WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2001-09-08 Time: 10:12:00 Posted By: Jan
I stumbled upon this most interesting article and have also highlighted
certain important things in it.
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON
(August 25, 2001 01:25 a.m. EDT ) – During the government’s hunt for
communists in the 1940s, congressional investigators heard hours of secret
testimony about how leftists in the film industry were trying to paint
Tinseltown red.
Newly released transcripts reveal the House Committee on Un-American
Activities was told that Soviet sympathizers made a science out of seeding
films with communist propaganda.
Actors, screenwriters and producers – mostly friendly witnesses with
anti-communist views – testified in Los Angeles in the late 1940s that
communists infiltrated trade unions, slipped jabs at capitalism into
scripts and schooled young actors on how to inject pro-Soviet doctrine into
scenes.
“Hollywood is one of the main centers of communist activities in America
due to the fact that our greatest medium for propaganda – the motion pictures
– is located here,” actor Adolphe Menjou testified in a closed-door May 1947
hearing. “It is the desire of the masters in Moscow to use this medium for
their purposes, which is for the overthrow of the American government.”
It’s been more than 50 years since members of the committee took their
anti-communism bandwagon to California and summoned Hollywood figures to
testify at public hearings, which led to blacklisting of some of filmdom’s
most famous names and ruined hundreds of careers. What witnesses told the
committee in executive session has been sealed until now.
The National Archives released more than 600 boxes of records this month from
the committee’s investigations of Hollywood, the Ku Klux Klan, American
Nazis, civil rights and anti-war activists, atomic espionage and the case of
Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of being a communist
spy. The Klan probe was stopped after the HUAC’s chief counsel, Ernest
Adamson, announced the committee did not have enough data to investigate.
The publicity the committee generated from its Hollywood investigation
prevented the Communist Party USA from “raising significant amounts of money
to propagandize the American public through an instrument designed for
entertainment,” Herb Romerstein, an investigator for the committee from 1965
to 1975, said in an interview Friday.
Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, a California author who wrote a book that said
communists seduced the film industry, agreed.
“Their ultimate objective was to co-opt the industry. It was a very bold
plan. They came close, but they ultimately failed,” Billingsley said Friday.
He said the committee wrongly focused on the content of movies instead of how
communists infiltrated Hollywood unions.
“The hearings were a circus,” Billingsley said. “I think they discredited
themselves and wasted a lot of time and gave the Communist Party a real
publicity coup.”
The communists worked in insidious ways, screenwriter Jack Moffitt told
the committee in 1947.
He testified that John Howard Lawson, a writer, member of the American
Communist Party and founder of the Screen Writers Guild, advised him to “try
to get five minutes of left-wing doctrine into every script you write.”
Moffitt said Lawson told him to write the Soviet propaganda into scenes
involving highly paid actors or many extras because executives wouldn’t be so
quick to cut or re-shoot expensive scenes.
“If you are merely an extra playing a member of a country club, play it in a
way that will invite prejudice against the class represented,” Lawson advised
acting students, according to Moffitt. “If you are an extra in a street scene
of a tenement district or in any poor surrounding, play your part to excite
sympathy.”
Jack Warner, then vice president of Warner Brothers, told the committee that
subtle communist references were tough to excise.
“Some of these lines have innuendoes and double meanings and things like
that, and you have to take eight or 10 Harvard law courses to find out what
they mean,” he said.
The transcripts revealed that the committee went so far as to look at tax
records. Chief investigator Robert Stripling said he had seen a return of
screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, which showed contributions to front
organizations.
Then Stripling said Stewart, to show contempt for the American economic
system, claimed 35 cents in deductions, including a 25-cent donation to the
Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Romerstein said looking at tax records was not a usual committee practice.
“That’s the first I’ve ever heard of that,” he said. “It was not something
that was routinely done, or could have been done. It was a violation of the
law. The IRS did not turn such records over to Congress.”
Not all the witnesses were friendly.
On May 12, 1947, committee members called Johannes Eisler, whose brother was
believed to be a top leader of the Communist Party in America. Believing the
committee was on a witch hunt, Eisler, who composed music for movies,
intentionally dodged questions about his trips to the Soviet Union and
whether he attended Communist Party meetings.
Stripling suggested Eisler might be lying but said his accusation was “not
on-the-record.”
“Of course not. Not anything decent or fair would get on the record,” said
Eisler’s attorney, Ben Margolis.
“I can sue you for calling me a liar,” Eisler chimed in.
The transcript of one closed hearing showed committee members complaining
about the lack of movies with anti-Soviet themes – films that would balance
the likes of “Mission to Moscow,” which flattered Soviet leader Josef
Stalin.
Committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas, R-N.J., went so far as to suggest a
plot line to an MGM executive of a movie showing Soviet troops, although
allies, shooting down U.S. planes.
“It would show that even then, when we were fighting side by side, hell,
there was no cooperation at all,” Thomas said.
Another committee member, Rep. John McDowell, R-Pa., was offended.
Pro-Soviet films are “sowing the communist mind,” he said, but it would be
just as easy for Hollywood to go too far the other way. “I think that
pictures ought to stay in the pure field of entertainment,” he said.
News Copyright 2001 Interest!ALERT All rights reserved.
I do believe the premature conclusion above that the communists did not
succeed in Hollywood is false. Colonel Stanislav Lunev, a recent and
high-ranking GRU defector said in his book, Through the Eyes of the
Enemy that the communist paid some Hollywood producers to produce movies
which were deliberately filthy and which degraded the West and Western
values. After those hearings in 1940, it should be remembered that people
like Jane Fonda and others aided the communist cause. Part of the communist
strategy has always been to attack Western culture, make it look more
decadent than it is and to portray an image of a crumbling, decadent Western
world.