939, William Z. Foster declared that the

“more we dramatize—correctly, of course—the hardships and poverty of the people, 166

the more we create a favorable public opinion of the people’s democratic demands and the more difficult we make it for reaction” (emphasis added).94 Under the

CPUSA’s new mandate, both national and international solidarity against Nazi

Germany was particularly foregrounded. Thus, antifascism was simultaneously an ideological imperative of the Party, a method of forming political coalitions, and a defense against red-baiting.95

Consequently, the thrust of the Party’s work with writers, artists and intellectuals after 1935 was to encourage antifascist alliances with “democracy” and push for peace, trade union rights, civil liberties, more jobs, and relief. By this move the

CPUSA had essentially re-articulated its “class war” as a “war on fascism” and hoped that its revolutionary ideology was now framed within an acceptable paradigm. However, to die-hard anticommunists, this was mere self-serving ideological camouflage. Lawrence Dennis, writing in the American Mercury, of June

1938, warned that the “real communist menace is constituted by the Party’s idealism, revolutionary ideology, and revolutionary strategy. They are the principal forces now hastening humanity toward war and degeneration…As for Communist ideology, it is nothing more or less than a philosophy of war, or the class struggle, having the largest possible mass appeal…It is by linking a class-war philosophy with the

94 William Z. Foster, “The Human Element in Agitation,” in The Communist, XVIII no.4 (April 1939): 352.

95 For a good discussion see John Howard Lawson, “Writers’ Trade Union,” Direction, 2 (May-June 1939), and Edwin Seaver, “Writers Lead Defense of American Culture,” in The Daily Worker, (9 June, 1937).

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innocent idealism of plenty, equality and efficiency that Communism becomes dangerous.”

Dennis went on to attack prominent communists and their penetration of

American institutions where they paraded their allegiance with democracy but secretly worked to spread the class-war ideas both within the intellectual and popular spheres. Dennis continued his harangue:

Earl Browder, Moscow’s present commissar for the United States, recently stated publicly that, regardless of anything being formerly written by any Communist, communism now stands for liberty, free speech, democracy, and constitutional government. Statements of this character would be funny, were they not being taken at face value by our Liberal statesmen and educators; if Granville Hicks were not being called from the New Masses to the faculty of Harvard University to spread communist propaganda; if our best Eastern Universities were not swarming with Left-Wing exiles from Europe who are privileged here to take jobs needed by unemployed native Americans, and, at the same time, to agitate for American involvement in Popular Front coalitions with Communist Russia. 96

The ideological alliance between the CPUSA and progressives like Roosevelt, particularly under the pro-democratic antifascist program, raised the ire of conservatives, who saw the left-right centering under antifascism as a cover for

“Red” agendas.

The anticommunist press churned out bitter critiques of the Party’s “democratic” position. Hearst papers, for example, tossed their outright condemnation on

Roosevelt and the U.S. government for continuing the economic malaise and keeping the capitalist free-enterprise system at bay in order to usher in “socialist cures.” In

96 Lawrence Dennis, “The Real Communist Menace,” The American Mercury, June 1938, 146-154.

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November 1938, the American Mercury, already shifting to the Right, sonorously announced:

Ours is the richest nation in history, enjoying a capitalist economy which has lifted us to heights of affluence and well-being never before known to mankind. And yet, here we stand poised on the brink of national bankruptcy, with millions of Americans in near-destitution, and with our national economy in rapid disintegration. What is the explanation? What is the only explanation? Is any other answer possible than that Mr. Roosevelt and his lieutenants are deliberately preventing the recovery of the American Capitalist system in order to clear the way for desired American Socialism? It is time for [us] to come to the grim realization that the most potent and relentless enemy of the American Capitalist system is the President of the United States. 97

Leftists, and the CPUSA front-rank, continued to counter these charges by declaring communist fraternity with American democracy. They foregrounded the alliance of these normally opposed ideologies as a bastion against the rising tide of fascism both at home and abroad.

In December 1938, in the heyday of the popular front, an essay by Earl Browder appeared in The Communist in which he argued that the CPUSA’s alliance with democracy provided (working-class, grass-roots) American culture with a shield against this encroaching fascism—here, referred to as “forces of reaction.” He declared,

The concept of ‘good Americans,’ in the sense of the national democratic and revolutionary traditions, embraces the whole progressive majority of the people, and, further, extends to a degree among the conservative masses insofar as they show capacities of resistance to the modern forces of reaction. We Communists, taking our place as an integral sector of the progressive and democratic camp, claim

97 Harold Lord Varney, “Roosevelt Does Not Want Recovery,” The American Mercury, November 1938, 258-264.

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the common title of ‘Good Americans,’ and further add to it the claim that our particular principles and programs embody future developments of our country. 98

An interesting point to note here is how Browder skillfully conflates the spirit of revolutionary ideology with the essence of “Americanism” and of the democratic tradition. Further on in the essay, Browder emphasized the need to continue alliances with all progressive forces in trade unions, government, and even progressive non- monopoly capitalists! This fraternal call was extended by Browder to all who would unite in a determination “to defend culture, to unite culture with the strivings of the people, to preserve and extend our democratic heritage, to assist our brothers in other lands who are suffering the bestial assaults of fascism.”

As the CPUSA’s ideological position slowly fused with the “centrist” Popular

Front, the Party’s “radical” and “revolutionary” cultural programs and productions transformed into pro-labor democratic forms. Both literary and cinematic radicalism was now included under the master trope of “antifascism.” Hollywood Leftists produced Blockade, Juarez and Confessions of a Nazi Spy during this time.

The Radical Shift: Leftist cultural production under the “democratic” and “antifascist” paradigms The CPUSA’s centrist move left the radical writer in a lurch. No longer could he write dramatic strike novels or vilify the “corrupt” middle classes. No longer could he author brutalized and degraded workers as protagonists caught in the maze of deceit, horrible working conditions for the laborers and brilliant profits for the

98 Earl Browder, “Concerning American Revolutionary Traditions,” The Communist, XVII, no. 12 (December 1938): 1082.

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owners. No longer, in his or her dramatic bildungsroman, could a working-man of conscience rise up against the forces of industrialism, “convert” to communism as the “true way” and work for the enlightened, classless world of the future. CPUSA’s organ, The New Masses, which had been preeminent in foregrounding class- conscious revolutionary ideology, became increasingly silent on the topic of

“revolution.” “Art as a Weapon” could not be so easily or openly used against capitalist oppressors; it was now to be used as a loaded weapon primarily against fascism.

However, strains of the radical leftist discourse continued, even if moderated under the new “official” agenda of the left-center coalition against fascism. In this discourse, anticapitalist and antifascist critiques were conjoined in popular magazine pieces, muckraking journalism and Hollywood Leftist filmmaking (as I have discussed in chapter 2). In these films, there was now a clear shift from focusing on fascism at home to fascism abroad, perhaps at the expense of the critique of racism and nativism within the United States. Deeper “coding” strategies were employed to show the structural and ideological consonance between fascism and unchecked, monopolistic capitalism. Both were examined and critiqued as political systems that had been made consistent with the “slavery” of the masses.

In general, however, the overwrought Marxist viewpoint in radical works was partially co-opted and reversed in the service of “democracy” against the “evil” of mass-minded fascism. Marxian viewpoint too, toward the end of the decade, 171

therefore became much more nuanced, generically and stylistically coded, more obscured. Instead of the (communist) “cause,” the watchwords for leftists in the late

1930s became “democracy” and “antifascism.” Discursively, the communist/capitalist dialectic was dissolved into a new patriotic antifascist synthesis.

As I have already discussed in Chapter 1, by the time of the Second Congress of the League of American Writers, in June, 1937, a remarkable group of politically diverse talent was gathering under the antifascist program, and the congress was far more on “democracy” vs. fascism rather than “radicalism” or “communism.” To repeat, at the Second Congress, the most socially significant works selected for praise and prizes were John Dos Passos The Big Money, Joseph Freeman’s An

American Testament, Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes!, John Howard Lawson’s

Marching Song and Van Wyck Brooks’ The Flowering of New England. These nominations and selections testified to the rather politically diverse platform on which the League of American Writers now placed itself.

The CPUSA did continue in promulgating its established leftist policies but rather more coded in the form of “reform.” This trend can be seen in the political positioning of prominent communists, such as Lawson, known in right-wing circles as “Hollywood’s commie commissar.” For the Third Writers’ Congress of the

League of American Writers, June 2-4, 1939, Lawson submitted a memo on the question of the development of unionization in the entertainment industry and in 172

literary and journalistic circles. Addressing the issue of writers working in the culture industry, Lawson theorized a strong connection between democracy and unionism

(as opposed to communism and proletarian rights), declaring that

The social and cultural objectives of the League of American writers can be greatly aided by the extension of economic organization. A strong trade union is the best guarantee that writers will have the security, the protection from pressure or discrimination, the freedom of expression, which are essential for the growth of a democratic culture. 99

At this conference, Albert Maltz also spoke on the necessity of joining all writers in a massive trade union under the auspices of the Author’s Guild section of the

Writer’s League. Under the antifascist, pro-democratic program, leftists were pushing for reform and greater organization within the motion-picture industry, other areas of cultural production and the larger culture. Unionization, better pay scales and benefits for the rank and file would go hand in hand with greater prestige, agency and authorial and political power for leftists. In essence, the Hollywood Left and its ideological cohorts were gearing up for the unrestrained filmic battle against fascism/Nazism. For this purpose they needed a dedicated, organized and well- funded “cinematic army.”

The Shifting Radicals: Embracing New Forms and Breaking with Old Ideas Did proletarian fiction and left filmmaking, like the radicalism that spawned them, simply, and quickly, die? I would argue not for their deaths but for their transformations. The proletarian novel and radical fiction in general, and Hollywood

99 John Howard Lawson, “Writers’ Trade Union,” Direction 2 (May-June 1939), 18.

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Left filmmaking practices in particular, became amalgamated with the left’s new political position and agendas. Like the CPUSA, they became “reformist,”

“progressive,” and “democratic.” Many writers, artists, filmmakers and intellectuals hailing from the radical tradition of the early thirties followed suit and joined directly through membership and through their subsequent work, the popular front. Albert

Maltz, who wrote agit-prop Marxist plays in the mid-thirties (such as Peace on

Earth, 1934 and The Black Pit, 1935), produced, in the late thirties, short stories and magazine pieces such as The Happiest Man on Earth (1938) and The Way Things

Are (1938), dealing respectively with joblessness and lynching. Such works cloaked their critiques of capitalism, nativism, xenophobia and Southern fascism in allegory.

Similarly, John Howard Lawson scripted the antifascist documentary Heart of Spain

(1937) and the Hollywood antifascist fiction film Blockade (1938). In contrast, writers such as John Dos Passos became increasingly alienated from the CPUSA, ended up leaving the Party and becoming anticommunist.

If literary radicals shifted from proletarian fiction to antifascist literature,

Hollywood Leftists also shifted their emphasis from Depression-era critique to incorporating elements of antifascism in their favored genre, the social problem film.

The anticapitalist discourse of leftist films became more nuanced, more deeply coded while antifascist critique and racial discourse slowly became more prominent in the late 1930s. The seminal antifascist and anti-Nazi films of the time, Gabriel over the

Whitehouse (dir. Gregory La Cava, Cosmopolitan/MGM,1933), First Lady (dir. 174

Stanley Logan, Warner Bros., 1937), Blockade (dir. William Dieterle, Warner Bros.,

1938), Algiers (dir. John Cromwell, United Artists, 1938), Juarez (dir. William

Dieterle, Warner Bros.,1939), Confession of a Nazi Spy (dir. Anatole Litvak, Warner

Bros.,1939), Four Sons (dir. Archie Mayo, 20th Century Fox, 1940), and The Man I

Married (dir. Irving Pichel, Zanuck Co., 1940), tackled fascism in a variety of genres hybridized with elements of the social problem film. The fact that much of this filmmaking effort was led by Hollywood leftists has been conveniently forgotten by most Hollywood film historians. Considering Charlie Chaplin’s ultra-liberal politics,

I would even count The Great Dictator (dir. Charles Chaplin, United Artists, 1940) in this antifascist line-up, a wonderful follow-up to his comedic broadside against

Fordism, Taylorism and capitalism in Modern Times (1936).

Proletarian fiction writers, Marxist “agit-prop” playwrights, radical documentarians, muckraking activists, leftist actors and writers like Maltz, Lawson,

Lillian Hellman, Alvah Bessie, Abraham Polonsky, Herbert Biberman, Paul Jarrico,

Gale Sondergaard, Samuel Ornitz, Paul Robeson, John Garfield, Leo Hurwitz, Ben

Maddow, Joris Ivens, Herbert Kline, among many others, swung over to antifascist production under the rubric of “social cinema.” These Hollywood Leftists, most of whom ended up on the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s, also joined the war effort, after Pearl Harbor, by writing, directing, producing or acting in anti-Nazi and anti-

Japanese combat films. 175

The “radical shift” also crossed color lines. Some blacks were attracted to the

Party because of its integrationist agenda and defense of blacks. When the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama, it was the CPUSA that had become associated with the defense of these young black men, imprisoned, in the earlier years of the Depression, by southern injustice. The left defended the Scottsboro boys with an amalgam of anticapitalist, antifascist and antiracist critique. Significantly,

Hollywood Leftists had banded together under the banner of the Hollywood

Scottsboro Committee and had the support of such luminaries as Robert Benchley,

Fredric March, Robert Montgomery, James Cagney, Dorothy Parker, Boris Karloff and Oscar Hammerstein. A letter was sent to President Roosevelt by the committee that proclaimed that “we pledge ourselves to continue this struggle until all these victims of prejudice and hatred are freed.”100 However, leftist in general and the Party in particular was accused by liberals and the NAACP of exploiting racial issues for its own purposes, such as instilling communist ideology among the blacks.

The black-white race-relation impacted antifascist film productions of the 1930s as well. Black radicals, who had criticized Hollywood’s racism for three decades, equated the studio mogul’s unwillingness to produce antifascist films in defense of

European Jews as an extension of the their lack of concern over “native fascism” in the South and the persistence of anti-black stereotypes from studio films. Only leftist

100 This letter, entitled, “Hollywood Screen Stars Protest Scottsboro Convictions,” was published in an article in the Dispatch, 21August, 1937.

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antifascist cinema rose to the challenge, subject, of course, to black radical critique, as discussed in Chapter 2. In essence, black critics, such as Louise Thompson and

Loren Miller101 often felt that the mixed-cast social problem films were, even when addressing the “Negro problem,” “feeble” in their attempts to mobilize the political muscle necessary to solve issues of crucial relevance to the African-American.

Hollywood Left’s Antifascism as “Social Cinema” Among the raging issues in leftist circles in the late 1930s was the question of

“social cinema” and the hopes of the American left to radicalize not only genre- bound Hollywood cinema but to agitate for an American “Marxist” cinema, as I have explained in the previous chapters. The Hollywood Left, as a sub-branch of the

American left, had been slowly gaining power and position since the mid-1930s, and it saw antifascism as a paradigm under which “social cinema” could germinate and survive the continuous rightwing onslaughts.

Radical leftist and communist playwrights, screenwriters, radio writers, magazine writers and littérateurs like Ella Winter, Joseph North, Arnaud d’Usseau, Donald

Ogden Stewart, Samuel Sillen, Granville Hicks, Mike Gold, John Howard Lawson,

Walter Bernstein, Henry Hart, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, and

Samuel Ornitz argued for a “critical” cinema that would be at once socially-

101 Articles in the NAACP journal, The Crisis, criticized Hollywood’s lack of progressive representation for blacks. See, for example, the following: Louise Thompson, “The Soviet Film” (February 1933); Loren Miller, “Uncle Tom in Hollywood” (November 1934) and “Hollywood’s New Negro Films” (June 1938).

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conscious, politically activist and commercially viable.102 Larry Ceplair states that,

“Radical screenwriters, hemmed in by studio policies and Hollywood conventions and under the influence of ‘social realism’ and ‘proletarian culture’ slogans of the

Party cultural line and the popular front tactic of the Party political line, seemed to emphasize liberal or democratic ‘inserts’ over scripts or storylines that flowed from a

Marxist aesthetic viewpoint.” 103 In effect, the leftists were striving for a transformed

“Marxist” cinema that was pro-democratic and whose discourse would operate in tandem with leftist discourse in literature, theatre, public art and, of course, political activism. Many leftist screenwriters shared the hope of creating a “meaningful” cinema. Some were equally dedicated to issues of unionism, workers rights and negotiating power within the Hollywood studio system, as they were to radical politics. Lawson, Cole and Ornitz had together co-founded the Screen Writers Guild

(SWG) in 1933, and Lawson had served as its first president. Hollywood leftists and their ideological and cultural cohorts soon realized that within the hierarchical and rigidly-codified confines of the Hollywood studio system, an unambiguously Marxist cinema was impossible. So they argued and agitated for the next best thing, a “social

102 Lawson’s own writings are replete with discussions on leftist/Marxist media praxis. See John Howard Lawson, Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (NY: G. P. Putnam, 1949), Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York: Masses and Mainstream Publications, 1953), and Film: The Creative Process (NY: Hill and Wang, 1967).

103 Larry Ceplair, “The Politics of Compromise in Hollywood: A Case Study,” Cineaste, vol. 8, no. 4 (1970): 5.

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cinema,” which, in essence, meant a “democratic” cinema utilizing “Marxist” critique and dedicated to social criticism and political activism.

In the late 1930s, the socially-conscious cinematic work of these communists,

Marxists and “fellow travelers” reflected an amalgamation of antifascism, democratic ideology, and pro-unionism that was a liberal integration of race, class, gender and ethnicity under “Americanism.” This was “progressive” cinema, not contentiously rebellious or radical, but socially-conscious and critical.106 This

“people’s cinema” produced such masterpieces as The Life of Emile Zola and Mr.

Deeds Goes to Town in Hollywood. It also produced seminal documentaries such as

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1934) and The River (1937) by Pare Lorentz under governmental auspices and the radical documentary Native Land (1937-41) under the communist-supported Frontier Films Group, a Marxist/communist enclave operating from the East Coast.

The quintessential commercial, fictional film of the late 1930s epitomizing

“social cinema” was John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (released, 1940), adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel, but I would also argue for Frank Capra’s Meet John

Doe, which however was not released until 1941. With antifascism as its structuring trope, the quintessential 1930s films were Blockade (1938), scripted by John Howard

106 For a good discussion on “social cinema” see Donald Ogden Stewart, “Hollywood Brigade,” in Fighting Words (NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940). For discussions on the symbiosis of politics and aesthetics in the work of the Hollywood Ten, see Bernard F. Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1989). For ideas relating to Marxist ideology and “critical” cinema, theatre and literature, see Gary Carr, The Left Side of Paradise: The Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). 179

Lawson and directed by William Dieterle; Juarez (1938), co-written by John Huston and also directed by William Dieterle; and the anti-Nazi, Confessions of a Nazi Spy

(1939), produced by Warner Bros., co-scripted by leftists Milton Krims and John

Wexley (who would be blacklisted in the 1950s), and directed by Anatole Litvak.

These films represented an increasing political “centering” of radical leftist discourse as Hitler’s and Mussolini’s presence and power mounted and as Europe plunged into war.

The Hollywood chapter of the League of American Writers addressed the issue of social content in film at a major session devoted to cinema at the Third Congress of the League of American Writers, held in 1939.107 A primary concern during the session was how cinema could help achieve a fusion of antifascism, a defense of democratic culture and the cultivation and mobilization of a class and ideology conscious audience. The results of these deliberations were published in a report entitled, “The Screen as a Democratic Force.” It noted that Hollywood had become a very powerful industry, employing thousands of skilled workers. It was imperative, it therefore argued, that these workers be offered the benefits of economic security through unionism, and that Hollywood should be free from “Wall-street influence” in order to devote itself to the task of using the screen as a social force.

The report implied that due to wage and contract negotiations, contentions over copyright issues, and the need to assure royalties for the creative talent, there had

107 “The Official Program of the Third American Writers’ Congress,” Direction, vol. 2 no. 3, (May- June 1939), 22. 180

been a “laboring” of Hollywood, just as there had been a laboring of American culture under industrialization, mass production and consumption since the turn of the century. In other words, there was the clear implication in the report that the studio system was not simply the playground of the “Movie Moguls” but a site of cultural production by a mass of working-class talent. The report implied that

Hollywood had become “socialized” and strong unions with the power to negotiate were necessary to maintain this “democratic culture.” As a unionized, organized enclave, Hollywood as a modern industry would be able to participate without fear and insecurity in the creation and maintenance of a “social cinema” that would reflect “socio-economic reality” and a “democratic” political consciousness rather than the mythical fantasies proffered by generic Hollywood films.

