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MOTION PICTURES AND THE WAR 549
historic screen material of the cinema's first thirty years from becoming "film that was lost."
Other notable short films were shown, and the "short subject/' which had been almost a hobby with me, was emphasized as an important form of historical record. The Museum officials told us how they were collecting "documentaries" from other nations also, to illustrate more widely the power of the film to inform, to persuade, to exhort, or to incite. They had been especially hard at work on the "non-fiction film," including films of opinion and orientation of all kinds, stressing the freedom of the screen as essential to the development.
Whatever my generation has done or left undone, it has certainly developed both the promotional and the testimonal dinner to a fine art. Eating together seems to make it easier to "get together" on any proposal. Looking back over half a century of such dinners— political, cinematical, philanthropic, and otherwise— I am reminded of something my longtime friend, the late James Rowland Angell, said at a dinner of his Yale alumni. The toastmaster in his introduction had given Dr. Angell high praise for all sorts of notable things he had done for the university. When the Yale president rose to speak, and in a flash of memory pictured all the similar dinners he had attended through the years, he turned and said, "Mr. Toastmaster, you omitted one thing; you forgot to tell how many fried chickens I've eaten for Yale."
Well, my souvenir file, too, contains a long chain of dinners, and among them are many of my happiest memories of people and events. One of the most delightful was a Variety Club dinner given to Cordell Hull during the Thanksgiving season of 1944, three days before his resignation took effect, at which the Honorable James F. Byrnes, then Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion, made the chief address, paying his tribute to the retiring Secretary of State, whose office he was to fill only eight months later. That evening I had the double privilege of paying my personal tribute to the guest of honor and of introducing the main speaker. For years the Secretary of State had worked with us like a Trojan to keep the foreign channels open for American films. He had been a tough fighter when American rights were unfairly restricted. Though the disruptions of war made it an unequal battle, he never stopped fighting.
One day in the autumn of 1944 I was lunching in Hollywood with Cecil De Mille when the now-famous "dollar incident" had its beginning. As we were eating, a messenger boy handed him a telegram. When he had read and re-read it, he silently handed it across the table to me, his face flushed, his expression set and stern. It was from the American Federation of Radio Artists, AFL, giving notice that an assessment of one dollar each had been levied on its three thousand members, of whom he was one of the most prominent. The fund was to be