Communist infiltration of Hollywood motion-picture industry : hearing before the Committee on Un-American activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-second Congress, first session (1951)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

1836 COMMUNISM IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY Mr. Tunberg. I would like, if I could just continue for a moment, to say that in 1947, Mr. Emmet Lavery, who was then president of the guild, offered to turn over our records, our entire records to the FBI, so you know that at this time the administration of the guild was fighting, even then, the problem, but we did have this influence, and they exerted pressure on guild policy far beyond their numbers, just because of the apathy of the general membership. I know I was typi- cal, a typical screen writer. 1 was busily engaged in writing, engaged in my professional work, and I paid my dues. I didn't pay much attention to what was happening in the guild, and I think this is true of a great many writers, and it was along about 1947 that I was first alerted to this danger. Allen Rivkin called me saying he had formed something called the All-Guild Committee to fight the Communist influence in the guild. The All-Guild Com- mittee was composed of people who were violently anti-Communist and were aware of the danger. He asked me if I would run for office. He said, "If you are worried about this problem, as I am, you will run for office," and I agreed to. Mr. Tavenner. That was in what year ? Mr. Tunberg. That was in 1947. Mr. Tavenner. Let me ask you a question which occurs to me at this point. You said your membership consisted of 1,200 ? Mr. Tunberg. That's right, approximately. Mr. Tavenner. And you stated that you had this problem of pres- sure brought upon your group by—I assume you mean by members of the Communist Party ? Mr. Tunberg. I assume they were. 1 must say here, I was never in their confidence. I wasn't in a position to know who was a Communist and who was not. All I know is the people who were against us, who seemed to be extreme left-wing influence. Mr. Tavenner. Well,-at that time did you have a bylaw of your organization which established the number of members which would constitute a quorum for the transaction of business? Mr. Tunberg. Yes, we did. It was 10 percent, I believe, at the time. Mr. Tavenner. Ten percent, and 10 percent of 1,200 mean that busi- ness could be conducted with a membership of—I mean, with 120 persons present? Mr. Tunberg. Ten percent of whatever the membership was at that date, yes. Mr. Tavenner. Then should there be 61 persons present at that meeting who were members of the Communist Party, they could con- trol the action, if there was a bare quorum ? Mr. Tunberg. That is actually what happened, Mr. Tavenner. We have really been through the mill on fighting these people, and they capitalized to the ultimate on the lethargy, on the apathy which kept people away from meetings. We found it very difficult to get people, who worked all day, to get out at night and sit around until midnight at meetings. They capitalized on that. They were disciplined, they were militant, they were vigorous. They came to a man to meetings and dominated them for awhile. Mr. Tavenner. All right. Now, in that connection, this investiga- tion has disclosed, so far, I am told, 78—the number may not be exactly correct. Mr. Tunberg. Yes; that is approximately right.