1948 January 9

Hollywood Ten Arraigned for Contempt of Congress

 

The Hollywood Ten was a group of screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions about their political associations at hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), beginning on October 27, 1947. On this day, they were arraigned on charges of contempt of Congress.

Eventually, they were all found guilty, served time in prison, and were blacklisted from working in the movie industry. Members of the Hollywood Ten included writer Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr, and Adrian Scott.

Contempt of Congress indictments became a heavy weapon against alleged subversives during the Cold War. While it had rarely been used before World War II, HUAC issued 21 contempt citations in 1946, 14 in 1947, and 56 in 1950. All other House Committees in those years issued a total of only 6 contempt citations.

The Hollywood studios announced the blacklist on December 3, 1947, and the ACLU promptly criticized it on December 14, 1947.

HUAC conducted a second set of investigations of Hollywood in 1951 and 1952, with over 30 days of hearings. The 1951-52 investigations were far more damaging than the Hollywood Ten hearings in 1947. Members of the Hollywood Ten lost the court appeals of the contempt citations and were sentenced to prison. No court decisions had established a First Amendment right to refuse to testify before an investigating committee. As a result, many witnesses in 1951 cooperated with HUAC and provided names of people they said were communists. Far more careers were destroyed than in 1947. A number of witnesses left the country to work in England or Europe.

After prison, and blacklisted from working in Hollywood, members of the Ten survived in various ways. Dalton Trumbo worked on many films under pseudonyms. And in fact he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as “Robert Rich” on March 27, 1957, for the film The Brave One. Ring Lardner eventually was able to work in Hollywood and won fame as the screenwriter for the film M*A*S*H, which then became one of the most popular television programs in the 1970s.

Read about the Hollywood Ten and the blacklist: Thomas Doherty, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018)

Learn more: Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (1980)

Watch the short 1950 documentary, The Hollywood 10: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taancRcLQ8o

Learn about the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (2015)

See a Filmography of Movies About the Red Scare in Hollywood: http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/AllPowers/film.html

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