Bombshell Intelligence Files Reveal the Government’s Secret Effort to Make America Look Less Racist

10 min readThe 1953 Dean Martin golf comedy “The Caddy” became the unlikely battleground where the CIA pushed for Black background actors to improve America’s global image during the Cold War’s ideological struggle.FBI and CIA intelligence records reveal a dramatic reversal in how U.S. government agencies viewed racial equality in Hollywood films, shifting from viewing it as Communist propaganda to reluctantly supporting it by the 1950s.A Paramount executive secretly working for the CIA attempted to combat American racism’s international perception through subtle tokenism, only to be blocked by studio leadership fearing Southern white audiences would reject racial integration.This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.If the 1953 golf comedy The Caddy is the subject of any discussion at all these days, it’s likely due to the film’s introduction of what would become star Dean Martin’s signature song, “That’s Amore.” But at one point during the production, this otherwise innocuous comedy was unknowingly at the center of an ideological conflict; the CIA’s own private Hollywood proxy even stepped in to try and sway the production to conform to the U.S. government’s secret mandate.The creative conflict, as catalogued in letters found among the papers of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Special Adviser for Psychological Warfare C.D. Jackson, was over some shots of spectators on the film’s golf links, and whether or not “some negroes” could be placed in the crowd, and “if possible, shown using a nice up-to-date car.”It might surprise you that the CIA seemingly had a vested interest in whether or not Black actors appeared in the background when Dean Martin romances Donna Reed on the fairway. But, in the same year that Brown v. Board of Education was being debated before the Supreme Court and the Baton Rouge bus boycott was occurring in Louisiana, the CIA had a man on the inside actually pushing for the inclusion of Black background actors in an “up-to-date car.”It was one of several surprises that struck John Sbardellati of the University of Houston when he decided to dive deep into the FBI and CIA records on the subject of Hollywood and race in a new study published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.Sbardellati was already well versed in the ways, both covert and overt, that the U.S. government observed and attempted to influence Hollywood’s creative output during the Cold War. His 2012 book J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies chronicled the titular FBI director’s conviction that Communists were slipping subversive messages into popular entertainment, drawing attention to America’s faults and iniquities in an attempt to destabilize the nation. But Sbardellati told Popular Mechanics that he kept coming back to the way the government documents he’d uncovered talked about race in the context of the Cold War.“I found that there was this kind of debate,” Sbardellati said about historians’ views of the government’s Cold War response to the American civil rights movement. One side of this debate posits that, for the United States government, the Cold War “provided yet another weapon to attack the Civil Rights movement via anti-communism.” On the other hand, some scholars (Sbardellati cites legal historian Mary L. Dudziak specifically) argue that, conversely, there was a “Cold War Imperative” that pushed U.S. elites to get behind “at least limited civil rights measures,” for the purposes of saving face on the international stage.“This is at a moment when the United States is proclaiming itself as the leader of the free world,” Sbardellati notes, “but that’s a hard message to get across, especially in the so-called “Third World” in the global south, where all the stories about U.S. racism and Jim Crow were really denigrating that ability to carry out that global project that these elites wanted to carry out.”But after poring over a trove of declassified documents from both the FBI and the CIA, Sbardellati found that neither side of that debate offered a full picture of the motivations behind the American intelligence community’s influence campaign in Hollywood. In fact, he found that the government’s stance on race in American film wasn’t static. Rather, like a classic Hollywood screenplay, there was a character arc that played out in the annals of the intelligence apparatus, with a plot twist tossed in for good measure.The FBI spent the years immediately after the Second World War carefully monitoring Hollywood’s creative output for suspected Communist content, having informants provide them with scripts, monitor productions, and even analyze the stories for subversive themes.“The FBI’s investigation of Hollywood really was motivated by a fear of what they considered to be Communist propaganda,” Sbardellati said. The bulk of previous film scholarship as it pertained to the Cold War and its Red Scare “really kind of wrote that off as just window dressing for, well, this is just anti-labor, or it’s just reactionary conservatism,” he notes. These historians “looked at the movies and said ‘No one in their right mind would call these communists. So clearly that was never the motivation.’ But in fact, it was.”Sbardellati’s study found that one focus for the FBI during those early years was “a handful of films that featured dignified portrayals of black characters in supporting roles, a trend the Bureau ascribed to Communist subversion.” In 1947, one FBI informant contacted the Bureau’s Los Angeles office to lament the propaganda they felt was being pushed by the boxing film Body and Soul, “especially its positive portrayal of a black prizefighter played by Canada Lee.” The field office’s report to Director Hoover summarizes the subversive content as “the white man takes the bribe and the negro [sic] refuses $60,000 to throw a fight; portraying the negro in a fine light… is the principal form of propaganda in this picture.” A critic for The Daily Worker, America’s foremost leftist newspaper at the time (and viewed by many in the mainstream as the mouthpiece for the U.S. Communist Party), would in fact single out Canada Lee’s character in a review of the film, describing his character as a “Negro with courage and dignity.”LMPC//Getty ImagesLobby card for 1947’s Body and SoulBut the FBI’s worries extended beyond what messages the Communists were allegedly sneaking into the country’s subconscious. They were also concerned with what American movies were projecting to the world outside its borders. The post-war years saw American cinema broadcast the country’s prejudices onto the silver screen abroad as well as on the home front. The proverbial pot was so boiling over in American art that not even a B-picture could be allowed on the back half of a double bill if it had too much to say.Crossfire, an 86-minute film noir B-movie released the same year as Body and Soul, was already subjected to overt censorship before production began. The novel it was based on, 1945’s The Brick Foxhole, centered its murder-mystery plot around homosexuality. The Motion Picture Production Code, a film-industry censorship mandate otherwise known as the Hays Code, explicitly forbade any mention of homosexuality in Hollywood films, deeming it a “sexual perversion.” So director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott changed the film’s motive for murder from homophobia to antisemitism.But the FBI records that Sbardellati uncovered show the change did little to mitigate the outrage from some corners of the industry. His study shows that the president of the Southern California Motion Picture Council, Mrs. William A. Burk, “furnished the Bureau with assessments of the film written by members of her Motion Picture Council that disparaged the core theme of Crossfire.” One such assessment called the film “near treasonable in its implications and seeming efforts to arouse race and religious hatred,” and another decried it as part of a Communist campaign of “injection of subversive or un-American propaganda.”LMPC//Getty ImagesPoster for 1947’s CrossfireMuch to the FBI’s chagrin, and in spite of its low-budget origins, Crossfire was greeted with praise and popularity at home and abroad. It won the prize for Best Social Film at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and became the first B-movie ever nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. That it didn’t ultimately win the Oscar was small consolation for those wishing to silence films speaking out against bigotry; it lost to Gentleman’s Agreement, the Elia Kazan-directed, Gregory Peck-led prestige drama that also directly addressed antisemitism in America. A July 1948 issue of Variety described the shared success of both films with the headline “Anti-Bigotry Pix Snare $5,000,000 Domestic Profit.”It was a success Crossfire’s filmmakers wouldn’t get much time to bask in. Mrs. Burk’s complaints about Crossfire were just part of a robust dossier the FBI had been building on the Communist ties both director Dmytryk and producer Scott were reported to have. Within months of the film’s release, the two were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and when they refused to testify, they were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted, becoming part of the infamous Hollywood Ten.In 1949, just two years later, Hollywood churned out an array of status-quo-questioning “racial problem films,” from Elia Kazan’s Oscar-follow up Pinky about a white-passing Black woman, to the scathing Home of the Brave, where a Black war veteran becomes literally paralyzed by bigotry.One would suspect that, if the films of 1947 raised eyebrows (and hackles) within the FBI, the films of 1949 would have caused even greater agitation. Instead, Sbardellati found that the FBI went quiet. What caused this sudden about-face on the subject of race in cinema?“Two things happened that really befuddled the FBI. One was that other anti-communist sort of stalwarts started celebrating these films,” Sbardellati says. Instead of viewing the fight against the status quo as a threat to American freedom, anti-communists began viewing these stories of fighting the status quo as a fundamental representation of American freedom in action.