Wyler said fear would lead to self-censorship and eventually the screen would be paralysed.[2]. [13][14] It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. "[21] Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project. And while 80 celebrities including Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly and John Huston signed a petition denouncing the committee as un-American itself for probing the politics of individual citizens, the anti-communist momentum of the day carried the hearings forward. Universal Newsreel 20-85 Oct. 23, 1947. . [34][35], In May 1960, the committee held hearings in San Francisco City Hall which led to the infamous riot on May 13, when city police officers fire-hosed protesting students from the UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges, and dragged them down the marble steps beneath the rotunda, leaving some seriously injured. Spearheaded by director John Huston and screenwriter Philip Dunne, the committee flew to Washington in the middle of the hearings to lend moral support to the motion picture industry. The museum has justfinished a massive renovation of the museum and its exhibitions, the first major renovation in more than 20 years and the largest since the museum opened its doors in 1957. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having either fascist or communist ties. [4], This subcommittee was originally concerned with investigating pro-German sentiments in the American liquor industry. What impact did the Second Red Scare have on the United States? 816-268-8200 | 800-833-1225 The HUAC hearings and blacklistings discouraged Hollywood from producing politically controversial films. Among them was noted film director Elia Kazan, who named numerous people who he believed were communist sympathizers, and they too were blacklisted. Americans were frightened that the Soviets had developed the atomic bomb. (4,000 pamphlets). Richard Nixon was an active member in the late 1940s, and the committees most celebrated case was perhaps that of Alger Hiss. Based on allegations and evidence provided by Chambers, Hiss was found guilty of perjury and served 44 months in prison. The Special Committee was widely known as the McCormackDickstein committee. A 1939 NKVD report stated Dickstein handed over "materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc." All Rights Reserved. Hiss then sued for libel, leading Chambers to produce copies of State Department documents which he claimed Hiss had given him in 1938. Director Edward Dmytryk testified a second time in 1951, outdoing even Reagan and Disney in his friendliness. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent, intoned Churchill. to determine whether government employees had communist leanings. As the anticommunism crusade subsided in the early 1960s, the Hollywood blacklist was slowly discontinued. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing the United States flag. Chambers named more than a half-dozen government officials including White as well as Alger Hiss (and Hiss' brother Donald). Although it ceased issuing subpoenas that year, its operations continued until 1975. Others did testify. The committee faced witnesses who were openly defiant. The fact that Rand may have been able to approach the head of the committee to complain about the way she had been interviewed strongly indicated that the friendly witnesses were stage managed. This was idea so pervasive that it even strongly affected the Kennedy administration. [citation needed], It has been reported that while Dickstein served on this committee and the subsequent Special investigation Committee, he was paid $1,250 a month by the Soviet NKVD, which hoped to get secret congressional information on anti-communists and pro-fascists. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. Its mandate was to get "information on how foreign subversive propaganda entered the U.S. and the organizations that were spreading it." The House Un-American Activities Committee was empowered for more than three decades to investigate "subversive" activity in American society. Even westerns began taking a liberal turn with films such as Broken Arrow (1950) and Devils Doorway (1949) depicting Indians in a positive light. . After World War II the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on opposite sides of a Cold War, which pitted the democratic United States against the Communist Soviet Union. [5] After 1951, there was no such confusion in the political message from Hollywood. Why did the Hollywood Ten not cooperate with the HUAC hearings? What is more important national security or personal freedom? (2018, February 9). While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The impact of these hearings was to ruin the careers of many individuals and to foster a political paranoia toward anyone suspected of holding contrary political views or of joining suspected political organizations. Hollywood Ten, in U.S. history, 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison . This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering communist subversion. After conviction on contempt of Congress charges for refusal to answer some questions posed by committee members, "The Hollywood Ten" were blacklisted by the industry. The film industry investigations reached their peak with the events surrounding the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were called to testify in October 1947. [6] Among the committee's targets were the American Civil Liberties Union and communist presidential candidate William Z. The hearings resulted in contempt of Congress charges against the Hollywood 10, a group of filmmakers, mostly screenwriters, who refused to cooperate with the committee and were ultimately jailed and banned from working for all of the major studios. Though many of the entries on the blacklist were the result of rumours, the hint of suspicion was enough to end a career. Capitalism was also the subject of allegorical attack. The HUAC investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood in 1947 was really the starting gun for the culture of accusation and intimidation that today we subsume under the all-encompassing