The New Masses and The Daily Worker with their direct CPUSA links and sponsorship provided arenas for debate over “social cinema.” Joseph North and Ella

Winter authored a series of essays108 in the New Masses, starting in July 1939, on the political, economic, ideological and socio-cultural aspects of film production in

Hollywood. The authors made it abundantly clear that Hollywood was in the grips of the “Wall Street boys.” Their insatiable need for commodities and profits prohibited realistic films that “Main Street” Americans wanted. What constituted “real” and

“social” cinema? North asserted that this, in the present moment, consisted of

108 Joseph North, “The New Hollywood,” The New Masses, XXXII no.2, (July 4, 1939), 3-6; and, the second article, Joseph North, “The New Hollywood,” The New Masses, XXXII no.3 (July 11, 1939), 15. 181

antifascism and unionism under the direction of “progressive” forces. By contrast, the forces of “reaction” (i.e. native fascism, conservatism, the radical right) were theorized to be undermining this enterprise. Social cinema consisted of films like

Juarez (1939) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) that depicted the true picture of what was happening in the world. The “true picture” that North and Winter referred to was the pernicious influence of fascism/Nazism globally. Blockade, Juarez and

Confessions were prime leftist expressions against these totalitarian, anti-humanist ideologies. These films should be viewed together as constituting Hollywood Left’s commitment to “democracy” and its sonorous debunking of these alternative social and political systems.

In the following sections I present detailed analysis and discussions of these films, and explicate how the leftist social-problem film genre was transformed under the impetus of antifascist/anti-Nazi propaganda. It is also important to note the larger geo-political contexts in which these films were produced: Blockade was a

“humanist” response to Spanish fascism; Juarez was a cry for revolutionary action against fascist encroachments in Mexico and Latin America; and Confessions was an open call for national mobilization against Nazism in the United States and Europe.

Significantly, the social problem film genre enabled leftist ideological signatures and leftist favored narrative, stylistic and generic elements to be seamlessly interwoven with antifascist/anti-Nazi discourse. By this means, the Hollywood Left 182

foregrounded its art and activism in favor of “democracy” while staying true to its foundational ideological and aesthetic roots.

Politically, films such as Blockade, Juarez and Confessions of a Nazi Spy were only possible because of ideological alignment between the Hollywood Left, the motion-picture industry’s professional and craft unions and guilds, Roosevelt’s New

Deal programs, and labor organizations such as the CIO. It was also encouraged by the protection offered to organized and unionized labor by the National Labor

Relations Board, which fostered collective bargaining and other peaceful negotiating strategies in order to obtain cooperative agreements with the managers and owners of the various laboring sectors, including the motion-picture industry. These protections were formalized in the Wagner Act of 1935. 109

For leftists like Joseph North, it was obvious that films such as Juarez would

“foster traditions of American democracy, promote world peace, develop understanding amongst religious, racial, social, and economic groups.” 110 According

109 For full details, see the database online available from http://www.nlrb.gov/facts.html. In summary: The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known popularly as the Wagner Act, was New Deal legislation designed to protect workers’ rights to unionize. It created the National Labor Relations Board, which still functions to enforce the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB conducts secret-ballot elections to determine whether employees want union representation and investigates and remedies unfair labor practices by employers and unions. The statute guarantees the right of employees to organize and to bargain collectively with their employers or to refrain from all such activity. Generally applicable to all employers involved in interstate commerce—other than airlines, railroads, agriculture, and government—the Act implements the national labor policy of assuring free choice and encouraging collective bargaining as a means of maintaining industrial peace. Through the years, Congress has amended the Act and the Board, and courts have developed a body of law drawn from the statute.

110 Joseph North, “The New Hollywood,” The New Masses, XXXII no.3 (July 11, 1939), 16.

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to North, it was clear that this goal was being successfully pursued from the committed developments in antifascist and unionists activities, as represented by the formation of the anti-Nazi League in 1935; the Motion Picture Artists Committee to

Help Loyalist Spain in 1936; the organizing of screen writers, directors, and a variety of smaller crafts unions in 1937; and, in 1938, the formation of the Motion Pictures

Democratic Committee to work against incumbent reactionary Republican governor

Frank Merriam. There were, as well, efforts started to organize audiences for these agendas through the formation of a group called the Associated Film Audiences.

“Social cinema” was therefore a particular formulation of “Marxist cinema” led by the Hollywood Left in opposition to commercially-commodified “Capitalist cinema.” Instead of “entertainment” only, it would offer “education.” Instead of reeling in “profits” it would “uplift” the masses. Instead of promoting dissatisfaction with individual lives, it would promote a sense of community. Instead of “satiation” with capitalist-commodification it would fire political “activism.” Above all, it would be a cinema of socio-political and artistic dynamism as opposed to static, formulaic recycling of popular myths, entrenched traditions and codified beliefs. For the Hollywood Left, only an artist free, in the deepest sense, of social understanding, political commitment and creative development could meet this demand. It was imperative, therefore, that the cinema as much as the cineaste be free—a condition that only “laborist” Hollywood could fulfill. 184

Clearly, Hollywood Leftists were pushing for worker’s rights such as unionization, improved working conditions within the studio system, wage-contract negotiations and other benefits, including, of course, expressive agency and political power in the industry, while organizing “social cinema” under the antifascist paradigm.

Juarez (1939): The Hollywood Left and revolutionary antifascism Juarez, a Warner Bros. historic epic directed by William Dieterle, is the story of the “democratic” struggles of Mexican President Benito Juarez (1806-1872) during the tragic era of Mexico’s Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian and his “mad queen”

Carlotta. Juarez was born to poor farmers in Oaxaca, and had to struggle to survive and get an education. Eventually, he became a lawyer, was elected to the governorship of the state of Oaxaca, and became the leader of Oaxaca’s liberal party.

When the French withdrew from Mexico, Juarez became president, instituting a host of social, political and economic reforms that curtailed the power of the Church, the landed gentry and the foreign colonial powers, particularly Britain, France and

Spain.

The film presents Juarez, played by liberal-left cinematic icon Paul Muni, as

“Mexico’s Lincoln,” a true proletarian hero and a man of conscience responding to the needs of “the people.” Throughout the film, Juarez is shown dressed in top-hat and coat, and in several scenes he is framed against the portrait of Lincoln while making liberal pronouncements or writing reformist declarations and manifestos. He is also, in fact, shown to be in active correspondence with Lincoln, exchanging 185

letters filled with “democratic” slogans and humanist sentiments. Later on in the film, when Juarez learns of Lincoln’s assassination, he nobly mourns the “loss of a friend” and instructs all flags to be flown at half-mast. Lincoln’s passing further stimulates him to devote all possible energy to liberate Mexico from the imperialists, and restore democracy.

Juarez retains distinct elements of the leftist social problem film. Arguably, the representation of Mexico as “besieged land” suffering socio-economic, political and cultural malaise, and the representation of its aristocratic and bourgeois/capitalist ruling classes as “un-democratic” and corrupt, echoes tropes similar to the

Depression-era social-problem film of the 1930s. Benito Juarez and his companeros are depicted as proletarian leaders carrying on a just war against the entrenched social and political classes and institutions under their direct manipulative control.

However, Juarez takes the social-problem film one vital step further. Instead of relying on a tragically hopeless “existential” finale or proposing a return to lost

“enlightened” ideals, it argues for a revolutionary solution to conditions. Juarez is, indeed, a revolutionary film in its discourse, ideology, intent and action. As such it proposes “democracy” rather than Marxism/communism as a revolutionary, emancipatory ideology. In my opinion, Juarez once again signals the amalgamation of U.S. communists, Marxists, noncommunist leftists, liberals and centrists under the

“democratic” paradigm. This is also in keeping with the alignment of the CPUSA 186

and the popular front, in the late 1930s, with the liberal Rooseveltian “democratic” mandate.

The opening scene shows the bourgeois king, Napoleon, surrounded by his fawning ministers as he delivers his “fascist” filibuster. To the assembly, Napoleon declares that his designs on Mexico are not for selfish reasons but that it is

A crusade to restore to our race and the rest of the civilized world our ancient force and prestige…Let the world know that our conquest of Mexico is only the beginning of the fulfillment of our holy mission!

The Emperor is clearly depicted as the embodiment of a fascist dictator. His speech disturbingly echoes Hitler’s war mongering and Aryan race politics. This totalitarian ruler favors aristocratic monarchy over all other forms of government, and particularly despises democratic ideology. To his minister of war he cynically comments,

Democracy…humph…the rule of the cattle by the cattle for the cattle…Abraham Lincoln…parliaments, plebiscite, proletariat…a mob intoxicated with the idea of equality!

Interestingly, in this pronouncement Napoleon amalgamates popular notions of democracy (parliaments and plebiscites) with communism (the proletariat), a very notable occurrence considering the fact that the film was made in an era when

CPUSA actively sought alliances with democracy and Browder was following his

“communism is 20th century Americanism” program.

When the Hapsburg rulers, Maximillian and Carlotta, arrive to take their courtly place at the national palace, a cut-a-way to the palace façade reveals a vulture perched upon the palace roof. The framing of this shot, however, echoes the Nazi 187

eagle atop a swastika, symbol of the Third Reich, indicating that “fascism” has descended over Mexico, with the “colonialist” and exploitative Napoleonic Empire sinking its talons deeper into the productive fertility of this land of poor but noble farmers. An eagle clutching a snake in its talons is also the Mexican national symbol, derived from Aztec iconography. The shot, in my opinion, is also interpretable in that sense. Significantly, it is the hypersensitive “mad Carlotta” who notices the vulture and winces, exclaiming, “it’s alive!,” perhaps seized by a foreboding—the spirit of Mexico (the people) will kill the snake (the “evil” foreign presence). In any event, it is both a premonition of “evil” (war, murder) descending over the Republic and a symbol of native power (liberty and revolution).

Paul Vanderwood notes that the screenwriters had to create a script highlighting hemispheric solidarity against fascism under the leadership of the United States.

Thus they had to fashion a series of favorable dialectics so that the film would

“match the democrat Juarez against the imperialist Maximillian, would bind

Mexico’s fortunes more closely to the United States than history had done, and would establish parallels between nineteenth-century French interventionists and

Europe’s contemporary dictators.”111 In the finished picture, Maximillian is less an autocratic ruler than a vacillating weakling struggling in the clutches of his flattering ministers and powerful land-owning capitalists. Juarez’s humility and nobility stand

111 Paul Vanderwood, “introduction,” Juarez (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 19. 188

in vast contrast to these corrupt and effete elites and the exploitative colonial powers that rule Mexico.

When Maximilian realizes that he and his queen have been sent to Mexico as

Napoleon’s dupes to sanctify and legalize the agenda of Mexico’s land-owning capitalists, he is childishly offended and prepares to abdicate. He even offers Juarez the position of prime minister in his monarchist government, hoping thereby to forge a coalition that would circumvent popular rebellion. These futile gestures come too late, as he is firmly in the trap of his generals and ministers, who convince him to authorize repressive measures against the citizenry. Carnage follows as innocents are indiscriminately killed in an effort to maintain the Hapsburg rule. Civil war erupts and Mexico “burns.” Napoleon, the “bourgeois” king, betrays Maximillian and

Carlotta to save himself and his empire against pressures exerted by the United

States government, and his own squabbling ministers.

The film clearly places the blame for the state of affairs less on politically naïve and socially “clueless” aristocrats and more directly on the capitalists who use

“fascist” methods for their exploitation and control of the “colonized” natives. The aristocratic ruling class, obsessed with ceremony and hauteur, are, in fact, shown to be manipulated pawns of the land-owning gentry and their capitalist “friends” and business associates. In contrast, the film depicts Benito Juarez as a tireless worker for the cause of liberty, and constructs him as the people’s democratic hero—a man belonging “to the people” waging the good war to construct a new nation “of the 189

people” “for the people,” while the Hapsburgs are ignobly defeated and their regime destroyed—of course, “by the people.” Maximillian is finally apprehended, tried by

Juarez, and shot.

The film’s political analysis typifies leftist-centrist discourse on capitalism, fascism, race politics, bourgeois ideology, imperialism, militarism and colonialism, and echoes the CPUSA’s more “centrist” and “democratic” rhetoric of the late

1930s. Juarez then is both an antifascist and a pro-democratic allegory that had special poignancy in 1939. The film takes every available opportunity to trace parallels between this “crisis” period in Mexican history and the European political situation in the late 1930s—it announces the defeat of the “forces of reaction,” the betrayal of “puppets” sympathetic to the fascists, and proclaims the ultimate victory of “democracy” in a righteous war by “the people” against the usurpers of god-given liberties.

Significantly, the film was a creative effort by a coalition of liberals, centrists and leftists. These included actors Paul Muni, Gale Sondergaard, Bette Davis, Brian

Aherne, John Garfield and Claude Rains, director William Dieterle, producer Hal B.

Wallis and screenwriter John Huston, among others. The film was produced at

Warner Bros. studio, which was, of course, a liberal-leftist enclave and perhaps the most anti-Nazi/antifascist studio in Hollywood. Juarez garnered two Academy

Award nominations and was a moderate commercial success.

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Racial politics in Juarez I would like to suggest that perhaps the greatest “coding” challenge for leftists lay in the racial/ethnic representation in the film. I argue that the Hollywood Left emplaced its social and political commentary in the racial/ethnic representation of

Benito Juarez, in addition to other aspects such as generic coding, stylistic tropes, narrative teleology and so forth. To the popular imagination, Juarez symbolized the disenfranchised “dark native,” a member of the American Indian population that had been subjected to violent genocide, inhuman exploitation, religious indoctrination and political powerlessness under colonialism.

I propose that to American leftists of the Thirties, however, he was the very embodiment of “enlightenment.” A member of the exploited underclass, he had, through dint of hard work, education, self-sacrifice and dedication to “his land,” raised himself from squalor to become a “populist” leader, working tirelessly for the emancipation of “his people.” Juarez’s rejection of orthodox Catholicism that was strongly anti-clerical, his rebellion against the capitalist landowning classes and mestizo elites, and his ceaseless struggle to free the Mexicans from European bondage, made him, in leftist estimation, a romantic revolutionary, a dark-skinned

Marxist/communist freedom fighter.112

112 In the context of leftist politics of the 1930s, it is worth noting that Karl Marx was a strong opponent of European control and exploitation of Mexico. Marx wrote in the New York Daily News (November, 1861) that Spanish, English and French intervention in Mexico’s affairs was “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.” 191

Yet, in the film he was to be no brawny guerilla or a breezy cabarello (like the latter-day Zapata or Pancho Villa), fighting a covert war in the jungles or fields but a man of somber organization, a diplomat and a political strategist. In short, a man in whom education, intellect and ideology coalesced brilliantly, a man equally at home in the combat zone and in the government offices. In sum, Juarez was to be shown as a revolutionary armed with the modern weapons of law, finance and military science, and endowed with a fine understanding of history, culture and liberal politics. This complex characterization was what was required of Paul Muni for leftist/Marxist ideological “coding” in addition to his satisfying the obligatory

“patriotic” role. The requirements, however, did not end there.

It was also important that Juarez be a humble man who had not forgotten his true racial/ethnic origins due to his higher education and knowledge, and his movement within elevated social circles. Juarez was an “Indian” who had not lost his “real identity.” Although he had acquired western accouterments, a sophisticated intellect, and refined social habits as a political leader, he had not become, in effect, a “dark

European”—a member of the very elite classes that were responsible for keeping the native population “enslaved” and ignorant. As an exceptional modern “native leader,” he was to serve as an excellent example of how a member of the dark, colonized races (African, Asian or Latin) could rise above all discouraging circumstances to take his or her place in the modern world with pride, a clear sense of racial/ethnic/cultural identity and loyalty, and a critical knowledge of history and 192

politics. In the representation and characterization of Benito Juarez, then, critical aspects of leftist discourse on race, class, ethnicity and ideology were to coalesce.

If the Hollywood Left had intended to keep Juarez’s representation

“ethnographically real,” it perhaps overcooked the formula to appeal to a wide audience and produced an image that was a combination of historical revisionism and ethnographic romanticism. Muni plays him too heavily, at times appearing to be a bit indecisive, and perhaps even undemonstrative when faced with crises such as military defeats and political betrayals. Muni’s Juarez is a bit too urbane, sober, statuesque almost dispassionate. His liberal and democratic pronouncements thus seem less convincing, flippant, hardly revolutionary. If Capra’s Jefferson Smith of

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (also produced in 1939) was an idealistic American country boy from the “heartland” who only reluctantly goes to Washington to make things right, then Juarez, as Muni plays him, seems too shrewd albeit Lincoln-like in his gravity. He seems a veritable pundit for liberalism ever-ready to fly across the peasant fields to shake hands, wine and dine and exchange democratic musings with the modern-day embodiment of Lincoln—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and come home bearing American “gifts” in the shape of military and economic assistance to save Mexico from the evils of totalitarianism.

Perhaps the contradictory ways in which the racial/ethnic and cultural representation of Paul Muni’s depiction of Juarez was received by both national and

Latin audiences helped stem the tide of conservative red-baiting. Had Muni played 193

him to leftist perfection, he may have been criticized as a “commie” or at least a fellow traveler in league with Hollywood Reds, similar to the accusations John

Garfield (who plays Porfiro Diaz in Juarez) would face from HUAC after starring as a leftist cinematic icon in postwar films such as Body and Soul (1947) and Force of

Evil (1948).

If the film’s reception was controversial all around, its role as an American

“democratic” ambassador was acknowledged at least in Latin diplomatic and governmental circles, and the picture succeeded in operating as an “official” nationalist, democratic antifascist declaration of hemispheric unity against the encroachments of Nazi Germany in Latin America.

The politics of production and reception As mentioned previously, Juarez was produced as a democratic, antifascist response to the increasing influence of Nazi Germany in Latin American affairs in the late thirties. Fascist organizations were spreading their power and gaining popular sympathy by heightening the resentment that native populations felt toward

U.S. militarism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation of resources and interference in local affairs. As Paul Vanderwood reports,

Militant European Fascism in search of hemispheric sympathies in 1937 broke surface in Latin America, as the Nazis sought support for the Anti-Comintern Pact that Germany had just signed with Italy and Japan. Fascist organizations found allies in countries where the concept of dictatorship was not entirely foreign and resentment toward “Yankee imperialism” great. German and Italian agents established new military missions in the region, underwrote the sales of weapons, set up propaganda outlets, controlled several airlines, and strengthened trade links to their dictatorships.113

113 Paul Vanderwood, “introduction,” Juarez (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 9-10. 194

Roosevelt was understandably concerned about fascism and Nazism getting a stronghold in Latin America, particularly Mexico, and sought to extend a reinvigorated “Good Neighbor Policy” to nations south of the border. This was both politically and economically expedient. Trade had been flagging between the U.S. and Latin America, and there was competition for the tremendous resources in labor and materials that the region represented to the United States, Nazi Germany and the

European colonial powers such as Italy, France, Britain, Spain and Portugal which, mostly through local elites, controlled the land, the laboring masses and the markets.

There was thus an ideological necessity to demonstrate “democratic” fraternity with

Latin America by elevating the positive role America had played in the past in helping colonized countries of the south free themselves from European rule.

U.S. government pressure on Hollywood studios and Roosevelt’s influence with

Jack Warner, certainly have significant bearing on the production of Juarez.114 It was important to paint European masters, and not the U.S., as exploitative capitalists and to suggest connections between current conditions and the self-serving role that

European powers, i.e. Nazi Germany, was then playing in Latin America. In the film, therefore, French colonial rule is depicted as “fascist” and exploitative against whom

“the people” carry on a “democratic” struggle led by Benito Juarez, the dark and determined embodiment of Abraham Lincoln. Mexico, in fact, operates as

114 For details on the fraternal relationship between the brothers Warner and Roosevelt, see Jack Warner and Dean Jennings, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (NY: Random House, 1964).

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synecdoche for all of Latin America and its colonial experience with dictatorial

European powers, and Juarez, as prototypical “native leader” operates as a veritable

New Deal loving ethnic Roosevelt, or, at least, his “Good Neighbor.”

Warner Bros. set the budget at nearly two million dollars for the film, the largest in the studio’s history. In producing this expensive epic, the studio and Hollywood as a whole had a vested commercial interest in Latin American film markets. With

Nazism/fascism gaining a stronghold in mainland Europe and loss of a significant share of those markets to the Axis powers, Hollywood sought to diversify its products and establish itself as the de facto “desirable cinema” for audiences to the

South vis-à-vis films from Germany and Italy. At home, the communist-hunting Dies committee, the government’s anti-trust suit against the major studios, and increased motion-picture industry unionization pushed studio moguls towards patriotic films that could be done cheaply and pose a good profit. Shooting a patriotic extravaganza designed to appease “commie hunters,” government lawyers and improve U.S-Latin political relations seemed to fit the bill.

Juarez, as big-budget action-adventure historical drama was thus intended to meet a very complex set of inter-related yet conflicting requirements: it was to be a paean to democracy and to hemispheric brotherhood against fascism/Nazism; it had to skirt censorship requirements of the PCA, the Legion of Decency, the Mexican government, and local censors; it would be a star-driven spectacle that would ensure profits; it would have “coded” socio-political commentary and “Marxist” critique of 196

capitalism, fascism and colonialism without violating “Americanism” or being derailed as “communist propaganda;” it would operate as a political allegory at a high enough level of abstraction so as not to displease conservative U.S. audiences, friendly European allies or the patriotic middle-classes of Latin America; it needed to be racially, ethnically and culturally specific enough so that Latin as well as U.S. and global audiences would recognize as “authentic” and respond positively toward the film; it should capture the heart and minds (as well as the pockets) of Latins and pave the way for future productions in a variety of genres aimed at these markets—it goes without saying that the themes of democracy, antifascism and hemispheric unity would be interpellated in these; and it would contain the necessary amount of

Rooseveltian “Good Neighbor” politics, albeit allegorized via the historical genre.

