MOVING-PICTURE SCREEN AND RADIO PROPAGANDA

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1941

UNITED STATES SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE,

Washington, D. C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to adjournment on Monday, September 15, 1941, at 10:30 a. m., in the caucus room, Senate Office Building, Senator D. Worth Clark presiding.

Present: Senators Clark of Idaho (chairman of the subcommittee), McFarland, and Tobey.

Senator CLARK of Idaho. The subcommittee will please come to order. Senator Sheridan Downey, of California, has asked the subcommittee to open the hearings this morning by the presentation of a statement. Consequently, at this time the subcommittee will hear Senator Downey, of California.

Senator Downey, one member of the subcommittee has inquired whether there are copies of your statement available here so that we may follow it.

Senator DowNEY. I can have them furnished later.
Senator CLARK of Idaho. Here are some.

ator Downey.

You may proceed, Sen

STATEMENT OF SENATOR SHERIDAN DOWNEY, JUNIOR SENATOR

FROM CALIFORNIA

Senator DOWNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the subcommittee.

You have convened this committee to investigate one of the greatest industries in California, and as a servant of that State I am naturally concerned in the process and the result of your research. But because your inquiry bears not only upon the affairs of one business but upon a principle vital to our democracy-the principle of free speechI am concerned as a citizen no less than as a Senator. For our Bill of Rights is a common heritage, and its jealous preservation is an obligation which rests upon us all.

Freedom of expression is the steel frame supporting our democratic structure. One fleck of rust will not cause the metal to disintegrate and the edifice to crumble. But rust-once it corrodes our shining steel-may spread until we abandon the structure into which we have poured so much of our toil, our blood, our vision.

For these reasons we should, I think, be wary of using the ill-defined term of "propaganda" as an excuse for censorship or harassing investigation. We are all of us humanly prone to regard the dicta of the opposition as plain propaganda, and our own dicta as unvarnished

data. It was with recognition of this fallability of man, and with suspicion of any absolute definition of truth that the founders of this country insisted upon the right of every man to come by his own truth, and to state it to his fellow men with impunity.

I believe that this same democratic guaranty covers such forms of expression as the moving pictures. I believe that the procedure of these pictures share the same privilege with editors, soap-box orators, radio commentators, clergymen, yes, even Senators, the privilege of airing their own views in their own way on problems of public concern. No Senator can control the kind of publicity that the movies may produce, nor can movie moguls find a national sounding board on the floor of the United States Senate.

But while I believe that the motion-picture producers possess the privilege of free speech like the rest of us, I am convinced that they have availed themselves of it with moderation, somewhat astonishing it seems to me, if we compare it with the tide of publicity now flooding out in every newspaper, on every air wave, at every street corner, and in the Congress of the United States. Specifically, I feel that a combing of films distributed in recent years has failed signally to reveal any such insidious propaganda for war as has been, I think, too lightly alleged.

I can speak upon this with some authority: I am an inveterate movie-goer, and I think I have seen most, if not all, of the pictures which have been mentioned here as evidence. And my attention has been about equally divided between the screen and the audience. If the showing of Man Hunt, Land of Liberty, I Married a Nazi, Sergeant York, Dive Bomber, Escape, or The Mortal Storm incited in the spectators any discernible fervor for intervention which they had not brought with them, then I must be both blind and deaf.

Take Man Hunt as an example. The audience was moved certainly. Who could fail to be moved by Walter Pidgeon's great portrayal of a decent and scrupulous human being awakening to the peril of an unscrupulous world force? But is that the result of propaganda, or is it simply the instinctive and indigenous reaction of Americans to the Nazi menace, and a sympathetic indentification with its victims?

Indeed, I believe that what is true of this film is true of all of its type; that the antipathy of the audience to nazi-ism evoked the film, and not vice versa. The opinion was there-any Gallup poll for years back will reveal that. And the movies reacted to their public, not the public to its movies.

If propaganda be stretched, as it all too often is, to mean the strong expression of one's views, with the hope of convincing one's fellows, then we are all guilty of it 10 times a day; and so is the movie industry. And I ask you gentlemen, what else should we expect of any free medium of expression, if it be healthy and not anemic, if it be not craven but with "the courage of its own convictions"? Should we expect Hollywood to turn its back upon the reality of our world and plunge into an unrelieved mist of fantasy? Should it ignore the chaos and the strife and the tragedy of the world we now live in, and devote itself exclusively to musical comedy, boy-meets-girl plots, and horse operas? Heaven knows,

that is a sufficiently prevalent tendency not to need encouragement from the United States Senate.

The Great Dictator has been cited before the committee as an instance of propaganda. Well, loosely defined, it is propaganda; undoubtedly it reflects the ideas of its famous producer, Mr. Chaplin, and it does seek to persuade one that dictators are not all that they claim to be. But surely, if the picture had a fault it was not that it made too dark a picture of foreign rulers, but one too light; it made comedy out of world tragedy, for at the time that film was made we thought it still possible to laugh at what dictators do; today we can only weep at what they have done.

