Circa1865

By 1936 FDR had communist-infiltrated labor unions supplying campaign money through Russian communist Sidney Hillman’s CIO-PAC, the first political action committee in the United States. By that date the Democratic party platform differed little from that of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and FDR’s running mate, Henry Wallace, helped attract collectivist votes to the Democrat party.  Today, Hollywood’s virtual reality programming continues its vital agitation and propaganda role.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

CPUSA Discovers Hollywood Clout

“The Communist Party [in the United States] enjoyed great success with “front groups,” organizations they controlled without that control being publicly recognized. One of the major front groups, the League of American Writers, had been an outgrowth of the American Writer’s Congress, an affiliate of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, headquartered in Moscow. During the 1930s, at the height of its success, the League even managed to enlist Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President of the United States.

The founders of the [Soviet Union] were fascinated with the cinema because they recognized that it allowed limitless alteration of reality, the very goal they that they were attempting to achieve in real life. “Communists must always consider that of all the arts the motion picture is the most important,” said Lenin, who sent cinema trains into the Russian countryside during the 1920s. [Stalin explained in 1936 that] “The cinema is not only a vital agitprop device for the education and political indoctrination of the workers, but also a fluent channel through which to reach the minds and shape the desires of people everywhere.”

In 1926, Sergei Eisenstein, the USSR’s premier cineaste, made Battleship Potemkin, a film about a sailors’ mutiny. The Soviets used the movie as part of their labor-organizing efforts. Joseph Goebbels praised the picture and said it should be the model for Nazi cinema. French actor Yves Montand, who was born to communist Italian parents who fled France from Mussolini’s Fascist regime, said it was the dramatic Potemkin, not the turgid Das Kapital, that stirred his loyalties to Marxism and the USSR.

In 1933, at the nadir of the Depression, impoverished New Yorkers paid $89,931 in four days to see King Kong, at the time a record draw for an indoor attraction. Party cultural officials, eager as Stalin to influence people “everywhere,” duly took notice of Hollywood’s clout . . . and even Stalin enjoyed American gangster movies.

The implications of such influence were staggering to those who were seeking to extend this major movement of their time. Stalin reportedly claimed that he could easily convert the world to communism if he controlled the American movie industry.

“One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of Propaganda,” wrote [Communist International] boss Willie Muenzenberg, “is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them.”

By the mid-1930s the tectonic shifts of history, and certainly the social and political conditions of the time, were all favorable to the Party, which was then moving from triumph to triumph. Hollywood loomed as one of its easier targets.”

(Hollywood Party, How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, Prima Publishing, 1998, pp. 20-21)

Roosevelt the Second charged Frank Capra with creating war propaganda films to sustain the war frenzy and silence critics of his war as “traitorously unpatriotic” — the facts would take a backseat to selling war bonds. The solution might be, as the editorial below suggests, of having films supervised by “well-known historical professors” – though it remains that the professors may willingly subvert the facts in exchange for tenure and a paycheck.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Historically Inaccurate Cinema of 1936

“Those of us who are interested in the presentation of correct history will read with interest an editorial which appeared in a recent Christian Science Monitor on historical films. While the writer deplores the fact that so many historical personages and events are treated inaccurately, yet he expresses his belief that better days are in the offing. The editorial says:

“The rising tide of historical films is rapidly sweeping away the bridges of knowledge that have been laboriously and slowly built over the wastes of popular ignorance. Such is the opinion of the effect of the recent state if historical films, expressed at the last annual meeting of the Historical Society of London.

The Society can easily back up its assertions with concrete instances. Henry VIII, who ruled over England with some strength at one of the most crucial periods of its existence, has been represented to millions of cinemagoers in all parts of the world as a mere buffoon. Catherine of Russia, one of the sternest and fiercest of governors has been shown as a sentimental schoolgirl.

But the French ruler who permitted Joan of Arc to go to the stake had perhaps better treatment than he deserved in a recent picture. Nor are such travesties confined to English-speaking films. The whole trend of serious historical study nowadays is to get away from attaching undue importance to personalities. This the screen is counteracting, regrettably, in an inaccurate manner. But there are signs that better days are approaching.

One large film company is this year extending its program of definitely educational pictures. Its first venture will be supervised by a well-known historical professor. This is perhaps only a small thing, but it may be the beginning of a more conscientious era of historical films.”

(The Main Street of the South, Anne V. Mann, Historical Films Not Always Accurate, The Southern Magazine, Volume II, Number 11, May 1936)