Cecil B. DeMille |
November 7, 1947
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Cecil B. DeMille
Film Director and Producer, The Squaw Man, The Virginian, The Ten Commandments, Union Pacific, Unconquered; Screenwriter; Co-founder, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Judge Bray, Justice Spence, honored guests, Lady and Gentlemen, when I was asked to address you I was told to...oh pardon me, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for rising, madam. Woman's suffrage is not dead.
I was told by your committee to be informal but stick to my subject. But I see that your committee means what it says when it places me between two distinguished justices and has the warden of Alcatraz close at hand. But I've heard that many men always desire to see an execution, and I appreciate the number that are gathered here today.
As for sticking to my subject, you must remember that my mother was a woman. So I'd like to switch, if I may, from subject to subject because the subject that I've been given is so big and involves so many different angles - as well as nations, ideologies and so forth - that I'd just like to ramble a bit. I'd like to start with the fact that there are two pictures that hang on the wall at my office. One is the picture of the little barn that Judge Bray mentioned a moment ago, which I rented in Hollywood for $25 a month, 35 years ago. That was our first studio. The other picture is of a plant so vast, covering so many acres that it can only be photographed from the air. That is the Paramount Studios of today. Together, these two pictures tell the story of the motion picture industry's growth in 35 short years. It's as though, well, as though Aladdin had rubbed his lamp and changed an orange grove into an empire. But they tell more than a story of material growth.
The influence of motion pictures has grown by the same leaps and bounds in the same short period of time. Thirty-five years ago, the movies were the stepchild of the entertainment world. No self-respecting citizen would be seen going into a Nickelodeon on a back street if he could help it - nobody except a few dreamers. Imagine that you could hold an audience with a picture running longer than 15 or 20 minutes. The movies were just a toy. Then, in 1912, when Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldwyn and I decided that I should go west and make The Squaw Man, a feature picture running the unheard of length of five reels, we had incorporated the company for $20,000 and we only had $15,000. We had $5,000 apiece. In fact, Jesse Lasky had just had a failure with the Folies Bergères and lost all he had. I had a failure with one of Mary Roberts Rinehart's plays with a new young juvenile actor named Walter Hampden. I'd lost all I had, and Jesse and I were sitting in the Claridge Grill, and he said, "What are we going to do?" And I said, "Well, what?" And he said, "Let's go into the movies." And I said, "All right, let's."
We turned over a Claridge Grill and formed this company. And just then a young glove salesman walked by - the government had taken the tariff off gloves - and he was broke, too. And he said, "What are you fellows doing?" We said, "We're forming a motion picture company," and he said, "I'm in." He sat down and joined us. That, of course, was Sam Goldwyn. So, we had to raise the other $5,000 some way. I offered my brother, who was a very successful New York playwright at the time, a 25 percent interest in the company for $5,000. He said that he would keep his money and pay my fare home.
He wanted no part in any venture to make galloping pin types. That was a quarter of what today is the Paramount Company. And today, motion pictures have a weekly audience in the United States of between 70 and 90 million people. Think for a moment what that means: 90 million men, women and children spending at least two hours a week taking in through their eyes and ears the stories and situations, the ideas and the ideals and the standards of living and conduct that Hollywood puts before them. You know the old Chinese saying, of course, that one picture's worth a thousand words.
Well, during the war, the Army found that it would teach raw recruits several times faster by pictures than by lectures. And I sometimes wonder if even the church or the school has as much real influence in molding the minds and desires and standards of the population as Hollywood has. What 35 years ago was the business of a few dreamers and experimenters is now the concern of everyone who is concerned about America, or about humanity. The movies are very definitely your business, too.
Look at it for just a moment from the businessman's standpoint. Suppose you're a manufacturer or a salesman of, well, let's say bathtubs. If our picture audience sees on the screen gleaming, spotless creations of porcelain and white tile more comfortable and more beautiful and more luxurious than the dingy tin and wooden tubs that I used to be dumped in when I was a kid, he's going to want your product. If a picture-goer in Egypt or Australia or Belgium sees his heroes and heroines arriving in an American-made car, smoking American cigarettes, eating American breakfast foods, he's going to want those products.