“I'm not saying they bought that argument,” Sbardellati says of the FBI, “but they’re recognizing that that’s in the discourse.”“But I think even more important than that was that the communists themselves turned against these folks.” In the latter half of the 1940s, Sbardellati found the East Coast wing of the Communist Party becoming “more rigid and doctrinaire in their approach to cultural institutions like Hollywood.”“The West Coast communists are like, ‘We think we’re doing great art.’ And then the East Coast communists say, ‘No, you can’t be doing great art because you work in Hollywood, and Hollywood’s owned by Wall Street, so therefore it can only produce Wall Street propaganda.’” As a result, just two years after The Daily Worker had praised Body and Soul’s challenging of racial stereotypes, the same publication cautioned that the incendiary Home of the Brave “can be as dangerous as its intentions are courageous and well-meaning,” with another writer decrying it as “an insidious film.”LMPC//Getty ImagesPoster for 1949’s Home of the BraveSuddenly, as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the entire game had been inverted. Whereas just a few years before, the push for racial equality on film was viewed as a Communist effort that needed to be carefully quelled by the FBI, now the FBI was, perhaps begrudgingly, on the side of the activist filmmakers whose work was challenging both the American status quo and the Communist party line.The study found that nearly a decade later, during the production of the 1958 Tony Curtis/Sidney Poitier race drama The Defiant Ones, the FBI pointedly avoided branding the film as subversive, despite being directly informed that the film’s screenwriters had been members of the Hollywood Communist Party Writer’s Branch. Instead, the Bureau took note of its “Oscar buzz” and positive reception at a Mexico City film festival that otherwise “had become notorious for its communist-inspired demonstrations of anti-Americanism.”Eventually, the FBI was letting up a bit in its scrutiny of Hollywood, but at the same time, the CIA may have started looking a little more closely. Sbardellati’s study notes that while the CIA had a tendency to covertly support artists and other intellectuals through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the agency had one overt, and arguably overzealous, insider they dealt with directly: Luigi Luraschi, head of the Domestic and Foreign Censorship Department at Paramount Pictures.University of Southern California//Getty ImagesLuigi Luraschi appears in a group photo with, among others, notable Indian filmmaker Mehoob Khan. Luraschi is on the far right of the back row.Luraschi was an ardent anti-Communist, Sbardellati notes, who “sympathized with HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on the Voice of America.” Through letters he wrote to the CIA, Luraschi not only reported on supposed subversive activity he observed from members of the film industry, but also “conveyed his adamant position that the movies refrain from critical examinations of American racism, which in his view only provided the communist world with ready-made propaganda.”It’s not entirely clear to what extent Luraschi’s actions came at the behest of the CIA (who, unlike the FBI, were not supposed to be concerned with domestic activities like Hollywood productions), as opposed to actions he took entirely on his own and merely reported to the CIA afterward. But his copious letters, now in the aforementioned papers of C.D. Jackson, show that he applied a very specific strategy in line with the government’s attitude toward fighting the cultural Cold War; namely, not giving the Communists any ammo for their anti-American propaganda.Luraschi’s approach was to avoid addressing racism in America overtly. In fact, he proudly boasted in a letter to his agency handler that he’d successfully killed Paramount’s efforts to mount an adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel Giant due in part to its “implication [of] wealth of Anglo-Texans built by exploiting Mexican labor.” (That film would ultimately be produced by Warner Bros. in 1956 and gross nearly $40 million, more than six times its budget.)Instead, Luraschi insisted on combating the perception of American prejudice through a more subtle approach: filling the backgrounds of films with “well-dressed” Black extras.That’s how the CIA’s inside man in Hollywood found himself fighting for Black extras to appear in 1953’s The Caddy. Unfortunately, Luraschi’s plan to burnish America’s image abroad for the CIA by exaggerating racial progress at home collided with his studio’s worry that domestic audiences would balk at seeing Paramount treat all people as equals.Specifically, Paramount’s head of production, Y. Frank Freeman, was “very cold to the idea” of a “cinematic desegregation of the American golf course,” fearing that it would be rebuked by southern white audiences in America, many of whom still clung to Jim Crow laws vehemently. “Ironically,” Sbardellati concludes the anecdote, “CIA tokenism had been foiled by the very racism Luraschi endeavored to obscure.”Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.