The script underwent numerous revisions in order to address these constraints, always walking the very thin line between patriotism, New Dealism, Marxist critique, revolutionary ideology, anticolonial, anticapitalist and antifascist discourse, and respectable, ethnographically truthful representation, while avoiding demonizing the Catholic Church (and the idea of “religion as the opiate of the masses”) and staying within the complicated censorship margins ordered by the PCA, the Legion of Decency, the Knights of Columbus and red-baiting public figures. Nevertheless,

Senator Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on un-American Activities, predictably found “communist influence” in Juarez, while the Catholic Church’s 197

Legion of Decency threatened boycott and picketing if the finished film failed to stay within confines of its mandated “decency.”

The film’s opening in April 1939 was both a political and a commercial event.

Latin American diplomats, Hollywood celebrities and government officials intermingled to pronounce the picture a symbol of North-South “democratic” unity.

The press played up the patriotic angle—one that Warner Bros. themselves had foregrounded in their publicity campaign. Newsweek, The Nation and The New York

Times all lavished praise but the New Masses found fault in the aristocratic razzmatazz of the Hapsburgs, which, inadvertently made the “dictator” more cinematically spectacular than the humble Juarez. In Mexico City the film opened at the Palace of Fine Arts after Mexican president Cardenas had previewed it favorably—a “good neighbor” nod to Roosevelt rather than a critical evaluation.

Mexican newspapers such as Ultima Noticias and La Prensa ridiculed the film’s proffered “American love” and its Hollywood gringos playing lovable Juarista revolutionaries.

The reviews, in fact, implied that Benito Juarez was an Americanized caricature and that the United States was the real “imperialist.” For Latin critics this cinematic handshake to Latin America was an entirely expedient gesture under the developing

Allied-Axis confrontation and was proffered with the need to enlist the ideological sympathies of Latin American nations in favor of the United States. Similar responses were forthcoming from other Latin American countries such as Ecuador, 198

Cuba, Brazil and Uruguay, where Juarez was also criticized as self-serving

“Yankee” propaganda.115

Nonetheless, the production of Juarez is yet another example of how Hollywood leftists contributed mightily to the exigencies of the global crisis and fulfilled their mission of “agitating” against totalitarianism and advancing the cause of democracy.

In contrast to films discussed in Chapter 2, which focused on fascism within the

United States, Juarez externalized the fascist threat in ways that were in line with the left’s refocus on European and Latin American fascism in the late 1930s. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, such contributions have been unfairly—perhaps calculatedly—relegated to national amnesia. Juarez is an important film when viewed in its political and historical context and, I propose, it should occupy its rightful place as an important Hollywood Leftist production of the “Red Decade.”

The Leftist Antifascist Propaganda Film In the late 1930s Hollywood political culture became both more and less defined in terms of strict affiliations. There were communists, Marxists, liberals, noncommunist leftists, populists, centrists, antifascists, and so forth, all of whom worked together in varying amounts of cooperation and contention. During this period of political pluralism and alliance under antifascism, the Hollywood Left

115 For an interesting discussion on how Warner Bros. films encompassed both politics and entertainment, see Leo Braudy, “Entertainment or Propaganda,” and Nancy Snow, “Confessions of a Hollywood Propagandist: Harry Warner, FDR and Celluloid Persuasion,” in Warner’s War: Politics, Pop Culture & Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood, ed. Martin Kaplan and Johanna Blakley (Los Angeles, USC Norman Lear Center, 2004).

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produced, in addition to Juarez, two remarkable propaganda films, the antifascist

Blockade (1938) and the anti-Nazi Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). As I detail in my discussions below and in the following chapter, both films suffered from critical, politically-motivated attacks at the level of production, distribution, exhibition and national/international reception. Despite all efforts to “sugar-coat” the films, accusations of “commie propaganda,” “war propaganda,” “Jewish propaganda,” and so forth were liberally hurled at them.

That these films were able to obtain a PCA code seal of approval despite vociferous and angry protests, points to a “motivated cooperation” between normally factionalized political groups, the studio system, the PCA and the government of the

United States, all operating under the Rooseveltian political mandate. The production, distribution, and exhibition of Blockade and Confessions and the debates engendered does serve to illustrate how, at particular historical moments, social and political content, otherwise blocked, obscured, repressed or suppressed, arose out of the motion-picture industry under carefully diffused and disguised top-down directives. The way to steer such controversial matter through the censorship apparatus lay in “generic coding” within entertaining, popular genres. That is to say, social commentary and political critique had to be molded into the conventions of the

Hollywood genre picture, such as the spy thriller, gangster/policier, romance melodrama and so on. 200

Matthew Bernstein states about Blockade that “it was the first to attempt a serious statement on the Spanish Civil War, and the major studios viewed it as a litmus test on the subject.” 118 As the subsequent history of Hollywood propaganda film production shows, Confessions, like Blockade before it, was also created as a

“test case” on anti-Nazism and would pave the way for many war-preparedness films to come, with Warner Bros. at the helm of much of this effort. These and other related antifascist films by the Hollywood Left helped tremendously in sensitizing a largely apathetic American public to the dangers of Nazism and Fascism. Blockade, in fact, was designed to agitate for direct U.S. intervention in Spain, just as

Confessions was a clear “war cry” against Nazi Germany.

In the following chapter, I present a detailed case study of Confessions of a Nazi

Spy in its political, historical and cultural contexts. In order to better understand contexts surrounding the anti-Nazi Confessions of a Nazi Spy, I discuss here the kind of political difficulties Blockade had to endure in presenting its critique of Spanish fascism. Blockade as a “risky” independent production, was a precursor to the studio produced and distributed Confessions, which was designed from the outset to be a mainstream propaganda film against German fascism. These films, like Juarez, represented a political coalition against fascism: Blockade aligned liberals and leftists together while Confessions was a motivated joint-effort between liberals,

118 Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 133.

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leftists, centrists and rightist who were moving in the direction of anti-isolationism.

The encouragement of Confessions by both the Roosevelt government and the FBI is significant in this regard.

Blockade, Juarez and Confessions were, in my estimation, seminal works that also paved the way for nationalist-patriotic films authored by the Hollywood Left, in cooperation with the liberals, centrists and the military during the post-Pearl Harbor era (December 7, 1941 onwards).

Spanish Antifascism and the Hollywood Left: The case of Blockade (1938) Within the confines of studio filmmaking practice, the allegorical leftist antifascist film—dealing, for example, with racism, xenophobia and the critique of entrenched class interests—generally flourished under a Rooseveltian mandate, with higher degrees of commercial and political risks involved. Films that were clearly aimed at the “fascist” political, cultural and military conditions, such as in Spain, were more often produced via independent efforts, such as by Walter Wanger, and financed through independent channels and distributed by the studio system through formalized agreements. Blockade, released through United Artists, is a good example of this. In this film, as in Juarez, the fascist threat is “externalized” to foreign lands.

The defense of Spain against the fascists was a rallying cry for the American left during the period of the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). As Hollywood Ten blacklistee, Ring Lardner, Jr., noted, 202

Spain was the big cause for all of us on the Left. We felt it was the only hope of defeating fascism…that if the democracies stood up to what was going on there and help the Spanish government resist this invasion then a second world war could be averted, and I still think it probably could have been. 119

Similarly, Lillian Hellman, reminiscing about Spain and the civil war in her memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, expressed

the passion that I felt, my absolute conviction, that when the Spanish War was lost, we were all going to be caught in a storm of murder and destruction in another, larger war. 120

Lillian Hellman was then a Hollywood screenwriter. She and another established writer, Dorothy Parker, visited Spain during the civil war and wrote about the human losses and degradation caused by the fascists. The two, along with other liberals and leftists from the Hollywood community, such as Lester Cole, Dashiell Hammett,

John Ford, Paul Muni, John Garfield, Lewis Milestone, Donald Ogden Stewart,

Frederic March and Gale Sondergaard among many, joined together to form the

Motion Picture Artists Committee to aid Republican Spain and the Joint Anti-Fascist

Refugee Committee. These were among many other groups and organizations working with Hollywood personalities under the popular front banner.

On a more direct level, three thousand American volunteers served in the

Abraham Lincoln Brigade—future Hollywood Ten Alvah Bessie among them. The anti-Nazi League, in which many Hollywood liberal-leftists served, was also at the forefront of antifascist politics. The rhetoric of the League, the CPUSA and other

119 Interview with Ring Lardner, Jr., in the documentary film Red Hollywood (1995) by Noel Birch and Thom Anderson.

120 Lillian Hellman, “An Unfinished Woman,” in Three (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1979), 129. 203

popular front groups tended to draw links between European fascism and counter- liberalism and anti-new Dealism at home. The leftist documentary enclave, Frontier

Films Group, which produced The Heart of Spain and Spanish Earth, both adamantly antifascist and incisively critical, operated through liberal-leftist financing and independent production, distribution and exhibition. Lillian Hellman, Ernest

Hemingway and Archibald McLeish wrote the scenario for The Spanish Earth, which, significantly, had a showing at the Whitehouse.

Walter Wanger produced Blockade under the aegis of his independent film company. He then hired John Howard Lawson to write the script, although various script ideas and treatments had been done by others before Lawson took over.121 The film was to be a cooperative venture between the “liberal” Wanger and the leftist/communist Lawson, and, as such, represented a political coalition between left and center against fascism. In Blockade, the protagonist is a Loyalist soldier named

Marco. His melodramatic adventure-tale concerns his transformation from an uncommitted citizen to an active “freedom fighter” in the Loyalist cause, engendered by his direct experience of the suffering caused “his people” by ”fascist” forces.

An early script had been worked on by Clifford Odets and Lewis Milestone but

Wanger had judged it unsatisfactory before bringing Lawson to the project. Lawson first worked on the script with Harold Clurman, the director of the radical leftist

121 For an extended discussion on Blockade in its overall contextual relevance, see Christine Ann Colgan, Warner Bros. Crusade against the Third Reich: a study of anti-Nazi activism and film production, 1933-1941 (2 vols.). PhD Dissertation (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1985). 204

Group Theater in New York. Later he worked closely with Wanger. Significantly, during this pre-production phase, Lawson was also busy trying to organize the

Hollywood branch of the CPUSA, a move he had discussed with Earl Browder and

V.J. Jerome. He had therefore set up discussion groups and formal classes where the local “cultural talent”—primarily writers and actors—were “critically awakened” to the possibility of combining art, education and political activism. He was subsequently elected chairman of the Hollywood branch, a position he maintained until 1945. Lawson, then, again emblematizes the “red generation” leftist whose art and activism went hand-in-hand.

Wanger knew Lawson to be a “Red” but he also knew that Lawson was one of the most committed antifascists in Hollywood. Lawson had joined the American

League Against War and Fascism as early as 1932 and had pursued antiwar campaigns on its behalf. He was personally dedicated to the “Spanish cause” and pursued his antifascism both in his playwriting and his political activism. In 1937 he was elected a member of the board of directors of the American Society for

Technical Aid to the Spanish Republic. He was already a committed member of the anti-Nazi League (initially, the only source of support for Republican Spain) and, later, the Hollywood Democratic Committee. He also joined the Theatre Arts

Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy in 1939.

When Lawson first started writing the script for Blockade he not only wanted to highlight the brutal killings and the mass starvation engendered by fascist repression 205

during the civil war, but, on a far more strident political note, to issue a warning that the Spanish situation was but a dress rehearsal for yet another World War. However, when Wanger first approached the PCA with the idea, Breen warned him against leaning the film overtly towards any one side (Loyalist or Republican Spain), in keeping with the official isolationist policy of the United States government. In addition, Breen “feared that movies about Spain or fascism would face controversial and damaging censorship offensives from states with large numbers of Catholics— campaigns which would rouse the lightly-sleeping dragon of permanent review and censorship.” 122 A feverish battle ensued between the filmmakers and the PCA, with

Breen demanding major changes and revisions in the script and issuing warnings against the film’s clearly antifascist rhetoric.

Censorship and the moderation of revolutionary discourse in Blockade In the end Wanger lost his battle against the PCA and had to significantly

“white-wash” the overt political content of the film, and greatly simplify the complexities of the Spanish civil war in order to create a popular film. The PCA granted its Seal of Approval (#4216) on May 5, 1938 after all the suggested changes had been incorporated in the finished film. As a result, the film did not say much about the specific ideological issues involved. Blockade’s attempt to set the story in some mythical, symbolic landscape by refusing direct references to Spain were exemplified in several ways: at a representational level, in a very non-Spanish

122 Larry Ceplair, “The Politics of Compromise in Hollywood: A Case Study,” Cineaste, vol. 8, no. 4 (1970): 4. 206

looking protagonist, Marco (Henry Fonda), and co-protagonist/love interest, Norma

(Madeleine Carroll), who appears as the daughter of an English antique dealer; at a military level, in the soldiers having generic uniforms; and in the ambiguous mis-en- scene, by avoiding direct references to actual locations in Spain. The only direct reference to Spain occurs in the very opening scene of the film. Over a shot of a beautiful, sunny countryside appear the words, “Spain: the Spring of 1936.”

In an effort to keep the film popular and accessible to both a national and an international audience, the filmmakers veered away from offering any in-depth analysis of the civil war and only concentrated on the idea of “fascism” as a malaise.

Consequently, the film was historically and politically simplified, and proffered an easily digestible good vs. evil theme. Compromises were also made in terms of genre and style. Instead of an ideologically revolutionary film, Blockade was a hybridization of male melodrama, social-problem film, action-adventure film, romantic melodrama and spy thriller. Stylistically, documentary and social realism were incorporated within the classical style, veering it away from the “stark realism” of documentaries like The Spanish Earth.

The moderation of revolutionary discourse, the hybridization of genres and styles, and the romantic-melodramatic twist to the narrative “centered” the film and made it more viable as a commercial, mainstream product. Wanger and Lawson hoped that the finished production would satisfy at least the following conditions: it would be an entertaining and engaging drama that would also serve an antifascist 207

allegory and, as such, would signal a liberal-left-centrist political coalition against fascism; it would be well received by a diverse audience and enjoy wide distribution; it would minimize negative political controversy, and; its success would pave the way for future antifascist productions. By the time he wrote Blockade, Lawson had obviously become more practical in his attitude compared to his earlier years writing radical Marxist plays. He was simultaneously a Party organizer, an activist, an educator and a successful Hollywood screenwriter.

In the film, Marco, played by Henry Fonda, is a simple farmer driven from his land by troops of invading soldiers. Railing against this invasive injustice, Marco, in an act of defiance, makes a speech declaring the need for freedom from tyranny—a speech laced with democratic tropes of “freedom,” “liberty” and the right to

“happiness.” Soon, in the vein of the Mexican revolutionary Zapata, he leads the peasants and refugees in defensive maneuvers against the attacking enemy. The refugees choose him as their leader and follow him around, all the way to their conscription in the Loyalist forces.

By virtue of his strong personality and his dedication to the “just” cause, Marco quickly rises in the ranks. General Del Rio decorates him for his bravery and makes him a lieutenant. While stationed in a city under blockade, Marco becomes acquainted with Norma, played by Madeline Carroll, who serves as a spy in Franco’s forces. Norma’s father is in the clutches of an international munitions dealer. She has been forced to choose her spy role to ensure their safety. Her “pro-fascism” is 208

thereby implied to be a result of political blackmail. Despite their differences, Marco and Norma become especially close when they are trapped in a building during a bombing raid. His sincerity and belief in the righteousness of the Loyalist cause sways Norma and she joins him in his struggle to “stop the murder of innocent people.” Her antifascism, then, is shown to be rather more humanist than ideological, rather more a moral stance than a system of political beliefs. The film’s antifascism, as represented in its central characters, is consequently moderated. It is checked in other ways as well. Even the troops that Marco and his men encounter wear uniforms designed not to resemble those of any actual countries, in keeping with the PCA stricture of not offending nations that consorted with or supported any one side against another. This change also addressed concerns that the film would be banned in several European countries. The film also avoided valorization of any particular group, such as the communists, who were countering fascism in Spain.

Blockade does end dramatically with an antiwar message, although one that is far more “universal” and “humanist” in its rhetoric than radically antifascist, leftist,

Marxist or communistic:

(Close-up on Marco, who has just been told he can go on leave) “Leave?” (He shakes his head bitterly) “You go on leave and find peace—away from the front—but where would you find it? The front is everywhere. They’ve turned our country into a battlefield, there’s no safety for old people and children. Women can’t keep their families safe in their houses—they can’t be safe in their own fields. The churches and the schools and hospitals are targets!” (His voice almost breaking—torn by his own emotions) “It’s not war—war is between soldiers—this is murder... We’ve got to stop it! Stop the murder of the innocent people! The world can stop it! Where’s the conscience of the world?!! ” (he declares passionately) (Fade out) 209

Lawson and Wanger had to consciously guide the film’s antifascist allusions within strict limits, which satisfied neither the communists, nor the liberal-leftists, nor the conservatives. If Blockade’s protagonist Marco was to be a “people’s hero” suffused with revolutionary spirit, the film barely lets him rise from his peasant roots. Marco is, instead, infused with moral outrage against the ravages caused by the “fascists.”

He is not shown fomenting a populist revolution. Fascism, as a repressive ideology, is never directly mentioned, only alluded to. What the communist Lawson and the liberal Wanger had hoped would be a radical political film was significantly moderated under PCA guidelines and the objections advanced by Breen. In the end, perhaps, the film, as Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund state, was “too obviously undertaken with one eye on the Hays Office and the other on Roosevelt administration.”123 Yet, leftist cinematic codes incorporated in the film testify to its role as Hollywood Left’s political expression.

Blockade as leftist social-problem film Despite Blockade’s significant generic hybridization and the moderation of social and political commentary, Lawson managed to retain elements of the social- problem film. As in the case of films like Juarez, it depicted Spain (or, rather, an

“ambiguous land”) as under siege by darker, anti-humanist powers and forces. It represented a beautiful, sunny paradise of “good people of the soil” reduced to abject

123 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund. Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 308.

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conditions by a fascist enemy serving the entrenched interests of the ruling classes.

Marco, the “peasant revolutionary” is, again, depicted as a man raised from “the people,” a man whose love for his land and his desire to free it from tyranny mark him as a “proletarian hero.” Norma, his love interest, increasingly becomes a co- protagonist in the film’s elliptical antifascist narrative. Both Marco and Norma undergo conversion experiences that awaken them to the conditions in the land and impel them toward committed action for the greater common good—saving the besieged and blockaded city, synecdoche for saving Spain from the increasingly violent (and well-armed) fascists.

Towards the end of the film, Marco and Norma are marked for elimination by the enemy. With death near at hand, they declare their love for each other and their dedication to their (antifascist) ideal. Marco utters the revolutionary punchline, “It’s hard to die when there is so much to live for, something greater than we are.” True to

Hollywood melodramatic ending, the couple is saved from certain death in the nick of time by the arrival of General Del Rio (who had earlier made Marco a lieutenant).

When Marco is asked to take some “R and R” to relax, he delivers the final rousing speech ending with “Where is the conscience of the world?”

Despite its moderated political rhetoric Blockade was clearly perceived as leftist pro-war propaganda by the isolationist elements. The film’s fictionalization of events, personalities, locations and historical “facts,” and its over-simplification of the political intricacies of the Spanish civil war, did little to appease them. Much as 211

Wanger and Lawson tried to cover-up the film’s overt political content, Marco’s final speech, in dramatic close-up, clearly gave voice to the degradation of the common people—“the proletariat”—imposed upon by an unrepentant aggressor.

Marco, as the prototypical Spanish “Joe,” and his ideological cohorts, stands as synecdoche for the rebellious “Spanish people” and signify a grass-roots revolt against fascism.

The film’s title, Blockade, was also a significant clue to its intent. The title was based on a well-publicized incident involving troops blockaded by pro-Franco forces while awaiting a food supply ship to save them from starvation. Thus, even the fictionalized and ambiguous references in the film bore too strong an indexical relationship to detailed, well-publicized “factual” reports, essays, stories and op-ed pieces in the popular press to escape the notice of the political cognoscenti. As a result, Blockade’s reception was contentious and controversial.

Blockade’s Reception Liberal-left critics tried to defend the film on the grounds that, within the restrictions of Hollywood filmmaking practice Blockade was a good attempt at

“humanist” political commentary and moral critique, even if its role as an instrument of political activism was contained. For example, Frank S. Nugent, penning his review in The New York Times on June 17, 1938, declared that the film “is not to be damned for its failure to mention Loyalist and Rebel, Franco or Mussolini. If it expresses an honest hatred of war, if it deplores the bombing of civilian populations and if it closes with an appeal to the ‘conscience of the world,’ it is doing the most 212

we can expect an American picture to do.”124 Nugent, however, lamented the fact that the political allegory, couched in a typical Hollywood spy thriller/romance- melodrama, was highly unsatisfactory as a political statement on the ravages of fascism in Spain. In contrast to Nugent’s barbs, communist critic Andrew Collins, writing in CPUSA’s masthead publication, The Daily Worker, praised Lawson’s use of the spy conceit, declaring that, “Lawson was working in a Hollywood that is, at best, still Hollywood…the spy story was a happy one. For what phase of civil war is a more shocking symbol of its horror than the decay of human relations, the suspicions of neighbors, the shame of betrayal?” 125

Blockade’s premiere was to be a gala occasion at Grumman’s Chinese Theatre in

Hollywood on May 19, 1938, but Wanger pulled out when he heard rumblings that several governments were preparing to launch “objectionable content” reprisals against the film—in particular, the Spanish and Italian governments. Wanger published a brief apology in the trades and asserted that the film was going trough

“re-editing” and could not been shown immediately. On June 3, 1938 Wanger arranged for a more “sober” opening at Westwood Village Theatre after some changes had been incorporated in the film.

