Despite the “Americans All” ethos during World War II, not quite all ideological conflicts in Hollywood were put on hold for the duration. The high profile of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League during the 1930s and the liberal outreach of the OWI, an agency packed with activists from the Screen Writers’ Guild, might have made it seem as if only artists pledged to FDR—or to leaders further left—worked in the motion picture industry. Yet Hollywood was also home to a substantial hive of conservatives who dissented from the dominant left-of-centerism around town. Devout Catholics, conservative Jews, and frugal artists who resented the IRS siphoning off upward of 94 percent of their base salary beat against the progressive tide. The dissenters found the wide-eyed deification of Joseph Stalin in leftist circles particularly noxious. Backed by an influential scrum of gossip columnists, trade press reporters, and editors for the Hearst media syndicate, they formed a phalanx of right-wing reaction to left-wing activism that made any political point-counterpoint a battle of equals.
However, unlike the liberals, leftists, and Communists, who bonded around a bewildering array of political action committees, Hollywood conservatives had no league of their own—until the evening of February 4, 1944, when about two hundred writers, producers, directors, and industry personnel gathered at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to oppose the prevailing liberalism, even unabashed pro-Sovietism, fostered by the OWI and underwritten by the SWG. The opposition force was called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which made for a mouthful of an abbreviation: the MPA-PAI.
Producer-director Sam Wood was named president, with no fewer than three vice presidents at his side: animation king Walt Disney, costume designer Cedric Gibbons, and director Norman Taurog. Director Clarence Brown served as treasurer, Fox producer Louis D. Lighton as secretary, and MGM producer George Bruce as executive secretary. James K. McGuinness, veteran of the Screen Playwrights, Inc. and now story editor at MGM, assumed the role of chairman of an executive board packed with heavy hitters.1
The nation still being in the midst of World War II, the language of militarism came naturally to Wood in his inaugural address. “Highly indoctrinated shock units of the totalitarian wrecking crew have shrewdly led the people of the United States to believe that Hollywood is a hotbed of sedition and subversion, and that our industry is a battleground over which Communism is locked in death grips with Fascism,” he declared. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crack pots.” Hollywood, Wood insisted, “is a reservoir of Americanism.”2
The MPA-PAI became the chief opposition to Hollywood’s left wing, whether liberal or Communist. The Communists called it the Motion Picture Alliance for the Prevention of American Ideals.3
Hedda Hopper: “Things I’d like to see: all our fellow travelers, who have such a passion for Russia, on a boat headin’ in that direction.”
Like the CPUSA, the MPA-PAI had its own cohort of fellow travelers, men and women whose fervent anti-Communism long predated the formation of an initialized organization. Two influential trade columnists and one powerful newspaper syndicate echoed and amplified Hollywood’s anti-Communist chorus.
Among the opinion makers in Hollywood—the journalists, critics, and trade press reporters who covered the industry but were not, at least officially, on the studio payroll, who maintained a modicum of independence, and who were therefore listened to by the moguls as reliable gauges of the temperature of American moviegoers—none was more heeded than W. R. Wilkerson, the founding editor-publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, the six-days-a-week newspaper that provided gossip, reviews, analysis, and the inside-dopester lowdown for a film-minded demographic. Wilkerson—known universally if not always affectionately as Billy—presided from his front page “Tradeviews” perch, a must-read column where he advised and lectured the industry, sometimes like an amiable colleague, sometimes like a stern coach.
Launched in the inauspicious year of 1930, the Hollywood Reporter quickly established itself as a flagship trade paper in the company town. If Variety was the industry’s bible, the Hollywood Reporter was the prayer book, close at hand, in the vest pocket. Unlike Variety, however, whose vaguely progressive outlook was subordinated to an obsession with box office tabulations, the Hollywood Reporter was infused with a deep-dyed political animus. Wilkerson was an early, vociferous, and relentless critic of Communist influence in Hollywood. Though he held HUAC in contempt for its willful ignorance of the workings of the studio system, he believed that both as a matter of patriotic vigilance and sound business practice the industry needed to purge its ranks of known Communists and lockstep fellow travelers. Otherwise, the poisonous fallout from the linkage between Hollywood and Communism would kill all the goodwill the industry had accrued from its admirable war record.
