The Movies and the Antiwar Debate in America, 1930-1941

Abstract

Despite recent work on interventionists, the film industry, and U.S. foreign policy in the interwar period, the relationship of antiwar groups to motion pictures has been largely ignored.1 Such neglect is unwarranted since surveys indicated that the overwhelming majority of Americans opposed U.S. intervention in another war throughout the 1930s, and, as late as July 1941, the final Gallup poll on the question revealed 79 percent still advocated U.S. neutrality (Gallup 290). Exploration of the relationship between antiwar groups and the film industry produces new insights into the foreign policy debate and into the place of movies in American public life. It indicates how some interest groups sought to filter and interpret motion pictures to their membership. It demonstrates how, for most of the 1930s, pacifists and isolationists sought to use films in a positive manner and to build a working relationship with the motion picture industry. It was only in 1941, with the advent of a new, more extreme anti-interventionist organization, that a vituperative campaign was launched against the Hollywood studios. Those who opposed U.S. military intervention abroad have been often linked together as isolationists, but they are more accurately analyzed as three separate entities. The peace movement was composed of a variety of pacifist and peace advocacy groups. Internationalist not isolationist, they opposed military force and collective security and advocated non-violent methods to address the causes or consequences of war. In contrast, the isolationist movement was neither pacifist nor internationalist. Its member groups opposed U.S. political as well as military intervention overseas but would support military defense of the Western Hemisphere. In 1940, a new anti-interventionist movement emerged. This ad hoc coalition, ranging from the political left to the right, was formed to prevent U.S. military intervention in World War II. Archival research in the records of groups from these three different antiwar movements2 can disclose much more than merely how they sought to increase membership and political influence-the standard use of such records.3 In this case, it reveals how such groups tried to shape members' attitudes and actions toward motion pictures, the film industry, and U.S. foreign policy. Both the pacifist Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the peace-oriented, isolationist influenced National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW) existed throughout the period. The anti-interventionist America First Committee (AFC) was a temporary coalition organization, existing only from 1940 to 1941. The U.S. section of the WILPF, founded by Jane Addams and other women pacifists in 1919 to work for peace and women's rights, was one of the most important pacifist pressure groups. It consisted of more than 13,000 women, most of them from middle or upper classes, in branches across the country. Mildred Scott Olmstead headed the influential Pennsylvania Branch, and, in 1934, she became chief administrator of the entire U.S. Section of the WILPF. (Alonso; Bacon; Foster; Pois). The most influential umbrella organization that included an isolation coalition was the National Council for the Prevention of War, headed by its founder Frederick J. Libby. A large, assertive lobbying coalition made up of a wide spectrum of groups from the American Federation of Teachers to the Grange and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the NCPW mailed out nearly two million pieces of literature a year to a large audience ranging from farmers and blue-collar workers to educators and editors (Kuusisto; Libby). The anti-interventionist America First Committee was headed by Robert Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck and Company, and counted a membership of some 850,000 persons, the majority in the isolationist Middle West (Cole; Doenecke; Moser). During American intervention in World War I, pacifists had been appalled by Hollywood's Hate the Hun silent films. …