In the late 1930s, or perhaps it was as late as 1940, my father and uncle, the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein, sought to join the American armed forces. The Army turned them away; it apparently considered their anti-fascism premature. That, at any rate, is family lore, and I have every reason to believe it. At that point, in the view of much of the government and the country at large, to be against Hitler was to be for Stalin; to be against fascism was to be for communism—by far the greater evil, if indeed Nazism and its ideals were considered evil at all. Add to this equation a third element, the Jews, for in much of the popular imagination the distinction between being an anti-fascist, a Communist, and a Jew did not exist. Even the horrors of World War II did not change public opinion; in one 1945 survey, two-thirds of respondents agreed with the proposition “Jews have too much power and influence in this country.”
At no time was American isolationism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia more pronounced than in the decade of the ’30s, and in no place was such nativism more fervid than in the country’s West—and above all in Los Angeles. By the third decade of the 20th century, the inner migration to the city by white, Protestant, dispossessed workers and farmers was all but complete. The Grapes of Wrath to the contrary, the mindset of these migrants—suspicious of the foreigner and the Jew, reactionary in domestic politics, isolationist toward the world—was reflected in the power structure of the city they had helped to build. It could be seen in the manufacturers and merchants, the police chiefs and sheriffs and attorneys general, the nearby military installations, and preeminently in the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. (Perhaps I might say here that my uncle Julie once wrote a letter to that paper defending the notoriously exclusionary country clubs of the town from the charge that they were anti-Semitic. “Why, recently both the Jonathan Club and the California Club have asked me to become a member. The Jonathan Club invited me to join the California Club, and the California Club invited me to join the Jonathan Club.”)
Julius (left) and Philip Epstein, the author’s uncle and father [Courtesy Leslie Epstein]
Little wonder, then, that when the German government began to mount propaganda campaigns throughout the area and to build networks of espionage and sabotage in preparation for “der Tag” when they would “blow the entire Jew Deal sky-high,” few in the City of Angels were prepared to stop them—and more than a few shared their goals.
What of Hollywood, that city within a city, where Jews made up both the power structure and much of the citizenry? Many of the artists in the town’s only industry were sufficiently appalled by fascism in Germany to fight back, most effectively in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; there, progressives and conservatives (John Ford, Bruce Cabot, Dick Powell, Herman J. Mankiewicz) united “to fight Nazism and Nazi agents in this country.” The less creative workers, those in the private security forces and members of the guilds, often felt differently. Both the chief and assistant chief of police at Warner Bros. were Ku Klux Klan members and Nazi sympathizers. Joe Breen, who made sure that every Hollywood film met the Motion Picture Production Code, thought that the Jews who ran the studios were, “probably, the scum of the earth.”
As for the moguls themselves, none save the suspect Walt Disney wished the new Germany well. What they did wish was to do business there and in the nations Hitler was rapidly gobbling up. With the honorable exception of Warner Bros., which closed its Berlin operation in 1934, most of the studios censored their films for the German market, made them judenrein, and fired their German offices’ Jewish employees. Some of them—Paramount, for instance, and 20th Century-Fox—hung on until after the fall of France.
In the main, the stance taken by the Jews who ran the motion-picture industry did not differ from that of Jewish leadership throughout the United States. Out of a combination of greed, denial, and the not-irrational supposition that active opposition to Hitlerism would be seen by Gentile America as solely a Jewish cause, the rabbis and mainline organizations took their largely barren actions behind the scenes. Thus the moguls quietly contributed to groups fighting Nazi influence in their industry and beyond, while at the same time doing what they could to dissuade their stars from being too public in their political activities.
Claude Rains as Job Skeffington and Sylvia Arslan as his daughter Fanny Skeffington Jr. in ‘Mr. Skeffington’ (1944) [Warner Bros.]
A good example of Hollywood’s disposition can be found in Mr. Skeffington, the only film from the beginning to the end of the war that dared to mention the words “Jewish” or “Jew.” In that picture, Job Skeffington (Claude Rains) tells his daughter that things would be better for her if she went to live with her mother because they are going to be divorced. When she asks why, he says it is because “I’m Jewish; your mother is not.” Before the film was released, the Office of War Information fired off a memo complaining, “This portrayal on the screen of prejudice against the representative of an American minority group is extremely ill-advised.” And when the movie actually opened, all hell broke out at the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League.
Here is a joke told in the ghettos of Europe: Two Jews are brought before a firing squad. A rather kindly Gestapo officer asks if they would like a blindfold. The first Jew thanks him and says yes they would. The second Jew jabs his friend with his elbow and says, “Shah! Don’t make waves.”
Bystanders help erect a giant swastika at the 1936 German Day party in Hindenburg Park near Los Angeles. This is one of several photos taken by Neil Ness, an LAJCC operative who surveilled Nazi activity. [National Archives and Record Administration, via NYU Press]
The best book on Hollywood’s reaction to fascism is Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939. The name Leon Lewis does not appear in it. Two new books—Laura Rosenzweig’s Hollywood’s Spies and Steven Ross’s Hitler in Los Angeles—were written to correct that omission and in general to tell the story of how a small, unknown organization did more to disrupt Nazi plans to prepare America for eventual fascist domination than the FBI, congressional investigative committees, or any other governmental body.
