On October 20, 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began large scale televised hearings on communistic activity in Hollywood.  So let’s start at the beginning, more or less.  During WWII the US and the Soviet Union were allies, but only because we had a common enemy – Nazi Germany.  You know, that whole “an enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing.  So, yeah.  It’s never that we really liked each other.  The Soviet Union wanted to eliminate us, and we wanted to eliminate them, one way or another.  And that’s why they grabbed as much real estate as they could after Germany was defeated.  And that started the Cold War.  And that led to the Red Scare – the fear that there were commies everywhere trying to subvert the American way of life.  And there really were, but no where near what the average citizen was led to believe. 

And all that led to Executive Order 9835, lovingly known as the “Loyalty Order,” which was issued by President Harry Truman on March 21, 1947.  You see, the Republicans had taken over Congress in the mid-term elections... hey, it happens.  And so Truman, not wanting to seem “soft on communism,” started programs that sought to weed out communists everywhere, Civil Rights be damned.  Hell, we even considered pre-emptively nuking the Soviet Union in the summer of 1947, before they had nukes of their own (which they wouldn’t get until 1949), just to keep the world safe from communism.  Which is a whole new definition of “safe.”  But I digress. 

It was out of all this that we got McCarthyism, which would last until 1954, when everybody finally got thoroughly sick of him.  In particular, it was a guy named Joseph Nye Welch, the chief counsel for the US Army, who confronted McCarthy after McCarthy had gone after a young lawyer in Welsh’s firm, a guy named Fred Fisher.  In front of god and everybody, including 20 million viewers on television, Welch famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”  And that was all it took for McCarthy to lose all public support.  Because, really, nobody likes a bully. 

Back to 1947, sort of, when McCarthy was just getting ramped up, when we got the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Investigations into communist subversion in Hollywood had begun as early as 1940, but then WWII came along, and we had bigger things to worry about than a few guys out in Hollywood who had joined the Communist Party during the Depression.  Following WWII, though, the commie hunt was on. 

The Committee believed that those godless commies out in Hollywood were trying to subvert the American way of life through motion pictures.  And they were right... kinda.  Yeah, there were a few communists in Hollywood... very few, especially relative to everybody that wasn’t.  And, yeah, they probably wanted to idolize their political ideas on the silver screen.  I mean, who doesn’t?  What happened was that everybody who was even suspected of being a commie was blackballed – nobody would work with them in Hollywood anymore.  For instance, the Hollywood Ten – made up of directors and screenwriters – denounced the Committee and refused to cooperate, for which they were sentenced to one year each in jail for Contempt of Congress. They each ended up serving between 6 and 10 months.

And that led to the Waldorf Statement on November 25, 1947, where movie studios promised that they would cooperate with the government and fire any alleged communists, or anybody who simply would not work with the Committee.  Aside from all the people who were blackballed – the actors, directors, producers, and writers – the studios would no longer touch any movie that was even the least bit controversial. 

The result was some of the worst movies ever conceived.  There was John Wayne in Big Jim McLain, which is exceptionally bad, along with The Red Menace, I Married a Communist, and I Was a Communist for the FBI.  All of them (and more) were nothing but really bad propaganda, void of any real character development or plot.  The best example is probably the animated 1953 version of Orwell’s Animal Farm (a film that was actually financed by the CIA).  At the end of the book, the pigs are no different than the people, and the animals’ revolution against communism has failed.  At the end of the 1953 movie, the animals rise up against the pigs and restore their utopia.  Because, by golly, communism can never win, even in a cartoon.

The Blacklist pretty much ended in 1960 when Stanley Kubrick hired Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, to work on the movie Spartacus, which won four Academy Awards.  Come to find out, people really do like quality movies.  Still, it took awhile for the talent to return to Hollywood.  Very few American-made movies from the 1960s are truly very good.  And that led to some really good movies in the 1970s, but that story’s for a different day. 

And that leaves us with today’s lesson:  Then as now, all it takes is one person willing to stand up to a bully.  Unfortunately, that one person is often hard to find. 

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