For Wilkerson, the SWG was the point of the Communist spear, an outfit always ready to cast “another vote for Stalin” and “take its orders from Moscow.”4 In August 1946, in a blistering barrage of front-page exposés, Wilkerson got specific, naming names and attaching them to Communist party cards. How Wilkerson obtained the cards remains a matter of conjecture: perhaps directly from the man with whom he was on intimate terms, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.
Screenwriter Lester Cole was the first Hollywood artist to see his name in print with a direct accusation disguised as a question. “Are you a Communist? Do you hold card number 46805 in what is known as the Northwest Section of the Communist party, a division of the party made up mostly of West Coast Commies?” demanded Wilkerson.5 In the days that followed, Wilkerson accused ten other screenwriters of doubling as “Hollywood’s Red Commissars”: John Howard Lawson, Emmet Lavery, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Harold Buchman, Maurice Rapf, William Pomerance, Dalton Trumbo, Gordon Kahn, Ring Lardner Jr., and Richard Collins.6 He provided the CPUSA card numbers for Buchman, Rapf, Trumbo, Kahn, Lardner, and Collins. An exasperated SWG spokesman could only respond that the Hollywood Reporter saw a “commie behind every typewriter in Hollywood.”7
Wilkerson’s main competition as an anti-Communist working the Hollywood beat was Hedda Hopper–née Elda Furry, a butcher’s daughter from Hollidaysburg, PA.8 In 1936, the former chorus girl and subaltern actress parlayed her fading screen career into a job in journalism as a top-billed gossip columnist. She proved more adept at writing her own copy than reciting the lines of others. Her only rival as a dirt-dishing diva was Louella Parsons, the Hearst syndicate’s conduit to the stars, who tended not to dilute her gossip with political commentary.
Syndicated from her home base at the Los Angeles Times, Hopper’s column was read—or scanned—by an estimated audience of 35 million. Radio shows like The Hedda Hopper Show and This Is Hollywood, augmented by frequent hosting gigs and guest appearances, solidified her eminence. As famous as the stars she yammered about, she cultivated an elegant and busybody-ish persona, not too far off the mark from her real self. Modeling the outlandish millinery that was her visual signature, she flaunted her proximity to celebrity with nonstop name-dropping (“David Niven, dining at my house the other night, told me…”).9 By 1947, Hopper had accumulated a decade of IOUs and a spider’s web of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours tipsters.
Hopper waited for V-J Day to fire off her heavy artillery on Hollywood Reds and fellow travelers. “Things I’d like to see,” she mused in 1946, “all our fellow travelers, who have such a passion for Russia, on a boat headin’ in that direction.”10 Or: “Why are our top studios still hiring writers, directors, and actors whom they know to be definitely on the red side? Well, this would be a good time to take on some fresh faces as well as minds who still have American ideals and think our way of life superior to that under a dictator like Stalin.”11
Wilkerson and Hopper were known bylines, one with a local, the other a national readership, but their influence paled beside the high circulation impact of the press syndicate and newspaper chain presided over by media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Though much shrunken since the 1930s, the reach of the Hearst empire in 1947 stretched out to seventeen newspapers, four radio stations, and nine magazines.12 Year in, year out, the Hearst press scorched and burned the red backside of Hollywood with screaming headlines, editorial opprobrium, scarifying cartooning, and multi-part exposés. The International News Service, the Hearst-owned wire service, transmitted the coverage to dailies from coast to coast with billboard-sized headlines tracing the connect-the-dots links between Hollywood big shots and Communist lowlifes. Louder and more incessantly than even HUAC—as the Screen Writer complained in 1946—“the Hearst press have cried ‘Red! Red! Red!’ ”13
Herbert K. Sorrell: “Willie Bioff tried that, and Willie isn’t with us any more.”
Cries of “Red! Red! Red!” also greeted the strikers who began to gather outside the studio gates as the war wound down. Now under the dynamic leadership of the two-fisted Herbert K. Sorrell, the Conference of Studio Unions did not wait for a formal end of hostilities in Europe to reignite its campaign against the major studios and the labor unions that served the moguls more than the rank and file.
