1 gen 1947 anni - HUAC has public hearings on communist infilitrations in movie industry

Descrizione:

HUAC: Congressional committee especially prominent during the early years of the Cold War that investigated Americans who might be disloyal to the government or might have associated with communists or other radicals.


The Truman administration had legitimized the vague and malleable concept of “disloyalty.” Other parts of the government went much further, beginning with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which Congressman Martin Dies of Texas and other conservatives had launched in 1938. In 1947, HUAC stoked the growing Red Scare with widely publicized hearings on alleged Communist infiltration in the movie industry. A group of writers and directors dubbed the Hollywood Ten went to jail for contempt of Congress after they refused to testify about their past associations. Hundreds of other actors, directors, and writers investigated by HUAC were unable to get work, victims of an unacknowledged but very real blacklist honored by industry executives.

Other HUAC investigations proved more legitimate. One was the so-called Hiss case. In 1948, Whitaker Chambers, a former Communist spy turned conservative journalist, alleged that a former State Department official named Alger Hiss — who had accompanied FDR to Yalta — was part of a secret Communist cell. Hiss denied the allegations, but California Republican congressman Richard Nixon doggedly pursued the case against him, and raised his own profile in the process. In early 1950, Hiss was found guilty not of espionage but of lying to Congress about his Communist affiliations and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Many Americans doubted whether Hiss was a spy, although intelligence declassified in the 1990s corroborated a great deal of Chambers’s testimony. No definitive proof has emerged, but many historians now recognize the strong circumstantial evidence against Hiss. Whether Hiss spied or not, the incident was a national scandal that fed the Red Scare.

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