rubric of McCarthyismeven though McCarthys career as a Communist hunter didnt began until 1950, three years after the HUAC-Hollywood hearings. What impact did the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings have on Hollywood? [9], In 1934, the Special Committee subpoenaed most of the leaders of the fascist movement in the United States. Shortly thereafter it was announced that no subversive would be knowingly employed in Hollywood. These friendly witnesses included Ronald Reagan, who testified that a small clique of communists have attempted to be a disruptive influence within the Screen Actors Guild, and Walt Disney, who declared that they had been behind a strike at his studio. Its defenders argued it uncovered vital information that bolstered national security, while critics charged it was a partisan tool bent on discrediting the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUACs influence was in decline, and in 1969 it was renamed the Committee on Internal Security. In 1947, studio executives told the committee that wartime filmssuch as Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and Song of Russiacould be considered pro-Soviet propaganda, but claimed that the films were valuable in the context of the Allied war effort, and that they were made (in the case of Mission to Moscow) at the request of White House officials. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC's influence. Critics claimed that HUACs tactics amounted to a witch hunt that trampled on citizens rights and ruined their careers and reputations. York, 1948, p. 221. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. How did the House Un-American Activities Committee obtain so much power? Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. His reign of terror came to an end in 1954, when the news media revealed his unethical tactics and he was censured by his colleagues in Congress. [47], The House Committee on Internal Security was formally terminated on January 14, 1975, the day of the opening of the 94th Congress. As part of the wider sweep of anticommunist activities of the postwar period, the Hollywood blacklist brought media workers into the web of suspicion and fear that characterized the era. After the opening credits, the narrator quotes from the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster byStephen Vincent Benet. Foster. However the NKVD was dissatisfied with the amount of information provided by Dickstein, after he was not appointed to HUAC to "carry out measures planned by us together with him." What was the significance to Americans of Sputnik? Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Those investigated during the Red Scare of 194754 included many artists and entertainers, including the Hollywood Ten, Elia Kazan, Pete Seeger, Bertolt Brecht, and Arthur Miller. [4] But their popularity did not guarantee their production. President Harry Truman saw the Communist invasion of South Korea as a test of the _____ and ordered U.S. naval and air power into action. He held public hearings in which he accused anyone he disliked of being a Communist. With the exception of Rep. Herman Eberharter (D-Pa.), the members of the committee seemed to support internment, and its recommendations to expedite the impending segregation of "troublemakers", establish a system to investigate applicants for leave clearance, and step up Americanization and assimilation efforts largely coincided with WRA goals. [42] Rubin attended another session dressed as Santa Claus. In the anticommunist furor of post-World War II America, many crusadersboth within the government and in the private sectortargeted the media as a site of subversive infiltration. In April 1948 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) sent to the floor for a vote a bill coauthored by Nixon and Rep. Karl Mundt that sought to proscribe many activities of the Communist Party though not to outlaw it altogether; the bill was passed by the House but failed in the Senate. Influenced by a pamphlet called Red Channels, which alleged that communists had infiltrated the entertainment industry and intended to use the suggestive power of media to spread propaganda to American audiences, in 1950 HUAC began investigating Hollywood figures.Red Channels charged 151 actors, writers, and directors with having ties to the Communist Party. Hiss also denied all charges; doubts about his testimony though, especially those expressed by freshman Congressman Richard Nixon, led to further investigation that strongly suggested Hiss had made a number of false statements. But it is not easy to see how in 1969, a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Its influence waned by the 1960s; in 1969 it was renamed the Internal Security Committee, and in 1975 it was dissolved. and you.[6] The communists take a fifth amendment and go The Cold War came early to Hollywood. Articles with the HISTORY.com Editors byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan and Matt Mullen. The conflict between the ultra-conservatives and the radicals came to a head at the HUAC hearings into communist involvement in Hollywood on 20 October 1947. [36][37] Soviet affairs expert William Mandel, who had been subpoenaed to testify, angrily denounced the committee and the police in a blistering statement which was aired repeatedly for years thereafter on Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley. What was the purpose of the Loyalty Review Program? Fax: 816-268-8295. (D-Tex. How did McCarthy's influence over American life end? Some people argued that the State Department and the Truman administration had lost China to the communists. As TIME reported in its coverage of the hearing: This time Dmytryk not only admitted membership in the party in 1944-45; he also gave the committee a longer list of party members (26) than any other witness to date and the best summary yet of the Communists Operation Hollywood.. Kreitner, Richard. David Schultz is a professor in the Hamline University Departments of Political Science and Legal Studies, and a visiting professor of law at the University of Minnesota. In 1999, Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar