Executive Order 9835

Executive Order 9835 is the 1947 federal loyalty measure that sets the political climate for the novel’s account of Hollywood under anti-communist scrutiny. Its significance extends beyond the government employees it directly addressed: the demand for loyalty oaths spread to private businesses, while investigations and threatened professional penalties made political suspicion a force in working life.

Purpose and Reach

Issued by President Harry Truman, the order required federal employees to swear loyalty and take part in security programs. The novel presents its wider influence as immediate: private companies, too, began requiring loyalty oaths. The distinction between public service and private employment therefore offered little protection from the era’s demand to demonstrate political reliability.

Hollywood Under Scrutiny

The order provides the backdrop for an unnamed actor’s protest against the government initiative in 1947. Alongside other Hollywood actors, he collected signatures and made statements defending constitutional liberties, especially freedom of speech and assembly. His political exposure widened when investigators considered his participation in the Screen Actors Guild’s 1945 contract negotiations. The union had sought health care for members, improved working conditions, a higher minimum wage, and payments when films were re-released; it was also accused of communist infiltration.

Anonymous anti-communist informants further accused the actor of long-standing association with known Communist Party members, including blacklisted screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. Within a year of his protest, he faced the prospect of being summoned to Washington, D.C., for questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The novel links these episodes as features of a growing climate of suspicion, without presenting the executive order itself as the cause of the committee’s investigation.

Threatened Consequences and Informal Recourse

The threatened hearing carried consequences beyond the questioning itself. The actor feared national bad publicity, possible boycotts of his films by the American Legion, the Catholic Legion of Decency, and other patriotic organizations, and eventual placement on a blacklist—though the studios indignantly denied that such a list existed. The reference to Charlie Chaplin, once adored and now branded a traitor, makes the danger vivid: public esteem could be recast as political disgrace.

I. E. Shinn, the actor’s agent, connected him with a film lawyer who arranged a private meeting with influential Republican representatives at the lawyer’s Bel Air villa. The meeting took the form of an elaborate dinner with French wines, during which the representatives questioned the actor informally. He impressed them with his directness and patriotic fervor, drawing on his service as a veteran who had fought in Germany during the final exhausting months of the Second World War. The passage describes this encounter as an alternative to a formal summons, but does not establish its eventual outcome.

Narrative Significance

The rule’s place in the novel is less as a procedural document than as the opening marker of a wider system of political testing. Public speech, union activity, personal associations, and professional prospects become entangled: actions presented as defenses of constitutional liberty can expose workers to investigation and threatened exclusion. The studios’ denial of a blacklist sharpens the contradiction between official denial and the concrete fear of career punishment.

A later exchange gives that atmosphere a small, physical expression. When Norma Jeane asks Shinn about another commission, he quickly raises a finger to his lips. The gesture is played as comic, with agitated eyebrows, but the fear in the eyes of those who use it is real. This later moment does not identify Executive Order 9835 as the direct cause; it echoes the broader habit of caution that the novel associates with political scrutiny.