Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [71]
Although Roosevelt had been reelected in November 1940 promising to keep the country out of war, he was secretly plotting with Winston Churchill to do just the opposite while publicly promoting preparedness, rearmament, and aid to Britain. For most of 1940 and 1941, the isolationists, led by the influential America First Committee, were ascendant. By May 1941, eight months after it had been founded, the AFC had almost 850,000 dues-paying members,104 and among its most prominent supporters were Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alice Longworth Roosevelt, and former ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who had been recalled from London by FDR for being too eager to appease the Germans.
The AFC was headquartered in Chicago, where its principal backers were General Robert E. Wood, the chairman of Sears Roebuck, and Chicago 1 1 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick. The only movie star on its national board was Lillian Gish, who during 1940 and 1941 was starring in the Chicago production of Life with Father 105 and, through her good friend Colleen Moore, seeing a lot of Loyal and Edith Davis. Although the AFC
would later come to be seen as a reactionary and even anti-Semitic group, its membership included such leading liberals as future ambassador Chester Bowles, and it began as a student antiwar group at Yale that included Gerald Ford, Sargent Shriver, and future Yale president Kingman Brewster.106 It should also be remembered that between August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, and June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the American Communist Party and its left-wing sympathizers were also vociferously isolationist.
Indeed, the American political scene during the prewar period was so complicated that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been started in 1938 by Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a far-left Democrat from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to investigate pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi organizations such as the German-American Bund, was soon taken over by Congressman Martin Dies, a far-right Democrat from Texas, who promptly launched an investigation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, claiming it was “under the control of Communists.”107 As the Brown Scare turned into the Red Scare, and Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe, the Anti-Nazi League—which had been formed in 1936
and had in its vanguard everyone from Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Ham-mett, and Dorothy Parker to Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, and Groucho Marx108—changed its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action and lost many of its movie star members.109
Nonetheless, Congressman Dies spent the month of August 1940 in Hollywood personally interviewing many of the stars associated with the Anti-Nazi League and like-minded groups. “One by one, the accused came to his hotel to seek absolution,” Neal Gabler writes in An Empire of Their Own, “Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Luise Rainer, Franchot Tone, even Jimmy Cagney, who left telling reporters that the charges claiming Hollywood was permeated by Communism were ‘so exaggerated that they are ridiculous.’”110
Cagney was papering over the fact that the Communist Party in Hollywood had been steadily growing since the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and had a strong appeal for the socially conscious intellectuals in the community. As Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner write in Radical Hollywood, Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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“In this world where networking meant everything,