This is not beyond Welky's purview. He has a sketchy little chapter about what happened after America entered the war, but he prefers the story of the anti-communist crusades of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
To be sure, the congressional hearings and blacklisting of that era were extensions of the prewar furor against communism in movies and the increasingly interventionist sentiment expressed on screen.
But this is not a story that can be told only in terms of the movie industry.
It needs to account for the silences of FDR, the arrogance of the State Department, the temporizing of the rabbis and above all the vast indiffer- ence of the American popu- lace.
Welky offers a good deal of interesting information that will, one hopes, someday be useful to a writer who not only focuses on what was really significant in Hollywood's confrontation with totalitarianism but also locates that struggle in the broader context of a shameful passage in American life.
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