HOLLYWOOD GETS TOLD
Hollywood Gets Told DR. GAETANO SALVEMINI, famed Harvard professor, showed some of the fire which once made him a feared opponent of Mussolini's Black Shirts, when he told the Hollywood Writers'...
...They asked for "definite assurance" that he would refrain from expressing his honest convictions and abide, instead, by the official propaganda line that all is well with our foreign policy...
...Meanwhile, most of the metropolitan dailies which have been fervent in wanting to hold the line against inflation by freezing workers' wages, were looking the other way the other day when the Treasury Department released a report admitting it had approved more than a million dollars in salary raises for corporation officials who had already been getting more than $50,000 a year...
...His biggest worry now is the two-thirds being levied on the taxpayers and he intends to do something about it...
...It was an intriguing question that the AFL president asked...
...Speaking for the AFL, the CIO, and the Railroad Brotherhoods, Green urged extension of the Price Control Law without major amendment and with adequate funds for enforcement...
...The report showed that 95 corporate executives had been knocking off $7,070,060 a year, or an average of almost $75,000 each...
...Does public ownership pay...
...Labor pleas for relief from the suffocating strait-jacket of the "Little Steel" formula are greeted with cold rebuffs in the Administration and indignant- editorializing in the press...
...Could it be," Green asked, "that those responsible for the top economic stabilization policies felt that mere publication of these facts would challenge the fairness of the overall economic stabilization policy which leans too heavily on rigid wage control while evading many basic price and profit issues...
...The political situation in Italy is critical...
...Is public ownership of utilities good business ? Ask that old radical, Ed Crump...
...s "If Churchill and Roosevelt would give the people local elective governments wherever possible, leading later to a national provisional government, they would have a feeling of freedom and gratitude instead of the hatred and contempt their present course is engendering...
...Not that Boss Ed will be found these days in the Memphis public library with his head buried in a copy of "Das Kapital...
...He has learned his fiscal difficulties are considerably reduced by city ownership of the gas and electric utility...
...The Treasury-approved raises averaged $11,500, bringing the individual salaries to an average of more than $86,000...
...Several days before his scheduled appearance, however, he reported in a newspaper interview that the plain people of Italy are frankly disturbed at the turn of events because "what they want is not Communism, but a republic," and warned that America and Britain are courting disaster unless they change their foreign policy...
...Conspicuous Gap IN the ranks of the reactionary politicians marching under the power trust banner, "Public Ownership Is Socialism," there is a conspicuous gap where once Boss Ed Crump of Memphis, Tenn., planted his stolid little frame to weld solid the anti-public ownership phalanx...
...His cap is set for public ownership of the Memphis Street Railway Company...
...Salvemini promptly told them to go to hell...
...The AFL president expressed the conviction of most thoughtful Americans who have been disturbed by the introduction of certain amendments which would weaken the Act when he said: "Organized labor, like all other groups representing the people, repudiates all these attempts to scuttle the Price Control Act and insists that Congress stand firm on continuation of the present legislation...
...Officials of the Hollywood Writers' Congress were shocked at the frankness of this man who had been a member of the Italian Parliament from 1919 to 1921 and who had been banished from Italy by Mussolini in 1925 for his liberal views...
...Salvemini had been invited to address the Congress...
...The censorship seems now to have been extended to other phases of profiteering...
...Among other statements by Salvemini which the Hollywood scribblers couldn't hear were these blunt words from a genuine friend: "Churchill and Roosevelt have taken the wrong track from the beginning...
...Corporation applications for $11,000 salary increases for executives already getting more than $50,000 are granted by the Treasury while the press can find no room for the news in ail the acres of advertis-" ing bought up by tax-evading corporations...
...The Raid On Price Control IN charging the Government with engaging in discriminatory tactics in its economic stabilization program, the AFL's Mr...
...Not by a long shot...
...Churchill is a British Tory and doesn't understand Europe, and Roosevelt has had very bad advisers—a few career boys who while in Italy mingled only with a few Government officials and spent their time in social salons instead of finding out what the overwhelming mass of people are thinking...
...Green rightly made it clear that his organization was not for this reason opposing legislation which is obviously better than nothing...
...He knows that his power rests on his ability to keep the taxpayers of Memphis satisfied...
...GAETANO SALVEMINI, famed Harvard professor, showed some of the fire which once made him a feared opponent of Mussolini's Black Shirts, when he told the Hollywood Writers' Congress last week that he preferred to have them "keep their money and go to hell" rather than agree to suppress his criticism of Churchill-Roosevelt bungling of the Italian situation...
...Strange Goings-On WILLIAM GREEN, president of the American Federation of Labor, made a serious charge the other day when he accused high officials of the Roosevelt Administration, including Stabilization Director Fred Vinson, of resorting to "rigid censorship" to prevent the public from learning the truth about corporation war profits...
...Strange goings-on, we think, in an Administration pledged to equality of wartime sacrifice...
...And Hollywood most of all ought to be exposed to the counsel of a man who was fighting Fascism with his bare hands when the movie crowd was picturing Mussolini as a strong, heroic character...
...Approximately ©ne third of Memphis' municipal expenditures today comes from the gas and electric revenues...
...Americans need all the constructive criticism they can get from a man like Gaetano Salvemini, who knows Italy and the aspirations of the Italian people...
...This clamor about public ownership of utilities being "socialism" is so much rot to Boss Ed...
...It is well known in Washington, for instance, that the Office of Price Administration has cracked down on the release of statistics showing the extent of profiteering in food...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 18
