John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [37]
In some quarters of America, people were beginning to become concerned about Communism. Pockets of Communists were certainly evident in America and, as far back as 1934, a list had been published 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 66
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in America of suspected Communist sympathizers, drawn up by an extreme rightist, Elizabeth Dilling, in a booklet called The Red Network. Among the suspects were lawyer Clarence Darrow and even Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the booklet was endorsed by William Randolph Hearst, it had little immediate effect as few people took Dilling’s list of suspects seriously.
In 1937 an article in the Screen Guild Magazine noted, “We’re up to our necks in politics and morality just now.” In response, Communist organizer Donald Ogden Stewart assured the magazine’s readers that he had personally attended virtually all of the so-called radical meetings and benefits. He stated that “99.44 percent of Hollywood is sleeping peacefully in its options” and that most people in the film industry were not “the least interested in anything political that does not concern their own studio or the abolition of the state and federal income tax.”
Wayne remembered that Donald Ogden Stewart was someone who was extremely active in spreading Communism in Hollywood.
There were a number of political groups that sprang up in Hollywood between 1935 and 1939, including the Motion Picture Democratic Committee and the Motion Picture Artists Committee to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Filmmakers and actors hosted fund-raising events for the various organizations they supported. Herbert Biberman and actors Melvyn Douglas and Edward G. Robinson drew up a petition, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, asking Americans to put pressure on President Roosevelt to boycott all goods from Germany. Fifty-six other celebrities signed the petition, including Henry Fonda, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Don Ameche, Myrna Loy, George Brent, and Alice Faye.
The most politically active of Hollywood’s artists were the screenwriters, and more than half of them were estimated to belong to radical leftist organizations. Wayne said, “Screenwriters, who were often the best educated people in Hollywood, generally thought themselves intellectually superior to mere actors, producers, directors, and studio executives. Many of them belonged to an alliance of liberals and Communists.”
But that alliance began to crack following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:42 PM Page 67
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August 1939. Liberals and anti-Fascists turned away from their Communist partners who, under orders from Stalin, justified the pact in September by arguing that the war in Europe was an “imperialist war” that was of no concern to Socialists and Communists. Lending support and, indeed, leading the campaign to keep America out of the war was the American Communist Party.
There was further political upheaval in 1939 when the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies, arrived in California to investigate Communist influence and infiltration of the film industry. Studios told their contracted actors to cooperate with Congress, and the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Frederic March, James Cagney, and many others were forced to go before the Dies Committee to state that they were not Communists.
Critics of John Wayne’s politics (and the role he would later play during the McCarthy era) point out that his name did not appear on the petition to boycott Nazi goods, nor did he speak out against Communism during 1939 and 1940 during the Dies Committee investigation.
But John Wayne was not considered by his peers to be a major star, still appearing, as he was, in minor B films, and would not have been