Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

African Americans and Jews in Hollywood \\ 267
enlist in the cause...to help spread the news to commercial theatres." Roy
Wilkins of the NAACP extended the sentiment into the postwar era when he predicted
that the Pentagon's considerably bolder sequel, Teamwork, "would do much
to promote racial unity now and for the future." 2 ^
So taken were these Black and Jewish activists with the prospects for a postwar
liberalized national conscience that they sought to head off the release of We've
Come a Long, Long Way, a rival to The Negro Soldier, that had been compiled by an
independently active team of the "race movie" maker Jack Goldberg and the
Black evangelist, Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux. At stake was their fear that
a prolonged rivalry between The Negro Soldier and the privately made
Goldberg/Michaux movie would create an unseemly "Jewish vs. Negro situation"
that might undo the bicultural alliance war had helped revive. 29
Of course, in any alliance the principals should have expected to compromise
goals and even to dilute some of their ethnicity in the interest of promoting their
common cause. The historian Kenneth M. Stampp spoke for the age in which
unity against foreign enemies obliged propagandists to emphasize ethnic "tolerance"
and even "brotherhood" when he asserted that "... innately Negroes are,
after all, only white men with Black skins." 50 Unavoidably, the war became a
touchstone of these sentiments borne by every liberal conscience. As a Jewish soldier
says in the war movie, The Pride of the Marines (1946): "Don't tell me we can't
make it work in peace like we did in war." One such movie, The House 1 Live
In (1946), an Oscar-winning two-reeler written by the eventually politically
blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, underwritten by
Dore Schary's RKO studio, and starring Frank Sinatra, featured a theme that sang
of "all races and religions.. .that's America to me." 31
The alliance even withstood postwar conservative countermeasures, particularly
in the form of the congressional Un-American Activities Committee that
masked its assault behind a campaign to root out "communists" in Hollywood.
Under such pressure it seemed to Jews and Blacks alike that wartime ideals had
to be kept alive in the form of both polemics and movies. And yet Jews, as usual,
despite a leftward leaning, could be found on both sides of the issue. Mayer
remained a Republican stalwart; Roy Cohn served as counsel to Senator
McCarthy's investigators; and Dore Schary, the otherwise doctrinaire liberal, both
composed and signed the "Waldorf agreement," a deceptively phrased response to
proscription of political expression that ended by agreeing to fire communists
because their scripts would be unsalable to good Americans.
Nonetheless, Hollywood Jews also stood in their accustomed place on the left
as well. Samuel Goldwyn, for example, wrote a piece for the Urban League's
Opportunity, entitled "How I Became Interested in Social Justice" (by reading of
Allied war aims in The Atlantic Charter!). Norman Granz, already famous for his
"Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts, produced the Oscar-winning short, ]ammin'
the Blues, that seemed so authentically Black that the columnist, Walter Winchell,
thought it had been shot from a hidden camera. Abraham Polonsky, eventually