Jane Fonda is reviving the Hollywood advocacy group to satisfy the high-stakes challenges to free expression within the Trump period.
Jane Fonda accepts her Lifetime Achievement Award finally winter’s Display Actors’ Guild ceremony.
(Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Photos)
Earlier this month, actor and activist Jane Fonda introduced the reformation of the Committee for the First Modification (CFA), the group her father, Henry Fonda, joined in 1947 as Hollywood’s preliminary reply to the Home Un-American Actions Committee (HUAC). Its revival is an inspiring bid to provoke the principled resistance to the anticommunist inquisitions of the McCarthy period in our present collapsing democracy—however the authentic CFA can be a cautionary story within the lengthy historical past of the leisure trade’s tolerance for dissent.
We noticed the inspiring facet final February, when Fonda accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Display Actors Guild (SAG). In her acceptance speech, she threw down a problem to her fellow actors. “Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of many nice social actions—apartheid or civil rights or Stonewall—and requested your self, would you’ve been courageous sufficient to stroll the bridge? We don’t must marvel anymore. We’re in our documentary second. That is it, and it’s not a rehearsal!”
As you may count on, Fonda didn’t wait round for her second. Her revival of the CFA is her reply to it—a recognition of how the second Trump White Home is dismantling the essential civil liberties of Individuals. In cities and states throughout the nation, residents are passing their documentary-moment checks by taking to the streets to oppose ICE and the Trump administration’s federalization of regulation enforcement.
Sadly, the institutional responses to Trump’s energy seize and shakedown makes an attempt have been anemic-to-subservient in comparison with the actions of so many on a regular basis Individuals. When the Trump administration threatened to chop off funding to universities until they alter curriculums and silence protesters, most failed that check. Harvard fought again, but it surely hasn’t had a lot firm—though some universities are lastly exhibiting some spine in refusing the administration’s “social compact,” which secures their political fealty by way of threatened federal funding cuts. ABC and Viacom/CBS caved to Trump’s meritless lawsuits alleging slanderous protection. The bosses at each networks gave in to Trump for purely monetary causes—in Viacom’s case, a pending merger with Skydance—and paid out $30 million in authorized settlements. In our nationwide documentary second, the platforms airing documentaries have largely failed.
One latest such failure, although, sparked a potent and promising free-speech backlash. Final month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel for ridiculing Trump’s empathy-challenged makes an attempt to look bereft the week an murderer killed Charlie Kirk. When FCC chief Brendan Carr signaled to the businesses that personal dozens of ABC associates that Jimmy Kimmel was unfit to air, they did his bidding, and preempted his present. ABC then suspended Kimmel “indefinitely.”
The nationwide outrage over this censorship and bullying induced greater than 1.7 million folks to cancel their Disney+ subscriptions. Tons of of artists within the leisure trade signed a petition to deliver Kimmel again. This was one other documentary second, and many individuals stepped up. Some, like showrunner Damon Lindelof, who created ABC’s Misplaced and HBO’s Watchmen, let or not it’s identified he would refuse to work with Disney once more if ABC canceled Kimmel. The present of solidarity from viewers and trade insiders labored. With that sort of blowback, “indefinitely” lasted solely six days.
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The Kimmel episode harked again to the CFA’s authentic mission. Whereas Fonda has but to spell out what the brand new CFA will do, she gave a touch in a latest interview with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman as they mentioned the Kimmel suspension. She known as such moments “CNN—creative nonviolent noncompliance,” arguing that the CFA may “mannequin that for the remainder of the nation.”
Fonda has been an activist for greater than half a century. That’s factor for the brand new CFA, as a result of the unique group was led by idealistic artists with little political expertise. In 1947, The Hollywood Reporter started attacking writers, administrators, and actors it thought of communists. That tabloid offensive attracted the eye of HUAC, which subpoenaed them about alleged communist or subversive sentiments in films like The Grapes of Wrath, Gentleman’s Settlement, and The Finest Years of Our Lives. In 1947, HUAC subpoenaed dozens of leisure trade figures to testify.
In response, administrators John Huston and William Wyler, actress Myrna Loy, and author Philip Dunne based the Committee for the First Modification. It rapidly attracted a stellar listing of cosigners from the studio period’s golden age, together with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, William Holden, William Wyler, and Groucho Marx. Broadway recruits included Ira Gershwin, George S. Kaufman, and Richard Rodgers. They weren’t joined formally by their unions or any studio executives.
CFA leaders joined forces with the subpoenaed to oppose the committee’s menace to the First Modification. Communists or not, they understood that to permit HUAC to go unchallenged meant that ultimately they might be subsequent—as a result of HUAC wasn’t investigating “communist” movies; it was investigating liberal movies made by mainstream Democrats. Many within the CFA had been assured that the movie employees subpoenaed by HUAC had been vetted, and that none had been communists. They needed to look as patriotic Individuals supporting the rights of everybody to talk freely, and never give the committee political ammunition to name the CFA a communist entrance or a gaggle of clueless liberals duped by communists.
This was particularly vital to Humphrey Bogart. He had been via this as soon as earlier than when the Dies Committee (the primary incarnation of HUAC) held closed-door hearings in August 1940 in Los Angeles. Democratic Texas Consultant Martin Dies had come west to analyze communism within the movie trade and, many felt, get himself some celebrity-generated headlines from stars like Bogart and James Cagney. Dies cleared Bogart and Cagney, and in 1947 Bogart insisted that the CFA be vetted for communists. He was assured that there have been none.
