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Room: 10th floor

In the 1940s, Hollywood began to produce a number of topical films about social issues, ranging from veteran adjustment and alcoholism to racial discrimination. Much of the historiography on these films sees these as cooperation of New Deal leftism by the individualizing ideologies of Hollywood. This paper, however, argues that changes in American social science – particularly the shift from Chicago school sociology to postwar functionalism – help explain the particular mix of "psychological" and "social" within the social problem film's popularized sociology.