No sooner was peace glimpsed on the horizon than, as Motion Picture Daily phrased it, “labor rumblings” began to add “a fuzzy tone to the otherwise euphonious film industry sound track.”14 What had always been, at least compared to other industrial workplaces, a relatively placid shop floor (the mob had seen to that) was roiled by dissension. After a decade of scarcity followed by wartime sacrifice, below-the-line workers demanded a bigger slice of the pie from an industry flush with profits.
On March 12, 1945, some six months prior to V-J Day, CSU went on strike. In what would be the persistent and corrosive point of contention, the catalyst was a jurisdictional dispute over which union should represent the stagehands, in this case the set decorators: CSU, which had been recognized as the bargaining agent by the War Labor Relations Board pending a final decision by the NLRB, or IATSE, which staked out a proprietary claim to motion picture workers on the basis of its 1937 agreement with the major studios. The clash was not only between labor and management but between two wings of the American labor movement, the accommodationist and the activist.
Sorrell faced a worthy opponent. The same month the strike erupted, Roy M. Brewer was appointed international representative for IATSE. Nebraska born and prairie tempered, Brewer had started in the motion picture business at age twelve as a rewind boy in the projection booth of his small-town theater. Moving up the ranks to projectionist, he organized his fellow booth men and learned to apply the leverage gained from hands-on control of the exhibition end of the business. By 1933, at age twenty-three, he was president of the Nebraska State Federation of Labor, making him the youngest head of a major union in the nation. Campaigning for Sen. George W. Norris, Nebraska’s legendary progressive Republican, he got an education in the trench warfare of electoral politics. He earned $125 a week from his position with IATSE and, compared to Willie Bioff and George Browne, he was squeaky clean.15
Unlike his predecessors, and indeed IATSE president Richard F. Walsh, an electrician by trade who was first elected in 1941 and served in the position until 1974 without getting indicted, Brewer was dedicated to the removal of what he saw as a cancer eating into the sinews of American labor. If unchecked, “the nefarious efforts to subvert our labor organizations to a political program that is inconsistent with the fundamental principles on which the American labor movement was founded” would destroy “the real liberal movement in America.”16
With two wings of the American labor movement—the conservative IATSE, with some twenty-three thousand workers, and the radical CSU, with some seven thousand workers—competing for the same turf, the result was predictable. From 1945 to 1947, the two unions engaged in an ugly series of jurisdictional battles over control of the Hollywood working class, all the nastier because it was intramural. When IATSE tried to undercut CSU by issuing union cards for additional painters, machinists, and electricians, Sorrell snarled, “Willie Bioff tried that, and Willie isn’t with us any more.”17
Months of picketing and work stoppages threw the studios into turmoil. Still, production crept along on the strength of non-striking IATSE members and what the studios called “replacement workers” and CSU called “scabs.”
On October 5, 1945, at 5:30 in the morning, in an all-out effort to shut down production, Sorrell’s foot soldiers concentrated their forces on Warner Bros., whose Burbank lot looked most vulnerable to a blockade. In the 1930s, the socially conscious programming and stalwart anti-Nazism of Warner Bros. had earned the studio the reputation of being the lone progressive island in a reactionary archipelago. When besieged literally at the gates, however, Jack Warner treated the strikers pretty much the way a nineteenth-century robber baron would have: he unleashed the private guards and called in the cops.18
With the melee outside spiraling out of control—fifty injured, forty arrested, including Sorrell—the studio was forced to shut down production for half a day.19 Both sides cried foul, both claimed self-defense, and both gave as good as they got. For management and labor alike, the blood-spattered date would be remembered as Black Friday.
Despite restraining orders limiting the number of pickets, disruptions and violence continued for months. Brewer accused Sorrell of inciting “a labor civil war,” something that was “typical Communist tactics.”20 CSU accused IATSE workers of charging the CSU picket lines. Goon squads from both sides roamed the streets. Sorrell got death threats; Brewer sent his daughter to school with a bodyguard.21
For newly elected MPAA president Eric Johnston the strike was a cold-water immersion into an industry whose glamorous front concealed a bare-knuckled underside. He stepped up to play peacemaker and honest broker. Representing the producers and the Good of the Industry, Johnston jawboned both union factions and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), to which IATSE and CSU were both signatories. By autumn, he had helped hammer out the outlines of a settlement.
