Cold War, culture war: The FBI and the battle over film propaganda

This project offers the first full-length study of the FBI's investigation of the motion picture industry. I argue that the FBI, along with its allies, effectively turned Hollywood into a key ideological battleground of the Cold War. This dissertation covers the period from the early 1920s through the 1950s, focusing chiefly on the 1940s. Whereas World War II has often been seen as a dormant period for anti-Communism, this work shows that the alliance with the Soviet Union during the war years provided the impulse for domestic anti-Communists to prepare their attack on the film industry.; The FBI, along with its allies in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, were correct in spotting elements of left and liberal thought in some Hollywood films. They erred, however, not only in attributing these works to the devious infiltration of Communist propagandists, but especially in transforming this discourse over American political culture into a matter of national security.; Based on multi-archival research, this dissertation also serves as the first post-revisionist account of the Cold War in Hollywood. Whereas the literature on this subject has long been marked by polemics on both Left and Right, I argue for the need to move past accounts of victimization and/or subversion, and toward a more complex understanding of the institutional developments and ideological conflicts in Hollywood during World War II and the early Cold War period.