"In the USA, meanwhile, the willingness of Hollywood to confront social problems, as in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the film of the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about dispossessed dirt-farmers, slackened. This change reflected political pressure not to criticise America, but, instead, to resist Communist 'subversion'. This pressure was orchestrated by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities as part of a battle over national identity and interests, a battle that owed its origins to resistance to the New Deal, but that gathered pace after World War Two as opposition to Communism made it possible to discredit progressive ideas. Those in Hollywood with Communist associations were blacklisted from 1947. Moreover, anti-Communist films were produced, for example The Red Menace (1949) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). These films spread images of the USA around the world. Film was tremendously important to the practice and currency of myth, symbolisation and characterisation that were central to the imagining of people, country and world. Anti-Communism was both cause and device. It was directed against alternative views of a more egalitarian America which were presented, instead, as causes and reflections of internal division in the shape of class conflict and radicalism. Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association, a committed anti-Communist, told script writers to act accordingly, and was supported by Ronald Reagan, President of the Screen Actors Guild, who linked radicals and strikers to foreign Communists. The nature of the American consensus was redefined from the 1940s, with important political, social and intellectual effects. Left-wing ideas were castigated as was cultural relativism. Instead, there was pressure for support of a conservative view of American culture."