that caused considerable division within the Hollywood community, highlighting the lingering effects of the director's testimony. Moseley was supported by Donald Shea of the American Gentile League, whose statement was deleted from the public record as the committee found it so objectionable. Rubin then "blew giant gum bubbles, while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes". The end of HUAC came when it began to investigate opposition to the Vietnam War. The end of HUAC came when it began to investigate opposition to the . In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, held a series of hearings on alleged communist infiltration into the Hollywood motion picture industry. [1] It also demonstrated the obsession of the committee with publicity. (Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, the namesake of an era marked by anti-communist paranoia, was not involved with the Congressional committee, although their aims overlapped.) Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States. The period became identified with the term "McCarthysim," as the televised hearings of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy nourished a climate of fear and intimidation throughout the United States. 2023, A&E Television Networks, LLC. The HUAC investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood in 1947 was really the starting gun for the culture of accusation and intimidation that today we subsume under the all-encompassing . In the 1930s, its purview included not just American Communists but the domestic Nazis in the German American Bund. Its influence waned by the 1960s; in 1969 it was renamed the Internal Security Committee, and in 1975 it was dissolved. One-third of those subpoenaed cooperated with the committee, which often meant accusing friends and coworkers, and those who did not cooperate risked going to jail and being blacklisted. Supporters of the committee, on the other hand, believed that its efforts were justified given the grave threat to U.S. security posed by communism. but only arrested those responsible for the accidental death of a communist [22], The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. stooge. Each contains information about the outcome of the hearings and the impact that they had on each entertainer's life. [19][20], In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan, but decided against doing so, prompting white supremacist committee member John E. Rankin (D-Miss.) [citation needed]. Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), The Cold War: Investigating the Red Menace, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac. The committee began operating in 1938, but its greatest impact came following World War II, when it engaged in a highly publicized crusade against suspected communists. Youre rightthats a very common misconception, the conflation of Senator McCarthy with the House committee. Those hearings anticipated the much more infamous and influential investigations that would take place after World War II. Ross argues that Robinson served as a powerful example to other left-leaning stars in Hollywood who shied away from politics in order to protect their careers. Before the fears and terrors of the . He warned that the committee was making decent people afraid to express their political opinions by creating fear in Hollywood. . Committee head J. Parnell Thomas argued with her saying that if the film was attacked, there would be a furor. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives (19381944), Volumes 117 with Appendices. Government officials felt the same types of pressures on the home front. You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. What impact did the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings have on Hollywood? Upon its formation in 1938, the official role of the House Un-American Activities Committee was to investigate Communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the Great Depression, though it also examined the activities of other groups on the political left. What was the ultimate fear during the Red Scare? During this time period the lines of civil liberties and national security began to blur, and U.S. citizens felt a sense of uncertainty. The hearings ushered in the film industrys blacklist era and scores more faced bans from work due to their political ideologies in coming years. The term has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate . In January 1947, studio head Jack Warner had received a Medal of Merit . In 1947 and 1951 it investigated alleged Communist Party influence in Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Citizens suspected of having ties to the communist party would be tried in a court of law. why the communists were not behind bars for murder of McLains partner. "Disorder Erupts as HUAC Investigates Anti-Vietnam War Movement." This intimidating atmosphere often produced dramatic but questionable revelations about Communists infiltrating American institutions and subversive actions by well-known citizens. Such refusal was often taken as tantamount to guilt, and many individuals were cited for contempt of Congress. Under the policy known as "massive retaliation," President Eisenhower was willing to threaten to use nuclear weapons in order to, One reason for President Eisenhower's massive retaliation policy was his belief that winning the Cold War would require not just military action, but also a, Under President Eisenhower, the CIA ran covert operations in countries where the threat of communism seemed strong in order to. In 1950, with Senator McCarthy and others arousing fears of Communist spies, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, usually called the, As worries about nuclear war and Communist infiltration spread, Cold War themes appeared in films, plays, television, popular fiction, and even in. Updates? He spent the rest of his life proclaiming his innocence and decrying his wrongful prosecution. At the time, McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin who had won election in 1946 after a campaign in which he criticized his opponent's failure to enlist during World War II while .