We used to say that trade followed the flag. Well, today it follows the film. And that applies to trade and ideas and ideals as much as it applies to manufactured goods. Every can of film that we ship from Hollywood is a teacher of our children and an ambassador of America to the entire world. Former President Hoover said to me only three weeks ago that motion pictures must be the voice of America. Now, what is that voice saying? You have a right to ask that question, because you have a stake in America and in the future.
Is America being well represented at home and abroad by this ambassador? Where does Hollywood stand in the worldwide struggle between collectivism and individualism, between Communism and liberty? Hollywood is a convenient target for so-called "witch hunters." I sometimes think that those hunters are actually hunting headlines, while the real witch sits in her little red tent and laughs at them. Whenever there is a debate on the topic, "Is there a Red menace in Hollywood?", one side smears Hollywood with mud, and the other side smears it with whitewash.
Motion pictures belong to the American people, and the people are entitled to the unvarnished facts. Yet there are Communists in Hollywood and some very dangerous ones, because they're very brainy ones. Like all Communists everywhere, they have one single purpose: to serve the Soviet dictatorship by every means at their command. The pattern of Soviet conquest is the same the world over. Destroy both free enterprise and free government and substitute for them a police state based on slavery. That is Russia and that is each one of the countries that has fallen to Russia. And that will be America, too, if the Communists have their way. And that is the objective of our American Communists: in Hollywood, in industry, in the schools, in the churches and wherever else they may be - and there are many other places where they are.
The Communists recognize the power of motion pictures, the immense influence of the screen upon the minds of those who watch it. As well as I can judge the Red's operations, I believe that their design is either to control the motion picture industry or to destroy it, certainly to destroy those who do not follow the Red path. And, in any industry, the Communists can destroy anyone if they can get control of his right to work. They do not now control Hollywood. They do not control motion pictures. Their influence is subtle and indirect. They have to be subtle, but I believe there's not one major producer in Hollywood who would tolerate outright Communist propaganda on the screen.
The American people know that with all its faults, capitalism has given them the highest standard of living and the greatest personal freedom ever known in the world. The Communists cannot deny that, but they can and do make a banker or a successful businessman their villain. They can and do pick out the sordid and degraded parts of American life and picture them as though they were typical of all America, leading the audience - especially the foreign audience - to infer that all America is one vast tobacco road and all its successful people little boxes.
The Communist governments and Communist trade unions abroad are quick to play the same game, with the added trunk of political censorship. The Hungarian film trade union has served notice on the Hungarian government that it will go out on strike against theaters which screen pictures with actors serving what the union called fascist, imperialist capitalism. In Romania, the Communist government has barred from the screen eleven American stars a few days after most of them had testified against Communism at the hearings in Washington.
It seems to me the motion picture industry has a choice: either to withdraw all of its product from those countries or furnish them only with pictures starring players thought to be un-American in sympathy. While the Communists over here decry political censorship, their comrades abroad are practicing political censorship in one of its most vicious forms, denying good Americans the right to work on their screens. There could be no clearer example of what Communists mean when they talk about freedom. Or, again, the Communists attach themselves like leeches to good and worthy causes, not to help the cause of others, but to help their own cause which strives on hatred, the hatred of race for race and class for class. Some of them can even talk about the First Amendment as though they really believed in freedom. And, I'm sorry to say that there are in Hollywood, just as there are in San Francisco and in every other city, a certain number of self-styled liberals, perhaps, confused and innocent enough to be taken in by this line of propaganda.
Communism is always a real danger wherever it is. Hollywood has no monopoly of it. The Communists are active here on the whole West Coast. They and their equally dangerous fellow travelers and their innocent dukes are apt to be in either political party or both political parties. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you may even find them in your church. You may find them in your factories and in your schools and on your newspapers and radio. And one of the biggest victories they could win would be to divert all of our Red-baiting energy toward Hollywood, so you wouldn't see them planting the seeds of chaos in your own backyards.
