Ronald Radosh, former radical, is a late-in-life convert to conservatism, earning him, perhaps, the label of neo-conservative. In Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, Radosh (together with his wife) has extended his purview of the inner life of American Communists and the New Left.
In this case, the book is an indictment of those Hollywood personalities who took an active role in Communist politics during the pre- and post-World War II era, and it is particularly severe on those who never repented. The Radoshes challenge the comfortable Hollywood legend that posits an evil House Committee on Un-American Activities against a progressive vanguard operating in America’s film capital.
(l. Ron Radosh)
“This fable of innocence destroyed by malice has acquired an almost irresistible sanctity during half a century of telling and retelling. It has become the consensus view of a troubled time and the story that Hollywood tells itself each night when it goes to sleep.” In Red Star the Radoshes set themselves the task of refuting this fable, a welcome effort, as far as it goes.
Of more interest, however, is the Radoshes’ search for what lay behind the efforts of Hollywood Communists’ to undermine and overthrow existing political and social life in America. Our intention is to look once again at what really happened in Hollywood during that fateful episode in our history and to re-evaluate this legend of good undone by evil. How and why did so many in the film community become enchanted not only with the Left but with its most totalitarian expression, the American Communist Party (CP)? What were their aims and objectives, and how did they set about achieving them?
…”The Hollywood Party,” as the Communist Party was fondly called, started early in the film colony’s history. Revolutionary Willi Münzenberg, a contemporary of Lenin and Trotsky, quickly realized the “propaganda potential” for Communism in film. “We must develop the tremendous cultural possibilities of the motion picture in the revolutionary sense,” he argued. “One of the most pressing tasks confronting Communist Parties on the field of agitation and propaganda is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda weapon…” In this respect, Münzenberg was successful, organizing an important vanguard of “culture workers” in Hollywood. While not all such culture workers were Jews, a large proportion of them were, which the Radoshes note in individual cases.
…This Jewish ethnic nexus is a constant throughout Red Star, but Radosh and his wife do nothing to explore or develop its implications. For instance, Republican John Rankin (left) succeeded in 1945 in turning the Committee on UnAmerican Activities into a standing committee of the House and then went on to wage what the Radoshes and others saw as blatantly anti-Semitic attacks on Hollywood leftists.
Noting that Rankin “and some others’ tirades against Jews had helped to stampede Hollywood’s studio chiefs into instituting the blacklist,” the Radoshes have the chance to step back and put into perspective what larger battle may have been taking place. Indeed, they observe in the opening pages of Red Star that “HUAC was the equal and opposite reaction” to the CP in Hollywood, a theme that if properly developed could have shed further light on the “aims and objectives” of Party members themselves.6
These Congressmen’s attacks on Hollywood Jews were hardly isolated. Among the most prominent of such attacks was Henry Ford’s The International Jew, which was published in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. Ford, as author Kevin MacDonald notes, “charged that Jews in the media and entertainment industries subverted gentile morals and viewed Jewish media involvement as part of a highly orchestrated Jewish plot described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Despite Ford’s forced recantation of these claims, American isolationists later blamed the film industry for its sustained attempt to draw America into the war against Germany, with Charles Lindbergh’s statement 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” being typical.
Addressing the central period covered in Red Star, Kevin MacDonald goes much further than the Radoshes in positing a Gentile-Jewish ethnic conflict. “The great majority of those stigmatized by the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives (HUAC) were Jews, many of them in the entertainment industry.”
Infamous anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith, for example, pointed to the Russian Jewish character of many in Hollywood and argued that this was the reason for the attempt to popularize Russian Communism in America through film. Whereas the Radoshes merely note the biographical backgrounds of Jewish screenwriters, MacDonald ties them together: “The substantive basis of the opinion of Rankin and others was that beginning in the 1930s Hollywood screenwriters were predominantly Jewish and politically liberal or radical…The American Communist Party (CPUSA), which was under Soviet control during the period, sent V. J. Jerome and Stanley Lawrence, both Jews, to Hollywood to organize the writers and take advantage of their political sentiments.
MacDonald properly quotes Gabler here on this ethnic nexus: “But as much as the Hollywood Communist party was a writers’ party, it was also…a Jewish party. (Indeed, to be the former meant to be the latter as well [emphasis added].)”7 How could Ronald Radosh, in particular, have missed this? Here we have perhaps the core of the whole blacklist story, yet Radosh simply brushes over it. One can only wish that he had been as insightful and honest as his similarly well-positioned friend David Horowitz….”
The Radoshes conclude their book by castigating modern Hollywood for wallowing in its fantasy of innocents persecuted. Specifically, they note the lack of historical context–the Korean War, the Cold War with the Soviet Union–in Hollywood’s portrayal of itself in so many such films.
“Also missing were the goals of the Communist Party, how it specifically targeted Hollywood, how it embedded its cultural commissars in the film capital,” etc. But this too is precisely what is missing in the Radoshes’ account.28
Given the power of film to propagandize the masses in twentieth-century America and the extensive Jewish control of that film industry, we can see what the epic battle between Hollywood leftists and HUAC actually was: The largely Jewish Communist movement in the Hollywood of the 1930s-1950s was an instance of a Jewish movement and, as the Radoshes note, HUAC was “the equal and opposite reaction.”
They might have added that it was an equal and opposite Gentile reaction. The Radoshes had the background information to discuss this in depth, for, to their credit, they undertook extensive archival research and interviewed many primary actors in this long drama. But failing to take broader Jewish-Gentile conflict into account makes Red Star a deeply disappointing book, better for reference than for a needed analysis of what those turbulent years in Hollywood really were.