When Blockade opened at the Radio City Music Hall, in New York, the film was attacked by the Catholic Right as “war propaganda.” Pickets were thrown up around

124 Frank S. Nugent, “Blockade,” The New York Times, 17 June, 1938.

125 Andrew Collins, Daily Worker, 17 June, 1938.

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Radio City while another conservative group, The Knights of Columbus, lodged protests at the Hay’s Office. Specifically, the New York State Council of the Knights of Columbus called the film an argument for “the Marxist controlled cause in Spain .

. . a red trial balloon . . . historically false and intellectually dishonest.” 126 Several educational, religious and “goodwill” groups did support the film on humanitarian and pacifist grounds, especially its final half hour. These included the New York

Board of Education, the National Educational Association, the Greater New York

Federation of Churches and the American Legion Auxiliary.

Fox West Coast Theatres refused to screen it as a regular first-run feature. The

International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), under the control of mobsters Bioff and Browne, declared the film to be propaganda and passed a resolution informing the producers that union projectionists “will not be responsible for the handling of propaganda films by its members.” 127 The film was also banned in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,

El Salvador, Guatemala, Singapore and Peru.

Against this constant onslaught, a beleaguered Wanger tried his best to defend himself and his film, citing “humanism” and “democracy,” rather than antifascism, as his chief concern in the film’s production. He did admit that his film contained “a message” but that this was essentially humanitarian, moral and democratic. Wanger

126 Knights of Columbus News, 4 July, 1938.

127 Winchell Taylor, “Secret Movie Censors,” The Nation, no. 197, (9 July, 1938), 39.

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boldly proclaimed that, “the ruthless bombing of noncombatants, no matter which government does it, is something that is horrible and should not be tolerated.”

Lawson retrospectively claimed a similar “message” in his script of Blockade, stating that “the people of Spain were fighting for democracy and freedom, and that the blockade cut off food, medical supplies and arms from the legal government. I had no other message, and there was none which so urgently needed to be said.”128 By claiming allegiance with American democracy and its humanitarian ideals, Wanger was attempting to construct himself as a democratic filmmaker whose primary intent was in making moralistic, antiwar statements and not films that demonized particular nations or ideologies or that fomented war-mongering in defense of the besieged.

Both Wanger and Lawson clearly perceived that unless they defended Blockade primarily on this basis, the future of antifascist film production was dim at best. The two were already in pre-production with Personal History, a stridently antifascist film in the guise of a social drama, intended to be shot partly as a documentary. This project underwent countless revisions and eventually had to be shelved.

Despite negative publicity and commercial failure Blockade did succeed in bringing controversial political material to the screen and it did garner recognition for the filmmakers. Walter Wanger was lionized as a visionary, independent filmmaker, especially by the liberal-left press. Academy Award nominations for

1938 were forthcoming for Werner Janssen (Best Original Score) and John Howard

128 Quoted in Gary Carr, The Left Side of Paradise: The Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 76. 215

Lawson (Best Original Story). William Dieterle was nominated for Best Film by the

New York Film Critics Circle, which also gave the film the Best Picture of 1938 award.

Blockade and liberal-left mobilization for antifascist film production Blockade was a call for aid, if not a call to arms, and was created to agitate for stepping-up U.S. involvement in the Spanish civil war by offering greater aid to the antifascist forces. Wanger’s and Lawson’s attempted cover under the rubric of

“democracy” was designed to repel rightwing accusations of the film as leftist anti- isolationist propaganda and to further the cause of antifascist propaganda in

Hollywood filmmaking. The Hollywood Left learnt from the experience of political filmmaking that Blockade engendered and sought to utilize debates surrounding the film to further strengthen its antifascist politics under the pro-democratic program.

In order to stem the rightwing objections to left-leaning films, the Hollywood

Left led in the creation of the Freedom of the Screen Committee. Figures in the

Hollywood liberal-left forefront, such as Herbert Biberman (who would become one of the Hollywood Ten in 1947), William Dieterle (the future director of Juarez) and

John Ford (who would film Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1940) spoke at the committee’s inaugural conference, in July 1938, to a group of liberal-leftists and representatives from a variety of cultural, religious and social groups. The stated objective of the Committee, as declared its chairman John Abbott of the Modern

Film Library, was not to back any “isms” but to lend support to producers of motion pictures and to the movie-going public in their right to produce “significant” and 216

“politically charged” films as filmmakers or to reject them as audiences. Ford voiced his open condemnation of any minority special interest group’s efforts to censor or suppress films. Wanger re-iterated this sentiment, stating that,

It is not Blockade they are fighting against but against the fact that if Blockade is a success, a flood of stronger films will appear and the films will not only talk but say something. 129

Wanger continued his polemic against the entrenched, conservative forces in

Hollywood. He urged distributors and exhibitors to support filmmaking exemplified by Blockade and provide the movie-going public with what needed to be shown and said.

The Freedom for the Screen Committee as well as other popular front antifascist groups such as the Motion Picture Artists Committee for Aid to Republican Spain, the anti-Nazi League and the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, clearly served as a mobilization groups for the Hollywood Left. They banded together to push antifascism in Hollywood film and raised funds for the production of documentaries, educational films and conferences that dealt with fascism, racism, the New Deal, and progressive politics in general. Fund-raising activities also raised money to send ambulances and medical supplies to Spain, a move that foregrounded the leftist commitment to Spain on “humanitarian” grounds, not simply on ideological principles.

129 Quoted in Walter Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 137.

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One remarkable publicity event organized by the committee included a screening of Blockade in conjunction with an exhibition of Picasso’s cubist masterpiece,

Guernica, which depicted the suffering and deaths of countless innocents caused by bombing of a Loyalist town.130 As an essential aside, it should be noted that Picasso painted Guernica in 1937, and it was first exhibited in July of that year in the Spanish pavilion at Paris International Exposition. Following Franco’s victory in Spain the painting was sent to the U.S. to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. At

Picasso’s request Guernica was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art in New

York, where it was exhibited as a centerpiece in the Picasso retrospective held there soon after the Nazi invasion of Poland (September 1939).

Blockade’s contentious reception allowed liberal-left mobilization against the isolationist right and the conservative censorship policies of groups such as the

Legion of Decency. The future of antifascist production hung in balance but the experience of Blockade proved that with a strong coalitionist united front, antifascist propaganda films could be produced and distributed with the cooperation of sympathetic local and national political groups, the critics, the press and politically- aware audiences. Antifascist filmmaking proceeded but with severe censorship restrictions. Radical political commentary in films such as Juarez (1939) and

Conspiracy (1939) had to moderated and allegorized.

130 For details see Gary Carr, The Left Side of Paradise: The Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). For an excellent discussion on the paintings and its contexts see Herschel B. Chipp and Javier Tusell, Picasso’s Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 218

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact factionalized the CPUSA and the liberal-leftists in general. Both anticommunism and anti-Nazism in the United States rose. Prevalent conditions nationally and globally paved the way for Warner Brothers’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Although this film would cause even more furor than

Blockade, the path was clearer and somewhat better marked.

The effects of leftist antifascism Leftist antifascism, while proving to be a great force in stemming the flow of fascism in Europe and the U.S., suffered from lack of direct governmental support until quite late in the game. Even as late as 1937-39 period, with the situation drawing close to a world conflict, the three “democratic” powers—the United States,

Great Britain and France—did not assume clear antifascist foreign policies. Despite vociferous leftist propaganda, the majority vote in these countries did not rally behind antifascism, perhaps because many failed to be convinced that fascism and its ideology had a direct impact on their lives, their futures and their liberties.131 In the

United States, particularly, the populace had been more concerned about recovery from the Great Depression and maintaining a neutral stance vis-à-vis the European situation than “declaring war” on what it perceived to be a “foreign problem.”

Perhaps a limitation of films externalizing the fascist threat, such as Blockade and

131 For an excellent discussion of leftist antifascist politics during the “Red Decade” see Larry Ceplair, Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, anti-Fascism, and Marxists, 1918-1939 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1987).

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Juarez, was that these films refocused on fascism abroad without linking it explicitly to fascism and racism at home.

Despite lack of direct governmental support, leftwing antifascism did eventually produce an effective and influential broad-based, grass-roots political movement.

Leftist antifascist propaganda helped sensitize the nation to the dangers of fascist ideology and to critically waken them to the necessity of supporting policies and practices designed to stem the flow of fascist doctrines globally. American leftists in general and the Hollywood Left in particular effectively utilized popular media to mobilize sustained political and military maneuvers against fascism. Their interventions helped Spain contain the threats from a coalition of Nazis, fascists and right-wing reactionaries; they helped organize materials, supplies and medical assistance in Spain and in Ethiopia; they were active in helping refugees who were victims of fascism and Nazism globally; they battled the specters of nativism and racism on the homefront and helped form a multicultural “laboring” American society; and their prolific antifascist propaganda helped create policy changes by the

United States government to actively oppose Nazism/fascism globally and at home.

Some self-interested capitalists in Europe and America had supported Hitler in his anticommunism and his offensive against the USSR, for they saw the latter as a threat to their conglomerate control of materials, trade, finance and labor. Most importantly, therefore, in the context of the looming World War, leftist antifascist popular discourse, conjoining democracy with communism, helped defend the Soviet 220

Union against the Nazi threat. Thus, the art and activism of the Hollywood Left helped turn the tide of American isolationism to a direct confrontation with the fascist regimes in Europe and Asia. By 1938-39, it became clear to the U.S. government that direct intervention in Europe could not be avoided. Germany, Italy and Japan had banded together to sign the tripartite anti-Comintern pact, used anticommunism as a means to rally popular support and gain power, and were militarily challenging communism in Europe (in their home countries and the Soviet Union) and Asia (particularly China). With the inevitability of direct confrontation with the

Axis/fascist powers, the left’s agenda shifted from “peace” to direct “war on fascism.” In this, the CPUSA, the Hollywood Left and the FDR government were in complete accord, although it was the left that steadily increased its pressure for war against Nazi Germany. Hollywood antifascist filmmaking reflected this shift in greater and greater measure, culminating in the production of Confessions of a Nazi

Spy in 1939 at Warner Bros.

In tandem with these political and (slow) policy changes, the American peace movement, of which the student antiwar coalition was a vital part, also shifted its stance, albeit awkwardly. The coalition of communists, Marxists, socialists, liberals, trade-unionists, and so forth, who had banded together to keep America out of war under the peace movement found themselves at odds with one another over the question of intervention as the force of national and international events hit them. At least 100 of the 800 members of the League of American Writers also resigned after 221

the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced. These included communist luminaries such as

Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley and Archibald McLeish.132 In the late 1930s, antifascism and anti-isolationism were the rallying calls of the American left, and both were targets of redbaiting by the isolationists and the conservatives. The case of

Blockade is symptomatic. In 1947, when HUAC called John Howard Lawson to the stand, his authorship of Blockade was considered to be leftist/communist propaganda. The film proved to be one of the many strikes against Lawson, who joined the ranks of the Hollywood Ten.

In the following chapter, I discuss leftist anti-Nazism and the ways in which the

Hollywood Left, in cooperation with Jack and Harry Warner, spearhead the filmic battle against Hitler at Warner Bros. studio. I present a detailed case study of the seminal Hollywood Left anti-Nazi propaganda film Confessions of a Nazi Spy

(1939), researched at USC’s Warner Bros. archive, and discuss the ways in which this and related leftist anti-Nazi propaganda films helped mobilize the nation against

Nazi Germany.

132 For details see New Republic vol. 104, (26 August , 1940), 279, and Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, 1967), 150-152. 222

CHAPTER FIVE

LEFTIST ANTI-NAZISM, WARNER BROS. STUDIOS AND THE FURTHER TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM FILM

May the shining flame of our enthusiasm never be extinguished! This flame alone gives light and warmth to the creative art of propaganda. Rising from the depths of the people, this art must always descend back to it and find its power there. Power based on guns may be a good thing; it is however, better and more gratifying to win the heart of a people and to keep it…

What an astonishing collection of significant political, cultural and economic events mark this year of German awakening! It finally destroyed the Marxist nonsense that had tortured the German people for six decades, condemning them to political impotence… The socialism that we preached for years found its living expression in the active participation of all Germans…

Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany…

--Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany, 1934.133

To the Chancellor of the German Reich, Herr A. Hitler.

I thank you for your letter. I hope that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the better in the political relations between our two countries.

--Joseph Stalin, Prime Minister and General Secretary of the CP, USSR 134

133 Excerpted from the speeches, essays and articles from “Nazi Propaganda by Joseph Goebbels” in The German Propaganda Archive. [database online]; available from http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm.

134 Letter to Adolf Hitler from Joseph Stalin quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 611.

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Introduction In this chapter I present a discussion of how Hollywood leftists, centering themselves at Warner Bros., pushed for stepping-up cinematic propaganda against the Nazis as Hitler’s power and position grew in Europe. The motion-picture industry organized for filmic battle against Nazism under such groups as the Anti-

Nazi League, which was a coalition of Marxists, communists, centrists, noncommunist leftists and studio heads such as Jack and Harry Warner. Leftist efforts were best represented by the production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the most intensely propagandistic anti-Nazi film to emerge from the Hollywood studios prior to World War II. The film elicited strong responses both at home and abroad.

Although highly nationalistic, it contained enough of a critical edge to elicit virulent red-baiting and accusations of “commie” and “Jewish” propaganda.

This chapter offers a detailed case study of the film and the debates and controversies surrounding its production and reception. The film, despite its greatly debated merits and demerits, paved the way for the production of anti-Nazi films in a variety of genres, such as the spy thriller (for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign

Correspondent, [1940]) and the leftist social-problem film (such as John Howard

Lawson’s Four Sons, [1940]).

I also argue that Confessions represents a further generic transformation in the leftist social-problem film genre by incorporating anti-Nazi propaganda. Generic transformations of the social-problem film under the paradigm of antifascism and anti-Nazism would pave the way for the hybridized combat films of World War II in 224

which leftist had a significant degree of authorship and production control. In essence, then, chapters 3 and 4 together demonstrate how the leftist social-problem film genre “opened up” to accommodate leftist discourse on changing social, political and cultural conditions, and how it allowed leftist art and ideology to be inscribed and transported cinematically into wartime film production.

The case of Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) I begin with a detailed case study of Confessions of a Nazi Spy based on archival research at USC’s Warner Bros. Archives.135 In the following sections I confine myself only to the essential elements of Confessions’ production history and the film’s critical and popular receptions. My work follows in the tradition of previous scholars but I aim to extend research on the film by drawing particular attention to several factors: the contributions of the Hollywood liberals and leftists not only to this film but to anti-Nazi/antifascist activism operating in tandem with this film and others such as Blockade and Juarez and how this activism was challenged by critics of various persuasions; how creative experimentation in cinematic form and function

135 Special thanks is due to Warner Bros. archivists Noelle Carter, Randi Hockett and Jennifer Pirindiville for making these rare documents available for research on this dissertation. Among records consulted for this project were files in the areas of Production, Reception, Story, Legal, Publicity and Censorship. I have also consulted the following works: Steven J. Ross, Johanna Blakley, Leo Braudy and Nancy Snow in Warner’s War: Politics, Pop Culture & Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood, ed. Martin Kaplan and Johanna Blakley (Los Angeles, USC Norman Lear Center, 2004); Michael Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism (NY: New York University Press, 2001); Jon Lewis, Hollywood V. Hardcore—How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (NY: New York University Press, 2000); Christine Colgan, Warner Brothers’ Crusade against the Third Reich : a study of anti-Nazi activism and film production, 1933 to 1941, unpublished PhD dissertation, (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1985).

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under an anti-Nazi/antifascist impetus transformed the genre of the leftist-favored social problem film; and, the degree to which the prominent talents behind the production of the film were investigated by HUAC, resulting in their denunciations, and subsequent blacklisting during the cold war era.

An implicit aim of this case study is to give voice to the post-film experiences of prominent leftist talents behind the production of this film, particularly scriptwriter

John Wexley, director Anatole Litvak and actor Edward G. Robinson, and to re- insert their (erased and forgotten) contributions into the archive of Hollywood’s most challenging productions during a particularly unsettling but creative period in its history.

Confessions is presented, analyzed and critiqued here in its socio-political, cultural and historical contexts. In addition to archival work, the analysis also draws critical insight from events organized at USC in the Fall of 2003 by a joint effort of

Fischer Gallery, the School of Cinematic Arts, the Warner Bros. Archive, and the

Annenberg School of Communication under the direction of the Norman Lear

Center, and under the patronage of the USC Arts Initiative.136

In my analysis, I argue that in the case of leftist-authored films such as

Confessions, Hollywood antifascism/anti-Nazism was patriotic and nationalistic,

136 These events included: --Warner’s War: Politics, Pop Culture and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (exhibition at USC Fischer Gallery) --Confessions of a Nazi Spy (screening of rare 35mm print at the School of Cinema-TV) --Propaganda, Pop Culture and Public Diplomacy (Panel discussion at the USC Annenberg School of Communications)

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allied with state ideologies concerning U.S. democracy and that it paved the way for anti-Nazi mobilization nationally and internationally. However, this co-optation of leftist discourse by an over-arching nationalism was problematic and contentious—

Confessions of a Nazi Spy contained enough of a critical edge to provoke reactionary, rightwing forms of anti-Semitic attacks and redbaiting under the rubric of isolationism.

Leftist Anti-Nazism at Warner Bros. studio According to Steven J. Ross, “Given the large number of Jews, European émigrés, liberals and radicals that populated Hollywood in the 1930s, it is not surprising that antifascism emerged as the focal point of political action.”137 Warner Bros. studios was perhaps the most anti-Nazi film production enterprise in the motion-picture industry.138 It was also the pre-eminent liberal studio in Hollywood and claimed perhaps the largest number of socially-conscious Jews in Hollywood.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy was part of the larger leftist discourse on antifascism that had slowly gained forced during the Spanish civil war, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s rise to power, and the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany. Films such as

Blockade had challenged Spanish antifascism but due to the restrictions placed upon it by the PCA, the studio system’s political-economical relationship with the

137 Steven J. Ross, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Warner Bros. Anti-Fascism and the Politicization of Hollywood,” in Warner’s War: Politics, Pop Culture & Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (Los Angeles, USC Norman Lear Center, 2004), 50.

138 For further details on the roots of Warner Bros. anti-Nazism see Michael Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (NY: New York University Press, 2001), 66.

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European markets and the isolationist bloc in the United States, the film could only approach its politics allegorically. However, by 1938 Spain was practically “lost” to

Franco and leftist antifascist discourse was more directly aimed at Nazism. The consolidation of a German-Italian alliance in Europe and the negotiations between

Germany and the USSR involving European boundaries and the other European powers, particularly Great Britain and France, rising German anti-Semitism139 and the Nazi’s aggressive threats to neighboring countries140 and the USSR, refocused

American leftist attention on Germany.

There were other significant issues involved in this refocusing as well, specifically the political, economic and military inter-linking of Germany, Japan and

Italy under the Axis umbrella. Japan’s political and military interlinking with Nazi

Germany had commenced with the anti-Comintern Pact signed in Berlin on 25

November 1936, and had been steadily gaining force. This agreement was directed against the activities of the Communist International. Although Germany and Japan were the initiators of the agreement, it was subsequently agreed to by “fascist” Italy

139 On November 10, 1938, Kristallnacht (the “Night of the Broken Glass”) occurred in Germany. Synagogues were destroyed, Jewish businesses looted, and over 100 Jews were killed or seriously injured. Nazi anti-Semitism had, through this action, turned into a state program of repression and elimination. Following Kristallnacht, over a quarter of a million Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. For further details, see Gary Grobman, “The Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers.” [article online]; available from http://www.remember.org/guide/.

140 Hitler’s “Anschluss” program, calling for the reunification of German-speaking regions with Germany, was put into effect by the Nazi invasions, during 1938, of neighboring countries such as Austria and parts of Poland, Hungry, and Czechoslovakia.

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on 6 November 1937. 141 Japanese imperialism in Asia and the Pacific continued to rise during this period. The second Sino-Japanese war had broken out in July 1937, and the Japanese had escalated attacks (including terror-bombing) and pushed further into China. In territories under its control, Japan had instituted anticommunist policies and repression of grassroots communist-led agitation.

On its homefront, Japan had also increased suppression of dissent and escalated repressive measures against the Japanese Left, which had consistently opposed

Japan’s imperialist, militarist and colonialist expansionism in Asia. In tandem with its Axis alliance, Japan had stepped up its anti-Semitic propaganda amalgamated with anti-Christian sentiments. These factors cannot be overruled as causes contributing to the attention of the left on Germany as the “root” of international fascism, of which Nazism was a particularly virulent form.

