Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is part of the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio, Hollywood Union Leader’s Home Bombed: “Two efforts have been made to intimidate me. Last Friday morning, eight carloads of men tried to prevent me from going to work. When this failed, they tried to do it by throwing a bomb at my house at 2 o’clock in the morning. The bomb shattered the windows in the front of the house. But had it been thrown ten feet further, it would have gone into a bedroom where two children were sleeping. Now I am a union man. I have been for ten years and intend to remain so. But I am one of 10,000 people in Hollywood that are caught in this jurisdictional dispute. But we still insist upon the American privilege of working when and where we feel like.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On October 5, 1945, a rivalry between two Hollywood trade unions came to a head, as 300 striking Hollywood set decorators with the Conference of Studio Unions picketed outside the gates of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. It was unseasonably hot that early autumn morning, and as the sun rose over the Hollywood Hills, 8 months into the strike, fatigue and anxiety had set in.
When replacement workers hired to undermine and break the strike arrived, the picket lines exploded into violence. The consequences were swift, and led to an increase in scrutiny over alleged communist infiltration into the unions, as accusations against leadership surged.
The rivalry between the unions turned violent long before that fateful morning in 1945 on the Warner Bros. lot. There were reports of attempted bombings at the homes of union leaders, planted car bombs, and fistfights on the picket lines.The rivalry over who would represent one of Hollywood’s largest workforces had become an all-out war.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: American Subversives. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Welcome to the clash of The Unionists. Our story begins with an infamous Tinseltown melee, dubbed “Bloody Friday.”
Archival Audio, October 5, 1945 News Reel: Several men were beaten, one stabbed, automobiles were overturned, all in a riotous blockade of Warner Bros. Movie Studio in Burbank, California. Pickets barricaded a main highway passing the studio, and detoured traffic. Several thousand movie set designers and decorators have been on strike at Warners for more than eight months. And they finally decided that their only way to act and get action was by direct action.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Thomas Doherty, professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and author of Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist.
Dr. Thomas Doherty: So in Hollywood, the two unions that kind of went nose-to-nose were the Conference of Studio Unions, which was the more radical left-wing union and the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, which had been the more long-running traditional union, more cooperative with the studio moguls.
So as this dispute is going on in Hollywood with the HUAC and the industry—back in Hollywood, they’re also squabbling about which union is going to represent the Hollywood crews and craftspeople.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees, or “IATSE,” was led by a man named Roy Brewer. Brewer, a Nebraska native with more than a decade in labor organizing before he arrived in Hollywood, had risen to become one of the most influential union leaders in the nation. As leader of IATSE, he waged a battle against rival group the Conference of Studio Unions, led by Herbert Sorrell, to represent the motion picture industry’s set decorators.
Sorrell was known as a radical, and rose to prominence in 1941 after he called for a strike against Disney.
The film, television, and theater industries were also represented by some of the largest unions in the United States, and as Cold War tensions rose, so did fears over communist infiltration at such a large and influential scale. After suspicions of communist infiltration in the trade unions, government inquiries into labor and its leaders escalated.
Accusations against Sorrell and alleged ties to communism plagued CSU and its members.
Dr. Thomas Doherty: And what happens in the end, of course, is that Roy Brewer’s IATSE wins, and the more radical union is not recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, and they basically get put on the outs.
And IATSE becomes, actually, one of the great enforcers of the blacklist. Even though Roy Brewer’s head of a trade union, he’s often at the table in terms of what was called “clearing” people to work again in the industry. And there was this long process, a really often humiliating, laborious process in which, if you were accused of being a communist, you had to prove that you weren’t. And sometimes, you would do this in testimony on the q.t. with the FBI. Sometimes there’d be kind of a committee hearing with the representatives of the Screen Actors Guild and other Hollywood representatives, which would then give you your clearance or not. So that’s all part and parcel of the events going on in 1947 to purge the industry of what was seen as a kind of a sinister, insidious infection known as communism.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the aftermath of the Warner Bros. picket lines, Brewer became one of HUAC’s most willing friendly witnesses, and publicly named more than a dozen people who he said, quote, “identified with communist activities.” Among the names were screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson. It was now only a matter of time before they too would be called to testify before HUAC.
