“INTELLIGENT GENTILES”

The Hollywood Question indexes powerful shifts within deep structures of perception. In particular, the Question helped to shape a whole way of thinking about a variety of issues concerning American life. As this chapter discusses, the Hollywood Question ultimately asserted an older version of American politics, one better suited to an unwired, premodern, agrarian America and the nostalgia that attends this myth. Throughout the 1930s, the Question espoused a vision of American foreign and domestic policy at odds with its nemeses: the Roosevelt administration, a cohesive cultural diversity, and a burgeoning sense of internationalism. At best, the Hollywood Question responded apathetically to Nazism: instead of articulating opposition to the Nazi treatment of the Jews, it explained German anti-Semitism as a natural response to Communism, and anti-Nazism as an overreaction that would bring even more hardship upon Jews. During this period, the Hollywood Question also found new ways to implicate Jews as Communists, seeing evidence of ethnic culpability in the world political climate and shifts in the country's domestic agenda. Communism had purportedly duped American Jews, playing upon their “natural” fears of domestic Nazism and fascism. And the Question explained that Jewish-Communist labor had strong-armed Jewish-controlled Hollywood into supporting the New Deal.

Because the Hollywood Question served as a uniquely flexible response to modernity, it could address a diverse range of political configurations. Channeling traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, the political incarnation of the Hollywood Question covered a spectrum of liberal and conservative interests. It addressed the older, inherently Populist ideals of both Progressivism and isolationism. At the same time, the Question connected these ideals to an emergent anti-Communist paranoia over the unseen global enemy.