Hollywood Goes to War

Propaganda may be defined as the attempt to manipulate public opinion for the purpose of helping or injuring a particular cause, individual or group. The propagandist seeks to control rather than to inform. After reading Hollywood Goes to War, one cannot help but come away with the impression that the movie industry and various government agencies were very much in the propaganda business before and during World War II. By the late 1930's the "Big Eight" Hollywood studios dominated the domestic and foreign markets. These corporations had created a vertically integrated industry. As authors Koppes and Black tell us: They controlled the entire process from casting and production through distribution (wholesaling) and exhibition (retailing). The Big Eight reaped 95 per cent of all motion picture rentals in the U.S. in the late 1930's. Their control over theater chains, particularly the all-important first-run urban houses which determined a pictures future, was critical. Koppes and Black go on to explain briefly that: The men who guided the industry in its transition to big business were mostly Jewish theater owners, who were uniquely suited to the task The playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht once observed that Hollywood constituted "a Semitic renaissance sans rabbis and Talmud." We are also informed that: In 1940 five of the fifteen highest salaries in the country went to movie people. Atop the greasy pole was the quintessential mogul. Louis B. Mayer, whose princely $1.3 million in salary and bonuses in 1937 probably surpassed the compensation to any other American executive. The content of motion pictures became avidly internationalist and anti-isolationist long before Pearl Harbor. In 1938 United Artists released Blockade, a pro-Loyalist tale of the Spanish Civil War starring Henry Fonda. Catholic organizations protested the showing of this picture because of the pro-Communist Republican armies' record of atrocities against priests and nuns. Joseph Breen, the conservative Catholic journalist and head of the Production Code Administration, accused Hollywood and in particular the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League of an attempt to "capture the screen of the United States for Communistic propaganda purposes." He claimed the League was "conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews." In 1939 Warner Brothers premiered Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which claimed in melodramatic fashion that Germany sought to conquer the entire globe. "Using semi-documentary techniques and long periods of narration, the film identified the German-American Bund as an arm of the German government whose purpose was to destroy the American Constitution and Bill of Rights." Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund, responded to this smear campaign with a libel suit for $5,000,000. After Kuhn was indicted and convicted for allegedly stealing German-American Bund funds, the suit was dropped. That these charges against Kuhn were politically motivated was indicated by the Bund's continued support of him.