One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

2. “Pro-British-American War Preachers”: Internationalism at the Movies, 1939–1941

 Senator Gerald P. Nye had no doubt that Hollywood could move the masses. In fact, Nye and his fellow isolationists insisted that movies wielded disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy.The North Dakota Republican outlined the anti-interventionist case against the U.S. motion picture industry during a 1 August 1941 radio address . Speaking from St. Louis, Nye charged that films had “ceased to be instruments of entertainment ” and had instead “become the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse the war fever in America.” The onetime chair of the “Merchants of Death” probe, a mid-1930s congressional investigation that accused profiteering financiers and arms manufacturers with dragging the United States into World War I, detected another international conspiracy to involve the country in an unnecessary foreign conflagration . Produced by businesspeople with a financial stake in a British victory, influenced by foreign agents operating within the United States, and made with the encouragement of an interventionist president, Hollywood’s movies “tricked and lied” to millions of theatergoers, leaving them with the impressions that Nazi Germany was their worst foe, Great Britain their best friend, and war their only recourse. Evoking the predominant “magic bullet” theory, Nye likened film to a “drug” designed to cloud “the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them, --      , –  --    that he will steal their trade, that America must go into this war—to rouse them to a war hysteria.”1 Hollywood’s product, which Nye considered “the most powerful” propaganda instrument ever, was particularly insidious because entertainment disguised its political message. Commercial pictures were not readily identifiable as propaganda, so unsuspecting ticket buyers were receptive to whatever the films had to say. Whereas one’s guard was up at, say, a political rally, the senator explained, “when you go to the movies, you go there to be entertained. You are not figuring on listening to a debate about the war. You settle yourself in your seat with your mind wide open. And then the picture starts—goes to work on you, all done by trained actors, full of drama, cunningly devised, and soft passionate music underscoring it. 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 if you don’t watch out. And, of course, it’s a very much better speech than just an ordinary speech at a mass meeting.”2 Nye’s address served as an opening salvo in a counterattack against what one isolationist called “Pro-British-AmericanWar Preachers,” shorthand for Hollywood’s offending output. In September 1941, Nye and his fellow senator Burton K.Wheeler, a Montana Democrat, led a sensational congressional inquiry into Hollywood’s alleged warmongering. Isolationist inquisitors were wrong about most things: anti-Semitism lurked just below (and often above) the surface of their conspiracy theory; the threat posed by Nazism to American interests (to say nothing of humanity itself) was real, not a figment of Hollywood’s fertile imagination; and U.S. belligerence was necessary and just.Yet anti-interventionists were correct in identifying the remarkable tide of anti-Nazi, pro-British, interventionist movies that flooded American theaters from 1939 to 1941—punctuated by Warner Bros.’ Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Alexander Korda’sThat Hamilton Woman (1941)—as being partly responsible for tipping the balance in the national debate about war or peace. Regardless of the extent to which movies triggered what would become a sea change in the American worldview, opponents believed that film was instrumental in causing the shift from isolationism toward internationalism. However misguided isolationists might have been, their words and actions attest to the screen’s presumed influence over the public and bearing on matters of state. So, too, do the endeavors of those identified by anti-interventionists as being responsible for what appeared in theaters. Prominent American and British figures—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime  --   Minister Winston S. Churchill to producer Daryl F. Zanuck and director Alfred Hitchcock—cooperated to educate Americans, on the receiving end of a transnational publicity campaign about the world situation.3 Although driven by different motives, policymakers and filmmakers combined forces toward a single goal: to replace isolationism and Anglophobia , symbiotic cultural trends that thwarted U.S. global activism, with an internationalist, pro...