Facing mounting financial and legal struggles, and unable to overcome collusion between Brewer and the Hollywood studios to force out CSU members, the Conference of Studio Unions was disbanded in late 1946.
As for Sorrell, his legal troubles continued long after CSU was dissolved. For his role in the 1945 strike, he was convicted of contempt of court and “failure to disperse,” though he was cleared of all felony charges including “incitement of a riot.”
Dr. Thomas Doherty: And in the end, IATSE kind of wins the great battle because the Conference of Studio Unions was seen as too leftist. And that same year, not coincidentally, something called the Taft-Hartley Act is passed, which says that you cannot be a union leader if you are a communist or if you are suspected of being a communist, which means all union leaders had to basically sign a loyalty oath attesting to their non-communist bona fides.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Taft-Hartley Act, officially known as the Labor Relations Management Act, was introduced in response to the tumultuous wave of strikes that overtook the nation after World War II, including Hollywood’s “Bloody Friday” riot. In addition to the anti-communist loyalty oaths, the Act also outlawed closed shops, allowing workers to decline to join a union in a unionized workplace, and gave states the power to enact “right to work” laws, which critics were concerned would significantly reduce the power of collective bargaining.
The bill, which received bipartisan support in Congress, passed over President Harry S. Truman’s veto, much to his frustration.
Archival Audio, Harry Truman Recalls Veto of Taft-Hartley Act: “The Congress handed me the Taft labor act. After two vetoes they passed it over my veto. It was harsh, punishing law. And it was an attempt to take all the rights away from labor that they’d been enjoying.
They brought it on themselves, though, by going to excess when they had all these rights.
“And it was trouble for the whole country as far as that concern. The country was of the opinion that labor had gone too far and were against them. And that’s the reason that Congress could pass the Taft Hartley Act over my veto.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1947, Walt Disney was called to testify before HUAC as a friendly witness. Disney was ardently anti-communist, and was called before the committee because of his willingness to publicly “name names” of those whom he believed to have communist ties.
Disney’s testimony was influenced by a years-long grudge he held against Sorrell, which stemmed from Sorrell’s role as the leader and negotiator for the Screen Cartoonists Guild during an animators strike in 1941. Disney was convinced that the only reason for the strike, which he considered an utter betrayal by his animators, must have been communist influence, and that Sorrell was that influence.
Throughout his testimony, he lambasted the labor leader as an agitator and bully.
Archival Audio, Walt Disney Testifies Before HUAC: “My boys, my artists, came to me and told me that Mr. Herbert Sorrell was trying to take him over. And I explained to him that it it was none of my concern, that I had been cautioned to not even talk with any of my boys on labor and they said it wasn’t a matter of labor, that it was just a matter of them not wanting to go with Sorell and they they had heard that I was going to sign with Sorell. And they said that they wanted an election to prove that Sorell didn’t have the majority and I said I had a right to demand an election, so when Sorell came I demanded an election, and Sorell wanted me to sign on a bunch of cards that he had there that he claimed were the majority. But the other side had claimed the same thing! And I told Mr. Sorell that there’s only one way for me to go and that was an election and that’s what the law set up, the National Labor Board was for that purpose, and he laughed at me and he said that he used the labor board as it suited his purposes, and that he had lost some election he’d been sucker enough to go for that labor board ballot. He lost some election, I can’t remember the name of the place, by one vote. Said it took him two years to get it back and he said he would strike and that was his weapon. He said ‘I have all the tools of trade sharpened,’ and I couldn’t stand the ridicule or the smear of a strike and I told him it was a matter of principle with me, that I couldn’t go on working with my boys feeling I had sold them down the river to him on his say so. And he laughed at me and told me that I was naive, I was foolish, he said you can’t stand this strike. I’ll smear you and I’ll make a dust bowl out of your place if I choose to!”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: During his testimony, Disney also stated, quote, “I believed at that time that Mr. Sorrell was a Communist because of all the things that I had heard and having seen his name appearing on a number of Commie front things.”
Some years later, in 1953, Sorrell testified that he was not currently, nor had he ever been, a communist, but that he had accepted money from them. No other friendly witnesses identified Sorrell as a communist.