A host of liberal-leftists at Warners contributed to the production of Confessions, such as Anatole Litvak, John Wexley, Milton Krims, Edward G. Robinson, Francis

Lederer, Lya Lys, Paul Lukas et al under the supervision of the anti-Nazi brothers

Harry, Jack and Albert Warner. While Blockade had to be produced independently under the supervision of Walter Wanger, Confessions’ emergence at Warner Bros.— one of the Big Five studios, and one that was predominantly liberal-leftist and anti-

141 These collaborations would continue into the war years. On 27 September 1940, a year after the initiation of war in Europe, the German, Italian, and Japanese Governments signed another pact at Berlin, agreeing to a ten year period of military, political and economic alliance. The Pact pledged the Axis powers for joint support and collaboration in order to establish a “new order” in Europe and East Asia. After Pearl Harbor, on January 18, 1942, Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan signed another formal military agreement in Berlin. 229

Nazi—is significant in that it signals a mainstream articulation of an impending anti-

Nazi national policy. As such it also indicates a “coalitionist” alignment between left, center and right under an anti-Nazi rubric. The film, as Buhle and Wagner see it, was “one of those antifascist films destined to give future blacklisted writers qualms that they had once boosted the FBI and pointed toward internal subversion as a pressing problem for American society…Confessions, along with Juarez, marked what was considered by the Hollywood Left a step forward toward relevance.” 142

The leftists who contributed to Confessions were taking a more “centrist” and more critical position vis-à-vis communism, the Party and the Soviet Union as

America edged closer to war. If Confessions is decidedly anti-Nazi, its positioning of the USSR is also critical and is certainly inflected by the Moscow Treason Trials of

1936-38, the Stalinist purges—which extorted preposterous confessions from old line Party stalwarts and put many to death—and in anticipation of Nazi-Soviet cooperation against the Allies. Stalinist histories not only glossed over these events but justified them by a process of creative historical revisionism.143

Confessions maintains its discursive and generic connections with other leftist authored antifascist films such as Blockade by retaining elements of the leftist social-

142 Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Blacklisted: the film lover’s guide to the Hollywood Blacklist (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 47.

143 For details of Stalin’s view of his “enemies” see History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (Moscow: 1948). Andrus Pork refers to Stalinist accusations as “direct lies” incorporated into the “official” histories of the Soviet Communist Party. For further details see Andrus Pork, “History, Lying and Moral Responsibility” in History and Theory, vol. 29, no. 3. (Oct., 1990): 321-330.

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problem film, as I discuss further on. I argue that, genealogically, Confessions belongs to the spate of leftist-authored social-problem films of the early to the mid-

1930s which critiqued native fascism, xenophobia, racism and anti-liberalism, exemplified by Fury (1936), They Won’t Forget (1937) and Black Legion (1937)— all produced at Warner Bros.—but that it abandons the tangential critique of these earlier films and tackles the issue of Nazism/fascism head-on. It also shifts the focus on fascism/Nazism as being rooted “externally” in Germany, but with calamitous influences in the United States.

Historical background to the film: The Nazi Spy Ring in the United States Confessions of a Nazi Spy was based on investigations by the FBI, in February

1938, of a vast Nazi Spy network operating in the United States and Canada. The ring leader supplying the Germans with secret military manuals, artillery plans, statistics on army and navy locations and so forth was found to be Guenther

Rumrich, an American army deserter. Rumrich’s “confessions” resulted in the exposure of an extensive Nazi spy network and in the naming of names of prominent and “respectable” German-Americans who were Nazi sympathizers, many of whom worked in munitions factories, airplane manufacturing facilities and U.S. defense plants.

FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover wasted no time in publicizing the “smashing” of the spy ring, elevating the patriotic and defensive stance of the FBI, and projecting the agency’s vital role in national security to the shocked and scandalized American public. According to producer Hal B. Wallis’ account, it was Hoover who leaned on 231

Warner Bros. to turn this episode into a great nationalistic drama, depicting the FBI at the helm of the nation’s safety and security. There was also, according to Wallis, a happy encouragement from the Roosevelt government and promises of full cooperation by the FBI. These rationalizations may be dubious but it does indicate

Warners’ need to demonstrate an alignment with national law enforcement institutions and to use the publicity surrounding this to enhance the film’s appeal.

(Filmic) Art as an (anti-Nazi) Weapon Confessions of a Nazi Spy went into production at Warners in early February

1939 and invited controversy from its very inception. The effect that Confessions sought, especially in view of the soon-to-be-consummated Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, was to provoke utter shock and disbelief that would lead to the realization of the pernicious methods practiced by the Nazis upon naïve Americans, and to boost national security. In the film, the rabidly pro-Nazi followers cajole, intimidate and even brutalize German-Americans into becoming accomplices and traitors.

The German-American Bund is shown to be a hotbed of Nazism, with German-

Americans enthusiastically heil-ing Hitler. The Bund is also shown to have direct propagandistic and espionage connection with Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in

Germany. When Dr. Kassel of the Bund visits Germany to meet with Nazi leaders and receive further instructions, the “Goebbels” look-alike character in the film, framed against swastikas, tells him,

From now on National Socialism in the United States must dress itself in the American flag. It must appear to be a defense of Americanism. But at the same time, our aim must always be to discredit conditions there in the United States and in this way make life in Germany admired and wished for. Racial and religious 232

hatreds must be fostered on the basis of American Aryanism. Class hatreds must be encouraged in such a way that labor and the middle classes will become confused and antagonistic. In the ensuing chaos, we will be able to take control.

Upon his return, Dr. Kassel is welcomed back by proto-Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers in the U.S. In a scene that farcically echoes Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will

(1934)—shots of Hitler riding triumphantly in his jeep at the Nazi rally in

Nuremberg—Kassel attends a militaristic gathering of young Nazis and expresses satisfaction at their complete indoctrination.

So if German propaganda, Nazi spies and Nazi rallies abound on our home soil, the film’s rhetoric declares in such scenes, the implication that Warner Bros. actively promoted is that filmic propaganda such as Confessions is a defensive act, a well- intentioned warning, a meaningful and urgent communication to ward off impending doom. In the context of shifting alliances between the United States, the Soviet

Union and Germany, it is interesting to note that these pronouncements by Dr.

Kassel’s strangely, perhaps risibly, echo Earl Browder’s fraternal assurances that

“Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” In view of the impending Nazi-Soviet

Pact against the Allied powers and the left’s shift away from (Stalinist) Soviet

Union, this symbolic correspondence between the Nazi Kassel [perhaps signifying

Hitler] and the Communist Browder [perhaps signifying Stalin], is doubly significant.

The project’s overt anti-Nazi politics would plunge it into innumerable difficulties with the PCA, the German government, the German-American Bund, as well as a host of American organizations concerned with censorship and the social/political 233

content of movies. In the following sections, I present highlights of the film’s production history to provide the contextual anchor for my arguments relating to leftist cinematic antifascism/anti-Nazism vis-à-vis shifting political conditions and the way in which the social problem film was transformed under the impetus of anti-

Nazism.

Warner Bros. Studios and Anti-Nazi Mobilization: Propaganda, Politics, Profits and Paranoia Opposition to the film’s production had come early. The German consul, Dr.

Georg Gyssling, had initially sought Joseph Breen’s aid in checking the anti-Nazi propaganda in the film 144 and later demanded that it be shelved, while Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund filed a lawsuit against the studios. Other Hollywood studios such as MGM and Paramount feared the loss of lucrative distribution and foreign sales revenue because of reprisals by Germany and nations sympathetic to the Nazis. They opposed Warner Bros.’ overt anti-Nazism. These financial concerns were conjoined with the shifting current of national and global politics. The

Roosevelt government may have come to the conclusion that a direct confrontation with Nazism was inevitable, but the first bold moves towards announcing anti-

Nazism as a national orientation was a challenge that could only be met indirectly by stepping up the volume of anti-Nazi propaganda in popular cultural forms, such as

Hollywood films, but the project was not immediately “green lighted.”

144 Gyssling letter to Breen, November 23, 1938. Confessions Production files, USC-WBA. 234

Perhaps this was one reason why Confessions was in pre-production phase for a considerably longer time than the average Warner Bros. film. Edward G. Robinson had already agreed to do the film and anxiously awaited the moment when the cameras would roll. Delays followed delays. Robinson reports that, tired of waiting, he and his wife Gladys went to spend time in Mexico, where they met with Leon

Trotsky. Gladys interviewed Trotsky about his views on Roosevelt, democracy,

Russia and communism, among other issues, a move that could only be described as

“tangential anti-Stalinism” but “covert pro-communism.” Since Trotsky was a

Stalinist exile and the Soviet Union seemed to be moving towards an alliance with

Nazi Germany at this time, the Robinsons’ publicized connection with Trotsky— well-known for his anti-Stalinist stance—may indicate liberal-leftist overtures away from the USSR. In any case, Robinson returned to the United States to resume

Confessions,

Only the script wasn’t ready. Only Warner’s couldn’t get the director they wanted. Only the studio was busy, there were no stages available. Only…they were scared to make it. Not Wallis, not Warner’s but that mysterious all-powerful influence in Hollywood called New York [which] did not want to have anything to do with a movie about the Nazis. 145

Perhaps the political cognoscenti in Washington and Hollywood leftists foresaw the formalization of continual Soviet-German negotiations in the form of an impending non-Aggression Pact. If so, Confessions’ anti-Nazism and its (comparatively mild) anticommunism were indicative of the political shifts the Hollywood Left was

145 Edward G. Robinson, All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography (NY: Hawthorn Books, 1973), 204.

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undergoing as the left’s rhetoric swung away from a defense of the Soviet Union and communism. Scriptwriter John Wexley later swore that he had personally observed

Senator Martin Dies, chairman of the newly formed House Committee on un-

American Activities (1937), exit Jack Warner’s office. Subsequently, Wexley was asked by Warner to people Confessions with both Nazi and communist spies and

“subversives” to be brought to justice—an offer he refused.146

In terms of studio ideology and in terms of publicity, production, distribution and exhibition, Confession served as the studio’s attempt to garner patriotic accolades.

The film was shot, edited and exhibited at break-neck pace in order to capitalize on the sensationalism of the spy trials. Production started on February 1, 1939 and the film was released nationally on May 6, 1939. The entire production process was shrouded in suspicion, paranoia and mystery. The studio aimed to create a sensation about this broadside against Nazism by heightening the suspense and tightening security around the production, intensifying its publicity campaign in the process.

The studio hoped that such measures would excite audience interest and make

Confessions into a profitable film, helping to create a niche market for future anti-

Nazi propaganda films. In line with this marketing strategy, cast and crew were willing to conform to the Warners request to eliminate the opening credits for the

146 For details see Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Radical Hollywood: the untold story behind America’s favorite movies (NY: The New Press, 2002), 211-212.

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film as well.147 Prominent actors, such as Louis Adlon and Edward G. Robinson, director Anatole Litvak and writers John Wexley and Milton Krims, all agreed.148

Indeed, some prints of the film were initially released and distributed without opening or closing credits except the Warner Bros. logo, the opening title card, and the end card. Later versions inserted the full end-credit roll, however.

On June 20, 1938, Leon Turrou, the prime FBI Nazi-spy investigator, resigned his position with the FBI to circumvent conflict-of-interest charges and signed on with Julius Stern, a strongly anti-Nazi publisher, in the interest of showing “how sweeping in scope was the German spy conspiracy and to point out the need for more men in America’s various intelligence services.” 149 Although fired by the FBI,

Turrou immediately signed an exclusive contract with Warner Brothers for $25,000 for a film or films based on the manuscript of his book-in-progress, “Nazi Spies in

America.” He was also retained by Warner Bros. as a Technical Advisor on these projected films.150 Roy Obringer, in a memo to Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, spelled out the salient features of the Warners-Turrou contract, from which it is obvious how the studio intended not only to control the Spy “property” (article 9 of the contract)

147 Studio memo, Hall Wallis to production team, March 16, 1939. Confessions Production files, USC-WBA

148 From the following studio memos, Confessions Production files, USC-WBA: Bob Fellows to Bob Lord, January 19, 1939; Wallis to Obringer, March 16, 1939; Litvak letter to Warner Bros., March 29, 1939; and, MacEwan to Obringer and Wallis, March 17, 1939.

149 The New York Post, 1 July, 1938.

150 Confessions Legal files. USC-WBA.

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but to use Turrou as the “official” propaganda agent by hiring him as a technical consultant and actor (article 3) as well as foregrounding him and his G-man rhetoric in publicity campaigns (articles 3 and 5).151

Financial and national considerations were further exacerbated by moral concerns over the plight of the Jews in Germany, to which the Warners were exceedingly sensitive. They feared that the Nazis would react by stepping up their persecution of the Jews, as well as other “non-Aryan” minorities, in all lands under their control.

Related to this issue was the concern that Confessions would be denounced as

“Jewish propaganda” specifically designed to drag America into the European conflict by the “Jews of Hollywood,” particularly those who were “commies.” That this was an active concern during the pre-production phases is evidenced by a

Warner Bros. memo from Herman Lisseur, Head of Research, to Producer Robert

Loud, which explicitly warned against the German-American Bund’s anti-

Semitism.152

All Jewish studio heads were sensitive to the fear of anti-Semitism rising to the level of fascist xenophobia, their concern sometimes verging on paranoia.153

However, the more socially- and politically-conscious Jews—who were mostly on the left and organized under such activist groups as the Hollywood anti-Nazi

151 Leon G. Turrou contract, signed by R.J. Obringer. Confessions Legal files, USC-WBA

152 Studio memo, Lissauer to Loud, January 9, 1939, Confessions Production Files, USC-WBA.

153 For an incisive ethnographic account of “Jewish Hollywood” see Neal Garbler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1988).

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League—could not condone the lack of moral, political or financial support by the studios for their anti-Nazi/antifascist cause. For example, Hollywood leftist and

(future) blacklisted writer Edward Chodorov complained that, “It was unthinkable to me that Louis B. Mayer, who was a Jew, knew what was happening in

Germany…unthinkable to me that he would insist nothing was wrong.” 154 Even socialist Jews, many of whom were non- or anticommunist, banded together in committees such as the Jewish Labor Committee, which often worked in varying amounts of contention and cooperation with the communist-dominated Jewish

People’s Committee against War and Fascism, established in 1933.

In consequence of their concerns, Chodorov, along with many other Jews in the film industry, had joined the Anti-Nazi League in the 1930s. Edward G. Robinson, who was also a Rumanian Jew, reports in his autobiography All My Yesterdays that he, too, was “taking an active interest in the newly-formed anti-Nazi League. I joined with some of the best brains and best names in films to try to rescue the victims of the Nazi terror, now achieving its full-blown shame—and we were managing to get out the penniless refugees.”155

Fictionalization of “real” events, personalities, locations and so forth became necessary to counter the complex legal, financial, ethical and political issues

154 Jon Lewis, Hollywood V. Hardcore—How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (NY: New York University Press, 2000), 25.

155 Robinson, 146.

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involved. Fearing the possibility of libel suits, Wallis shot off a memo to Einfeld, warning that the Warners advertising department “get prior approval of all promotional materials from the New York legal department.” 156 Yet, the essential narrative had close links to the enfolding drama of the Nazi Spy case so that it was clear to audiences that Confessions was a dramatization of current events. This was further reinforced by incorporating documentary realism in the film’s stylistics.

Appeals to “authenticity” and “Star Power” In the film, the creative utilization of documentary footage, with shooting style, editing rhetoric and authoritative voice-over narration in the mode of The March of

Time series of patriotic documentaries, places the “fictional” drama of Confessions within the realist ethos of the newsreel, and raises its discourse to the level of the

“real” and the “actual.” However, getting to that point also proved to be a creative and political challenge. Since Harry Warner had initiated a boycott against any cinematic depiction of Hitler and Nazism, starting in 1936, and used the anti-Nazi

League to pressure the industry to follow suit, 157documentary archives such as

Universal Newsreel, Hearst News, Movietone News, Fox News and even French

Pathe, refused to sell any news footage that was shot in Germany to Warners. 158

156 Studio memo, Feb. 3, 1939. Confessions Production Files, USC-WBA.

157 For example, Warner Bros. had boycotted the exhibition of the March of Time episode entitled, “Inside Nazi Germany—1938,” which, in their opinion, constituted “Nazi propaganda.” For an excellent discussion on this issue, see Christine Colgan’s PhD dissertation.

158 Studio memo, Bob Fellows to Bob Lord, January 19, 1939. Confessions Production Files, USC- WBA.

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Paramount Pictures also rejected director Anatole Litvak’s request. 159 When desired footage was finally obtained, it was enhanced and added to by “manufactured” documentary-style scenes, a compromise that critical viewers took exception to.

Edward G. Robinson felt that the film should have been shot entirely “as a semi- documentary with unfamiliar faces” instead of a melodrama,160 in order to give the film the kind of credibility it wanted to promote.

Robinson was a Warner contractee and established screen star when he was cast in the role of Edward Renard (literally, “the fox” in French), the FBI investigator possessed of a smooth and calm exterior and a refined and calculating intelligence.

In the film he pursues Kurt Schneider (the fictionalized Rumrich) and “smashes” the spy ring. This casting decision was a strategic move on three counts: (1) it capitalized on Robinson’s established star power for ensuring financial success, (2) it allowed anti-Nazi propaganda to be interpellated into the detective/policier genre, and (3) it functioned as a national-popular “cinematic sign” of anti-Nazism by

“centering” Robinson as a mainstream icon of patriotism.

Robinson had established himself in popular Warner Bros. genres of the crime picture and the social problem film, being cast as a gangster or shyster, often playing alienated and cynical anti-heroes. If Little Caesar (1930) is regarded as Robinson’s

159 Studio memo, Bob Fellows to Bob Lord, January 30, 1939. Confessions Production Files, USC- WBA.

160 Robinson, 205.

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quintessential gangster film, then Bullets or Ballots (1936) and I Am the Law (1937) represent the turning points in his career as the protagonist on the “right side” of the law. As Inspector Renard in Confessions, Robinson obtained the opportunity to shine as a patriotic version of an American “Sherlock Holmes” type sleuth—a pipe- smoking, democracy- and proletarian-loving authority-figure hero, a characterization that is an extension of his role in the successful Warner Bros. crime film, Bullets or

Ballots (1936). Henceforth, Robinson would play mostly “good guys”: scientists, federal agent and respectable businessman, among other “establishment” types.

Career choices aside, Robinson felt that commitment to antifascist/anti-Nazi art and activism was absolutely necessary in the prevailing conditions. He told Hal B.

Wallis, in a letter dated October 20, 1938, that he wanted to do the film “for my people [i.e., the Jews]” and claimed it was his duty as an “American” to fight

Nazism/fascism.161 In his autobiography Robinson stated that he felt certain that

“Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini were conspiring, if not to take over the world, certainly to reform the world on an elitist basis. To me they were not only anti-

Semitic but anti-Christ, and anti everything America stood for. And they seemed to be certain of conquest.”162 Robinson was a leftist and most certainly a “fellow traveler” in the 1930s, and, I argue, his positioning in the film as a nationalist

161 Edward G. Robinson statement in Confessions of a Nazi Spy Pressbook, Warner Bros. Confessions Publicity Files, USC-WBA.

162 Robinson, 162.

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authority figure is a further indication of the alignment of the Hollywood Left with centrist forces in the battle against Nazism/fascism.

Leftist cinematic propaganda vs. Anticommunism and anti-Semitism Proto-Nazis, German sympathizers, rightwingers, isolationists, anti-Semites and those who used the label of “Jewish propaganda” in order to undermine any criticism of the Nazi government, attacked Confessions. For example, pro-isolationist Senator

Gerald P. Nye attacked “war mongering” propaganda in motion pictures, while

Father Coughlin labeled the film a product of Hollywood’s Jewish communists, claiming that “if there were any lingering doubt about this, the manner in which the film is embraced by the Communist Party and the Communists’ Daily Worker would dispel it.” In his estimation “Hollywood must be set down as America’s Red nest,” 163 and Hollywood’s Jews were fifth columnists working in the interest of the Soviet

Union, evidenced by their production of propaganda films such as Confessions.

Nor was Coughlin alone in his contention that “Jewish Hollywood” was very selective in its denunciation of foreign agents and spies working feverishly to undermine America. He was simply the most visible, voluble and influential spokesman of the powerful anti-Semitic, anticommunist enclaves in the nation.

Coughlin’s rhetoric echoed, albeit at high volume, the kinds of anticommunist, red- baiting rhetoric circulating in the media generally. For example, Thomas M. Johnson wrote an article entitled ”Russians, as Well as Nazis Active Here in the Role of

163 “Hollywood ‘Haters’,” Social Justice (May, 1938) Confessions Publicity and Reception Files, USC-WBA.

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Spies,” as part of the Spies Within Our Gates series of articles in the New York Post.

According to Johnson, “Among our most enthusiastic would-be democratic allies is

Soviet Russia, which does more spying, sabotaging and propagandizing in this democratic country than all the Fascist powers. The spying is conducted in devious ways, sometimes with connivance of American Communists.” 164

Since most studio heads were Jewish and many of the Hollywood leftists were also Jewish (culturally if not religiously) and were openly members of the CPUSA or at least part of the radical left, the likes of Nye and Coughlin would claim to see

“collusion” operating between the agenda of getting America into war with (anti-

Jewish) Nazi-Germany, the “commies” of Hollywood and their connections to

“Moscow.” This trenchant anti-Semitism would also be carried over to the

“propaganda hearings” of 1941,165 held at the urging of pro-isolationist senators,

Burton Wheeler of Montana and Gerald Nye of North Dakota.