They want to rot away the economic structure in every great city and every great industry until the national structure of free government falls. Europe is an object lesson written large for us to see and heed. Penetration is the Communist method and chaos their goal. And their blindfolded dukes dance around the crumbling ruins shouting, "Look, this is the new era." So Hollywood has its Communist problems, but I wish the rest of the country were as alert to Communism as an element as Hollywood is. In every Hollywood studio and guild and union where the Communists or their sympathizers are active, the Americans are active in opposition. I wish I could say the same thing about every industry, union, political party, church, and school system in the rest of the country.
Hollywood will welcome investigation and help from any government source or any government agency or any other source, provided the same investigation and the same help are extended to the other parts of the country that need it just as much or more. But Hollywood will not welcome being made a whipping boy for the benefit of headline hunters and sensation seekers or irresponsible mudsmearers. Let the pot wash its own face before it calls the kettle black. The great majority of Hollywood, of course, is anti-Communist and is organizing and working to turn back the Red tide. People in Hollywood are taking sides as they must take sides in San Francisco and everywhere else. They're going to have say, "I am for America and things American," Or, "I am for a foreign ideology and the destruction of spiritual values, the destruction of the American form of government." You can't mix these two ideologies, because nothing will mix with Communism.
Well, I'm wrong, when I say that, there is one thing. Poison will mix with Communism. If you shoot one drop of cobra venom into your veins, your whole system will be poisoned. There are only a handful of Communist Party members in the whole nation, but this little minority is infecting a much greater number. In many places, they control a vast number of American workmen through control of his right to work. How many of us have seen our own sons waiver and wonder? I was talking just recently to a fine American who said to me, "My boy has a different ideology. I don't know what happened, I don't know where he got it, but he's got it." Well, that's the insidious poison you've got to fight and destroy wherever it shows itself. If you don't, it will destroy you and your children and your children's children. But anti-Communism alone is not the whole answer. You can be anti-pneumonia and still die of pneumonia.
We have a more positive job to do, you and I and all Americans. We must stand up and defend the system that made this country great. Capitalism is not perfect, but there's nothing wrong with it that Communism can cure. This is a capitalist country, it was built on capitalism, it succeeded on capitalism. And capitalism is Joe Brown's right to own his own grocery store. Every American - not just the rich men on Wall Street - every American has a stake in capitalism. Every worker has a stake in capitalism, because an employer that doesn't make a profit is not a safe employer. There are no jobs in closed factories. Don't be ashamed of capitalism as too many of us have been. How many businessmen have come out in defense of their own side? Too many of them have hidden their light under the nearest bushel while a few people have borne the brunt of the whole attack.
If America goes under, the short-sighted timidity of many American businessmen will be as much to blame for it as anything else. If you're on the right side, come out and be honored. It's really a very curious spectacle. America is the envy of the rest of the world today. Why? Because capitalism has kept the doors of freedom and opportunity open, because private enterprise has fostered the determination and courage and creative power that make a country great. And instead of standing up for the system that has kept us free and strong, we're in danger of letting it fall before an ideology born of despotism, cruelty, viciousness and dishonor, unless we're willing now to stand up and be counted.
Hollywood's part is to put America, the real America, on the screens of the world and into the minds and hearts of our own people. Again, in President Hoover's words, "Motion pictures should be the voice of America." It's a challenging job to put on a few thousand feet of film all that has gone into the making of that new and extraordinary figure that appeared on the world's stage less than 200 years ago: the American. People sometimes ask me where we get the ideas for pictures. Believe me, they don't just happen. That Aladdin's lamp I mentioned a few minutes ago burns midnight oil. No one walked into a producer's office with a finished manuscript ready to shoot. I got the idea for Unconquered one Sunday afternoon when I was reading a history of the American colonies and came across the fact that less than 200 hundred years ago, you could buy a white man here in America, buy him and own him for 50 pounds and a white woman for 20. I saw drama there, for drama is conflict, and in that simple bill of sale was a germ of the conflict between Old World oppression and New World liberty.
