“Hollywood Ten” HUAC Hearings Begin – Angry Confrontation Erupts
The famous confrontation between the “Hollywood Ten” and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began on this day. The first “hostile witness” was the screenwriter John Howard Lawson, who like members of the Hollywood Ten who followed, was aggressively confrontational with the committee, refusing to answer questions and challenging the committee’s legitimacy.
The key question, labelled the $64 Question,” was “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party in the United States?” All of the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the question.
Originally, nineteen so-called “unfriendly” witness had been called by the committee, but in the end only ten actually testified. After Lawson was removed from the witness chair, he was followed by HUAC investigator Louis Russell, a former FBI agent, who testified and introduced evidence of Lawson’s communist activities, including a photostat of his Communist Party membership card. Russell would do the same with all of the Hollywood Ten.
HUAC had launched an investigation into alleged Communist influence in Hollywood that is probably the most famous event in the entire history of the committee. The hearings began on October 20, 1947, with a series of “friendly” witnesses who testified that there was Communist influence in Hollywood. Beginning on this day, a group of so-called “unfriendly” witnesses who refused to testify about their beliefs and associations resulted in stormy confrontational hearings. This group of directors and screenwriters became known as the “Hollywood Ten.” In retrospect (and for many people, almost immediately), it was apparent that the aggressive, confrontational tactics of the Hollywood Ten only alienated potential support across the country.
The hearings ended on October 30, but HUAC conducted another set of hearings in 1951, which resulted in more blacklisting.
All members of the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress, convicted and sentenced to prison, and then blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. They included Dalton Trumbo (see his testimony on October 28, 1947), who won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay on March 27, 1957, which he wrote under the pseudonym “Robert Rich” while blacklisted. Other included Adrian Scott, Alvah Bessie, and Ring Lardner, Jr. Lardner testified on October 30, 1947, and after the blacklist became famous as the author of the movie M*A*S*H, which inspired the popular television series of the same name).
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.
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.
Michael Wilson was blacklisted after the 1951 HUAC hearings on Hollywood. When he was able to return to work in the 1960s he took his revenge by including a wicked parody of HUAC in the script for the original version of Planet of the Apes. In the key scene, Charlton Heston is forced to stand naked in from of an “Un-Ape Activities Committee.” See February 8, 1968.
Read the fascinating book: Thomas Doherty, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018)
Learn more: Michael Freedland, with Barbara Paskin, Witch-Hunt in Hollywood: McCarthyism’s War on Tinseltown (2009)
View a collection of videos about HUAC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Z5aYU6x0o&list=PL5Ep0ZOB1B7o1mtMHEJsO08H0ZQ0whwsZ
Learn more about the history of HUAC: http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac
Read the classic account of HUAC’s process: Victor Navasky, Naming Names (1980)