Generic and political hybridity in Confessions of a Nazi Spy Countering PCA’s objections, Jack Warner brilliantly structured his anti-Nazism under a “democratic” agenda, stressing the film’s social function in raising societal awareness of crucial issues. His was a calculated attempt to place Confessions in the tradition of the many social-problem pictures that Warner Bros. had built its pro-

164 Thomas M. Johnson, “Russians, as well as Nazis Active Here in the Role of Spies,” New York Post, 22 June, 1939.

165 For details see John E. Moser, “Gigantic Engines of Propaganda: The 1941 Senate Investigations of Hollywood,” The Historian, v. 63, n. 4 (2001).

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democratic, proletarian, socially-conscious reputation on. Jack Warner emphasized that,

With this picture, I hope to do for the persecuted victims of Germany—Jews and Catholics—what we did for law and order with ‘Public Enemy’ [1931, dir William Wellman]. The immediate result of that picture was to arouse the public to the horrors of gangsterdom and put gangsters behind bars. 166

This strategy was, I argue, in keeping with, or co-opting, the Hollywood Left’s notion of social cinema which was a reformulation of “Marxist” cinema under the democratic paradigm (as I have discussed in Chapter 2). Warner Bros. continually emphasized Hollywood’s sense of responsibility to democratic society and presented

Confessions as advancing this goal in upholding the moral order of a just and humane world against Nazi “barbarism.” In the film’s climatic court scene, district attorney Kellogg delivers the film’s moralistic, nationalistic and anti-isolationist punch line against the Nazi spies and their collaborators, declaring that,

this group of defendants conspired to secure secret information about our national defense and to transmit this information to the advantage of a foreign government— namely, Germany! [They] have been but little cogs in a vast and intricate machine…a vicious network whose complex fabric weaves inevitably through the Naval Intelligence Offices in Bremen and Hamburg, through many German-American organizations here, through the War and Propaganda Ministries in Berlin to the inner sanctums of present Germany’s highest officialdom…But there are some who will say there is nothing to fear, that we are separated by vast oceans from the bacteria of aggressive dictatorships and totalitarian states. But we know…this bacteria can slowly poison the organism of our civilized society and dull its common sense and reason, working insidiously through its Bunds and training camps, where its spies take cover and where it diligently trains its youth to seize power...but ladies and gentlemen, America is not simply one of the remaining democracies, America is democracy!

166 Confessions Publicity Files, USC-WBA.

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The film’s antipathy to Nazism was structured as pro-American “populism,” and the film appropriately ends in a coffee shop where counterman “Joe,”—the quintessential working-class white male of American populist cinema—shows an awareness and understanding of the Nazi threat. When Kellogg voices the opinion that even though Americans are optimistic and easygoing, the Nazis “won’t have much luck in this country...because when our basic liberties become threatened—we wake up.” Counterman “Joe” adamantly agrees and exclaims that the Nazis do not realize that “this ain’t Europe.” Two customers at the counter also voice their agreement. “The sooner we show ‘em, the better!,” exclaims one while the other reiterates the aggressive theme—“Sure, we’ll show ‘em!”

District Attorney Kellogg, the moral sign of the law and the representative of the nation, sighs deeply with satisfaction upon hearing the common folk expressing their understanding of the evil presence and designs of the Nazis, declaring these coffee shop utterances to be “the voice of the people.” FBI Detective Renard, the militant anti-Nazi fighter and defender of democracy, in turn exclaims, “Thank God for the people.” Kellogg concurs with even greater relish with “Yes, thank God,” conjoining

America, God and democracy in the battle against Nazi “barbarism.” These final, words by “the people” of America against the Nazis represent, one might argue, the

“collective” popular front, and the American proletariat, in league with patriotic nationalists, declaring its war on global fascism, of which Nazism was but one virulent strain. 246

The political hybridity is also signaled at the level of genre conventions.

Confessions hybridizes elements of several popular Hollywood genres: the detective- policier, spy thriller, male melodrama, social-problem film, antifascist film, courtroom drama, Capraesque populist cinema and documentary newsreel, creating a cinematic symbiosis of divergent ideological forms. For example, the social-problem film and the antifascist film were defining leftist genres while the detective/policier that Robinson had recently completed (such as I Am the Law, 1937) were patriotic and aligned with “democracy” and mainstream nationalism.

The documentary rhetoric had clear parallels with patriotic, government- approved propaganda newsreels shown in movie theatres, exemplified by the March of Time series. The use of documentary style and rhetoric, then, functioned as

“official” declarations on Nazism and the Nazi spy case. The film is also peopled with well-meaning but naïve Capraesque characters (such as counterman “Joe”) who no longer represent a liberal political position but who are mobilized patriotically against the Nazi threat. In addition, Confessions’ courtroom drama follows the tradition of leftist social-problems films such as Lang’s Fury (1936) and LeRoy’s

They Won’t Forget (1937), and of populist films such as Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to

Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). In the larger context of

Hollywood Left filmmaking, it is also worth noting that Confessions, as social problem film, concentrates on external fascism as “evil,” whereas leftist cinema of 247

the early 1930s tended to equate corrupt police and the criminal justice system as manifestation of the evil within America.

Jack Warner arranged private screenings for FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, future

OWI chief Lowell Mellet and Washington columnist Robert Allen. Special screenings were also arranged for social, religious and civic organizations such as the

B’nai Brith, the American Legion, the Civil Liberties Union, and so forth, all designed to rally grassroots organizational support for united-front anti-Nazism and to prepare the ground for more favorable reception of future anti-Nazi projects. That such a diverse audience with political affiliations spanning left to right were willing to participate in these events indicates the extent to which anti-Nazism as a national zeitgeist was spreading in the United States. It remains unclear how well Confessions did at the box office as fluctuating figures were reported by the studio and the press.

However, the film’s use in mobilizing support for the new orientation was remarkable. It also paved the way for anti-Nazi films that followed, such as Alfred

Hitchcock’s spy-thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940, United Artists) and Vincent

Sherman’s Underground (1940, Warner Bros.).

Nazism/fascism as a (national) “social-problem” in liberal-leftist films Confessions, I argue, is a seminal film that signals the further transformation of the leftist social-problem film under the paradigm of anti-Nazism, just as Blockade and

Juarez represent the genre’s transformation under antifascism. The “social problem” faced by the (American) national collectivity is not the shortcomings of democracy or the violability of the American Dream as coded in the early 1930s leftist-authored 248

socially-critical films, but Nazi/fascist ideology and its challenges to humanism, democracy and the security of the Allied nations. In their publicity campaign,

Warners played up the “Nazi menace” to the fullest extent, constructing Nazis and their sympathizers as “criminals” and “gangsters,” and their presence, activities and ideology were described with phrases like “Hitlerian fungus,” “bacteria” “spies and traitors,” “parasitic growth,” “dictatorship,” “totalitarian,” and so forth. The film, then, was presented in terms of moral defense of a besieged society.

As I have noted in the previous chapter, earlier leftist-authored films such as

Blockade (1938) had demonstrated the successful interpellation of antifascist discourse within the generic and narrative structure of the hybridized social-problem film. In Blockade, the social-problem genre was hybridized with male melodrama, romantic melodrama, spy thriller, war film and elements of the revolutionary film, while the narrative was clearly antifascist in intent. In Juarez (1939) antifascism was conjoined with the social-problem film, the revolutionary political film, and the historical epic. Confessions incorporates anti-Nazi discourse explicitly but takes generic hybridization further, so that the social-problem genre is no longer the dominant structure but co-exists as a strong presence along side the detective/policier genre.

Confessions, I argue, retains distinct elements of the 1930s social-problem film at the levels of characterization, narrative and genre. The representation of

Rumrich/Schneider as an amoral character suffering simultaneously from socio- 249

economic disenfranchisement and ideological confusion places him in the company of the social-problem anti- or non-heroes, but one whose “condition” impels him towards becoming a socio-path. He is an idealist turned cynic due to all the “lousy breaks” he has been subjected to. In Confessions the protagonist turns to spying and betrayal of one’s country instead of turning to violent crime, corrupt business practices or gangster-capitalism as in the classic 1930s social-problem films such as

Little Caesar or The Public Enemy. His socio-economic psychosis results in his capitulation to fascism. In a radio broadcast, one Confessions commentator observed that in a pre-release preview “one of the most interesting aspects of the picture was the remarkable fashion in which the director succeeded in laying bare the psychological springs in a human being that might make a Nazi or a Fascist out of him.”167

Rumrich/Schneider is a deeply flawed character, a bit of a bumbling buffoon who is equally proud of his intelligence and his ability to defy authority figures and the law, and challenge national institutions. Even his spying is primarily for monetary gain. He wishes to sell his services as an agent and the information he obtains as a result of his espionage for impressive sums of money to the Germans, as if trying to legitimate his identity as an anti-nationalist “hood.” Although he suffers from economic marginalization and social alienation, this is not the result of an

167 Johannes Steel, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” News Broadcast, WMCA, New York. 27 April, 1939. A copy of the transcript sent to Jack Warner is available in the Confessions Publicity files, USC-WBA. Jack Warner responded to the broadcast enthusiastically and wired his heartfelt thanks to Steel. The files also contain this document, dated 27 April, 1939. 250

unrepentant, class-entrenched capitalism, as in the case of the protagonists of 1930s socially-critical films, but more directly based on his own lack of efforts. He spends his days loitering about, smoking, drinking “bier,” arguing politics and attending rallies and meetings. His “social problem” is as much personal as it is a result of indoctrination by German nationalists. In the end, Rumrich/Schneider lives up to his reputation as a “cheap hood” and makes a career of betrayal, naming all his associates in the spy ring. His confessions then call forth appropriate “patriotic” action on the part of the law, resulting in the arrest of the fast-developing social problem threatening the national body with ideological dementia: native fascism and imported-Nazism pervading American life as a form of misdirected nationalism.

Since American proto-fascists and Nazis are shown to be alienated from their own

“democratic” country they overcompensate by declaring their undying fealty to a supremist ideology. In this sense, the film does present a critique of homegrown fascism arising from economic disenfranchisement, social alienation and ideological confusion.

In Blockade John Howard Lawson had made Madeline Carroll both an object of

(sexual) desire and (antifascist) derision. Through her ideological conversion to the cause Marco (Henry Fonda) espoused, she transforms into a sympathetic and attractive figure. Hilda Kienhauer, who plays the spy-mistress of Dr. Griebl, is represented as both sexless and unintelligent. Instead of playing the role of a co- protagonist and defender of the “male under crisis”—a role that, for example, Sylvia 251

Sidney plays remarkably well for her “man” Spencer Tracy in Fury (1936)—Hilda of Confessions quickly turns coat when faced with damning evidence against her activities by Inspector Renard. There is no ideological conversion to democracy as the “true way,” only a desire to save her own skin by becoming an informer. The fraulein spy remains distinctly unattractive throughout her relatively short career in the film but does provide the kind of stereotype of female communist party functionaries that peopled the cold war anticommunist films of Hollywood.

Rumrich, Kienhauer and even the suave Dr. Kassel are insecure, paranoid and obsessive—veritable film noir characters who are outsiders to the American Dream and democracy. To enliven their dull lives they seek solace in feverish dedication to a misguided revolutionary ideology. In essence, their rebellion is against

“democracy” and “capitalism” and their response fundamentally similar to that of the

1930s cinematic gangsters, hoods and criminals. In the Nazi assumptions of supremacy they seek ideological, psychological, emotional and socio-economic salvation. Unlike the essentially good common men and women of Depression-era social problem films, Confessions’ Nazi characters are basically weak and misdirected.

Arguably also, Confessions is an example of the patriotic social-problem film, in which a collective democratic working-class America is shown to be suffering from an internal but linked to an external threat—a threat that is in the end challenged and contained by “the people” and their morally righteous elected officials. As cross- 252

reference to the exchange in the coffee shop at the end of Confessions one may cite the final scene in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941) in which a member of the

“common and decent” American people tells off the politico Norton in the film’s final climactic scene. Norton is an irredeemably corrupt politician, the embodiment of the populist-fascist leader on the rise on America’s native shores, who has been cynically wending his way to the nation’s highest office, the Presidency. Norton is defeated in his schemes by a popular front, grassroots political movement emblematized by the John Doe clubs across the country. Declares the (democratic)

American to the proto-fascist, “There ya go Norton, the people…try and lick that!”

Interestingly, Confessions ends with the rising notes of “America the Beautiful” as

“The End” appears on the screen, very similar in the visual style and timing to

Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which ends with the folksy tune of “For

He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Like Confessions, Capra’s Doe ends in the triumph of populism against encroaching fascism. Significantly, Doe was shot on the Warner lot and released through Warner Bros. Capra had left Harry Cohn and Columbia Studios at this point and the acceptance of his proposal by Warners was, as Christine Colgan re-iterates, due to the film’s theme and Capra’s box-office status. Like previous Warner antifascist productions such as Black Legion (1937) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy,

Capra’s film “assayed the danger to American democracy from fascist forces [which] 253

hide behind nationalism to spread their power and influence.” 168 Within the popular reception domain, the kind of finale given to leftist-authored cinematic- propagandistic texts such as Confessions exhibits a discursive fraternity between the rhetoric of the Hollywood Left and the populism represented by “liberal” and

“centrist” Capra et al.

However, as potent and imaginative as Warners’ publicity campaigns were, audience responses were varied, even contradictory, perhaps indicating how the intent of authorship, be it for nationalist or anti-ideological purpose, can be transformed, even negated, by the specificities of spectatorship. If Confessions proved itself to be an antifascist/anti-Nazi Hollywood prototype of an exciting and effective propaganda film, it had to endure the fate of films that challenged the status quo—virulent critique or undying featly.

In the next sections I discuss the positioning of the film by the critics, both nationally and internationally, illustrating how these critical positions vis-à-vis national policy determined their responses. This also provides a rich background for evaluating the politics surrounding the film’s reception.

Confessions’ Critical Reception The film’s exhibition elicited both enthusiastic and positive responses as well as protests, denunciation, violence and rioting. Colgan, Ross and Birdwell et al have all

168 Christine Colgan, Warner Brothers' crusade against the Third Reich: a study of anti-Nazi activism and film production, 1933 to 1941, unpublished PhD dissertation (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1985), 627.

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presented excellent discussions of this issue. Steven J. Ross declares that the film

“was a milestone in American cinema…the first major studio production to take an explicit stand on foreign policy and warn Americans about the dangers of a particular regime.”169 Although this is certainly true, a brief sampling of critical reviews that appeared at the general release of the film indicates that in the United States critical reception was also mixed, varied and contradictory despite Warner Bros.’ full- throttle publicity campaign.

The New York Times disapproved of the film’s call-to-arms rhetoric and its evident villanization of the Nazis. Frank Nugent bluntly stated that, “We can endure just so much hissing, even when Der Fuehrer and the Gestapo are its victims” and

“that the picture has cheapened its cause and sacrificed much of its dignity by making its villains twirl their long black moustaches.” 170 Variety also commented darkly on the film’s rabble-rousing politics, stating that the film “could scarcely be more inflammatory if made in wartime. Nearly every charge is fired. Only thing missing is a rape scene by a German soldier.” 171

The Anti-Nazi League, predictably, defended the exposure of Nazi spies and fifth column activities declaring the film to be “the best answer to Fritz Kuhn, Father

169 Steven J. Ross, Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Warner Bros. Anti-Fascism and the Politicization of Hollywood, 50.

170 Frank Nugent, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” New York Times, 29 April, 1939.

171 Variety, 2 May, 1939.

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Coughlin, and the American Nazis.” 172 Surprisingly, Louella Parsons of the isolationist Hearst newspaper, the Los Angeles Examiner, guardedly praised the film.

She lauded its authenticity, its dedication to “facts,” its newsreel quality and its entertainment value, asserting that Warners did not resort to any undue exaggeration in their desire to “create unprecedented attention with American audiences.” 173 A positive nod towards Confessions and Warner Bros. by the conservative, isolationist

Hearst bloc does indicate, I argue, that the political ground was clearly shifting by mid-1939 and that an anti-Nazi political coalition was developing nationally between the left, center and the right, albeit subject to continual debate and contention.

Internationally, the response was also quite varied. The official reception accorded the film depended upon the degree of ideological alignment between the exhibiting country and the Allied or Axis powers. The British passed Confessions for general release with only minor deletions, in June 1939. London’s Film Weekly raved about the film’s enthusiastic reception, although Grahame Greene’s dissenting voice in The Spectator lamented “this picture of methodical violence and treachery,” and called it a “magnificently constructed engine-of-war.”174 The film was obviously banned in Germany, in German-controlled markets, and in the Axis countries of

Japan and Italy. German political, economic and military influence in, and control of

172 Confessions Publicity Files, USC-WBA.

173 Louella Parsons, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 5 May, 1939.

174 Grahame Greene, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” The Spectator, 24 June, 1939.

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media in countries under Nazi hegemony followed suit. These included Scandinavia

(Denmark, Sweden and Norway), Switzerland, Holland, Hungry and Spain in

Europe. In Latin America, the ban extended to Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,

Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Most of these countries were under Nazi political influence, or sided with the German position for fear of political and economic reprisals.

“Thanks for Opening Our Eyes”—Popular Reception and its Politics What I present in this section is a cross-section of popular opinion on

Confessions, utilizing communications to the Warner Bros. offices in Hollywood and

New York, by a diversity of viewers that represent a good cross-section of race, class, gender and ideology. All the responses discussed here have been excerpted from correspondence saved in the Warner Bros. Publicity and Reception files. I would like to clarify at the outset that there is no clear-cut way to determine which of these communications were “genuine,” which are examples of “crank mail,” and which have been selectively deposited in the archives by the studio. My arguments are necessarily based on a select group of letters which typify the kinds of fan mail

Warner Bros. received in connection with the film.

Several viewers challenged the studio’s overt and racist denigration of the

German people, expressing displeasure at the “low mindedness” of this technique.

For example, on the subject of Warners’ anti-Nazism and the propaganda methods it used to influence the public, Instructor in Political Science at USC, Frank H. Jonas, wrote a pointed letter to the studio, stating that, 257

It is known that the Nazis in Germany used the same technique in Germany against the Jews. This to our class was considered reprehensible (We have several Jewish students in our class, by the way.) Is your technique of attacking Germans, therefore, not to be placed in the same category? If not, why not? 175

Philip A. Turner, from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, presumably also an instructor, expressed similar misgivings about the “war mongering” methods used by Warner

Bros. Turner declared the film to be “dangerous propaganda,” that breeds hatred. 176

On the other hand, there were viewers whose response was either entirely politically-motivated or who understood that the film’s propaganda was a necessary device to combat similar anti-Allied propaganda being churned out by the Nazi machine. They, perhaps correctly, viewed the film’s discourse as a prophylactic against Nazi sympathizers and fifth columnists nationally. Soon after the film’s general release Hans J. Wollenberger, Executive Vice-President of

Deutschammerikanischer Kulturverbund (German-American League for Culture), in

Los Angeles, wrote to Hal Wallis of Warner Bros. to reiterate that “not all German-

Americans were Nazis” and that the film “is a masterpiece of education, well-fitted to enlighten the American people about the real danger of these un-American Nazi- activities…You can help us and the American people in producing more pictures of this kind.” 177 In a similar vein, Sylvia Wilcox Razey, Executive Secretary of an organization calling itself the Descendents of the American Revolution,

175 Frank H. Jonas letter to Warner Bros., May 11, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

176 Philip A. Turner letter to Warner Bros., August 4, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

177 Hans J. Wollenberger letter to Hal Wallis, July 14, 1939, Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

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headquartered in New York, wrote to commend Warners for exposing fifth-column

Nazis “mask[ing] under the cover of ‘patriotism’ and ‘Americanism’ who are, undoubtedly, the foremost menace to our liberties and democratic institutions.”178

Razey was pointing out the danger that, unless checked, native forms of Nazism constituted a challenge to the democratic national body, that it was a social and political “problem” that America as a nation must face and must evolve a collective response to. Razey was, perhaps covertly, also echoing the kinds of charges that the rightwing typically leveled at the CPUSA. If so, it does indicate that, in the late

1930s, Nazism rather than communism was starting to be the national problem of greatest concern in the popular American imagination.

Mort Blumenstock, Warner’s Executive in charge of Advertising and Publicity for the East Coast, wrote back to Razey and several other patrons who had expressed similar sentiments. After thanking them for their appreciation of Confessions

Blumenstock went on to recommend Juarez, noting that this film is “equally timely and has been generally acknowledged to be one of the most important screen productions of recent years.” 179 Clearly, Warners publicity strategists were linking the politically revolutionary ethos espoused in their film of Mexico’s struggle to oust the “fascist” aristocracy and colonial powers and achieve “democracy” with

178 Sylvia Wilcox Razey letter to Warner Bros. (New York office), May 8, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

179 Mort Blumenstock letter to Sylvia Wilcox Razey, Samuel Koner and Philip Shan, May 11, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

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Confessions, in which “Nazis” were shown to be infiltrating the bastion of democracy—America—and create a totalitarian regime with fascist ideology. In both films the “social/political problem” faced by the collective national body is

“fascism,” and their redemptive struggle is on behalf of “democracy.” In essence, then, both films were constructed and popularized as “social problem” films, although their reception does not necessarily conform to this expectation. If

Blockade and Juarez shifted attention to fascism as a “foreign problem,” Confessions rebounded with concerns regarding Nazism gaining force at home. However, the source of the “evil” continued to be external, specifically in Europe.

