75-19-B5
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Communist Conspiracy? # 2[edit]
Transcript[edit]Back in 1947 Hollywood found itself doing it's biggest battle scene without benefit of stuntmen or trick photography. I'll be right back. Yesterday, I talked about a group of writers, advertising people and theatrical folk who've announced plans to radicalize the media. So far those plans consist of plays, books, films and tv shows purportedly telling the truth about Hollywood back in 1947 when the film industry was brought to its knees by a jurisdictional labor dispute. Having played a part in that whole affair my own version will be somewhat different from the one you'll see in those shows, plays, books and so forth. For example I doubt if they'll bother to tell how a number of motion picture unions and guilds were infiltrated and taken over by communist sympathizers, or how those unions formed a rump organization outside and apart from their parent group, the AFL film council, then engineered a jurisdictional strike over the question of whether some 350 workers should continue in the union they'd always belonged to or lose their jobs to members of another union. Nor will they explain the real purpose of the strike, which was to close down the studios until we were all convinced our own unions were helpless to reopen them. At that point they would then propose a great new union including all picture people from producers and stars to prop men and stagehands and that "they" doing all of this would control that union and the content of pictures, which is what the whole fuss was about. "Tinsel town"— land of make believe in 1947 was for real. The phone would ring at midnight and you'd be told where you'd find the bus in the morning that would take you through the mass rock throwing pickets. A few tried to drive through on their own but not after the cars were turned over and their arms broken to make them unable to work. Homes were bombed and some members of the striking unions, loyal but unaware of their leaders true purpose, lost their jobs permanently as well as their homes cars and whatever savings they owned. The Screen Actor's Guild, of which I was president, unaware at first of the truth we would subsequently learn, volunteered to be the mediator to keep an industry from being closed and thirty thousand people from losing their jobs because of an argument between two unions. We began meeting with the rival factions and soon learned who were the bad guys. Those meetings dragged on for seven months—twice a day—seven days a week. Time after time we'd leave a meeting to get some sleep convinced we had a settlement the next morning they would walk in with a passel of lawyers and a new set of demands. It was a model for Pan Mun Jom and the Paris peace talks yet to come. We'd probably still be meeting if we finally hadn't said, "Enough already. We've kept the studios open without you and these meetings are over." and that's the way it ended, or did it? Why do I have a feeling, here we go again. Tomorrow I'd like to tell you about the communist fronts and the real Hollywood blacklist. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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