In the months and years that followed the strike, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, or “MPA,” ramped up its efforts to counter left leaning organizations like the Writers Guild. The MPA sought to root out what they deemed the Communist threat in entertainment. Top stars and executives joined the MPA, including Disney, who – in addition to being a founder – also served as its vice president, Ronald Reagan, Cecil B. DeMille, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Ayn Rand, and Ginger Rogers
The group advised film producers how to avoid what they felt were quote “communistic touches” unquote.
Dr. Thomas Doherty: Both the union activists and Hollywood filmmakers will become more timorous in what they say and the kind of films they make. So, increasingly throughout the 1950s, when Hollywood wants to tackle a controversial theme, they will really try to allegorize it or to hide it, to conceal it. So if you look at the 1950s, one of the great places they go to talk about racial intolerance is the Western. So you take a very traditional, All-American, allegedly harmless genre like the Western, and you can make films about American policy towards the Indians or American racism, like John Ford’s The Searchers.
And so that, I think—the sort of more fearlessly explicit social problem films that you got in ‘47 to ‘49 start disappearing gradually, or at least they’re not quite as unqualifiedly defiant as they might be. American capitalism as a system is almost never explicitly questioned, although some of the moral quandaries and moral compromises of capitalism are. So it isn’t like these themes disappear from Hollywood in the ‘50s, because the ‘50s, we now know, is one of the richest eras for Hollywood cinema, but they tend to be more subsurface and hidden.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The floodgates had opened, and investigations into unions from other industries also increased, as a narrative that Communist infiltration was the true root cause of contemporary labor conflicts was embraced by a number of American politicians. Virtually any group represented by organized labor had members called before HUAC.
Dr. Thomas Doherty: So teachers were particularly affected. The military was affected. Virtually any trade union was affected as well—autoworkers, for example. They tend not to get as remembered in the publicity because, of course, anything involving Hollywood is always going to be remembered better because, you know, we like the stars. And that is really one of the reasons that HUAC starts going after Hollywood. Two main reasons. One, Hollywood matters. We know that after the Second World War. And secondly, if Gary Cooper is coming into the Capitol, he’s going to be covered like a blanket by the newsreels. So your average middle school teacher or Air Force major is not going to initiate that kind of activity.
And in fact, not parenthetically, the Screen Writers Guild, who were many of the writers of the original Hollywood Ten—or many of the members of the original Hollywood Ten were screenwriters—is also facing this same kind of very crucial practical and moral decision. Because if the Screenwriters Guild is led by people who are communist or who will not say they are not communist, it means that the Guild will lose its certification from the National Labor Relations Board.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Congress was far from done with its investigations into Hollywood, and Disney was just one of many notable figures who agreed to testify for the House Un-American Activities Committee. SAG president Ronald Reagan also served as a friendly witness, giving his full cooperation to the proceedings.
Dr. Thomas Doherty: Reagan testifies, and he makes a terrific appearance. I mean, he’s widely praised. He’s the only witness, I believe, who does not appear with a lawyer because he said, why do I need a lawyer? You know, I don’t need—I’m very proud of my industry. He puts on his glasses, because he was blind as a bat, and reads a statement. And like I say, he got really positive notice for that. And, in fact, one reporter I came across, Quentin Reynolds, who was writing for a liberal paper called PM, as he’s recounting Reagan’s testimony, says, you readers might think I’m a little crazy here, but I got to say, if this guy ever decides to go into politics, I think he has a real future. And so Reagan, as head of SAG, is assuring the industry that no members of the Screen Actors Guild will be trafficking in communism and that we’re going to try to keep the communists out of leadership positions in the Screen Actors Guild.
Archival Audio, Ronald Reagan Testifies Before HUAC: “I will be frank with you that as a citizen I would hesitate, or I would not like to see ANY political party outlawed on the basis of of its political ideology, because we spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight for itself against the inroads of any ideology, no matter how much we disagree with it. But at the same time, I never, as a citizen, want to see our country become so…uh…or become urged by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles, through that fear or resentment.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In our next episode with Dr. Thomas Doherty, we’ll delve further into the HUAC hearings and meet the Hollywood Ten.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by executive director Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, Critical Past, the Gordon Skene Sound Collection, the Screen Gems Collection at the Harry S. Truman Library, and the US National Archives.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
