Left-Wing Hollywood
Dear Editors, in an otherwise laudable editorial (“America’s Media Is Enemy-Occupied Territory,” May 2026), Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried repeats a number of inaccuracies that have circulated for 70 years about the communist problem in Hollywood after World War II. Prof. Gottfried downplays the seriousness of the problem and states that most of official Hollywood was staunchly conservative and dedicated to preserving the essential American ideal. The reality is different.
V. I. Lenin himself saw the importance of capturing the motion picture industry when he stated in 1921, “Communism must consider that of all the arts the motion picture is the most important.” He urged party leaders to seize control of America’s film industry. To this end, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) established cells within the motion picture industry. It sent a cultural commissar, Victor Jeremy Jerome, to lead this effort, and, with the help of Comintern agents, the Hollywood branch of CPUSA was founded in 1935.
The party did not, as a general rule, focus on talent among the actors and actresses in the industry. They did, however, make assiduous efforts to organize the unions and guilds, specifically the Screen Writers Guild, with an eye toward slipping propaganda into scripts. John Howard Lawson, the chief architect of the Communists’ strategy, instructed writers to refrain from writing overt propaganda into their scripts, sensing that the public would see through heavy-handed proselytizing. Lawson told his people to simply put about five minutes of party doctrine into each script, and let the chips fall where they may.
The big mistake the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) made in 1947 was in concentrating on the film moguls like Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and company, and the stars like Robert Taylor and Ronald Reagan, rather than the writers and the directors. As far as Communist Party members among the actors and actresses, it was revealed that Eddie Albert, Karen Morley, Gale Sondergaard, and bandleader Artie Shaw were CPUSA members. The blacklists were a dreadful thing, but there were also reverse blacklists, known as “graylists” or “whitelists,” that operated against conservative actors such as Robert Montgomery, Ginger Rogers, and George Murphy. Ronald Reagan himself blamed the Communists for helping to derail his acting career. Among the conservative screenwriters, Morrie Ryskind, Edward Dmytryk, Fred Niblo, and Dick Collins, among others, swore that reverse backlists existed and that they were on them.
The problem is much more complex than we generally know. The CPUSA, under orders from Moscow and using agents like the very dangerous Otto Katz, attempted to organize and run the motion picture industry starting in 1934. They were prevented from doing so due to the noble efforts of conservative Hollywood, whose members woke up and took the counteroffensive. Unfortunately, this was symptomatic of the problem that we conservatives always face. We are constantly on the defensive, fighting off our back foot, while the enemy is constantly advancing.
—Prof. Brian E. Birdnow
St. Louis
Dear Editors, I am currently rereading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: an Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964). In his opening chapters, Burnham discusses how liberalism had, in the post-World War II era, become the dominant ideology in the United States via control of media, schools, advocacy groups, and other institutions. The question is not liberal dominance per se. Rather, it is, as Paul Gottfried’s article (“America’s Media Is Enemy-Occupied Territory”)brings up, how did the current lunatic form of leftism develop into what is generally termed “wokeness?”
Back in the early 1960s, when Burnham was writing, liberalism could hold some promise for producing the good society of equality, justice, and peace. Liberals would, in the 1960s, push through various civil rights acts, the War on Poverty, decolonization campaigns, and so forth. But the result over the ensuing six decades has been a failure of liberalism on every front. Liberal run cities have become wastelands of crime, homelessness, and corruption. Post-colonial, one-man-one-vote states have turned into dictatorships and failed polities. The Second Gulf War was supposed to bring liberalism to Iraq and Afghanistan. Gender studies in Kabul resulted in the Taliban sweeping to victory in August 2021.
The failure of six decades of liberalism provides an “explanation” for wokeness. Liberalism morphed into wokeness in reaction to its own failure.
All forms of legal discrimination (at least against minorities) have been ended both in law and in general practice. Yet the statistics on school test scores, university admissions, prestigious career numbers, and so forth supposedly fail to represent minority communities. So liberals invent ideologies like systemic/institutional racism to explain the discrepancies, and then mandate DEI programs to force equality of outcomes.
Not coincidentally, all these programs justify massive spending programs that employ thousands of otherwise useless diversity enforcers, classroom indoctrinators, and workplace commissars. Of course, no one considers that the liberal programs themselves were flawed from the get-go.
The massive outbreak of leftist violence over the summer of 2020 is one manifestation of this syndrome. Something had to be responsible for the failure of decades of liberalism to manifest the promised land of equality. So, let’s tear down statues, abolish advanced placement programs, and engage in Orwellian rewrites of cultural history (consider the current Nolan version of The Odyssey). All this is dutifully supported by the instruments of the liberal establishment: media, universities, NGOs, and much of the corporate world. The result is that liberals are creating a super Potemkin Village, which props up the illusion of equality.
And this provides a key to bringing down wokeness. As Prof. Gottfried’s editorial observes, a rising generation of young rightists is challenging the left’s hegemony. Victory in the culture war will not happen by adherence to the orthodoxy of the past but rather via radical new approaches. As Burnham points out in his The Machiavellians (1943), power is only opposed by power—in this case, cultural power.
The current online meme campaign against Nolan’s film is one front opened in this struggle. Let us see more such campaigns against the enemy-occupied media.
—Joseph Miranda
Northridge, Calif.
Prof. Gottfried replies:
I am grateful to both Prof. Birdnow and Mr. Miranda for their careful reading of my editorial on Hollywood and the information they provided. Since Prof. Birdnow has published a book on the Communist infiltration of Hollywood (The Subversive Screen: Communist Influence in Hollywood’s Golden Age), I defer to him on the process of infiltration, but I would add a few qualifying remarks.
After World War II, there was a serious pushback by Hollywood actors and scriptwriters like Murray Ryskind and Actor Guild officials like Ronald Reagan against Communist Party members and sympathizers in the film industry. Leading actors, including Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, and Elia Kazan, testified before Congress about Communist infiltration.
All the leading film producers were staunchly anti-Communist and cooperated in purging Communist scriptwriters. Not all reds were purged, but certainly Hollywood confronted this problem, even if not to the extent that Prof. Birdnow would have liked. Moreover, Hollywood’s most egregiously pro-Soviet film during WWII, Mission to Moscow, was made upon the urging of the Roosevelt administration, which hoped the film would foster goodwill toward Stalin’s Russia, our then-supposed ally. The lead actor, Walter Huston, was already widely viewed in Hollywood (with good cause) as enthusiastically pro-Soviet.
Lastly, I’ll stand by my point that, in comparison to the relentless woke propaganda now being sold to us as quality cinema, the work of Communist scriptwriters in the 1940s and 1950s was rarely subversive. One of the best movies ever made, The Maltese Falcon (1941), was based on a book by the Communist Dashiell Hammett and directed by John Huston, the far-left son of Walter Huston. I discern no leftist message in this superlative film.
Mr. Miranda is right that the attitudes that informed the transformation of the American film industry into an appendage of the woke world empire closely follow what James Burnham considered “liberal” ideas. I’m not sure that term entirely describes all the leftist lunacy we’re now witnessing, but Burnham’s list of symptoms shows he knew something about this disorder. For example, the rejection of one’s civilization, professed adoration of globalism, and unbounded sympathy for sentimentalized enemies. Although Burnham didn’t live long enough to see the full flowering of this madness, he would have dissected it with the same precision he showed in explaining its earlier manifestations.
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