Now What? Chapter Three: Movies Made By Jews Under Attack For Warmongering
Americans loved going to the movies and many Jews up from mercantile activities took up making them. Roosevelt used their "Added Attractions" to make the people proud of their military men in uniform.
This Episode: Churchill came home from the mid-ocean meeting filled with lofty expectations that he would soon see as fanciful. Roosevelt sailed back to America seeing himself as “bankrolling” the armies of Britain and soon Russia, to say nothing of his own army in America, and he wasn’t even in a war. If Japan attacked in the Pacific he might not have the financial or political strength to respond and Britain would be desperate there without his help
This Chapter: In the late summer of 1941 he Congressional isolationists found the stalking horse they were looking for in their last ditch attempt to keep Roosevelt from bringing America into readiness for war. It was the movies, specifically the movies made by “giant corporations” led by men with names that sounded Jewish. They summoned a hearing on the matter and the men with names that sounded Jewish hired a lawyer to defend their business. He was Wendell Willkie and Harry Hopkins was helping him.
Contents of “What Now?”:
Assessing
Hitler Struggles; Roosevelt Too
Movies Made By Jews Under Attack For Warmongering
Tallulah’s Dinner Party for Harry’s Birthday
Toil and Trouble
Chapter Three: Movies Made By Jews Under Attack For Warmongering
Reading time: ten minutes
Americans learned that summer, if learning mattered, by way of newspapers, magazines, radio, and movies; books and plays had lesser influence. Newspapers were outspoken in their opinions, magazines slightly less so. On the coasts, they leaned liberal, but in the hinterlands they leaned the other way. Radio was still finding its footing, and was providing programs that attracted listeners without regard for the biases of its owners.
Movies were new to the educational spectrum and were taking both comfort and criticism from it. Until recently, movies had no status at all as providers of information, and still no accompanying free speech rights according to a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in 1915. The industry had petitioned the Court for protection under the umbrella of the First Amendment when they were beset with a maddening onslaught of state censorship boards that carried fees, fines, and even imprisonment at the far end of things for productions that were considered beyond the puckered pale. But the Court said, “Since motion pictures may be used for evil, we cannot regard their censorship as beyond the power of government.” They went painfully farther. “It would be equally unreasonable to grant free speech protection to the circus.”
Chastened, the industry entered years of caution, leading to engaging in extreme self-administration. They organized themselves as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, which never caught on in its MPPDA acronym, and hired Harding’s Postmaster General, Will Hays, to run it. Hays’s duties ran to advice on how to stay on God’s side of wholesomeness in films, but it was a losing battle. In 1933 when the Catholic Church created a National Legion of Decency to rate films for immorality and boycott those that crossed the line, Hollywood responded by creating the Motion Picture Production Code — the “Hays Code” then and evermore — which assessed films from concept, through script, to final edit, to earn either the industry’s seal of approval or disapproval and fines if the producers released them anyway. They hired as Code Administrator a man named Joseph Breen who was not only a rock-ribbed Catholic moralist but, as it turned out, an unashamed anti-Semitic. With Breen’s prurient standards now formally their own, the moguls had nearly knelt to show their good citizenship, wanting nothing more than acceptance from governments and good-thinking people everywhere. Well, one thing more: profits.
Hollywood got really rich in the Thirties, the first decade of synchronized sound, from feel-good features that starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and Shirley Temple. Criminals made news in the days of the Depression, and crime films became good business. But the bad guys, despite their animal appeal, always got their just desserts at the end in a hail of righteous bullets. The market went global as translations were dubbed or “intertitled” or, where the magic of Miss Temple was concerned, considered superfluous.
As Hitler opened his war in Europe, the industry dabbled in films that showed the effects of war’s barbarities on innocent bystanders, but Breen said not so fast. “There is a strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country and while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.” The Hollywood guardians of the golden goose, who were mostly first generation immigrant Jews from Europe, grumbled about that among themselves over golf and poker, but went along, thinking Breen was not far wrong. They defunded their own creation of the Anti-Nazi League when Breen told them the world at large, and especially America, their land of opportunity, would “see the League as conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews.”
America truly was ambivalent about what responsibility the Jews themselves bore for bringing on the war through behaviors that Hitler found nettlesome. Breen said it would cloud the question if the movies became so political that they would call unnecessary attention to the heritage and ethnicity of the moguls who made them. They settled for the formula of war movies with clean-cut heroes on one side and brutal villains on the other. The word Jew was never mentioned onscreen, and “Nazi” avoided if possible, at the cost of verisimilitude. It chafed an enterprise that was nothing if not creatively artistic.
That kind of concern was widespread among influential Jews, going well beyond the movie industry. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became Publisher of the New York Times in 1935 after his father-in-law Adolph Ochs died, embarrassed himself by withholding the disturbing revelations of his paper’s investigation of anti-Semitism in America because he feared its publication would be attributed to his personal bias as a Jew.