MPAA president Eric Johnston (center) tries to bring together the warring labor factions represented by Herbert K. Sorrell (left), leader of the Conference of Studio Unions, and Roy M. Brewer (right), international representative of the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, October 16, 1945.
On October 24, 1945, after eight months of picketing and hundreds of injuries and arrests, the AFL ordered both unions back to work. CSU could claim a measure of victory: it was recognized as the exclusive bargaining agent for the set decorators while IATSE’s substitute workers/scabs were cashiered with severance pay. The AFL directive was a “complete vindication and victory,” crowed Sorrell, who lorded his aggressive trade unionism over IATSE’s cozy “non-striking alliance which is more on the line of a company-dominated union.”22
How close the strike had come to lethal violence was underscored the week after the AFL directive. As Sorrell was exiting the driveway of his home in Glendale, a black Packard raced by and fired three shots into his car. The bullets missed his head by inches.23
Though—unlike Sorrell—never at personal risk, Johnston had survived his first trial by fire. Whether Johnston’s efforts were “instrumental or incidental, the outcome has added greatly to his prestige in the industry,” judged Motion Picture Daily. Upon news of the settlement, Johnston issued a public statement that was equal measure sigh of relief and wishful thinking. The AFL agreement “provides the basis for labor peace in the industry,” he declared. “We hope to make the labor relations in the industry the best of any in the world.”24 With good reason to be optimistic, Johnston looked forward to “an era of labor peace.”25
Pat Casey: “Your unions are engaging in coercive mass picketing in direct violation of law and court orders.”
Eric Johnston’s hoped-for era of labor peace was short lived. On September 26, 1946, a second CSU-orchestrated strike, this time started by the painters and carpenters, rocked the industry. In solidarity, electricians, set decorators, and cartoonists also struck and set up picket lines. True to its roots, IATSE aligned itself with management.26 In time, the long-running strike would be deemed the “bitterest labor fight in Hollywood annals” by Daily Variety.27
To bring the studios to their knees, CSU targeted Warner Bros. and MGM.28 Sorrell ignored court orders, took arrests and jail time in stride, and rallied his troops with incendiary speeches and manifestos published in the trade press.
Having thought the jurisdictional battles settled, Johnston and the studio executives were livid at the return of their labor woes. “[The] strike is being conducted in such flagrant violation of the laws of our land that it borders on anarchy,” declared Pat Casey, chairman of the Producers Labor Committee. An ex-vaudeville showman and legendary behind-the-scenes fixer, Casey had handled labor negotiations for the moguls since 1926, but he had seen nothing like the present state of siege.29 “Our employees are being beaten, their homes are being bombed, and your unions are engaging in coercive mass picketing in direct violation of law and court orders,” he wailed at Sorrell.30
No longer pretending to be an honest broker, Johnston now stood squarely on IATSE’s side of the picket line. “The jurisdictional strike has done more to hurt the cause of labor than any other single thing,” he told the IATSE membership at the height of the conflict. “It cannot be defended on any grounds at all. It is without justification.”31 CSU faced three united opponents: the MPAA, the Producers Labor Committee, and IATSE.
As usual, Sorrell was not giving an inch. “Johnston wants federal laws passed to make slaves out of members of our free, democratic and autonomous unions,” he said. “At the same time he wants to provide protection for his company maintained unions.” The federal law Sorrell had in mind was the Taft-Hartley Act, then winding its way through Congress despite fierce opposition from President Truman and the Democrats. The legislation was crafted to limit radical labor tactics by neutering radical labor leaders like Herbert Sorrell.
An incident straight out of a Warner Bros. gangster film showed how high the stakes had become. On Sunday evening, March 2, 1947, while on route to the weekly CSU meeting, Sorrell was abducted by three assailants, one of whom was dressed as a police officer. He was handcuffed, pistol whipped, knocked unconscious, and bundled into a sedan that screeched off into the night. The thugs dumped Sorrell in a remote spot in the Mojave Desert, fired three shots at him as they sped away, and left him by the side of the road—battered, bloody, and bound head to foot. A spokesman for CSU laid the violence done Sorrell “directly at the door of the conspiracy between the producers and the racketeer labor leaders in Hollywood.”32
By the next Sunday night, the resilient Sorrell was back in action, exhorting his troops at a comeback rally, beaten but unbroken.