I saw the story taking shape of how this bartering of human flesh would strike an American. For already in 1763, though European flags were still flying here, the new American was taking shape, and the new answer was being wrought to the age-old question, "What is a human being worth?" That's what we show in Unconquered: The brewing of the American; the brewing of the American spirit; the brewing of American freedom and independence that mankind had only dreamed of until this strange new creature, the American, made it real. Already in 1763, the melting pot was simmering. Fifteen years later, it would boil and boil over. Out of the weary stews of the Old World, men and women were coming here and being made into something new. A man might have been a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German, a Swede, a Pol, an Irishman, or a Scotsman or a Swiss. He might have been a titled gentleman or a felon from Old Bailey - our ancestry is very mixed, you know. But none of that counted in the New World. A man's worth was in himself. Here, the old bloodstreams of Europe mixed to produce a new man, just as the Liberty Bell had to be recast before it could ring out its message of freedom. That is what our picture, Unconquered, tries to do: to show how the countries of the Old World poured their wounded masses yearning to breathe free into the melting pot to produce that strange, new and wonderful creature, the American.
The Old World has often looked down and laughed at this new creature, the American. They said he was crude, brash, uncouth, the clumsy braggart who played too many games and saw too many movies. But twice in our lifetime that young American has gone back to the Old World to - well, that gum-chewing, wisecracking, sentimental, tough young American from Brooklyn or Texas or San Francisco has gone back to the Old World to fight for freedom. He may not be able to twist his tongue around the unalienable rights of man, but let them be threatened and he's in there fighting with both fists. And tomorrow's tyrants will feel his fists again if they delude themselves into thinking that he's too tired or too fat or too rich or to poor to care anymore about freedom.
The Communists and their sympathizers call this American imperialism. Well, if American imperialism means keeping free nations on their feet, if it means feeding millions of men, women and children and countries that can never pay us back except by friendship, if it means the American schools and missions strung around the world from Egypt to China, if it means letting people know that American free enterprise has produced the world's highest standards of living, highest production, highest wages, and the greatest personal freedom, if it means spreading to other country the ideas of free speech, a free press, freedom of religions, free elections and the right to work, if American imperialism means these things, then it's bred in the bone of every real American, and he can be very proud of it.
It's Hollywood's job to tell that American his own story, and to tell the world what he's really like and why. It's your job to keep that story true. Hollywood will reflect the America that you make. For 160 years, America has been unconquered by any foreign foe. Our greatest weakness, perhaps our only weakness, is from within. From the termites in government, from the Communist minorities in labor, from the little groups in certain churches who put the spirit of Lenin ahead of the spirit of truth. From the misleaders of youth who teach the principles of Karl Marx instead of the principles of Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln, and your action, pro-American and pro-freedom, must be as intensive and as broad as the anti-American action of our enemies. In their strategy - and I beg you to listen to these two or three little words - in their strategy, every move, from the swallowing of a nation to the electing of a fellow traveler to some village school board, is a deliberate, planned step toward the Soviet Empire of the world. We must oppose every such move without exception and without compromise. This means more than sitting down like King Canute and bidding the tide go back. It means a vigorous outthrust of all the power we possess, to push ever forward the frontiers of man's freedom, both abroad and here at home.
Fight Communism as hard as you can, but fight just as hard to plague spots that breed Communism out of injustice and oppression. The world is hungry for what we have, not only for wealth like ours but for the freedom and enterprise that produce that wealth. God has sewn the hunger for freedom in every human heart, and then he planted the wheat of freedom here in America, and gave us hands to reap it and make it bread for all mankind. And our work is not done, nor may we take our rest, so long as anywhere in the world one human being asks for liberty and is not fed.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers