Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [121]
By then the strike that had violently disrupted the industry for a large part of the previous year was sputtering to an end, and Herbert Sorrell was a desperate figure, the victim of his own demagogic excesses and the relentless right-wing campaign to hang the Communist noose around his neck. After SAG led twenty-four other Hollywood unions in declaring the CSU “a rump organization, conflicting with our duly constituted A.F.L. central labor council of Los Angeles,” workers deserted the picket lines in droves. “The CSU dissolved like sugar in hot water” is the way Reagan put it.9 “Crushed to powder” was more like it, said liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne, adding that Reagan was “always careful to hide his own aggression.”10
Larger forces were at work, too, creating a climate in which left-wing union activism was increasingly untenable. In the November 1946 elections, Republican majorities took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928; among the newcomers were Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Representative Richard M. Nixon of Southern California.
On March 12, 1947, the White House announced the Truman Doctrine to defend Greece and Turkey from Soviet aggression. That same month Harry Truman signed an executive order requiring loyalty oaths of all federal employees.11 In June the new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto; it outlawed the closed shop, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns, and required elected union officials to take an oath that they were not Communists.
Divorce: 1947–1948
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Across the nation, the right was resurgent, and the left was divided and on the defensive. In the last week of 1946, ICCASP merged with the National Citizens Political Action Committee, another left-wing group, to form Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), laying the groundwork for a third-party challenge to Truman in the 1948 election by Henry Wallace.
In Hollywood, the remains of HICCASP—including Gene Kelly, Lillian Hellman, John Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo—voted to go along with the merger.12
One week later, in January 1947, a group of nationally prominent liberals met in Washington to launch Americans for Democratic Action. The organization had “two objectives,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “to infuse the Truman administration with the spirit of the New Deal, and to liberate the democratic left from Communist manipulation.”13 Schlesinger was an ADA founder, along with Eleanor Roosevelt; Harold Ickes, the former executive director of ICCASP; Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis; economist John Kenneth Galbraith; columnists Stewart and Joseph Alsop; labor leaders Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers; and AVC national head Charles Bolté.14
“The liberal split was crystallizing,” Schlesinger explained. The two new organizations “were in substantial agreement on domestic issues, but they disagreed on qualifications for membership. A.D.A. rejected ‘any association with Communism or sympathizers with Communism as completely as we rejected any association with fascists or their sympathizers. Both are hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which this Republic has grown great.’ P.C.A., on the other hand, welcomed ‘all progressive men and women in our nation, regardless of . . . political affiliation.’ . . . And the admission of Communists moved P.C.A. toward the Soviet side in the Cold War.”15 Mrs. Roosevelt agreed: “The American Communists seemed to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters.”16
Actor Melyvn Douglas became ADA’s California chairman in early 1947, and Reagan joined fellow liberal anti-Communists Walter Wanger and Philip