Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945

3. Radical Hollywood and Poland

5 3 Radical Hollywood and Poland the Fbi traced the comintern’s determination to establish a presence in American films to articles by Willi Münzenberg in the Daily Worker in 1925 that extolled the significance of motion pictures as a means of political propaganda and hence the need for the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to control their production.1 The accuracy of this genealogy is problematic, as it was several years before the party undertook concrete steps to gain a foothold in the entertainment industry. In 1934 the total party membership in the Los Angeles area was estimated by the FBI to be a paltry three dozen,2 but in that year a special “Hollywood studio section” was organized, and it grew rapidly thereafter.3 Party headquarters in New York sent the Polish-born party intellectual Isaac Romaine (using the name Victor Jerome) as “cultural commissar ” to the fledgling operation in California.4 It was Jerome who decided that “Hollywood luminaries” would constitute a unique section, separate from the local party rank and file, linked directly to headquarters in New York, bypassing the normal hierarchy. Writers—not actors, whom the party regarded as “99 percent political morons”—were the emphasis.5 Members of the section would be protected by having party membership books destroyed.6 Jerome apparently had the playwright John Howard Lawson sent from New York to become the permanent head of this effort, and when Jerome returned to New York, Lawson became the undisputed master of the Hollywood Communists.7 FBI informants insisted that the party 5 Hollywood’sWar with Poland, 1939–1945 had a definite plan of infiltrating and gaining an influential position in the movie industry, which it put into operation in the mid-1930s.8 In 1934 Lawson joined Samuel Ornitz, Dudley Nichols, Guy Endore, and Harry Carlisle to form the Screen Writers Guild, with Lawson as its first president. All were party members except Nichols, who was a fellow traveler.9 Soon after, party member John Weber founded the Screen Readers Guild, whose members—most aspiring screenwriters—were to analyze potential scripts. They were notoriously, and predictably, dominated by the Screen Writers Guild.10 Lawson noted, “The Communist Party exerted a good deal of influence in Hollywood.”11 As early as 1934, Lawson declared, “My aim is to present the Communist position and to do so in the most specific manner,” a credo he never renounced.12 It was Lawson’s party assignment to recruit and organize Hollywood screenwriters and then enforce the party line, disciplining those found to be wavering. Doctrinaire and arrogant, Lawson was described by a party comrade as speaking “with the voice of Stalin and the bells of the Kremlin.”13 His own son noted that Lawson turned “a blind eye to Soviet reality.”14 Held in awe by many young radicals in Hollywood, Lawson assumed that others would bring their work to him for ideological imprimatur.15 Lawson’s respect for the truth is well indicated by his explanation that freedom of speech was to be protected for Communists in the United States but denied to fascists because the former spoke the truth and the latter lied.16 Lawson later explained that a screenwriter should try to insert a few minutes of party propaganda into a film, best placed in an expensive scene, lessening the likelihood of reshooting.17 Lawson’s devotion to propaganda is obvious in his admonition to young actors in 1946: “Unless you portray any role given to you in a manner to further the Revolution and the Class War, you have no right to call yourself an artist or an actor. . . . You must do this regardless of what the script says and what the director tells you.”18 The next year, 1935, Comintern agent Otto Katz arrived incognito in Hollywood to organize front organizations as part of the energetic cultural work then being conducted by the Comintern throughout the world. Katz, who later boasted that, whereas “Columbus discovered America,” he had “discovered Hollywood,” was instrumental in creating the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, described recently as “the key Communist front around which the work of Stalinist politics was Radical Hollywood and Poland 59 accomplished in Hollywood during the Popular Front” era.19 The league appeared in 1935 and grew rapidly to almost three thousand members, the vast majority of them not Communists at all but those concerned about...