Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [72]
In Dutch, Edmund Morris repeats a startling claim by the screenwriter Howard Fast, that Ronald Reagan tried to join the Party in 1938. “Reagan got carried away by stories of the Communist Party helping the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the homeless,” Fast told Morris. “Some of his friends, people he respected, were Party members. So he turned to them.
Said he wanted to become a Communist.” According to Fast, who was in the Party at the time, Reagan’s Brother Rat costar Eddie Albert and his far-left Mexican wife, Margo, talked him out of it, at the behest of the local Party hierarchy, who thought Reagan was a “flake.”113 Leonora Hornblow told me she was “shocked” by Morris’s story, and said Ronnie “never gave any indication” of Communist leanings in their political discussions on the Brother Rat set.114
The first HUAC investigation of Hollywood fizzled out, but a year later the movie industry was under attack again. “[The movies have]
ceased to be an instrument of entertainment,” declared the isolationist Senator Gerald B. Nye of North Dakota in an inflammatory speech he gave at an America First rally in St. Louis on August 1, 1941. “They have become the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse . . .
war fever in America and plunge this nation to destruction.” The studios had the power to “address 80 million people a week,” he pointed out, and were run by executives who came from “Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the Balkan countries.” As he shouted out their names—Mayer, Warner, Goldwyn, Cohn—the crowd booed.115 “Are you ready to send your boys to bleed and die in Europe, to make the world safe for Barney Balaban and Adolph Zukor and Joseph Schenck?” he railed, naming the president and chairman of Paramount and the president of Fox.116
One month later, on September 11—just four days before Louella Parsons Day in Dixon—Lindbergh, the AFC’s most popular spokesman, weighed in with a speech in Des Moines that created a national uproar and would tarnish his reputation forever. “The three most important 1 1 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House groups,” he said, “who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” He went on to say that the Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”117
On September 25, 1941—ten days after the Dixon festivities—Harry Warner was called before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Moving Picture Propaganda. The subcommittee, chaired by Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho, a leading isolationist, had compiled a list of fifty films it said contained pro-war propaganda, including eight made by Warner Bros. Harry Warner didn’t flinch. “You may correctly charge me with being anti-Nazi.
But no one can charge me with being anti-American,” he told the committee.118 “Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany I became convinced that Hitlerism was an evil force designed to destroy free people, whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or Jews.” He added that he had
“always been in accord with President Roosevelt’s foreign policy.”119
Warner Bros. wasn’t making propaganda movies so much as historical movies, Harry Warner calmly claimed. But as both proud Jews and the most conspicuous Roosevelt supporters among the Hollywood hierarchy, the Warners had taken the lead in opposing the Nazis and preparing the American public for eventual intervention in Europe. In April 1938, to give one example of their high-profile efforts, Jack