If Confessions succeeded in critically awakening viewers to the dangers of

Nazism, it elicited super-patriotic responses from others, who used accolades such as

“this kind of picture really tells the truth,” “let us have more of these kinds of pictures,” “this will keep Nazism out of our country,” and calling for “more exposes of Nazi ‘influence’…which I will endorse to the nth degree,” 180 and to “keep this picture circulating until every city in the United States” has exhibited it. These responses were heartening for the studio as they indicated that there was a potential niche market for anti-Nazi films (of which Warner’s had several in pre-production, such as The Bishop Who Walked With God and Underground), even if the mode in which these films were received was primarily patriotic rather than critical. It is worth noting here that this co-option of leftist discourse by patriotism indicates one

180 All quotes from audience correspondence from Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

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limit of leftist political and aesthetic strategies. The shift in focus on Nazism as primarily an external problem was perhaps done at the expense of shifting attention away from the dangers of U.S. fascism in the form of reactionary populism and racism.

Unfortunately, some viewers even conflated Warner Bros. antifascism with anticommunism and, again, the usual accusations of “war mongering,” “Jewish propaganda” and denunciations of the “commies of Hollywood” surfaced. An immigrant housewife from Beverly Hills wrote to express disappointment with

Hollywood’s desire to mold public opinion via propaganda pictures such as

Confessions. She felt that instead of concentrating on crime and spy films the studio would serve the public better by concentrating on the appeal of democracy vs. totalitarianism and the viability of the American Dream in the then current crisis conditions, stating that,

The biggest problem we have in America today is to convince the American people and, especially, the youth of America that the American Ideal, or ideology, has more to offer the common man, than any other ideology, whether it be socialism, Russian Communism, German Nazism or Italian Fascism… First, and even second generation Americans, and those of foreign birth who have come to America, must be shown the contrast of what they might have had in the old country and what they may attain under constitutional government, and freedom and justice it guarantees. I can think of a dozen such stories right now. Your writers, if they have any brains, should think of dozens more. 181

Ruth Herrmann of New York wrote directly to Will Hays of the Production Code

Administration in which she declared her resolve to boycott Confessions and all

181 Helen S. Walton letter to Warner Bros., Sept. 26, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

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subsequent Warner Bros. films asserting that “We Aryans, Americans are not fooled by the Jewish propaganda today. We know they want to bring war with Germany and want us to fight for them.”182

Yet another viewer mailed in a paper clipping of an article which challenged

Hollywood’s lack of “real” patriotism because it was controlled by the “commies.”

The article writer despaired of all the anti-Nazi propaganda being interpellated in

Hollywood films and complained that something like Booth Tarkington’s novel

Karabash would never be considered for adaptation. The novel “tells the story of how the ‘great chairman’ of a communist state, ‘Pogol,’ sends disciples to America to preach communism” but discovers America to be the land of freedom and opportunity, “a land they had secretly dreamed of.” According to this viewer, such a project would never be filmed because it would “expose the underground workings of Russian communists just as actively at work as Nazi spies in America.”183

These letters are illustrative of audience responses from a wide spectatorial arena and provide some idea of the popular reception of the film in several measures: the degree to which it was both agreeable and contentious; the ways in which publicity itself inflected spectatorship and elicited responses in contradictory ways; and, the extent to which its propagandistic intent was misdirected, co-opted or spun away in unintended ways.

182 Ruth Hermann letter to William Hays, February 3, 1939. Reception files, USC-WBA.

183 Mrs. J. Haesle letter to Jack Warner, September 7, 1939. Confessions Reception files, USC-WBA.

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The importance of Confessions to the Hollywood Left Confessions of a Nazi Spy demonstrated how a politically radical film could emerge from the Hollywood studio system under “crisis” conditions and succeed in mobilizing national and international sentiment, albeit subject to contention and spectatorial miscommunication. It also illustrated how the emblematic leftist genre— the social-problem film—was malleable and was capable of responding fully to the particular necessities and crises of the times. In case of Confessions it showed that, under Hollywood Left authorship, discursive influences, leftist ideology, national agendas and political positions could be seamlessly and successfully incorporated into its generic elements.

This “lesson” would prove to be vital during wartime when the social-problem film would be hybridized with the war and combat films. Films such as Destination

Tokyo and Action in the North Atlantic were nationalistic but, because they were social-problem film hybrids they maintained a “critical patriotism” that was anchored in the discourses of race, class, ethnicity, gender and ideology, as in the case of the 1930s socially-critical cycle of films.

Even if propaganda films like Blockade (1938), Juarez (1939) and Confessions

(1939) succeeded in gaining exhibition and distribution support, the victory, as such, was never complete. In 1941, when Senators Nye and Wheeler called for a close examination of propaganda in Hollywood films, there was a growing concern among conservatives that the PCA was not doing its job properly, particularly in containing the Hollywood Left’s power and discursive authority in matters filmic. Jon Lewis 263

states that Wheeler and Nye’s call for political censorship of films such as

Confessions was motivated not only by “a growing distrust of the PCA, which seemed unable to attend to even the narrowest interpretation of its charter” but also because the talents behind these films was “notoriously left-wing.” 184 Clearly the

Right felt threatened and sensed a Left “conspiracy” at work in Hollywood—“Jews and Commies” were readying America for war, as witnessed by the rapid proliferation of anti-Nazi, antifascist fare like The Great Dictator (1940, dir Charlie

Chaplin), Pastor Hall (1940, dir Ray Boulting), The Mortal Storm (1940, dir Frank

Borzage) and The Man I Married (1940, dir Irving Pichel). The Senate subcommittee on War Propaganda and the House un-American Activities Committee could not make inroads into Hollywood in 1941 partly because it was a “company town” with strong leftist presence that provided a compelling united-front resistance.

Leftist political filmmaking in Hollywood continued to be a contentious affair even under the crisis of World War II. Immediately afterwards, HUAC started its investigations of Hollywood once again, culminating in the hearings of 1947. The rest is (Hollywood Blacklist) history.

The anti-Nazi social-problem films Despite the contentions surrounding Confessions and the on-again off-again status of anti-Nazi films from the Hollywood studios, anti-Nazi films did continue to be produced immediately afterward. Most were quasi-independent efforts

184 Jon Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hardcore—How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (NY: New York University Press, 2000), 22.

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spearheaded by committed producers, such as Chaplin and Zanuck, outside the confines of the more established studios, although distributed by the studio system

(typically United Artists). They tended to deal with the effects of Nazism outside the

U.S. boundaries. They also acquired a more allegorical character, often taking the shape of a morality play or personal melodramas. Significantly, several of the more interestingly dramatic films were social-problem film hybrids authored by leftists in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Notable among the spate of anti-Nazi films that followed Confessions are: Alfred

Hitchcock’s spy-thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940, United Artists), produced by

Walter Wanger, an endlessly re-written version of John Howard Lawson’s squelched collaboration with Wanger, Personal History; Roy Boulting’s Pastor Hall (1940,

Charter Films, UK/United Artists), a male melodrama in which a German pastor is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for raising moral awareness of Nazi philosophies. There he is beaten, tortured and eventually killed after giving a rousing final sermon; Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940, United Artists), a hilariously comedic and biting social and political satire of Hitlerism; Mitchell

Leisen’s Arise My Love (1940, London Films/Paramount), a hybrid of romantic melodrama, social satire and war adventure in which a happy-go-lucky couple is awakened to the Nazi menace when their “honeymoon boat” is torpedoed; Vincent

Sherman’s Underground (1940, Warner Bros.), a male melodrama/social problem film in which two brothers Kurt and Eric display opposite reactions to Nazi ideology. 265

Kurt is a gung-ho pro-Nazi radio announcer while Eric operates an underground resistance radio station. Slowly but surely Kurt realizes the insidiousness of the Nazi doctrine, joins his brother in the resistance and helps defeat a group of fifth columnists; Irving Pichel’s The Man I Married (1940, Zanuck Co.), a romantic melodrama/social-problem film hybrid in which an innocent young American woman discovers that the charming man she has fallen in love with is a willing victim of Nazi indoctrination; Mervyn LeRoy’s Escape (1940, MGM), another romantic melodrama/social problem film in which a young American dares to rescue his mother from a German concentration camp. The script was written by Marguerite

Roberts, who, along with her husband, was also blacklisted by HUAC in the 1950s;

Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940, MGM), a family melodrama hybridized with the social problem film set in Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise to power.

Nazism insinuates itself in the relatively harmonious family life so that divided loyalties engendered by divided ideologies tear the family apart; Anthony Asquith’s

A Voice in the Night (1941, Two Cities Films, UK/Columbia Pictures), a male melodrama/social-problem film in which a German doctor becomes increasingly alienated from his Nazi employers and their oppressive ideology. He finally rebels, sets up a clandestine radio station and transmits anti-Nazi propaganda to his countrymen; and, Archie Mayo’s Four Sons (1940, 20th Century-Fox), written by

John Howard Lawson, another family melodrama/social problem film hybrid in the vein of Storm but set in Czechoslovakia. 266

Lawson’s script of Four Sons is probably the best example illustrating how the leftist-authored social-problem film genre “opened up” to new and vital discursive influences in this period. In Blockade, Lawson had successfully wedded this genre with the spy thriller, romantic melodrama and the male melodrama, interpellating antifascist discourse in the genre conventions. Blockade’s implicit (Spanish) antifascism is transformed and extended into explicit anti-Nazism in Four Sons. For this reason, I would like to discuss its scenario in some detail.

Four Sons was Lawson’s first explicitly political film after the controversial

Blockade. The writing took place in 1939, a period during which several key events took place: the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the formalization of the

Nazi-Soviet non-Aggression Pact, and the declaration of war on Germany by Great

Britain and France. 185 This story of four brothers is set in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation. One brother, Karl, succumbs to

Nazi ideology and joins their “cause,” while another brother, Chris, reacts entirely differently. He becomes a resistance fighter who wants to free his country from the enemies. Joseph, another sibling, escapes to America while the youngest brother is conscripted into the German army only to be killed during the Nazis’ Polish campaign. The film, then, highlights the divided loyalties and diverging responses to the takeover by a powerful, totalitarian “foreign influence”—a disturbing malaise affecting the national collectivity, as it were, and fragmenting its unified identity.

185 Victor Navasky, Naming Names (NY: The Viking Press, 1980), 301. 267

Lawson’s script particularly concentrates on the dialectical/ideological conflict between the brothers Karl and Chris—the “Nazi” and the “freedom fighter.” To heighten the melodramatic aspect of this conflict and to push the narrative envelope allegorically, Lawson develops a “love triangle” and has Karl, the “bad brother,”

“steal” the fiancée of the “good brother,” Chris, early on, setting up their activities on a visible moral compass. Karl and Anna have a child together. When the ideological battle gains force, Chris steps up his anti-Nazi activities. One day, while being pursued, he accidentally kills Karl without realizing it. Anna denounces him, and

Chris is himself killed in turn when the German army rushes across the border in a blitzkrieg maneuver. In constructing this state of affairs, the film displays its moral themes: both betrayer and betrayed, the informer and the informed upon, are subject to violent and meaningless deaths—brother divided against brother and the ideologically-divided family symbolize a nation torn asunder by a malignant force.

In a climactic scene towards the end of the film, the mater familias, Frau Bernle, stands at the head of a dining table and the ghosts of the four sons appear to her, a tragic reminder of her irredeemable losses. The “evil” foreign influence, the malaise of Nazism, is therefore depicted as a moral and ideological “problem” for which there are no solutions except one of resistance and elimination. For the fallen nation, as for the divided family and the new generation—symbolized by the family grandchild—the only beacon of hope is “democracy.” This is contained in the living 268

embodiment of Joseph, the son who has escaped the dis-ease and is safely ensconced in America, the “land of freedom.”

At the railroad station, when Frau Bernle is heading for the United States with her grandchild, she runs into the town’s old schoolmaster, recently released from a

Nazi prison camp, who tells her to give her American son the universal message of hope that “barbed wire cannot hold back the spirit of man.” This resounding message announces the triumph of humanism over totalitarianism and, by extension, of democracy over Nazism. The film ends in the ideological and spiritual redemption of the Nazi victims by the benign future promised by democracy. Four Sons is a remarkable artistic and political achievement by the Hollywood Left wherein the generic conventions of the leftist social-problem film and the socially-realist style are expertly interpellated with anti-Nazism.

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, anti-Nazism and antifascism became the rule in Hollywood, and the Hollywood Left aligned with nationalist ideology in the defense of democracy, and joined in the war effort by producing nationalistic films such as Destination Tokyo (1943, co-scripted by Albert

Maltz) and Action in the North Atlantic (1943, scripted by John Howard Lawson).

These as well as several other films authored by the Hollywood Left were hybridized social-problem/war/combat films, a trend that continued the transformation of the social-problem film genre under antifascism/anti-Nazism in the “crisis” conditions of wartime and direct combat. 269

Hollywood Leftists in the aftermath of Confessions: John Wexley, Anatole Litvak and Edward G. Robinson face Blacklisting In this section I trace the creative and ideological genealogies of prominent leftists involved in the production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy, in particular writer

John Wexley, director Anatole Litvak and star Edward G. Robinson. In the post-WW

II period, when the United States and the Soviet Union became ideologically opposed and locked in a cold war, leftists from the “Red Decade” came under political censure and creative repression because of their liberal politics and their support of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s.

The fact that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R were allies against Nazism/fascism during the height of the World War, and that Hollywood leftists made notable commercial propaganda films and documentaries extolling U.S-Soviet Alliance under a governmental mandate, was quickly and conveniently forgotten. In the immediate postwar period, the cross-race, class, gender and political cooperation that had characterized the years of antifascism/anti-Nazism, fell asunder. These alliances felt apart under the new anticommunist zeitgeist. Perhaps this was the one crucial reason why the House Committee on un-American Activities was so successful in denouncing, blacklisting and exiling the best of the “Red Decade” leftists. I hope the following discussions will provide ample thought, in the contemporary context, on the necessity of maintaining a strong cross-race, class, gender, ethnicity and ideology front against conservative, rightwing forces once again threatening the openness and liberalism not only in Hollywood but also in the larger national culture. 270

John Wexley Scriptwriter John Wexley had honed his creative skills as a playwright in off-

Broadway venues and the Federal Theatre Project, and later became one of the most successful leftist writers and unionists at Warner Bros. Even if his placement in

Hollywood was happier than that of some other leftist comrades, such as Clifford

Odets, he remained committed to the socially-critical, Marxist vision exhibited in his early plays such as The Last Mile (1930), Steel (1931) and They Shall Not Die

(1934). These plays had achieved artistic success for Wexley on the New York stage;

Mile and Die were later made into Hollywood films. Mile was an indictment of capital punishment and Die was based on the Scottsboro case. The latter was mounted in 1934 as part of the fund-raising efforts by communists for the defense of the Scottsboro boys charged with rape.186

Wexley had expressed great excitement over his work on Confessions and, perhaps in alliance with Jack Warner’s massive publicity campaign, had asserted that whatever the film’s merit “exhibitors will spring upon the prints…as mana from heaven because the very nature of the subject lends itself to every form of publicity exploitation and sensational advertising.” 187 Despite the challenges posed by the reception of Confessions to his Hollywood career he continued his anti-

186 The Last Mile played from February 13 to April, 1930 at the Sam H. Harris Theatre, New York. Steel played through November, 1930 at the Times Square Theatre, New York. They Shall Not Die played from February 21 until the end of April, 1934 at the Theatre Royale in New York. The Internet Broadway Database [database on-line]; available from http://www.ibdb.com/

187 “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” Theatre Arts Committee (April, 1939), 19.

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Nazi/antifascist collaboration with fellow Hollywood leftists. For example, he wrote the English language narration for the Soviet documentary, The City That Stopped

Hitler—Heroic Stalingrad (1943, Artkino), which was distributed by Paramount in the United States. The film eulogized the Russians and their resistance of the Nazis and incited hatred of the Germans aggressors. Perhaps the implicit pro-communism of this documentary impelled the Legion of Decency to label it “objectionable in part.” Wexley also participated, as an on-site script overseer, in the production of

Song of Russia (1943), a film that gained the attention of HUAC’s as a prime example of “communist propaganda” in motion-pictures.

Wexley’s next anti-Nazi propaganda film was with Fritz Lang in Hangmen Also

Die (1943). The film was also a collaboration between Lang and fellow German

émigré Bertolt Brecht, who wrote the original scenario but later denied having any decisive part in the authorship of the film. Brecht’s dissociation was prompted in part by Lang’s dilution of the film’s radicalism, a move necessary to make the film an entertaining suspense-thriller. The denial of authorship also served Brecht well when facing his denunciation by HUAC as one of the “Unfriendly Nineteen” in 1947.

Hangmen’s original scenario was extensively re-written by Wexley and concentrated on the moral decrepitude and socio-cultural malaise engendered by the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, a follow-up to John Howard Lawson’s script of Four

Sons (1940). As in Confessions and Four Sons the “social/political problem” faced by the collectivity—here, the Czech nation—was Nazism. 272

When HUAC investigations gained force in the immediate postwar period, it claimed Wexley as one of its first casualties. Jack Warner, in his appearance before

HUAC in October, 1947, proudly declared his “Americanism” and his loathing of communism. As proof of his patriotism he assured the committee he had fired a dozen staff writers from his studio, including Bessie, Kahn, Koch, Lardner, Lavery,

Lawson, Maltz, Rossen, Trumbo, Wexley, Odets and Irwin Shaw.188 Wexley was thus one of the earliest and significant victims of the blacklisting of Hollywood leftists.

After the Rosenberg trials, Wexley’s authored a pamphlet entitled “The

Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” 189 in which he systematically challenged and thoroughly destroyed the government’s case against the accused and executed

“spies.” For HUAC and anticommunist conservatives, this was another vital piece of

“evidence” of his defense of and sympathies for condemned communists and subversives. After Wexley’s blacklisting his next feature—which was also his last— was The Last Mile (1959), based on his 1930s play. The film was directed by his old leftist friend from Warner Bros. days, Howard Koch. Wexley’s career effectively ended with his blacklisting and, unlike many blacklistees who made a comeback in the 1960s and 1970s, Wexley did not.

188 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community (NY: Doubleday, 1980), 280.

189 John Wexley, The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (New York, Cameron & Kahn, 1955).

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Anatole Litvak Anatole Litvak was born Mikhail Anatol Litwak in Kiev in 1902. Litvak was

Russian-born, Jewish, a Hollywood leftist and a committed antifascist/anti-Nazi. He had entered Soviet cinema in 1923, working in Nordkino studios as a set decorator and assistant director, and came to Hollywood in 1937 after working in England and

France. Like his other leftist comrades in the motion-picture industry, he was under political suspicion, particularly after Confessions. He was never formally associated with the Party but was, by professional necessity and ideological orientation, a

“fellow traveler.” During World War II he worked with Frank Capra on the Why We

Fight propaganda documentary series, serving as director on The Battle for Russia

(1943), the narration for which was written by Confessions’ co-writer John Wexley.

He also collaborated with Capra and his Army Signal Corps. Film unit on other Why

We Fight episodes such as The Nazis Strike (1942), Divide and Conquer (1942), The

Battle for China (1943) and War Comes to America (1945).

Even this collaboration was fraught with suspicion of his patriotism by conservatives. Thomas Doherty reports that Senator Ralph Brewster (R-Maine) expressed concern about Litvak’s status as a “naturalized American” while serving in the army’s propaganda unit. The Senator urged the military to use more “seasoned citizens” than Litvak—who had become an American citizen fairly recently and at a 274

relatively older age.190 Eric Smoodin, however, reports that Litvak’s association with the established Capra offered some protection from conservative attacks. His research reveals that in October, 1943, Robert Lord, a lieutenant colonel in the

Signal Corps, wrote an extended memo in the vein of an “official history” of the

Capra documentaries and asserted that the films produced by Capra and his “able assistant” Litvak would demonstrate high artistic merit and stressed that the films would most certainly reflect the personality of “Col. Capra.” 191 This was perhaps a veiled suggestion that the leftist Litvak would be unable to insert “communist” or

“Jewish” propaganda into the films.

After the war, Litvak continued his association with liberal-leftists to make innovative and controversial film noirs such as Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and The

Snake Pit (1948). Both films are excellent examples of postwar leftist “socially conscious” cycle of films that were darkly fatalistic and paranoic, with protagonists caught in webs of conspiracies and betrayals, their psychological orientation verging on hysteria. Undoubtedly, these were highly allegorized melodramas that reflected the cold war/red scare cultural conditions. HUAC’s investigations of leftist and their anti-ideological cinematic discourse included Litvak and his work on films such as

190 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 191.

