Overview

In Policing Show Business, Francis MacDonnell explores the starring role played by J. Edgar Hoover in the development of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s. As director of the FBI, Hoover poured resources into scrutinizing show business, a policy choice unjustified by any corresponding threat to public security. He detailed agents to write regular reports on actors, screenwriters, lyricists, singers, and studio executives. His frequent handwritten comments on papers inside the files of film industry personalities demonstrate a level of interest bordering on obsession.Policing Show Business is not just another book about the Hollywood blacklist. MacDonnell approaches the Red Scare through biography using FBI records on such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Adolphe Menjou, Lena Horne, Fredric March, Cecil B. DeMille, and Burl Ives to present in unexpected, surprising, and sometimes poignant ways the rich human dramas experienced by both targets of the bureau and its collaborators. MacDonnell’s meticulously researched account, drawing on many newly available FBI files, evokes the passions and resentments; the courageous acts and calculated evasions; and the petty tyrannies and self-interested campaigns of an ignominious episode in the annals of American freedom.

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9780700637935

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Reviews

"This is a superb book. MacDonnell has scoured the archives to give us the fullest account yet of J. Edgar Hoover’s role in the Hollywood blacklist. Crisply written, the book will appeal to everyone interested in America’s domestic Cold War. It also speaks to today’s debates about cancel culture.""""—Tony Shaw, author of Hollywood’s Cold War""""Although there have been other books on the Blacklist and the careers that it destroyed and derailed, Policing Show Business is the most authoritative. Names that ordinarily receive little or no attention such as Burl Ives and Fredric March are given their due. MacDonnell’s research is awesome but never overwhelming, If you are going to read any book on the Blacklist, this is the one.""""—Bernard F. Dick, author of The Anatomy of Film"

"""This is a superb book. MacDonnell has scoured the archives to give us the fullest account yet of J. Edgar Hoover’s role in the Hollywood blacklist. Crisply written, the book will appeal to everyone interested in America’s domestic Cold War. It also speaks to today’s debates about cancel culture.""""—Tony Shaw, author of Hollywood’s Cold War""""Although there have been other books on the Blacklist and the careers that it destroyed and derailed, Policing Show Business is the most authoritative. Names that ordinarily receive little or no attention such as Burl Ives and Fredric March are given their due. MacDonnell’s research is awesome but never overwhelming, If you are going to read any book on the Blacklist, this is the one.""""—Bernard F. Dick, author of The Anatomy of Film"

Author Information

Francis MacDonnell is emeritus professor of history, Southern Virginia University, and the author of Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front.

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