First, the CFA did what its members did finest. It placed on a present. To state their objectives on their very own phrases earlier than arriving in DC, CFA members staged two radio broadcasts on ABC to make their case, Hollywood Fights Back. Dozens of the CFA’s members appeared in cameos to defend free speech, cite HUAC’s critics, and expose its odious allies. “Earlier than each free conscience in America is subpoenaed,” Judy Garland mentioned of HUAC’s chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, “Inform them how a lot you resent the best way Mr. Thomas is kicking the residing daylights out of the Invoice of Rights.”
HUAC’s supporters in media answered with a mini–Crimson Scare timed to hit the subpoenaed and their CFA sponsors as they testified on Capitol Hill. Syndicated leisure columnist Hedda Hopper, a die-hard right-winger, devoted the primary of a number of columns to red-baiting quotes concerning the CFA solicited from her like-minded readers. A telegram from Ms. Gertrude Smith of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, learn: “Till we’re certain that Katie Hepburn [one of our favorites] and all others concerned in any manner in—to us, significantly menacing-ways of communism, we can’t and won’t attend a film through which these folks play or write.… Why are they protesting so emphatically in opposition to this investigation into un-American actions if they aren’t concerned in it? Why? What have they to worry?”
On the opposite facet of the nation, DC gossip columnist George Dixon outed John Howard Lawson and Sterling Hayden as Communist Get together members (Hayden mentioned he had stop the celebration by 1946), but in addition falsely lumped Bogart and Bacall in with them. Based on Dixon, Hayden allegedly hit on DC socialite Mary Benton Gore—a distant cousin of Vice President Al Gore—at a cocktail party with the unpromising pickup line of asking why she was not a communist. “The Communist manner is the one lifestyle,” Hayden reportedly mentioned, earlier than pulling some pamphlets from his pocket, and saying, “I would love you to learn some literature on the topic.” Miss Gore, whose household owned the Fairfax Lodge and its elite Jockey Membership, proved an unwilling recruit. “I used to be shocked,” she supposedly mentioned later. “They contained essentially the most vicious Communist propaganda I’ve ever seen.”
With public stress mounting, the HUAC listening to grew rancorous. Ten of the subpoenaed witnesses acquired into loud, defiant exchanges with committee members over their proper to imagine no matter they needed—and their proper to refuse to reply. A number of truly had been communists—which, in fact, that they had each proper to be. It was a brutal lesson in Washington politics for the fledgling CFA; its members had staked out the ethical excessive floor; they had been completely proper in what they mentioned, however the combative celebration members who had hid their affiliation had been a PR catastrophe.
Afterward, they heard from a furious Bogart: “You fuckers offered me out!” “We didn’t notice till a lot later that we had been getting used to a point by the Unfriendly 10,” Lauren Bacall mentioned. After the listening to, HUAC had all of the political ammunition it wanted to label the CFA dupes and communists, and so it did.
The rising divisions in their very own ranks and the hardball ways of HUAC made the well-meaning members of the CFA look like they had been in over their heads. After HUAC issued contempt-of-Congress citations for the Hollywood 10, the studios went into aggressive damage-control mode, and issued what grew to become often known as the Waldorf assertion—a pledge to purge communists from the movie trade. Ten of the HUAC witnesses would get jail time for contempt, and would turn out to be often known as “the Hollywood 10” in histories of the McCarthy period.
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The Writers Guild of America, the Administrators Guild of America, and the Display Actors Guild quickly fell in line behind the Waldorf assertion and deserted their members. The comparatively small group of the CFA’s writers, artists, and administrators stood on their very own. “We oughta fold,” Billy Wilder mentioned, and fairly quickly they did. To avoid wasting his profession, Hayden testified earlier than HUAC and named names in 1951. In 1952, John Huston moved to Eire and have become a citizen.
Happily, 2025 just isn’t 1947. The leisure trade isn’t restricted to a handful of studios; most Hollywood guilds have already protested Kimmel’s suspension, and the members of the brand new CFA ought to have already got a good suggestion of what’s forward because the Trump administration crackdowns proceed. The group’s web site signifies a familiarity with historical past. “The formation of this Committee just isn’t a warning shot,” it says. “That is the start of a sustained struggle.” The positioning additionally pledges to doc the capitulations of different trade gamers: “To those that revenue from our work whereas threatening the livelihoods of on a regular basis working folks, bowing to authorities censorship, and cowering to brute intimidation: we see you and historical past is not going to overlook. This is not going to be the final you hear from us.”
That, too, is sweet information. It was the choice of the studio heads to fold earlier than HUAC’s calls for that doomed the unique CFA and elevated HUAC as de facto arbiters of content material and expertise in Hollywood films till the blacklist was lastly damaged greater than a decade later. It’s what the FCC simply tried with Kimmel. And what we discovered is that collective motion from the artists who create content material for studios, mixed with an outraged groundswell of resistance from the viewers who purchases it, can break the stranglehold of Trump-authored bribery and intimidation. The problem for Fonda and the brand new CFA is to proceed constructing on that precedent—and maintaining their backers on message and united.
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