When Hollywood Was Punished for Its Anti-Nazism

[Behind the Aegis]

“We’d rather march to hear Willkie on national unity than be marched into a concentration camp,” Harry Warner firmly stated in the summer of 1941. The mogul was responding to criticism for his encouraging studio employees to attend a rally at the Hollywood Bowl featuring 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a strong advocate for U.S. intervention in World War II. That same summer, a competing rally was held at the Hollywood Bowl on behalf of the America First movement. The keynote speaker was famed aviator and eugenics enthusiast Charles Lindbergh. The same aviator who, at an America First rally in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941, argued that one of the biggest threats to the United States was the Jewish-controlled media. Lindbergh’s hate-fueled rhetoric is covered at length in the new PBS docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. However, the series overlooked another event that launched days prior to Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech — the U.S. Senate Investigation into “motion picture propaganda.”

A missed opportunity in an otherwise commendable docuseries, the Senate investigation operated on the same seeds of hatred explored in The U.S. and the Holocaust. Isolationist fever, fueled by the likes of Lindbergh and radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, coupled with the America First movement, built toward a crescendo of anti-Hollywood sentiment that walked hand in hand with America’s antisemitism. Senators Gerald Nye (R-N.D.) and D. Worth Clark (D-Idaho) were friends of America First and respected by Nazi front groups like the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund. Nye publicly attacked Hollywood studios as “gigantic engines of propaganda,” before introducing Senate Resolution 152 — the subject of my latest book, Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation Into Motion Picture Propaganda.

Toward the end of the first episode of The U.S. and the Holocaust, Burns declares that “all but one Hollywood studio went along with the Nazis.” This overgeneralization has been part of a larger conversation over the last decade following the publication of Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler in 2013. What the documentary does not note is that the primary reason Hollywood didn’t make anti-Nazi films earlier was because the self-governing Production Code had rules against ridiculing other nations. It was not out of some fear or alliance with the German Consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling. The German consul had say in what went to the German market, which was a lucrative one, but he had no authority in what was released domestically in the United States. Burns correctly stated that Warner Bros. was the first Hollywood studio to pull product from Germany, but that does not mean the others were in some way goose-stepping along with Hitler.

The American film industry was a hotbed of anti-Nazi activity after Hitler took power in 1933. Attorneys Leon Lewis and Mendel Silberberg organized a spy ring that regularly exposed and thwarted nefarious Nazi activity. The entire operation was secretly funded by the Hollywood moguls and was the subject of two excellent books: Hitler in Los Angeles by Steven Ross and Hollywood’s Spies by Laura Rosenzweig. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League began operation in 1936, held many well-attended events, and ran Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl out of town when she came to visit in 1938, as chronicled by Thomas Doherty in Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939.

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[Docreed2003]

1. A fascinating article. Ty for sharing this!

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Eko]

3. kick