Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

266 // THOMAS CRIPPS
demolition man. But when White learned during production that the Black role
had been written out, he wired the MGM producer, Howard Dietz, and successfully
pressed to have the role restored. Thus both the movie and its making symbolized
the compelling wartime powers of the ethnic alliance. By war's end, the
ethnic angle had begun to embrace Jews still more widely as in the case of Dore
Schary's Till the End of Time (1946), in which a wounded veteran spits in the eye
of a recruiter for a racist veterans' group, a gesture he offers in memory of "Maxie
Klein," a dead buddy left on the beach on Guadalcanal. 25
For their part, African Americans zealously took up White's agenda and made
it their own. William G. Nunn, the publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, for example,
called for a "Double V" for victory simultaneously over foreign (and anti-
Semitic) fascism and domestic racism. Such activism signaled the formation of a
broadly based coalition that embraced Black publicists, White's lobbying in
Hollywood, a link to the 20th Century-Fox boardroom through its chairman, the
defeated presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, who served as special counsel
to the NAACP, and the Jewish studio chiefs themselves. As the screenwriter,
Sidney Buchman, put it: "Hollywood as a whole has recently been made aware of
the Negro's true position in America and our responsibility toward the subject."
And speaking of his own contribution, the script for Talk of the Town (1942), in
which he had written a Black role of substance, his motive was the "fundamental
thing in this war we are fighting." 26
Outside of Hollywood, in the circles of documentary and propaganda
filmmakers the story was the same. At every turn, Jews pressed both studios and
their government for opportunities to portray on film Black images that reflected
the liberalizing propaganda aims of the Western Alliance. The "race movie" distributor,
Ted Toddy, proposed to the War Department a saga of the Black 99th
Pursuit Squadron with Paul Robeson as its star; Alfred Sack picked up Marching
On, an espionage yarn directed by Spencer Williams, director of the evocative The
Blood of Jesus (1940); the historian, Saul Padover, proposed to his wartime boss in
Agriculture a film that would extend racial propaganda into peacetime by means
of a documentary portraying the African American as "an average human being";
Gene Weltfish transformed Race: Science and Politics, a book by the anthropologist,
Ruth Benedict, into an anti-racism comicbook and thence into the UPA movie,
The Brotherhood of Man; and both Paramount and Warner, among other majors,
pressed on with short theatrical movies on racism long after the impending end
of the war rendered them both militarily obsolescent and profitless. 27
The resulting agenda that had been set both by NAACP lobbying in
Hollywood and by each new movie that pressed against former constraints on
Black movie portrayals led to a Black and Jewish frame of mind that prodded the
studios against inertia or backsliding. Upon the completion of the Pentagon's
own The Negro Soldier, the studio bosses concurred in Harry Cohn's hyperbolic
praise of it as "the greatest War Department movie ever made," while Edwin R.
Embree, director of the Black-oriented Rosenwald Fund, urged "many of us...to