Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism

“This Isn’t What We Had in Mind”

“This Isn’t What We Had in Mind” The U.S. declaration of war in December of 1941 brought an end to the Nye-Clark subcommittee hearings.1 What was ironic about those hearings was that the Nye-Clark subcommittee could have proven their allegations of warmongering against Warner Bros. if they had followed John T. Flynn’s advice and had conducted a formal investigation. If they had subpoenaed studio records, production files, interoffice memoranda , or other documents currently housed at the Warner Bros. Archives, the committee would have had all the evidence it needed to prove that Warner Bros.—if not the whole industry by 1941—supported intervention. In the lengthy May 8, 1940, memo that Julien Josephson and Harry Chandlee sent to Jesse Lasky, they openly discussed the propaganda elements inherent in Sergeant York. They wanted not only to fill audiences with patriotic pride, but also to illustrate the fact that war is sometimes necessary if liberty is to prevail. They wrote, “On the abovementioned point of flag waving, object will be not to wave any flags ourselves , but when the picture is over to have made the audience wave flags.”2 Though the subcommittee wanted to find fault with Hollywood, the way they conducted the hearings proved haphazard. The senators on the subcommittee were ill informed and operating on hearsay. John T. Flynn appropriately advised the subcommittee about the best means to investigate the film industry, but his recommendations fell on deaf ears. He implored them to [g]et the original story. Get the report from the Hays Producers Association , what they said you could not put in, what they said you could put in. Get the report of the cutout. In other words, see every process in the production of those films.3 Instead, from the outset the subcommittee’s conduct was incompetent, and its findings were both arbitrary and unsubstantiated. It is doubtful, 7 172 given the eventuality of Pearl Harbor, that even if they had conducted a thorough and logical investigation, Warner Bros. would have been adversely affected for very long. At worst the studio might have been publicly censured, fined, and warned to avoid producing potentially controversial films under pain of further penalties. There is another irony, which in the long run proved to be a vindication of Harry Warner’s prewar stance against Nazism. The selfsame Washington establishment that had called movies the product of a fiendish Jewish plot turned to those same Jews immediately after Pearl Harbor, begging for their much needed assistance in mobilizing a nation for war.4 Jewish moguls now found the government wooing them for their cooperation in the war effort, and as a result Hollywood and Washington entered into a formal business partnership that would forever change the film industry. Warner Bros. willingly and enthusiastically cemented its partnership with the government and turned its studios over wholeheartedly to the war effort. Not only did movies help instruct soldiers and civilians about life in wartime, but they also unified America in new and unprecedented ways, preaching community sacrifice, individual honesty, and integrity, thereby helping ease the pain of war for both the civilian and the military population. To accommodate audiences involved in wartime production, American movie theaters operated twenty-four hours a day, providing escape and moral support for a nation at war.5 Ironically, this cooperation ultimately proved to be detrimental to the life of classical Hollywood because the partnership with Washington soon turned sour, and the film industry has never recovered from that relationship . Beginning in 1947 the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC), which Harry Warner had supported in its efforts to uncover Nazi provocateurs, turned its attention on Hollywood. During those hearings in the formative years of the Cold War, the debate over who or what constituted “One-hundred-percent Americanism” breathed new life into the subcommittee formerly chaired by Representative Martin Dies of Texas before World War II. HUAC had looked for both Nazi and Communist subversives before the war, but as the Cold War descended upon the United States, the fear of a monolithic Stalinist takeover gripped the nation. This time HUAC’s only culprits were Communists and Communist sympathizers, and once again Hollywood found itself at the center of a federal investigation; but this time it would not fare as well as it had with the Nye-Clark subcommittee on warmongering propaganda.6 Wendell Willkie’s open letter to Chairman D. Worth Clark “This Isn’t What We Had...