As the controversy over Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary time-out from talk show hosting played out last September, Jane Fonda announced that she was reviving the Committee for the First Amendment to help preserve freedom of expression in the Age of Trump. The first iteration of the committee was a star-studded political action group formed to protest the first round of hearings held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947, a sensational show trial mounted to investigate alleged communist subversion in the motion picture industry. The group, said Fonda filles, was founded by her father, Henry Fonda.
That is not quite true. The Committee for the First Amendment was the brainchild of screenwriter Philip Dunne and directors John Huston and William Wyler. They wrote the public statements, placed the ads in the trade press, and stage-managed its most memorable publicity stunt, a flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. with 25 stars on aboard, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, to protest the hearings in person on Capitol Hill. A stand-up guy and stalwart liberal, Henry Fonda was indeed a member of the Committee for the First Amendment and an early signatory to the defiant statements published in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, gestures that, in the context of the times, were gutsy acts of conscience. “We, the undersigned, as American citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempts of the House Un-American Activities Committee to smear the motion picture industry and Broadway,” read a typical broadside. However, he was not a founder nor did he make the celebrated trip to Washington.
Fonda may have conflated her father’s involvement in the CFA with another activist Hollywood committee in which he took a more visible role, namely the Committee of 56. Less well-known than the Committee for the First Amendment, the Committee of 56 targeted an opponent even more menacing than HUAC, namely Nazi Germany. Moreover, unlike the Committee for the First Amendment, the membership expanded well beyond the elite ranks of Hollywood talent. Its strategic outreach to a broad spectrum of the American public provides a better model for Hollywood-initiated political activism than the insular and ineffectual Committee for the First Amendment.
The Committee of 56 was formed on December 8, 1938 when Clark Eichelberger, an unofficial American delegate to the League of Nations and representative of 42 peace groups, came to Hollywood to recruit members of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League to sign on to a statement of principles called the Declaration of Democratic Independence. Since its formation in 1936, HANL had been trying to alert Americans to the menace of Nazism at home and abroad — cajoling the studios to produce anti-Nazi films; protesting visits to Hollywood by Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator, and Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker; and holding huge anti-Nazi rallies.
By the end of 1938, with the news from Europe growing ever more ominous, HANL’s membership was eager to take more decisive and headline grabbing action. The year had seen the annexation of Austria in March, the invasion of western Czechoslovakia (what the Nazis called the Sudetenland) in October, and, on the night of November 9-10, the Reich-wide pogrom now known as Kristallnacht.
Because screenwriters were in attendance, Eichelberger’s prose was punched up and a catchy name was settled on for the group. The Committee of 56 took its numbering and inspiration from the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and patterned the prose after Thomas Jefferson’s rhetoric in the original. Just as Americans in 1776 “threw off the yoke of tyranny and called upon the world to witness their Declaration of Independence,” a new generation has been called upon “to assert man’s inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the face of “a new tyranny [that] has arisen to challenge democracy’s heritage.”
The group listed a long train of abuses by the Nazis, a regime “unfit to be the friend of free people” and issued a demand for concrete action from the Roosevelt Administration. “All economic connections between the governments of the United States and Germany [must] be totally severed until such time as Germany is willing to re-enter the family of nations in accordance with the humane principles of international law.” (It was at an this early organizational meeting, held at the home of Edward G. Robinson, that Groucho Marx raised his glass and delivered his famous tribute: “I want to propose a toast to Warners — the only studio with any guts.” The studio had just announced the news that Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first explicitly anti-Nazi film produced by a major studio, was in the pipeline at Warners Bros.)
Though more than 56 eager signatories were waiting in the wings, the organizers limited the number to 56 to conform to the branding. In 1938, the marquee names would have been known to every American moviegoer, a constellation that included Don Ameche, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Myrna Loy. With the congenial mainstream liberal Melvyn Douglas serving as chairman and spokesman, the committee was a classic Popular Front group casting a wide ideological net. Artists known to be on the left — Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, and Gale Sondergaard — and artists of a more conservative bent — James Cagney, John Ford, and Robert Montgomery — signed up side by side. Imagine, say, Mark Ruffalo and Sylvester Stallone marching under the same banner.
Also among the signatories were representatives from a subsection of the Hollywood workforce that tended to shun public pledges of political allegiance — the moguls. Jack and Harry Warner from Warner Bros., Joseph M. Schenck of 20th Century-Fox, and Carl Laemmle, the retired founding father of Universal Pictures, were among the signatories. “This very welcome change of attitude on the part of a few tycoons was unquestionably traceable to the news of the most recent Nazi persecutive outrages,” observed Ivan Spears, the influential columnist for Box Office, referring to the bracing impact of Kristallnacht in the company town. Alas, Spears lamented, most studio heads still refused to sign on to the declaration, perhaps because the Nazis had sent out word that the German market for Hollywood films would be further curtailed due to “incessant agitation against the Third Reich in the United States” from a certain industry “under predominating Jewish influence.”
