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184 Conclusion THREE PERSPECTIVES ON THE DEATH OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM FILM As the 1940s drew to a close, the Cold War intensified. The “twin shocks” of 1949—the Soviet detonation of the atomic bomb and the “fall” of China to Mao Zedong’s Communists—heightened fears of the red menace at home and abroad. In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy began his anti-Communist rampage with his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech in which he boldly claimed to have in his possession a lengthy list of Communists in the State Department. The senator from Wisconsin frequently changed the length of said list, but his sensational allegations only grew more frightening after war erupted in Korea in June. U.S. participation in this hot war, as well as the espionage arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, exacerbated fears of subversion at home. In the fall, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto, forcing Communist groups to register with the government. In this frenzied context , the House Committee on Un-American Activities cast its gaze back on the motion picture industry in 1951. This time its hearings targeted hundreds. What remained of the Hollywood Left was torn asunder. Victor Navasky has accurately described these latter hearings as “degradation ceremonies.” Ostensibly gathering information, the committee in fact already had all the “facts”; instead its public sessions functioned as a ritual to enforce ideological conformity.1 Moreover, during these 1951–53 hearings—and in contrast to the 1947 hearings—HUAC paid scant attention to film content. Had fears of Communist propaganda, so pronounced during the 1940s, been a mere ruse? Or, rather, had the job already been accomplished? CONCLUSION 185 As we have seen here, the countersubversive attack on Hollywood during the 1940s was certainly motivated by a fear of radical film content. The FBI, the Motion Picture Alliance, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were correct in finding political elements of a left and liberal shade in some Hollywood films. However, not only did they err in attributing these to the devious infiltration of Communist propagandists, but they effectively transformed this legitimate discourse about American political culture into a matter of national security. In seeking to put an end to the production of films it deemed communistic , the FBI and its allies were wildly successful. Indeed, by 1948 the bureau could report that“the trend [in Hollywood] is toward pure entertainment.”2 The death of the social problem film amid the political turmoil of the early Cold War years is well established.3 Yet, no longer can we attribute the decline of this artistic movement to an almost accidental byproduct of blacklisting politically minded screenwriters or merely to the general atmosphere of timidity in Hollywood during the sterile 1950s. Instead, as these pages have revealed, the countersubversive network cast its aim at the films themselves and, in so doing, turned Hollywood into an ideological battleground in the struggle against Communism. Yet, as the FBI had come to realize, publicly framing the battle around the issue of film content was a risky proposition, “because it then becomes a matter of opinion as to what is and what is not propaganda and communists are skilled in discussions where the point at issue is a matter of opinion.” Film criticism left room for differing interpretations; Communist Party membership could be demonstrated on a factual basis. Furthermore, if the state avoided investigating film content directly, it would deny “the communists a chance to ‘holler thought control.’”4 Thus the countersubversives’ primary purpose in seizing on the motion picture industry was to dramatically alter film content. The fact that HUAC buried this motivation in its public hearings during the early 1950s represented a shift in strategy, not motive. The casualties of Hollywood’s cold war can be quantified if we are concerned with tallying the hundreds of people whose careers were destroyed. So too can we count those, such as John Garfield or Canada Lee, who suffered the more ghastly fate of death, possibly due to the stress brought on by anti-Communist investigations.5 But it remains much more difficult to measure the effect on film content.Let us take a look,then,at how the major players discussed in these pages explored this question. First, the countersubversives. Perhaps surprisingly, considering their ascendancy , they exuded little in the way of triumphalism, at least when it came to the question of prohibiting Communist propaganda. In its report on the 1951 HUAC hearings...

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