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Key words: Hedda Hopper; Louella Parsons; Hollywood columnists; World War II and American film; anti-communism in Hollywood.
While the common historical interpretation of the American film industry during World War II is that "Hollywood went to war with gusto", as Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black succinctly put it, famed Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was a prominent exception.1 When the Los Angeles Times picked up her fledgling movie gossip column "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood", in 1938, the struggling, underemployed supporting actress became a powerful figure in the movie industry and a celebrity journalist rival to the "First Lady of Hollywood", Louella Parsons. Syndicated in eightyfive metropolitan newspapers during the 1940s, as well as weekly papers and small town dailies, Hopper's column had an estimated daily readership of 32 million by the mid-1950s (out of a national population of 160 million).2 Hopper, in her famous hats, had become a Hollywood icon.
Yet Hopper also sawherself as a political figure and activist. She used her journalistic platform to express what she saw as proper political values, to advise and chastise members of the film industry about their politics, and to mobilize her readers around contemporary political issues. Letters from readers throughout her career testified to their interest in politics as well. While it was not uncommon for gossip columnists to discuss politics - after all, Walter Winchell "made the seemingly improbable leap from gossipmonger to political commentator" in the 1930s, according to his biographer Neal Gabler - Hopper's main competitor was Parsons, and Parsons's "heart was not in politics".3 Hopper's was. Always a conservative, and a proud, active, and highly partisan member of the Republican Party, she expressed strong animosity toward the Democratic Party, labor unions, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement, but was best known for her strident anticommunism.
Less known, but no less significant, was Hopper's first opportunity as a new and rising Hollywood gossip columnist to take a major political stand: her opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, Hopper's gossip career was only in its second year, but she had a nationally syndicated column, a radio show and a large audience, and she fiercely embraced isolationism. "Settle our home...