Everett Historical Collection/CSU Archives
Edward G. Robinson, J. Edgar Hoover, and others on the set of The Last Gangster, September 1937.
In recent days Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, two former MAGA podcasters who have threatened to punish Donald Trump’s political foes and media critics, have been named the director and deputy director, respectively, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What does this alarming development portend for free speech in America?
Francis MacDonnell gives us a good idea in his meticulously researched book, Policing Show Business, a case study in the weaponization of government against dissenting filmmakers during the Red Scare era. An emeritus professor of history, McDonnell details how longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover waged war against the movie industry “as the prime mover and first cause of the blacklist.”
Policing Show Business: J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies
By Francis MacDonnell
University Press of Kansas, 328 pages
Release date: November 2024
Hoover and his fellow Cold Warriors’ conservative cancel culture purged members of the motion picture industry accused of being disloyal and acting in league with the Soviet Union against the United States and demanded that they recant their leftist activism and inform on others. From 1947 to around 1960, some 300 actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were barred from making movies. Some, including the Hollywood Ten, were imprisoned and fined.
Hoover’s “monomaniacal hatred of communism,” MacDonnell relates, caused him to develop “a network of connections” of players ranging from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and conservative newspaper columnists, and the American Legion. Hoover’s unholy alliance also included Senator Joseph McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn and what MacDonnell, in a reference to Sherlock Holmes, calls “the Sunset Boulevard Irregulars”—movie industry insiders who spied and snitched on colleagues. FBI agents conducting counterintelligence and surveillance routinely “broke the law through illegal wiretaps and burglaries.”
The FBI “blurred the lines between subversion and left-of-center political views, reading vigorous support of civil rights, unionization, and extensions of the welfare state as suspiciously close to the Moscow party line,” MacDonnell writes. “The G-men did not limit their suspicions to party members. Indeed, they interpreted spirited support for the New Deal as an indicator of subversive tendencies.”
Policing Show Business chronicles how liberals including actor Fredric March and radicals like Ring Lardner Jr. were pursued by Hoover’s bloodhounds. And yet, “No evidence has emerged showing that any proscribed artists engaged in espionage.” As comedian Zero Mostel is quoted saying in the book: “What sabotage could actors be accused of—giving acting secrets to the enemy?”
University Press of Kansas
Tellingly, not a single North American-born Hollywood talent ever defected to the U.S.S.R. Instead of protecting national security, Hoover and others waged “a culture war . . . out of FBI headquarters,” seeking to impose a conservative agenda and ideology over movies and their makers. The blacklisted artists’ real crime wasn’t spying for the Kremlin, but, as George Orwell put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “thoughtcrime.”
Due to Hoover’s riding roughshod over the First Amendment, McDonnell notes, the overall quality of what the studios produced was diminished: “Moviegoers during the Red Scare likely experienced fewer laughs, fewer thrills, fewer moments of transporting spectacle, and fewer pictures that prompted serious reflection.”
MacDonnell also makes the important point that “Hoover’s surveillance of the movie business established patterns that would be continued in his later scrutiny of the civil rights and anti-war movements.” And clearly, there are parallels to what is happening today, as President Donald Trump targets advocates of diversity, equity, and inclusion while vowing “Our country will be woke no longer.”
Policing Show Business is an indispensable addition to histories of the Hollywood Blacklist that can be read and appreciated by newcomers and experts in the field alike.