Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960

Chapter 3: Casting the Iron Curtain

63 3 Casting the Iron Curtain In September 1946, while vacationing on the lovely island of Nantucket, literary agent Audrey Wood received a letter from a friend and client, playwright Tennessee Williams. Accustomed as she was to Williams’s antics, she relished learning of his latest adventures and his bursts of creative genius. At the conclusion of a letter updating his progress on the script for A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams swerved into a non sequitur. Although nominally apolitical, he wrote, “The International outlook is becoming quite fearful. Don’t you think there ought to be an organized movement in the Theatre to insist upon a clarification of U.S. foreign policy?” Instead of leaving it at that, Williams added specifics regarding his reaction to a belligerent speech by Secretary of State James Byrnes just days earlier. It appears to me that Byrnes and the administration have formulated a policy of their own in line with the most reactionary elements in the country and they are taking the shortest cut to world destruction through their inflammatory meddling in Europe. This is without the understanding or sanction of the vast body of Americans who, like everybody else, will go down the drain if we’re drawn into war with Russia. I think there ought to be popular demonstrations of all kinds in protest against it. The theatre could start such a program.1 The Cold War inflamed the passions of even the most politically disinterested individuals. Artists of all sorts, moreover, sought ways to use their positions as purveyors of national culture to influence the American postwar character and foreign policy. For Progressives in Hollywood, this was certainly the case. From 1945 to 1947, just as the Cold War intensified, the entire motion picture industry became associated in the minds of many Americans 64 Casting the Iron Curtain with dangerous radicalism. Important events that linked Hollywood with radicalism included an industry-wide strike, affiliation with national radical organizations, and flirtation with the doomed candidacy of Henry Wallace. The One World idealism that infused many successful films (both critically and financially) during this period also contributed to the sense that Hollywood was promoting a radical agenda. Yet these same events revealed fissures within the motion picture community that would develop into a chasm amid the Red-baiting and witch-hunting that began in 1947. At first, Hollywood and the larger political left united against congressional interference, as they had done before the war. But that front soon crumbled as studio executives struggled to form bonds with the government and as liberals drew distinctions between themselves and the activities of purported “radicals.” In sum, the early postwar era witnessed some members of a conflicted film community promoting universalism and others defining the communist menace. Radicals in Hollywood Freed from wartime restrictions and armed with renewed purpose, President Truman introduced a liberal, twenty-one-point program on September 6, 1945. He added other items haphazardly, Roosevelt-style, in the following months until he had compiled a sweeping legislative agenda encompassing full employment, a higher minimum wage, housing shortages , price supports, and health care. Principally, Truman sought to extend the New Deal beyond Roosevelt’s grave, but his plans met with lethal resistance at the hands of a conservative Congress. In one area, though, Truman was successful: his administration set out to investigate and prosecute antitrust suits in a variety of industries after the war, including cement, sugar, steel, automobiles, and—to be sure—motion pictures.2 Whereas Truman looked to the future with optimism, studio moguls looked with dread. Hollywood labor strife and the renewal of the antitrust crusade provided headaches for studio executives. Pursuit of the antitrust case against the major studios was the most significant development for the industry in that era.3 In October 1945, Attorney General Tom C. Clark renewed federal antitrust litigation against the Hollywood “Big Eight” in a New York federal district court. After a month, the government rested its case. In June 1946 a three-judge panel found the studios guilty of pricefixing and block-booking, and ordered fair and competitive bidding on a film-by-film, theater-by-theater basis. By 1947, even before the Supreme Casting the Iron Curtain 65 Court settled the issue in dramatic form, Hollywood was already reeling. After the case made its way to the Supreme Court, on May 3, 1948, Justice William O. Douglas issued a unanimous opinion...