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President Donald Trump, now well into his second term, is hell-bent on retribution, threatening journalists, political opponents, judges, academia, pro-Palestinian protesters, and more, with jail, budget cuts and deportation. His authoritarian crackdown on free speech and political dissent comes just as a new book is out documenting the FBI’s repression in Hollywood at the beginning of the Cold War. In J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War Movies (University Press of Kansas, 2024), Francis MacDonnell, emeritus professor of history at Southern Virginia University, painstakingly details the ruthless persecution of workers in the motion picture industry from 1947 to around 1960.
MacDonnell’s book details how, using illegal wiretaps, break-ins and informers, and other sinister methods, dissenters were purged from Hollywood by Hoover’s secret police in collaboration with other conservative culture cancellers, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). While Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations mostly pursued alleged “commies” inside government, HUAC targeted film industry. Trump’s contemporary crusade against “enemies of the people” is like a Hollywood sequel, “Part II” of the Red Scare’s inquisition. Notably, Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel, as 2024’s Oscar-nominated The Apprentice — which Trump, predictably, tried suppressing — dramatized.
In this candid conversation, MacDonnell, interviewed via phone in Virginia, discusses the blacklist, FBI fixation on films and the historical relevance of the repression in Hollywood to the Trump regime’s threats against free speech.
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Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Ed Rampell: Describe the Hollywood blacklist.
Francis MacDonnell: It was a list of names of individuals who were deemed too risky for movie studios to hire because of their ties to communism, left-wing front organizations or controversial political stances. A bunch of groups generated the list — famously, HUAC, in Congress; in California, the Republican State Sen. Jack Tenney Committee; the American Legion; private right-wing countersubversive outfits like American Business Consultants, ex-FBI agents who published Red Channels, listing 151 entertainers; plus the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI).
What were the targeted talents accused of?
What people were accused of is being part of the Communist Party. Historian Maurice Isserman American communism’s paradox is the vast majority of members were , commitment to labor rights, civil rights, social justice and numerous admirable causes. But the party itself followed a foreign, authoritarian power. Party headquarters in New York collaborated with Soviet espionage.
So, Hoover then made the leap to the idea that if you’re a communist, you’re a potential internal security threat. He put someone like Yip Harburg (the lyricist of “Over the Rainbow”) and actor Fredric March, who weren’t communists, on the National Security Index with individuals deemed threatening; in case of national emergency, they’d be detained. The potential crime for Hoover is belonging to this political ideology the FBI saw as subordinate to an American adversary, trying to brainwash Americans through film. He was obsessed with this idea that theatergoers see motion pictures, then believed what they saw.
Even though there were hardly any pro-Soviet movies.
There were however some movies that were actually co-written by members of the Communist Party or “fellow travelers” that were close to it, though.
During WWII three movies are consistently mentioned in HUAC at the height of the grand alliance as trying to foster better relations between Moscow and Washington: , The North Star and Song of Russia.
Hoover thought people would fall for this propaganda and was quite concerned.
What was the FBI’s role in the blacklist?
Starting during WWII, when the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, and through the late ’50s, the FBI undertook a far-reaching investigation into the film industry, gathering information on studio executives, actors, screenwriters, songwriters. They shared this information with HUAC and were the inspiration for the most fervent anti-communists in Hollywood, the MPAPAI, who felt they were on Hoover’s team. The American Legion had a close relationship as well with the FBI, as did conservative columnists.
Hoover was a spiritual leader, folk hero, eminence grise for the anti-communist movement. Through investigations the bureau set into motion processes undermining careers of some of Hollywood’s most gifted artists. Hoover is at the center of all this. For him, this was an obsession. One thing that’s so striking is how engaged he was. His fingerprints are everywhere when you look in the Hollywood blacklist.
The FBI is accusing Hollywood figures of being radical extremists, but they’re often relying upon radical right-wing extremists and informants to get their information, from Cecil B. DeMille, Lela Rogers, to Hedda Hopper. While Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan identified nine actors as radicals, Hoover acted behind the screen of secrecy, an unelected bureaucrat, an instrument of the state acting in a way that prevented people from working.
The blacklist didn’t just affect communists. How did it impact liberals and progressives who weren’t party-affiliated?