The moviemakers were men up from penny arcades at amusement parks to nickelodeons, from there to showing rented films in rooms above bingo parlors, to building and owning their own viewing emporiums, and from there to making movies on their own nickels. As they flourished, they operated their studios as high-risk film production businesses, but they retained ownership of the movie houses they had left behind, and even expanded their number, as a kind of insurance. A new film might fail to satisfy the moviegoers, but it could quickly be withdrawn from the screens and replaced with one that kept the seats filled. That made good bottom-line sense, but the ownership of their distribution venues caught the eyes of the hawks in the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice who called it “stovepiping,” and monopolistic inquiries were opened.
Roosevelt’s early actions against unbridled business practices were now being weighed and found wanting against the need to turn America into the arsenal of democracy. If that ended up creating an uncontrolled corporate state, it would come after he was gone and it would be someone else’s job to do the harnessing. He had an army to build, and he had an emerging belief that the huge audiences of America’s movie theaters could be turned into a patriotic force, a tool in his hands. He came up with a good deal, and asked Harry Hopkins, his Secretary of Commerce back then, to negotiate it with the Hollywood moguls. Their end was to make short films that would herald the honorable and vital role of America’s armed forces and show them in the movie houses before the feature films. For their trouble, which would be met with the full coöperation of the Army and the Navy, he would let the stovepipe ownership issue slide.
The timing was perfect. The movie houses were already carrying “Added Attractions,” usually newsreels of current events, before the screening of the main event. When Hitler reared up, the March of Time series produced by Henry Luce began telling the audiences not only of the horrors of the goose-stepping Nazis but also of their treatment of Jews. The studios were experimenting with fictional weekly sagas, called “serials,” that found favor with little boys of all ages. In these quickly-made, back-lot productions, masked heroes carrying names like “Spy Smasher” would foil a plot, save a maiden, and fall into the grasp of unspeakable villains who were about to hurl them into an inferno just as the weekly episode ended. The next Saturday, Spy Smasher would magically elude his captors and do the same thing all over again in another ten thrilling minutes. The author of an article in the ultra-isolationist magazine Scribner’s Commentator wrote, “If you seek escape in a movie theatre there is a good chance that an added attraction will present a spy with a thick German accent stealing our latest bombing sights or planting TNT along the locks of the Panama Canal.” It was not an exaggeration.
The isolationists turned their attention that summer to the pervasive effect of the movies on pushing America into war. They may have understood that the newsreels — the news was getting worse — and their fictional serial cousins were more the problem than the full-length feature films, or maybe they didn’t, but “movies” were an easily understood target. More, they were produced by the people who were the subtextual, subliminal target they blamed and hated most of all: Jews.
Senator Burton Wheeler, an isolationist Democrat from Montana and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, opened the assault in a speech where he said, “A little clique of Wall Street bankers, together with the motion picture industry, are trying to stir up sentiment to take us into war.”
His Republican colleague from North Dakota, Gerald Nye, took the bit in his teeth. Nye had a long-lingering contempt for what he called “the liberal media of newspapers and radio” for not providing the kind of coverage he preferred. In 1929, when the Republicans had an iron control on all three branches of the federal government, he proposed legislation that would permit the government to confront the media on his terms by operating radio stations and newspapers of its own. But when the market crashed, and the prospect of all that power landing in Democratic hands became a possibility, he strategically mouseholed.
Now, he got more specific than Wheeler, saying in an America First speech in St. Louis, “When you go to the movies, you go there to be entertained. And then the picture starts and goes to work on you, all done by trained actors, full of drama, cunningly devised. Before you know where you are you have actually listened to a speech designed to make you believe that Hitler is going to get you. This is nonsense. America’s peril is in fact lessening while Hollywood is promoting a war to make the world safe for the British Empire and Communism.
“The silver screen has been flooded with picture after picture designed to rouse us to a state of war hysteria. Hollywood films are designed to drug the reason of the American people. Who has brought us to the verge of war? Who is putting up the money for all this propaganda? It is coming from eight giant corporations run by men who came from Russia, Germany, Hungary, and the Balkan countries, men from nations under Nazi control. It is no coincidence that they carry names like Mayer, Schaefer, Zukor, Schenck, Zanuck, Silverstone, Goldwyn, Warner, Katz, and Bernstein. With their homelands overrun by the Nazis, they have a vested interest in America going to war because their financial survival depends on revenues from Great Britain. Are you ready to send your boys to bleed and die in Europe to make the world safe for this industry?”
Nye said the whole thing was a conspiracy drummed up in the White House. He said, “In the Roosevelt administration’s drive to whip up the warrior spirit in our young men, the federal government has ordered Hollywood, that raging volcano of war fever, to churn out militaristic pictures. In agreement, Hollywood has confiscated the United States Armed Forces to perform in their movies, all at the direction of the president, whose house itself is full of names just like the names of Hollywood.”
Wheeler appointed a subcommittee of five senators to investigate “Propaganda in the Movie Industry.” The industry needed a lawyer to shield their interests, and found their man on the recommendation of Franklin Roosevelt. He was Wendell Willkie and he charged $100,000. The hearings would open in the second week of September.