That organization was the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC). It was run, as anonymously as possible, by two men: Lewis, a modest, extremely private lawyer, and Joseph Roos, an Austrian-born journalist. As Jews, they could not risk going into the field (though both were eventually threatened and one of them, Roos, badly beaten); instead they hired a series of non-Jewish men and women to infiltrate the Friends of the New Germany, the German American Bund, the Silver Shirts, and as many as possible of the other like-minded groups working throughout Los Angeles. None of these spies was professional. At $30 per week, none was going to get rich. But each had his motives for despising Hitler’s Germany or for loving the idea of America, and all knew perfectly well that in winning the trust of those who wished to overthrow the government of their country they were risking their lives—and one of them, Julius Sicius, seems to have lost his in the cause.
Their tasks were to discover what they could, to sow dissension among the leaders and members of the groups they had joined, and ultimately to make it impossible for those dreams of der Tag to come true. The first thing they discovered was that those dreams were not half-baked fantasies. Many of the pro-Nazi groups had formed cells that were following orders from Berlin. Their members met German ships that supplied them with propaganda matter and sometimes with personnel. These groups made plans to steal weapons from sympathetic guards at armories; arms were stored around the city in factories and private homes. Strategies for sabotaging power plants and naval facilities were studied, revised, and kept in waiting.
Armed paramilitary groups like the Silver Shirts—an American fascist group modeled after the Brownshirts, they sewed their own uniforms to prevent them from being touched by Jewish tailors—paraded in the Hollywood Hills. That same group also kept maps that showed where prominent Jews lived and had allies in the LAPD, including chief James E. Davis, who seemed to believe that all Jews were Communists.
Besides the Silver Shirts, other cells readied themselves to hang selected Jews—including Lewis and Roos, together with Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Louis B. Mayer, and B. P. Schulberg. In one fevered plot, two chemists began to treat needles with a poison that could be “shot into a Jew either by rubber band or by a blow gun.” In another, uncannily prescient, the head of the American Nationalist party dreamed of forming
There is no question that the network of LAJCC agents discovered a great deal. Nor is there any doubt that they spied so well that their targets, knowing information was being leaked to authorities, began to spy on themselves and so undermined each other’s efforts. Yet a chasm remained between exposing the agents of Berlin and bringing them to justice. Lewis and his little army had to fight not only against the fifth column but against the entrenched network of their sympathizers and collaborators that stretched all the way from studio cops up through government prosecutors at every level, Congress and the State Department, and parts of the cabinet. Indifference to the threat of fascism, combined with zeal to deal with the red menace, allowed all too many of the conspirators to escape.
Still, the LAJCC had victories small and large. As an example of the former, one of Lewis’s men persuaded a Nazi agent on his way to Tokyo that a grove of trees on a golf course was a secret military installation; the photos of those oaks made it all the way to Japan. As for the latter, the Douglas Aircraft plant was almost certainly saved from sabotage by information passed on by an LAJCC operative. That no explosions rocked defense establishments anywhere on the West Coast, as they had in the East, was in large measure due to the spies’ undercover work and intervention. Some of the pro-Nazi operatives exposed by the LAJCC’s detective work fled or were deported, and Congress managed to pass the Alien Registration Act, a tribute to the evidence that LAJCC had put before it.
Both Hollywood’s Spies and Hitler in Los Angeles have a good story to tell. Alas, neither is written by a storyteller. Both authors are scholars—and it shows. The prose in both books is serviceable, though Laura Rosenzweig tends toward clichés (“hearts and minds,” “met his match,” “avoided the limelight,” “limits of the law”) and is not always well organized, while Steven Ross succumbs to the affliction of all too many scholars—having unearthed a fact, he can’t bear to part with it; we must take care not to get lost in the weeds of names, places, incidents, and dates. Still, the general reader should persevere. The story isn’t merely good, it’s important. These Jews did join the battle, and their story deserves not only to be told but to be celebrated.
Another photo taken by Neil Ness at the 1936 German Day party in Hindenburg Park near L.A. In this photo, picnickers chat beside Nazi banners. [National Archives and Record Administration, via NYU Press]
In the hours before he allowed his six children to be poisoned and before he shot himself to death, Joseph Goebbels declared that the ideals of National Socialism—the emptiness of life and that man is a wolf to man—would return triumphant in 50 years. He was off by 20. In Poland, in Hungary and Turkey, and in movements through the rest of Europe—alas, even in Germany now—the tide that he predicted is rising. These two books remind us of the high-water mark in one American city and by extension in the country at large. We had a president then that saw the danger and willed the country to have the courage to fight it. And in Los Angeles a small group of men and women risked their lives to fight it, too. The president we have now winks, nods, and encourages those who march with torches and shout that the Jews will not replace them. Will the country find itself, and its own best ideals, so that it might fight once again?
One last note. When Julie and Phil were turned away from the Army, they returned to their jobs at Warner Bros. Three months after the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, they started work on their screenplay of Casablanca. Two years later they wrote and produced Mr. Skeffington. They were no longer premature. It is never too early to resist.
Leslie Epstein teaches in the creative writing program at Boston University and is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novel King of the Jews.
