Hearings regarding the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session. Public law 601 (section 121, subsection Q (1947)

2 COMMUNISM IN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY This committee, under its mandate from the House of Kepresentatives, has the responsibility of exposing and spotlighting subversive elements Avherever tliey may exist. As I have already pointed out, it is only to be expected that such elements would strive desperately to gain entry to the motion-picture industry, simply because the industry offers such a tremendous weapon for education and propaganda. That Communists have made such an attempt in Hollywood and with considerable success is already evident to this committee from its preliminary investigative work. The problem of Communist infiltration is not limited to the movie industry. That even our Federal Government has not been immune from the menate is evidenced by the fact that $11,000,000 is now being spent to rid the Federal service of Communists. Communists are also firmly entrenched in control of a number of large and powerful labor unions in this country. Yet simply because there are Communist union leaders among the longshoremen or seamen, for example, one does not infer that the owners of the shipping industries are Communists and Communist sympathizers, or that the majority of workers in those industries hold to an un-American philosophy. So it is with the movie industry. I cannot emphasize too strongly the seriousness of Communist infiltration, which we have found to be a mutual problem for many, many different fields of endeavor in the United States. Communists for years have been conducting an unrelentless "boring from within" campaign against America's democratic institutions. While never possessing a large numerical strength, the Communists nevertheless have found that they could dominate the activities of unions or otlier mass enterprises in this country by capturing a few strategic positions of leadership. This technique, I am sorry to say, has been amazingly profitable for the Communists. And they have been aided all along the line by non-Communists, who are either sympathetic to the aims of communism or are unwilling to recognize the danger in Communist infiltration. The ultimate purpose of the Communists is a well-established fact. Despite sporadic statements made to the contrary for reasons of expediency, the Communist movement looks to the establishment of Soviet-dominated, totalitarian governments in all of the countries of the world, and the Communists are willing to use force and violence to achieve this aim if necessary. The United States is one of the biggest obstacles to this movement. The fact was startlingly illustrated recently by the open announcement of the Communist International — a world-wide party organization dedicated to promoting world-wide Communist revolution, which previously operated underground. The vituperation leveled at the United States by this new international Communist organization clearly indicated that America is considered the chief stumbling block in the Soviet plans for world domination and is therefore the chief target in what we might call the Soviet Union's ideological war against non-Soviet governments. There is no question that there are Communists in Hollywood. We cannot minimize their importance there, and that their influence has already made itself felt has been evidenced by internal turmoil in the