WHAT’S THE STORY?

70 YEARS ago today, the secrets of Hollywood began to be laid bare as never before when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee of the US House of Representatives, started to investigate allegations of communist activity in Hollywood.

Depending on your point of view, this was either the beginning of the darkest chapter in American history that would lead to 1950s McCarthyism, or the exposure of a Red Menace in California’s finest acres.

With hindsight, most people would incline to the former view, but probably not President Donald Trump or his supporters.

Either way, it was an absolutely sensational story that had America riveted for weeks and ended in disaster for many prominent people in the film world.

HUAC?

THE House Un-American Activities Committee actually began its operations in 1938. What exactly constituted “Un-American” was never totally defined but being members or even fellow travellers of Communist or Fascist groups was deemed to be unacceptable.

HUAC had the power to subpoena any citizen and force them to testify or risk going to jail. That was to prove a devastating weapon. From the outset, HUAC was controversial, with its members and defenders saying it improved national security, while critics said it was all about Republicans trying to prove President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal programme encouraged socialism.

There had been several such committees before HUAC, which curiously enough tended to concentrate on the “Red Menace”, and from 1938 when HUAC was established – it was sometimes known as the Dies Committee after chairman Martin Dies, a conservative Texan Democrat – it almost exclusively went after Communists and those associated with socialist groups.

On his appointment, Dies received the following telegram from the Ku Klux Klan: “Every true American, and that includes every Klansman, is behind you and your committee in its effort to turn the country back to the honest, freedom-loving, God-fearing American to whom it belongs.”

WHY THE BIG SCREEN?

THE hearings in October 1947 were all about Communist activities in the film industry, and followed HUAC’s investigation into the Federal Theatre Project, which was biased to the point that committee members claimed the project had put on plays that were “sheer propaganda” for Communism and the New Deal. The project had discovered Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, among others, and its productions included those well-known Communist propaganda pieces Macbeth – directed by Welles – and The Taming of the Shrew.

Having failed to expose the Federal Theatre Project as a communist front, HUAC went after the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, trying to expose its membership as “reds under the bed”. That their investigation had credibility was due to columns in The Hollywood Reporter – which is still in existence – that named Communists and sympathisers working in the industry. They were known as Billy’s Blacklists after publisher William R Wilkerson, the six-times married compulsive gambler and womaniser, who personally wrote and supervised the columns. Wilkerson’s son much later apologised for his father’s part in the “Red Menace” scare.

WHO TESTIFIED?

WALT Disney was first up and named people that had worked for him as either Communists or sympathisers. Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, said there had been a Communist plot to take over the Guild but it was under control – his then wife Jane Wyman tore into him and she later said his testimony helped lead to their divorce.

Of the 43 people cited to appear, 19 said they would not give evidence. Ten of those would go to jail.

There had already been a staggering development – huge Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Danny Kaye formed the Committee for the First Amendment to protest against the targeting of their industry. Sadly for them, some of those who had denied being Communists were actually members of the party and that anti-HUAC movement fizzled out.

WHO WERE THE TEN?

ALVAH Bessie, writer; Herbert Biberman, director; Lester Cole, writer; Edward Dmytryk, director; Ring Lardner Jr, writer; John Howard Lawson, writer; Albert Maltz, writer; Samuel Ornitz, writer; Robert Adrian Scott, writer; Dalton Trumbo, writer. All were found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify during those October hearings. They also refused to name names. All went to prison and all were blacklisted and banned from working in the American film industry – many more names were added to the list.

Some moved to Britain on release, and the blacklist only ended in 1960 when Kirk Douglas credited Trumbo with writing Spartacus. Lardner was also welcomed back and wrote MASH, for which he won an Oscar in 1970 – Hollywood was finally over the blacklisting that began in this week of October, 1947.