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By Root 3083 0

November and early December, Mayer and other top executives urged the leaders of the directors, writers, and actors guilds, including Reagan, to endorse the Waldorf Declaration, arguing that their harsh new policy was necessary to mollify public opinion and protect the industry from more government interference. “It was generally agreed that Louis B. Mayer, at the second of these sessions, hit on the most graphic way of expressing the official point of view,” screenwriter Gordon Kahn recalled sarcastically in his 1948 memoir, Hollywood on Trial. “The British people, he said, had their Royal Family, in veneration of which a certain deep human impulse was satisfied. American democracy had to have a similar object of worship, and it had found it in the personalities of the motion picture business. That was why any word or act from Hollywood which shook the loyalty of even a fraction of the royal subjects was a matter for grave alarm and a potential contribution to national disintegration.”110

Reagan had been reelected SAG president in mid-November; in that same vote his fellow actors backed his policy of requiring Guild officers to sign loyalty oaths. Still, he had serious misgivings about denying anyone employment because of his or her political affiliation, as the producers were setting out to do. He made this clear in the pointed questions he asked Mayer and his cohorts at the December 3 meeting—Why had they suddenly reversed their policy? How could they prove someone was a Communist? What about members of Communist fronts who were not Communists themselves?111—and in a statement he prepared for the December 8 meeting of SAG’s board, in which he wrote, “We have no desire to protect communists. However, liberty cannot be held in water tight compartments. Once suppression, backed by the pressure of fear, breaks down one bulkhead, the other compartments are soon flooded.”112 Mayer responded by saying that he knew a Commie when he saw one, and the SAG board rejected Reagan’s proposed statement as not tough enough.113

By December 19, when Reagan met with the FBI for the second time that month, he had apparently come around to the producers’ point of view: T-10 advised Special Agent [blacked out] that he has been made a member of a committee headed by L.B. MAYER, the purpose of which allegedly is to “purge” the motion picture industry of Communist Party members, which committee was an outgrowth of the Divorce: 1947–1948

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THOMAS committee hearings in Washington and the subsequent meeting of motion picture producers in New York City.114

Reagan was not the only would-be liberal floundering ideologically; nor was he alone in giving in to the rising tide of reaction. Shortly after the HUAC hearings, the Directors Guild followed SAG in adopting a loyalty oath, with only a furious John Huston and a hesitant Billy Wilder, among the 150 or 200 directors present, voting against it. Even William Wyler, who had founded the Committee for the First Amendment with Huston, raised his hand in support.115 Dore Schary, then vice president of RKO, and the prominent independent producer Walter Wanger, both longtime liberal activists, had reluctantly gone along with the Waldorf Declaration, had then helped Mayer sell it to the guilds, and now took an active role in setting up Mayer’s purge–cum–public relations committee, officially called the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC). Reagan represented SAG at the council’s first meeting in early 1948; six months later, he was made co-chairman of this increasingly powerful group, which brought together the leaders of the studios, the guilds, and the unions under a single anti-Communist banner.116

“You bore me! Get out!” Those were the words with which Jane Wyman greeted Ronald Reagan upon his return home from the Washington hearings in late October 1947. Reagan was accustomed to his wife’s moodiness, but this was the first time she told him—in no uncertain terms—that she wanted a divorce.117 “Jane wasn’t interested in what Ronnie was interested in,” Nancy Reagan told me, “and she wasn’t about