But perhaps it is the peroration of Mr. Chaplin's film which irks some critics of the industry. In it he made a plea for peace, for the end of tyranny and the realization of the modest desires of the little men" of all nations. Is this propaganda for intervention? If so, then I am an interventionist-and I assure you, I am not, despite my defense of those who may be and who may want to express their opinions.

Let my position on this matter be clear: I defend the right of any man or group of men to urge this country to intervention or to isolation, to go to war or to stay out of it. My own view of our crisis is unchanged. I believe that we have neither the power not the will to impose our kind of peace upon the world by force of arms. I believe that any such crusade will finally fail and we will return to the New World disillusioned and despairing of world-wide salvation through our leadership and sacrifice. But if a majority of the American people decide upon such a venture, I will serve their purpose with as much strength as is in me, but, I confess, with a reluctant and unhappy heart.

That I may not be misunderstood, I want to reaffirm my declaration made at the time I voted for the lend-lease bill; That I believe the American people by solemn obligation of honor are committed to support and assist Great Britain by every material resource short of war-and let me emphasize, I mean short of war. Likewise, too, I am persuaded that we must continue to build and maintain the most potent military power that we can, here in the Western World. I recognize, also, that President Roosevelt has been selected by a majority of the American voters to guide our international policy in this period of dreadful strain and chaos, and in my official conduct I shall give due consideration to that important fact.

Frankly, gentlemen, it strikes me that the subcommittee is focusing its inquiry in the wrong direction. The world is on fire, and because a few pale shadows of its conflagration flicker for a moment or two on the screen which is Hollywood, you seek to throw cold water on California. You pursue an illusion. The blaze is in Europe and Asia, not in my State; the propaganda you seek for is history itself; the fiery unrolling of events across the seas, the tumbling into ruins of old civilizations. If you cannot put out the fire there, how can you hope to prevent its reflection here?

The potent propaganda is not movies about Hitler; it is Hitler himself-his words and his deeds. The record-the bare, factual record of this man is what conditions the mind of America toward hatred of nazidom-not any ephemeral shadows of Europe's Armaged

don. What movie genius could produce so fierce a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda as Hitler has himself brought forth in Mein Kampf? What script could arouse our animosity toward his philosophy as surely as the simple chart of Nazi conquest-the torn-up treaties, the invaded and subjugated countries, the destruction of millions of homes and the families that loved them, the cancer-like spread of concentration camps and slave labor from one end of Europe to another? No, gentlemen, the facts themselves make propaganda pale.

Voltaire said in despair of another age: "Vice no longer pays to virtue even the homage of hypocrisy." But surely no age exhibited that more clearly than this one. With appalling brutal frankness, Hitler has glorified all the unhappy doctrines of Machiavelli and added his own terrifying touches. He boasts his belief in consistent lying, condemns honesty, endorses slavery, and revels in bloody racial persecution. Integrity, justice-all the spiritual values to which tyrants of former times at least paid lip service-he openly derides; never has there been loosed on this earth an evil force so fully conscious of itself, so impervious to the ordinary restraints of decent civilization. Hitler and his armies of destruction are nihilism brought to terrible incarnation.

Gentlemen, in the face of this reality, which oppresses the mind of every American, whether he has ever seen a movie or not, it is idle, certainly, to single out the motion-picture industry as a force in the molding of public opinion. Without a doubt the movies are potentially a powerful instrument of political expression; no one could or would gainsay that. But in my opinion, no convincing evidence can be presented showing that their influence in determining our people's attitudes toward other nations has been anything but negligible.

Even, however, if it could be proved that the motion-picture industry were attempting to push our citizens toward attitudes essentially alien to their own natures, there would still remain insuperable difficulties in censoring such efforts. In the last analysis, who can censor but the Government, or some agency of it? And is the answer to private propaganda-Government propaganda under the cloak of censorship? Surely, this could mean only an aggravation of our tendency toward centralizing governmental power-and a death blow to our individual liberties of expression. I ask this subcommittee, if it should deny to Mr. Chaplin the right to decide whether or not The Great Dictator should be displayed, to whom would the right of decision be given? Should the control be passed to a censor appointed by the President, by Congress, or would the governors and legislatures of the several States be empowered to act? No, even if the motion-picture industry-or the press or radio for that matter-should abuse its freedom of expression, I say, "Let us have abuse rather than abrogation; let us have license rather than limitation." If the byproducts of free speech be distortion and defamation, still let us endure them and count ourselves to have the better bargain. Even when some abuse our sacred freedom, to indulge that fearful phobia, that despicable sin against our common humanity-anti-Semitism-still would it be better to have that ancient falsehood proclaimed and destroyed, as it must be, rather than risk the suppression of truth itself.