More surprising than the involvement of a few moguls was the cooperation from the exhibition end of the business, a branch of the industry traditionally skittish about alienating any segment of the moviegoing audience. Ed Kuykendall, president of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America, assured Melvyn Douglas that he was “in hearty accord” with the declaration and “would be glad to suggest to our membership in the next bulletin that they cooperate in circulating the petitions.”
The trade press, which was usually prone to go into lecture mode whenever Hollywood stars recited unscripted lines, also expressed approval. “This is exciting stuff,” editorialized Box Office. “It can drive home to American audiences what a free country has meant, does mean, and can continue to mean so long as it stays free.” “Hollywood Strikes Back at Hitler!” was the headline of a laudatory account in Screenbook, an article that THR described as “a wide departure from the usual fan mag guff — and readers go for it!” The support from the producers, the exhibitors, and the trade press signaled that the Committee of 56 was riding the crest of an anti-Nazi cultural wave not paddling against it.
On December 21, 1938, the 56ers orchestrated their most media friendly event, a ceremonial signing of the declaration staged for the newsreels and wire service photographers. On a stage decorated with American flags and portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Melvyn Douglas read from parts of the declaration while Fox Movietone, Universal, and Metrotone newsreels filmed the stars affixing their John Hancocks to a mock-up of the declaration written on colonial style parchment “to resemble the first declaration as nearly as possible” (presumably with technical assistance from a studio prop man). “All of the newsreels will insert the clip in their weekly release, and Committees of 56, which have been formed throughout the country, will hand out petitions to theatergoers following the showing of the clip,” reported THR. A photograph of 17 well-dressed members of the group posing as if for a John Trumbull painting appeared in newspapers around the country.
Each member of the 5,000-strong Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was given five copies: one to fill out for themselves, four to be passed on to friends. However, outreach went well beyond the precincts of Hollywood. 300,000 copies of the declaration with spaces for 56 signatures were printed up and distributed nationwide. Subcommittees were organized in virtual all major American cities, sometimes featuring ceremonial signups led by descendants of the original 56 singers. Newbold Morris, president of the New York City Council, and a direct descendent of Lewis Morris, who signed the Declaration of Independence as a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, staged a signing in honor of his forefather. In Montana, subcommittees were formed in all the state’s 56 counties. The Committee hoped to have 20,000,000 Americans co-sign the declaration and then present the petitions to President Roosevelt on July 4, 1939.
On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany, the committee kept up the momentum with a massive “Quarantine Hitler” rally at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. “Drama, Stars, Speakers, Ballet, Music,” promised the handbills. Presided over by Melvyn Douglas, the evening featured the presentation of a “living newspaper of Hitler’s six years of terror” performed by Joan Bennett, Groucho Marx, Miriam Hopkins, and actors from the Federal Theatre Project. The “living newspaper” was an innovative specialty of the Federal Theatre, a (literally) ripped-from-the headlines play made up of dramatic readings from the newspaper reporting of the day.
Throughout the first half of 1939, the committee arranged signings, lectures, and radio addresses. Swank cocktail parties lent an atmosphere of proto-radical chic to the activism. In the Mandalay room of the Delmonico Hotel in New York, Sylvia Sidney, Franchot Tone, and the cast of the Group Theatre’s production of Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People hosted a sign up.
One scheduled event, however, was derailed by history. The committee had planned to host Edvard Beneš, the former president of Czechoslovakia, as a guest of honor at a luncheon and banquet in Hollywood. Beneš’ appearance was cancelled when, on March 15, 1939, the Nazis invaded Prague and erased what remained of Czechoslovakia from the map. Jan Masaryk, son of Tomáš Masaryk, first president of the Czech Republic, spoke in his place.
The Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia helped propel the committee’s cause; it also had a transformative effect on American public opinion. In April 1939, a Gallup Poll showed 65 percent of Americans supported an economic boycott of Nazi goods. That same month, the US government placed a 25 percent tariff on German imports. “With the levying of a 25% tariff on most of the products that come from Nazi Germany,” said Melvyn Douglas, “the Hollywood Committee of 56 has great cause for rejoicing.”
By then, it had collected 5,000,000 signatures, well short of the goal of 20,000,000, but it had seen its pro-boycott, anti-Nazi sentiments go mainstream and had certainly played a role in the attitudinal change. The committee decided to declare victory, merge back into the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and work on another agenda, the ending of American isolationism — until that is, August 23, 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact blasted apart the unity of the Popular Front and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League alike.
In 1947, many former members of the Committee of 56 — including Henry Fonda — signed on to the declarations of its spiritual successor. At the dawn of the Cold War, however, the Committee for the First Amendment was pushing against the cultural wave. It stopped neither the investigations of HUAC nor the implementation of the Hollywood blacklist. In February 1948, the group folded after the employers of the membership made clear that an outspoken commitment to the First Amendment was a career killer.
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