In public activities many liberals stopped supporting progressive causes. Judy Holliday told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee: “I don’t say yes to anything now, except cancer, polio and cerebral palsy [fundraisers].” Liberals were affected sometimes by being accused, sometimes by being criticized in American Legion Magazine, in a way that led them to make fewer social issue films.
There was a retreat in the later ‘40s through the mid-‘50s in the number of social problem films. Dorothy Jones (chief of the Motion Picture Analysis Division of the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Picture in Hollywood during WWII) wrote that 21 percent of all 1947 features were social problem films; only 9 percent were in 1950. For liberals, one effect was more caution about putting politics into movies.
How many artists were blacklisted?
According to film historian Larry Ceplair, there were about 300 communists purged in Hollywood, about 1 percent of the industry. The FBI, meanwhile, estimated that there were 600 Communist Party members in Tinseltown.
How many were charged with and/or convicted of committing espionage, sabotage, other subversive acts?
Zero, zero, none.
So, if they didn’t commit crimes, why were they actually persecuted?
For being associated with communism and taking controversial left-of-center political stands.
Were they persecuted for free speech and activities constitutionally guaranteed by the First Amendment?
People lost their jobs for holding unpopular ideas, and for refusing to inform on colleagues, not because of any criminal activity. For example, Communist Party members sought to expand unionization, defend civil rights and fight for New Deal social programs. They faced scrutiny over pushing back against racism too: The FBI reported on lyricist Yip Harburg’s attempt to hire Black extras on the movie Meet the People in its discussion of his “subversive tendencies.”
Are there similarities between Hoover as FBI director during the early years of the Cold War and Trump’s attacks on “radical leftists”?
President Trump made clear his willingness to use instruments of state power to pursue retribution against political enemies. Hoover always did things quietly, tried to represent the FBI as an organization above partisan politics. Hoover created a culture of secrecy.
I find some reason to hope in that President Trump is quite public about what he plans to do and isn’t hiding that he’s behaving in an incredibly partisan way. Maybe it’s a ridiculous hope, but it makes hard for people to then look at any excesses or persecutions as justified by legitimate national security or public policy. But who knows in these days, with purges of federal officers, people getting fired arbitrarily?
I have hope journalism will do its job. The old Washington Post motto “Democracy dies in darkness” is true. When FBI abuse is made public and media aren’t shying away from saying it, this will help rally principled conservatives, centrists, liberals, progressives. Maybe that’s a foolish hope.
Trump seized the Kennedy Center and aggressively sues or threatens to sue news outlets and journalists, including ABC, CBS, Bob Woodward and The Des Moines Register. What lessons does the blacklist/Red Scare era have for today?
It’s important not to overestimate the power or public support of those trying to silence or censor alternative views. During the Red Scare, culture warriors represented themselves as speaking for a much larger public than they did in reality. HUAC, the American Legion, conservative press, MPAPAI and FBI all said they spoke for the American people. Hedda Hopper claimed to represent the Heartland. But in fact, these countersubversives’ efforts to use cultural institutions to pursue political agendas always represented minorities of partisans.
Some kinds of small acts of resistance can limit the unfortunate effects of what’s going to happen. During the Red Scare, one great defense for possible blacklist victims was the law courts — both Fredric March and Dore Schary filed suit against people who smeared their reputations. The Marches won a retraction, but at great expense: $50,000 in legal fees. Schary’s case never made it to court but nevertheless succeeded in ending the smears it was responding to.
During the Red Scare, HUAC acted more or less in public, but what the FBI did was in secret. The weaponization we’re seeing… the admission of a willingness, again, to use power in government to pursue political adversaries, is being done in an open and direct way, which I presume will make it much easier for the targets to respond to show the injustice. That this is not being done for the common good, for justice, but out of petty vengefulness and is harming rights.
One of the great arguments that took a while to take hold, and a group of persecuted screenwriters and directors known as the Hollywood 10 pushed it in HUAC hearings, was that the anti-communists were the real anti-Americans — the far right were the real enemies. They’re the ones undermining the value of free speech.
Standing up and speaking out in defense of the First Amendment doesn’t always win at first, but it may eventually take hold.
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