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Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists. By Gerald Horne. 335 pp. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Photos, notes, index. Paper, $22.95. ISBN 0-292-73138-8.
In recent years, historians have acknowledged the significance of the motion-picture industry and its product as central features of American cultural and business history. Gerald Home's pathbreaking study of labor relations in Hollywood provides readers with a clear picture of postwar anticommunism's devastating impact on the fortunes of the union movement in the turbulent 1940s. Not since Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund's Inquisition in Hollywood (1980) has there been such a comprehensive analysis of the anatomy of Red-baiting in the movie capital. Going beyond Ceplair and Englund's cultural analysis, Home covers the origins of Hollywood unionism, management resistance, and the role of organized crime in the attack on the studio unions. He argues that accusations of communism were intended not just to remove Reds from the industry but also to crush noncommunist labor and thus solidify the producers' dominance in a labor-management relationship based on collaboration with the business unionists of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).
As Home examines the development of studio unions and talent guilds in the 1930s, he documents a long-standing...