Isegoria

Steve Sailer describes the left coast’s right turn early in the 20th century:

Hollywood was not always so ideologically homogeneous. Consider one of the best films of the industry’s best year, 1939 — “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Leading man Jimmy Stewart, director Frank Capra, and studio head Harry Cohn were all Republicans, while its screenwriter Sidney Buchman was a card-carrying Stalinist. Today, though, acceptable views run the gamut all the way from Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats like Barbra Streisand on the Left to Harry Truman Democrats like Tom Hanks (who named a son “Truman”) on the Right. What happened?

Keep in mind that Hollywood’s relationship with the outside world is tenuous. It’s a self-absorbed community, and its politics are skin-deep, serving functions within the industry that aren’t always obvious to outsiders. Today’s liberal monoculture is in large part an outgrowth of the compromise resolution to the ancient struggle between studio executives and screenwriters that culminated in the endlessly discussed but little understood blacklist of Marxists in the 1950s.

One of the blacklist’s main roots has disappeared down the memory hole because it doesn’t burnish the heroic image created to flatter the Communist victims. A 1919 theater strike won the playwrights of the Dramatists Guild the right to retain copyright in their works. To this day, dramatists own their plays and merely license them to producers. Further, they have the right to approve or reject the cast, director, and any proposed changes in the dialogue. Contractually, a playwright is a rugged individualist, an Ayn Rand hero.

With the introduction of the talkies in 1927, Hollywood began importing trainloads of New York dramatists. Salaries were generous and the climate superb, but the dramatists found the collaborative nature of moviemaking frustrating, even demeaning. Screenwriters were employees in a vast factory, which owned their creations. The studios could, and generally would, have other hired hacks radically rewrite each script, all under the intrusive supervision of some mogul’s semiliterate brother-in-law.

In the 1930s, Hollywood’s Communist Party, under the command of its charismatic commissar, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, improbably but enthusiastically championed the intellectual property rights of scriptwriters. The ink-stained wretches found that the Marxist concept of alienation described their plight. They felt just like the once psychologically fulfilled hand-craftsmen forced into becoming dispossessed factory drones who cannot recognize their creativity in their employer’s output.

Insanely ironic as it seems now, many screenwriters became Communists because they despised the movie business’s need for co-operation. How turning command of the entire economy over to a dictatorship would restore the unfettered joys of individual craftsmanship was a little fuzzy, but, hey, if you couldn’t trust Stalin, whom could you trust?

The possibility of studios blacklisting writers first surfaced in the 1930s, when the moguls’ cartel turned aside the leftist screenwriters’ push to align themselves with the Dramatists League by threatening to fire union supporters. “It wouldn’t be a blacklist because it would all be done over the telephone,” Jack Warner explained.

Decades later, after the formal blacklist era, this labor-management conflict was resolved by a tacit compromise. The blacklisted writers were elevated in the collective memory to the role of martyrs. Their leftism (but not their Stalinism, which was conveniently forgotten) was enshrined as the appropriate ideology of all respectable movie-folk. In return, the producers hung on to their property rights in screenplays.

Steve Sailer recently read Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, and I have to agree with him that I tend to like the idea of Stephenson more than his actual books. Here Sailer explains at least part of the idea behind Stephenson’s 17th Century historical novel:

Quicksilver involves, besides much else, the origin of the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over credit for the calculus. It’s a sort of WASP Nerd’s History of the World, the male equivalent of all those historical novels about princesses and duchesses that sell so well these days.

Sailer cites a 2004 Salon interview with Stephenson, which discusses his fascination with Puritans and Victorians:

You’re remarkably sympathetic to the Puritans, too, which is unusual these days.

I have a perverse weakness for past generations that are universally reviled today. The Victorians have a real bad name, and the word “Puritan” is never used except in a highly pejorative way, despite the fact that there are very strong Victorian and Puritan threads in our society today, and despite the fact that the Victorians and Puritans built the countries that we live in. The other one, by the way, is the ’50s. Someday I’ll have to write a ’50s novel.

The reason why people are so vituperative about those generations is not because they know anything about the history, but because they’re really talking about splits within our culture today that they’re worried about. In the same spirit that I wrote a Victorian novel earlier in my career [The Diamond Age], I figured it might be a kick to see what to do with some Puritans. Not hip, jaded, cool Puritans, but honest-to-god, fire-breathing Puritans. Drake [Waterhouse, Daniel's father] is an arch-Puritan, but by no means exaggerated. There were a million guys like this running around England in those days. He became the patriarch of this family of people who have to respond to his larger-than-life status and extreme commitment to religion.

What do you admire about the Puritans?

They were tremendously effective people. They completely took over the country and they created an army pretty much from scratch that kicked everyone’s ass. This is not always a good thing. They were guilty of some very bad behavior in Ireland, for example. But any way you slice it they were very effective. Cromwell was a tremendous military leader. A lot of that effectiveness was rooted in the fact that they had money, in part because persecuted religious minorities, if they’re not persecuted out of existence, often manage to achieve disproportionate wealth. It happened with Jews, Armenians, Huguenots. Earlier in this project, I could have rattled off five more. They have to form private trading networks and lend each other money. They’re unusually education conscious. Puritans — and when we say Puritans, we’re talking about a whole grab bag of religious groups — tended to prize literacy and education. I’m sure they had a higher literacy rate than the general English population. Literacy and education make people more effective.

Another answer is that they very early on adopted a set of views on social topics that everyone now takes for granted as being basic tenets of Western civilization. They were heavily for free enterprise. They didn’t want the state interfering in private property. Now our whole system is built on that. We tend to forget that someone had to come up with that idea and fight for it. And those people did.