THE HOLLYWOOD SQUEEZE
Mayer, Milton
The Hollywood Squeeze By MILTON MAYER Hollywood THIS wonderland of the world is going to be investigated by Congressman John Rankin, who is so much ¦worse than Congressman Dies that the liberals...
...The fact that this is the historic technique of reactionaries against radicals was, of course, forgotten...
...They all hate Gerald, but they love democracy more...
...Some of them have opposed it and have been damned as violently as the rabbis of Amsterdam damned Spinoza...
...I say they are pretending...
...The essence of the Bill of Rights—and the Bill of Rights is the democratic essence of our Constitution —is free speech, not for those we like, but for those we don't like...
...If it makes sense and will work, then the only ground for suppressing a man's words is that advanced by Justice Holmes, namely, that the words create a "clear and present danger" to the safety of the state...
...I honor the Commies, dirty and anti-democratic though they are...
...Luce would put it, has decided to stay in California...
...The capitalists pretend to believe in democracy, while the Commies, since last month, no longer even pretend to...
...Like him, only coming at it from the opposite direction, they love democracy so much they could hug it to death...
...Now what bothers me about Hollywood's crusade to strangle the most fundamental of all fundamental democratic rights is that some of my fellow-Jews are mixed up in it...
...The American Civil Liberties Union, the local Civil Liberties Committee, and several eminent individuals such as Mr...
...For Democratic Democracy If democracy makes sense, then it has to be democratic...
...But they are all well disguised as 101% Americans...
...And not all the Jews in Hollywood are mixed up in it...
...Suppression may be good for the majority...
...Either democracy makes sense, or it doesn't...
...Suppression is the heart of fascism, and fascism, unlike democracy, is not good for the Jews...
...Either it will work, or it won't...
...The crusade against Gerald is not being run by the Jews...
...Ernest Caldecott, the Unitarian divine, have stuck their necks all the way out in behalf of Gerald's right to be heard...
...Then the Hollywood democrats, whose advertising lineage is legion, put the heat on the local press, demanding, in the name of the Four Freedoms, suppression of announcements of Gerald's speech...
...The local press, being somewhat more venal than the owners of halls, responded to its masters' voice, and Gerald was given the Silent Treatment...
...If only one Jew were supporting this crusade, I would be horrified, since nothing less than democracy will ever save the Jews...
...The Hollywood democrats went right to work...
...but I shudder as I contemplate the prospect of being squeezed between the Hollywood democrats, on the one hand, and Congressman Rankin, on the other...
...They deny that democracy is lost as the result of a victorious war fought in its name...
...The Hollywood Squeeze By MILTON MAYER Hollywood THIS wonderland of the world is going to be investigated by Congressman John Rankin, who is so much ¦worse than Congressman Dies that the liberals are beginning to long for the bad old days when Marty was conducting the Congressional crusade to save America for the white, Protestant, Republican Americans...
...It rained the following day, and Gerald, punch-pleased, as Mr...
...but there is more than one Jew mixed up in this Gentile crusade to destroy democracy, and my horror is something to see...
...He arrived here last week and went around town trying to rent a hall to make a speech in...
...Smith Goes To Hollywood Since last week, Hollywood's crusade for democracy has been focused on Gerald L. K. Smith, the petty rednecked hoodlum who, after a campaign last year that had the liberals all mobilized to keep him off the ballot, got something like five hundred votes out of something like two million cast in the state of Michigan...
...If the safety of the state is so precarious that a two-spot like Gerald endangers it, then the state is lost anyway, whatever the Hollywood democrats do to preserve it...
...and once the civil rights of any man are lost, the civil rights of all, beginning with the minorities, are jeopardized...
...In the name of democracy, which defends to the death the right of a man to talk, the Hollywood democrats put the heat on the owner of every hall in Los Angeles to refuse Gerald a meeting-place...
...if they so much as took a gander at his record, they would know that Gerald could not be built up into a clear and present danger, not even in the movies...
...The Commies, and the Hollywood actors and writers who play with them out of boredom, are right in there and boxing alongside the capitalists who suppressed the announcement of Gerald's meeting in the papers...
...Gerald went through his song and dance, blaming the recent lack of rain in this area on the Communists and the Jews...
...It is being run, like everything in this country, by the Gentiles...
...There are good men and true even here, though...
...But he spoke anyway, and the result of all these democratic efforts to suppress him, was that he had an audience of 3.000 or 4.000, most of whom doubtless attended for no other reason than that they figured that anybody whose suppression was demanded by so many nice people must have something to say worth hearing...
...Hollywood is not afraid of being investigated, or even exterminated, by Congressman Rankin, because it knows that it will rise again at the unanimous request of the admirers of Dorothy Lamour and the American Way...
...But they will not listen to me, and my frustration has driven me almost to the-point of entering a monastery, if only I could find one that specialized in cheese blintzes and borscht...
...but the smaller the minority is...
...The owners, of one of the big halls refused to be terrorized by the democrats, however, and Gerald had his meeting scheduled...
...This is so elementary and obvious an assertion that I should have blushed to make it ten years ago, but it is one that is not understood any more in Hollywood...
...Year in and year out I have warned the Jews not to get mixed up in such dirty Gentile business as suppression...
...Now the Hollywood democrats are pretending that Gerald is a clear and present danger to the safety of the state...
...They are subversive, all right, but they don't know it, and the most subversive of those I have met, in the course of my own 15-minute investigation of Hollywood, remind me of nobody so much as of Congressman John Rankin...
...the more suppressihle...
...Smith has, I understand, changed the name of his racket to the Christian Americans, or something of that sort, and, the citizens of Michigan having got rid of him by tickling their throats with a feather, he has decided to see what the shake-down is like in Golden California...
...If Congressman Rankin knew a subversive when he saw one—or, for that matter, his ear from his elbow—he would find plenty of, them in Hollywood...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 30