191 For further details, see “Coercive Viewings: Soldiers and Prisoners Watch Movies,” in Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity and American Film Studies, 1930-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

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Confessions, although it may have been his association with the Army Signal Corps unit and Capra that deflected much of HUAC’s scrutiny.

During their appearance before HUAC and their blacklisting, Litvak also defended the Hollywood Ten and participated in the Committee for First

Amendment, which was created to counter HUAC charges against the “communist influence in the motion-picture industry.” During the 1950s, with most of the top leftist talents on the Hollywood blacklist, Litvak worked in Europe, although he was not formally blacklisted. He finally left the United States to settle in Paris in 1961.

Edward G. Robinson Robinson was investigated in the early postwar period for being a “communist sympathizer” and an ardent supporter of Rooseveltian agendas. He was called up for questioning before HUAC, although his appearance seemed as much motivated by his desire to clear the charges against him as it was a defense of his cinematic and political “radicalism.” Although Robinson always denied the charge of being a

“Hollywood communist” he maintained that his support of Roosevelt was based on his antifascism and his belief that he was involved in humanistic, worthy causes.

States Robinson,

I joined with all those who were opposed to the dictators and were supporting F.D.R. for a second term. I am listed as belonging to a great many organizations by the House un-American Activities Committee—so many that I cannot recall lending my name to them. I readily admit belonging to those I do remember: the Progressive Citizens of America (I was even on the executive board), and certainly I was active on the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Communist Front organizations? Perhaps, I don’t know. It never occurred to me. What occurred to me was that both groups were active in their passion for the deprived, the put-upon, the victims not only of Nazi terror but of our economic imbalance. 276

And we had meetings at my house…it seems it was all worry and work and social consciousness…yet, there were friends…lots of new ones…I must admit we all shared the same political bias.192

Among Robinson’s closest friends and allies was Dalton Trumbo, whom he had befriended but not sought out openly. However, during their collaboration on Our

Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945, MGM), Robinson and Trumbo increasingly shared political beliefs and attitudes, and public appearances—a “union that was noticed by many of the wrong eyes.” 193 Although he was never formally a Party member, Robinson, like Anatole Litvak, was, either by happenstance, or professional connections or political choice a “fellow traveler.”

Robinson’s association with prominent Hollywood leftists like Trumbo, organizations such as the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign

Born and his sponsorship of venues such as the congress of the National Council for

American Soviet Friendship eventually proved to be strikes against him, even if these activities took place during the height of US-Soviet alliance and inter-national cooperation in the war effort against the Nazis. In addition, he often spoke at length—in Russian, Yiddish and English—during meetings involving Jews, academics, film people and Party members, and allowed his name to appear as sponsor and supporter of groups, such as the Foreign Born, that extolled US-Soviet association.

192 Robinson, 163.

193 Alan L. Gansberg, Little Cesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson (Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 120.

277

Among his accusers was Gerald L.K. Smith, an organizer for the Knights of the

White Camellia, which was both anti-Semitic and antiblack. Smith named Robinson as a communist and called him one of “Stalin’s main agent in Hollywood” and part of the “Stalin machine in Hollywood.” Anticommunist publications such as Red

Channels, and Counterattack, and organizations such as Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals all denounced Robinson as well. 194

Robinson initially appeared before HUAC on October 27, 1947, then again on

December 21, 1950. At each session, Robinson was aggressively questioned about his political activities, ideological beliefs and Hollywood association with

“communists” and “subversives.” Each time he defended himself against the charges of being a communist and a working Party functionary, organizer and agitator in

Hollywood, each time he went back to the status quo of “Nothing happened. No doors opened. No jobs offered.” 195 Congressman John Rankin, excoriating

“Hollywood’s Jews” for their defense of the Hollywood Ten, named several including Robinson, “whose real name is Emmanuel Goldberg” as “attacking the

Committee for doing its duty in trying to protect this country and save the American

194 For further details on Robinson’s experience with anticommunist activists and the House un- American Activities Committee, see “Little Caesar vs. HUAC,” in Alan L. Gansberg, Little Cesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson (Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 169-192. In addition, see Edward G. Robinson, All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography (NY: Hawthorn Books, 1973), 248-264.

195 Ibid.

278

people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate

Christian people of Europe”196

Following his appearance before HUAC, Robinson was effectively “graylisted” by the studio system. Between 1950 and 1952 he only appeared in only two films,

My Daughter Joy (1950, London Films/UK) and Actors and Sin (1952, United

Artists), both lower-budget features produced outside of the Hollywood studio system. Robinson tried his luck on television but because Red Channels had listed him as a “subversive” no sponsor was willing to support him. To seek some form of

“redemption,” Robinson turned to Broadway, which offered a few prospects. He accepted the part of Rubashov, the protagonist in Sidney Kingsley and Arthur

Koestler’s anticommunist play Darkness at Noon.197 He toured with the play from the time it opened on September 28, 1951 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New

Jersey, to its final performance at the Cox Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio, on April 26,

1952.198 It was perhaps a desperate attempt to earn a living, keep the artistic spirit alive and, simultaneously, to announce his disassociation from communists, the

Party, “fellow travelers” and anyone on the FBI, Red Channels, Counterattack or

HUAC “lists.”

196 Gordon Kahn, Hollywood on Trial (NY: Boni and Gaer, 1948), 176-177.

197 The Broadway play ran successfully for a total of 186 performances at the Alvin Theatre from January 13, 1951 to March 24, 1951 and the at Theatre Royale from March 26, 1951 to June 23, 1951, both in New York. Internet Broadway Database [database on-line]; available from http://www.ibdb.com/

198 Gansberg, 265.

279

Future HUAC chairman Francis E. Walter (D-Pa.) utilized Robinson’s eagerness to be cleared of communism to call upon everyone under suspicion to cooperate with the committee. Walter declared that “this Robinson hearing was a good thing. The time has arrived when we should find out what influences have been at work in

Hollywood, who was responsible for the charges of Communism, and who is and who is not a Red.” 199 Robinson’s final appearance before HUAC occurred on April

30, 1952, which duly noted his performances on Darkness. At the end of the session he was labeled a “well meaning individual,” one who had been led astray. Mr.

Walter, now chairman of the committee, flippantly declared that “this committee has never had any evidence presented to indicate that you were anything but a choice sucker. I think you are number one on the sucker list in the country.”

However, HUAC’s decision was challenged by Republicans in Congress who felt that the actor only survived the scrutiny because no witnesses were brought in to give validity to his “red connections.” These conservatives demanded that Robinson be re-tried with witnesses called in to testify against the actor. Robinson, however, survived these last-minute onslaughts.

Robinson, like many well-meaning leftists, had felt that during the height of

Hollywood’s anti-Nazi propaganda (1938-1941) it was un-important if the Anti-Nazi

League board members were communists or if they were “pacifists, warmongers,

Trotskyites, Stalinists, Quakers, Holy Rollers, anarchists or Republicans. I would

199 “Francis E. White statement to HUAC,” December 21, 1950. Variety, 22 December, 1950.

280

have joined them in some small way to fight against the black horror that was beginning to sweep Europe.”200 Yet, he was forced to distance himself from communists and communism under FBI and HUAC pressure to be “patriotic.” His film and television career only revived after this restorative ritual and “clearance” from HUAC.

HUAC charges against Hollywood Leftists: anticommunism as patriotism In the degrading ceremonies engineered by HUAC, anticommunism became the de facto mode of proving one’s allegiance to the United States and its new foreign policy.

Robinson had been a staunch anti-Nazi and antifascist from the 1930s to the end of the world war and believed that a politically pluralist defense against the rising power of Nazi Germany was absolutely essential to defeat totalitarianism. The alliance between democracy and communism was necessary to this aim. Robinson never denied, to HUAC or to anyone else who questioned his affiliations, that he

“belonged to and supported every organization that was opposed to Hitler,” and readily admitted that,

I not only gave money, I went to meetings and sat through them and let my name be used on letterheads. More than that, I worked actively with some of the groups. I am no fool; I knew that some of the people with whom I was involved were pro-Stalin and pro-Soviet Union, but I thought then, and I kept thinking for a very long time, that those political motivations were secondary to their concerns about the German tentacles that threatened Europe and the world. If communism was a way to stop the brutalization of the world, so be it. I would deal with that later. The first and prime consideration was major and undiluted opposition to the Third Reich. 201

200 Robinson, 146.

201 Robinson, 194. 281

These calculations proved insufficient in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet non-Aggression Pact. This event was constructed in the United States as the interlinking of Nazism and Communism as aggressive totalitarian regimes aligned against the democratic Allied nations of Great Britain, France and the United States.

The political pluralism and coalitionist effort involved in the production of

Confessions of a Nazi Spy was torn asunder, and the talents who had contributed to the film, and their (Jewish) leftist or communist cohorts, were under FBI scrutiny.

Paul Buhle and David Wagner assert that,

As every Hollywood radical (or liberal) knew, the FBI in real life was never as interested in the [German-American] Bund as in Communism. High agency officials including Hoover himself regarded Jews as likely subversives; not all that far from Nazi ideology in another key respect, he and many of his agents considered movements for black equality a communist-inspired effort at promoting a biologically impossible egalitarianism…In any case, hardly a charge made against “foreign subversion” in Confessions of a Nazi Spy would not be turned against Communists during the [Nazi] Pact and with more concentrated ferocity during the decade after the war. 202

In the postwar period, affiliations such as Robinson’s were enough for HUAC and the MPAA (the Motion Pictures Producers Association) to brand Hollywood liberals and leftists as “communists” and “subversives” and contribute to the studio system’s gray- or blacklisting of these talents. Significant to note here is the role the MPAA unwittingly played in the implementation and legitimization of the blacklist under political and economic pressures.

202 Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 212. 282

The Department of Justice had pushed for a resumption of the antitrust suit against the Hollywood studios at the end of the World War. Facing both ideological and financial crisis, the MPAA, as a spokesman for the studio system, cooperated with HUAC in the preparation of the Waldorf Statement, which declared its intention to rid the studio system of “communist influences” and was the basis for the denunciation meted out to the Hollywood Ten. As with other Hollywood unions and guilds, such as the SWG, SAG and IATSE, the MPAA acquiesced to the rising tide of cold war/right wing agendas in the immediate postwar period, and took on a decidedly conservative and anticommunist stance in order to prove its “patriotism” and to survive under the new zeitgeist.

283

CHAPTER SIX

FURTHER RESEARCH ON LEFTIST STUDIES OF THE THIRTIES

As the Thirties came to a close, events pushed the Allied and Axis powers closer to the World War. Great Britain, France and countries neighboring Germany were engaged in direct combat during 1939-41. Although the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939, it was violated the following year when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The United States slowly but surely moved away from isolation and edged closer to a direct confrontation with Nazi Germany. With the attack on Pearl Harbor,

December 7, 1941, Japan and the United States were engaged in direct combat.

Hitler also declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, and the global confrontation began between the Allied and Axis powers. The Hollywood studios swung fully under the patriotic umbrella and the era of combat films and war-themed films commenced.

During wartime, 1941-1945, the Hollywood Left authored some of the most exciting war films to emerge from the Hollywood studios (particularly at Warner

Bros., Columbia, RKO and Paramount Pictures). These films were distributed both nationally and internationally, and were shown to U.S. troops in the European as well as the Pacific war theatres as part of the “entertainment and education” policy of the military and the U.S. government. Leftist auteurs, interpellating genres and working in hybridized forms were able to skillfully combine social criticism, positional politics, democratic ideology, literary tropes, leftist signature styles and 284

popular entertainment within the dramatic framework allowed by established

Hollywood formulas. Hollywood Leftists were able to synthesize a re-invigorated mode of leftist cinematic discourse in the shape of the generically, stylistically and discursively hybridized “social problem” war film—what I call the patriotic social- problem film—that signaled a “democratic” unity against Nazism/fascism to the films’ national/Allied audiences. The present study, in my opinion, will be considerably enhanced by a close re-examination of the contributions of the

Hollywood Left to the war effort, both in terms of film production and in terms of their efforts towards a larger national mobilization and unification against fascism/Nazism.

Suggestions for further Research on Leftist Studies of the Thirties There are a number of ways in which the present work could serve as a foundation for further engaged research on the 1930s, both in cinema studies as well as in related disciples such as American studies, American history, literature, cultural studies and gender studies. Below, I mention some possible projects, research sources and methodological approaches.

Literary and Theatrical Studies: In a Gramscian sense, leftist literary works of the period especially show the co-existence of philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, gender, cultural, historical and sociological perspectives. Such works are exemplified by Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes

(1939), Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932), Josephine Herbst’s Pity is Not

Enough (1933), Myra Page’s Moscow Yankee (1935), Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got 285

His Gun (1939), Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle (1939) and Bread and a Stone

(published, 1941), Albert Maltz’s proletarian fiction The Way Things Are (1938),

The Underground Stream (published,1940), and the collection of his short stories from the Depression era, Afternoon in the Jungle (published, 1971), as well as his agit-prop Marxist plays, Peace on Earth (1933) and The Black Pit (1933), and

Richard Wright’s early journalistic pieces such as “I Have Seen Black Hands” and

“Portrait of Harlem” among many others.

Most of these works are a creative amalgam of proletarian fiction, Marxist theatre, and muckraking journalism and utilize experimental approaches combining social and documentary realism, literary montage, psychological realism as well as psychological subjectivity, ethnography, sociological analysis, and so forth. A re- examination of these texts would reveal the extent to which the discourse on gender, race, class and ethnicity were used as potent socially-critical, and often anti-capitalist and antifascist, strategies by the Left, and how these literary genres and styles both influenced and worked in tandem with Thirties leftist/Marxist cinema.

The Radical American Documentary Movement: Above and beyond

Hollywood Left’s production of fictional films, it is imperative to investigate the interventions and contributions of the radical American documentary movement represented by Nykino and Frontiers Films Group, which culminated in the seminal

American left documentary, Native Land (1939-41). Documentarians such as Pare

Lorentz, Joris Ivens, Leo Hurwitz, Leo Seltzer, Paul Strand and Sam Brody et al 286

were instrumental Marxist/communist documentary filmmakers, and amalgamated creative experimentation with incisive political analysis and commentary in memorable works such as The Plow that Broke the Plains (1934), The River (1937),

Native Land (1939-41), The Heart of Spain (1937), The Spanish Earth (1937), The

City (1939), Return to Life (1938) and Power and the Land (1940). These and many others from the archives of the American documentary movement deserve a thorough textual as well as contextual re-examination. The USC Moving Image

Archive contains excellent film prints of many of these films, which, sadly are out of general circulation and distribution to universities and colleges.

Education and the American Left: In their formative years during the 1930s, many leftists were instrumental in college politics, teacher’s unions and in influencing educational policy. Student activism against fascism and Nazism in colleges and universities in the late 1930s was formidable and was spearheaded by leftist educators. Many leftists sowed their ideological oats on campuses as students, teachers, union organizers and political activists and became involved in a host of social and political causes. This is evidenced, for example, in Buhle and Wagner’s biography of Hollywood leftist Abraham Polonsky, A Most Dangerous Citizen—

Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. The authors elaborate on the decisive influence City College, New York, had on him and other 30s radicals.

In the early 1960s, with President Kennedy ushering in a new era of liberalism, the censure that stalwarts of the Old Left had faced—of which the Hollywood 287

blacklist was only the most visible example—was on the wane. Many leftists, barred from academia in general by virtue of their Marxist/communist background or their formal blacklisting, as well as their lack of formal academic degrees, were allowed to teach media classes in a generally apolitical academic environment. The generation of film and media makers of the late 1960s up to the present has been influenced by the creative vision, theoretical and philosophical orientation, as well as methods and techniques espoused, developed and practiced by the loyalists of the Old

(Hollywood) Left at such eminent film/media institutions such as the USC School of

Cinematic Arts, UCLA and NYU.

The inter-relationship between leftist art and activism and the American educational system is an important new area of research that scholars need to address further. As such academic and institutional support is vital in these efforts. Such investigations will enrich our knowledge and understanding of American socio- cultural history, create an impetus for transforming educational policy, and provide a forum for debates on how current educational curricula should incorporate significant amounts of social, political and cultural criticism.

Archival Research: Generally, critical works based on research studies of the period tend to fall into the categories of (auto) biographies/ethnographies, political commentaries and editorials, auteurist approaches or historical accounts. These are related to histories of the labor movement, the CPUSA, motion-picture industrial practices, and so forth. In my dissertation I have attempted a methodological 288

pluralism anchored in Hollywood history and American socio-cultural history, augmented by original archival sources. These are worthy of further in-depth investigations.

Just in Southern California, “thick deposits” exist at USC: the Warner Bros.

Archive, the Moving Image Archive, the USC Cinema-TV Library, USC Special

Collections, the Feuchtwanger Library, the Doheny Microfiche Collection and

ARGO services, the University Rare Books and Archival Collections, and the David

L. Wolper Center, among others. At UCLA: the UCLA Arts and Research Library and the UCLA Film Archive. In Los Angeles: The Southern California Library for

Social Research, The Los Angeles Central Library, and the Glendale-Brand Arts

Library, and in Beverly Hills: The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of

Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Many of these archives contain buried and forgotten references on the Old Left. Patient, systematic and dedicated digging could invigorate this new Archeology of the Left, both within the Hollywood system as well as without (such as found in literary, theatrical and journalistic works, independent productions, and so forth).

The legacy of the Hollywood Left on American history and culture In the 1930s, the Hollywood Left was committed to political activism and social uplift in both media and extra-media arenas to provide a sustained counter-discourse.

Official historiographies of Hollywood as well as American culture have insistently remained oblivious to these “counter histories” in which the left figures as an agent of history, not its neglected detritus. The American left, and its local manifestation, 289

the Hollywood Left, was, and continues to be, a positive agent of history consisting of the productions and the social, cultural and political action of artists, intellectuals, writers, activists, organizers, students, professors, administrators, scholars, politicians and the like committed to progressive changes in the national culture.

We, as critical scholars, can no longer ignore the burden of the past, nor continue to romantically wallow in a celebration of past lives, struggles and achievements, as exemplified by the experience of the left in the 1930s, so as to conveniently erase the sorrowful specter of the “lost generation” of the “Red Decade.” The wreckage of the past propels us into the future, where further havoc possibly awaits us. As committed scholars and sensitized, critical intellectuals we are like the Benjaminian “Angel of

History” that is caught in the maelstrom of events. In Benjamin’s words,

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. 203

Like the Angel of History we must struggle to turn towards the future, despite the storm. But in this effort we must be forever cognizant of the “pile of debris” of the past that threatens to “eternally return.”

History is not just a jumble of facts nor culture merely a set of ritualized practices that inform the present. They are, rather, a living presence that can pave the

203 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (NY: Pantheon, 1969), 257.

290

way to a future where the unrealized dreams and hopes of the past can evoke possibilities we can consciously pursue. As Hayden White has declared,

the burden of the historian in our time is to reestablish the dignity of historical studies on a basis that will make them consonant with the aims and purposes of the intellectual community at large, that is, transform historical studies in a such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of history. 204

Even if the past can never be fully comprehended, or accepted, and its complexities and pluralities resist easy “lessons,” we, as intellectuals and critics, have a responsibility to a “motivated” understanding of the past so as to make informed moral choices for the ever-emerging future.

Events since 9/11 only confirm the view that if history has any lessons, they are all too conveniently forgotten, erased and revisioned by “hegemony” and its sophisticated mechanics of obtaining consensus and consent from a politically apathetic and historically misinformed citizenry. It is imperative under the present cultural conditions to connect our own “micro” histories, our works and our future socio-political, cultural, artistic and intellectual aspirations to the larger collective history of the American left. In Benjaminian terms, it remains to be seen whether the present era, which promises to be a great social, political, cultural and artistic renaissance for an awakened new world is merely a farcical “vulgar re-edition” of a tragic past or its faithful “eternal return.”

204 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 40-41 291

EPILOGUE

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility;

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

--William Shakespeare, Henry V (5.3.44-51)

292

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307

FILMOGRAPHY

All Quiet on the Western Front (dir Lewis Milestone, Universal Pictures, 1930)

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir Mervyn Leroy, First National, 1932)

American Madness (dir Frank Capra, Columbia, 1932)

A Man’s Castle (dir Frank Borzage, Columbia, 1933)

Heroes for Sale (dir William Wellman, Warner Bros., 1933)

Wild Boys of the Road (dir William Wellman, Warner Bros., 1933)

Black Fury (dir Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros., 1935)

Fury (dir Fritz Lang, MGM, 1936)

These Three (dir William Wyler, Warner Bros., 1936)

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (dir Frank Capra, Columbia, 1936)

They Won’t Forget (dir Mervyn LeRoy, Warner Bros., 1937)

You Only Live Once (dir Fritz Lang, United Artists, 1937)

Blockade (dir William Dieterle, Walter Wanger Productions, 1938)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy (dir Anatole Litvak, Warner Bros., 1939)

Dust Be My Destiny (dir Lewis Seiler, Warner Bros., 1939)

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (dir Frank Capra, Columbia, 1939)

They Made Me a Criminal (dir Busby Berkeley, Warner Bros., 1939)

Juarez (dir William Dieterle, Warner Bros., 1939)

Four Sons (dir. Archie Mayo, 20th Century Fox, 1940)

Red Hollywood (documentary, produced by Noel Birch and Thom Anderson, 1995)