Hollywood in Washington

Senator McFarland: Senator, what sort of legislation do you propose, to end these abuses you allege? Senator Nye: I hope it is not going to be necessary to resort to legislation.

McFarland: You mean that we should conduct this inquiry just for the purpose of publicity? Nye: I do not mean anything of the kind. I think you are being very, very unfair when you imply that.

This exchange took place at the first hearing of a Senatorial subcommittee investigation into the motion-picture industry and the radio. What was the investigation trying to prove? Like many another U.S. citizen, Reporter Jack Moffitt, who covered the hearing for The Hollywood Reporter, could not find out.

He asked his question all over Washington. The only place he found where everybody knew what it was all about was the National Press Club, and there all was calm. "You fellows from the coast must realize," said a member grandly, "that this is but one of many investigations that continually are being held in Washington." Reporter Moffitt hotfooted it to the hearings to see for himself.

There was no calm there. This "investigating" subcommittee was no ordinary Senatorial investigating committee. No Senatorial vote authorized it. Set up by Isolationist Senator Wheeler, in his capacity as chairman of the Interstate Commerce Committee, it held hearings supposedly to determine whether an investigation should be made. Stuffed with diehard Isolationists--Clark of Idaho, Bone of Washington (absent because of illness), Tobey of New Hampshire, Brooks of Illinois--it had only one Administration supporter. He was Ernest McFarland, 6-ft. ex-judge of Florence, Ariz., who had won a surprise victory over Senator Ashurst.

The Committee had invited some 40 witnesses, with Senator Nye the first.

What Nye thought of the movies was no secret. He had publicly accused the companies of trying to make the U.S. "punch-drunk with propaganda to push her into war." He had accused Jewish and foreign-born producers--Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Darryl Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn, Murray Silverstone and others--emotionally agitated by Hitler, of being responsible. Said he: primarily responsible for movie war propaganda were "four names, each that of one of the Jewish faith, each one foreign-born." Yet he denied that he was antiSemitic, said "I remain, as yet at least, bitterly opposed to the injection of anti-Semitism as a cause or issue in our American thinking and acting." He linked newsreels and the MARCH OF TIME with dramatic films in his picture of a gigantic conspiracy.

To Reporter Moffitt's Hollywood eye it seemed that the Senators were working without a script. There was Senator Tobey ("He has a nervous trick of making dainty thrusts with his cigaret ... as though he were giving the hot foot to invisible pixies"). There was Wendell Willkie, counsel for the motion-picture industry, who upset the proceedings at the start. Denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, Lawyer Willkie jumped the gun with a 2,600-word blast defending the industry, attacking the legality of the Committee, and pointing grimly at the anti-Semitism he found in the proceedings.

Said he: "I write with hesitation because [Senator Nye's] reasoning is so contrary to the American way of thinking, as it has been expressed since the Bill of Rights and our Constitution were first evolved. ... If the Committee feels that the racial and geographic background of American citizens is a condition to be investigated, there is no need for the investigation. We frankly state that in the motion-picture industry there are in positions both, prominent and inconspicuous, both Nordics and non-Nordics, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, native and foreign-born."

When Senator Nye damned Sergeant York, Convoy, Escape, many another movie as pro-war propaganda, but admitted that he did not "pretend to have seen them all," Lawyer Willkie grabbed the microphone, offered to show the movies in the committee room. He grabbed it again to defend one of his press releases, growled and snorted the rest of the time with the agony of a man who has good answers he isn't allowed to make. After the first two days he dashed off a frustrated comeback: So far, nothing has been suggested except that "perhaps the industry should be required to produce movies on 'both sides' of the international question.

This, I presume, means that since Chaplin made a laughable caricature of Hitler, the industry should be forced to employ Charles Laughton to do the same on Winston Churchill."

By week's end, Hollywood Reporter Jack Moffitt had heard some brisk rough-&-tumble exchanges (Said he: "McFarland worked on Nye like a censor working on Lady Chatterley's Lover.") and a good deal of laughter from the audience ("Laughter . . . was hard to suppress," he told his readers). He saw it all when, after Chairman Clark rapped for order, "Senator Tobey, the mad wag of the committee, leaned toward his microphone and proceeded to coin a phrase of rarest minting. 'A little nonsense now and then,' he said through sad lips, 'is relished by the best of men.' It's the best explanation to date of the present investigation."

The Committee's inquiry looked like plain hypocrisy to blunt Westbrook Pegler. Said he: "Everyone who has ever had any relations with the movie industry knows that in spots it is unimaginably foul. Some of its business ethics would shame a dope peddler, and it reeks of nepotism, discrimination, and favoritism. ..."

But, said Pegler, the movies have not created the only anti-Hitler propaganda. "The most powerful propaganda against Nazi Germany is to be found in the daily record of events in Germany since Hitler began to rise. ... No fictioneer invented the horrors of the concentration camps. . . . The reason [why we have no pro-Nazi films] is that in all the record of Hitlerism there isn't enough favorable material to make a short. ..."

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