On March 4, 1947, two days after the near-hit on Sorrell, Eric Johnston appeared before the House Labor and Education Committee in Washington, D.C. The MPAA president’s first appearance before a congressional committee that year was to explain un-American activities in the industrial infrastructure—not the ideological superstructure—of Hollywood cinema.
For three hours, Johnston was grilled about the CSU strike, then in its seventh acrimonious month. He blamed Communist agitation for preventing a resolution. “Their tactics seem to aim at slowing down production,” he said, making certain to assure Congress that however disruptive the Communists might be on the shop floor, they had never infiltrated the motion picture screen. “None of their influence or ideals get into pictures and only a few of them are in minor positions and not connected with the preparation of film scripts.”33
The leftward tilt of American labor would soon be righted by congressional action. On June 23, 1947, over the veto of President Truman, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, the most significant change in the federal oversight of organized labor since the New Deal. But where the New Deal had expanded the rights of American labor, Taft-Hartley restricted them. The act prohibited just the kind of jurisdictional strikes that had bedeviled the studios since 1945 and empowered the NLRB to order the strikers back to work. The most coercive provision of the law denied bargaining authority to unions whose leaders might “reasonably be regarded” as Communist or Communist sympathizers.34 To avoid being so regarded, union leaders had to sign affidavits or loyalty oaths denying Communist sympathies or associations.
The Taft-Hartley Act struck at the heart of the IATSE-CSU dispute: it was a jurisdictional strike and it was spearheaded by a union leader who might “reasonably be regarded” as a Communist. The act gave a steel-tipped bludgeon to the federal government to force a settlement to the advantage of IATSE.
Armed with Taft-Hartley, and not averse to a junket out of Washington, a delegation from Congress decided to look into the situation on the ground. On August 4, 1947, a subcommittee of the House Labor Committee chaired by Carroll D. Kearns (R-PA) convened in Hollywood to hear testimony into the IATSE-CSU confrontation. A freshman in the newly elected Republican majority in Congress, Kearns had a propriety interest in the performing arts: he was a trained singer, former soloist with the Chicago Opera Company, and paid-up union member in the American Federation of Musicians. Kearns’s on-location hearings promised to deliver “intrigue, argument, and violence,” blurbed Motion Picture Herald, as if promoting a thriller. “The subcommittee is investigating labor practices and in Hollywood it is striking gold.”35 By “gold” it meant “red.”
On August 21, 1947, Chairman Kearns got an up-close look at the level of visceral hatred between the two unions during a tour of the MGM lot with Sorrell and IATSE business agent B. C. “Cappy” Duval. While walking through the soundstages, his companions cursed at each other and nearly came to blows. On two occasions, the congressman had to physically pull the men apart.36 Daily Variety passed on an expurgated blow-by-blow:
“You’re a lying so-and-so!” roared Sorrell, his fists clenched.
“We’ll have none of that!” ordered Kearns, stepping between [Duval and Sorrell].
The situation simmered down briefly until Sorrell, addressing Kearns, spotted three IATSE carpenters working on a flight of stairs and referred to them as “scabs.” Duval moved menacingly into Sorrel’s personal space.
“I’ll knock you on your ∗∗∗ if you interfere with me!” shouted Sorrell, cocking his fist.
“You’ll knock nobody on their ∗∗∗!” snarled Duval.
Again playing referee, Kearns came between the men before any punches were thrown.
The rest of the tour was a tense standoff with each man claiming that his union represented whatever workers the entourage encountered. The mood lightened only when the group walked on to the set of MGM’s aquatic musical On an Island with You (1948), featuring amphibian star Esther Williams and a bevy of scantily clad water ballerinas, who gave a special performance for the visitors. “Nobody yelled ‘This job is ours!’ during the show,” grinned Daily Variety.37
Bathing beauties notwithstanding, to say the jurisdictional battles between IATSE and CSU left bad blood doesn’t quite capture the level of acrimony: members of the rival unions wanted to strangle each other with their bare hands.
