House Un-American Activities Committee Research Articles

Edward K. Barsky (1897–1975): Surgery, activism, and the Spanish Civil War

Edward K. Barsky (1897–1975) was born and raised in New York City and became a surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital. During the political upheaval of the 1930s, Barsky became passionate about the cause of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, as the democratically elected government came under siege by insurrectionists led by General Francisco Franco. Barsky transformed his beliefs into action as a founder of the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, where he led a medical mission to the Spanish frontlines from 1937 to 1939. In Spain, Barsky organized American hospitals and operated under fire, contributing to significant advances in battlefield medicine. After the fall of the Republic in 1939, Barsky returned to the United States and his career as a surgeon in New York while also dedicating himself to the cause of Spanish refugees. His political activities, however, made him a target of political persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he ultimately lost both his freedom and his medical licence. Barsky was a surgeon, scientist, humanitarian, and activist, and his life illustrates the often complicated ties between politics and the practice of medicine.

Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition

Abstract In 1952, while working on my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, two men from the Department of State came to our apartment and picked up my passport and that of my husband, Chandler Davis. In 1962, Chandler was finally allowed to immigrate to Canada with his family and take up a professorship at the University of Toronto. The ten years in between were packed with politics: Chandler’s refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); his firing from the University of Michigan; his court case challenging HUAC; his six months’ prison term for contempt of Congress; and throughout, his inability to get a tenure-track appointment at any American university. I myself was not called to confess my political views or memberships but investigations against Chandler were based on the publication of Operation mind – a pamphlet which I had co-authored together with Elizabeth Douvan and which is presented here. I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’.

Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s Gregory Camp

The 1950s were a pivotal decade in the history of Hollywood music. The great movie studios had dominated the early days of sound film production and distribution but were battered in 1948 by the Supreme Court’s antitrust Paramount Case, which forced them to divest from the theatres they had previously controlled and through which they had exerted an effective monopoly on the distribution of their product. As a result of the ruling, studio profits cratered over the next decade, leading to a crisis within the film industry. This crisis was compounded by the traumatic experience of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which devastated Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s as writers, directors, actors, and composers were forced to testify and inform on one another regarding any political activity deemed to be subversive. But the worst shock to Hollywood’s old order came from the advent of television. As the baby boom generation emerged in the wake of Second World War, TV presented a stay-at-home alternative that caused attendance at cinemas to drop precipitously. To lure viewers back to the cinema, Hollywood rolled out a succession of enticing attractions in the 1950s: spectacular new Widescreen formats such as Cinemascope or Cinerama that provided opportunities for sweeping vistas in historical epics like Ben Hur and thrilling genres such as science fiction and horror, which presented astonishing monsters and flying saucers. At the same time, a relaxing of the strict censorship code that Hollywood, fearing boycotts from the religious right, had imposed on itself since the early 1930s, led to increasingly frank depictions of sex and violence on the screen that reached a culmination with Hitchcock’s boundary-pushing Psycho in 1960. All of this provided new opportunities for musical expression: science fiction and horror films, with their emphasis on the strange and unfamiliar, inspired composers to experiment with modernist techniques such as atonality and electronic music, while movies dealing with contemporary topics such as addiction and teenage crime invited the dangerous and thrilling sounds of jazz and rock’n’roll into the heretofore rather sheltered late-Romantic musical universe of Hollywood film. A new generation of American composers, including Alex North, Leonard Rosenman, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini, entered the film-scoring scene during this period and proceeded to expand the stylistic palette available to film composers with elements of jazz and modernism. It is not surprising, then, that the 1950s has provided a particularly rich terrain for film-music scholars. An important early contribution to the analysis of pivotal scores by North and Rosenman, among others, was George Burt’s monograph The Art of Film Music (Boston, 1994). In recent years, a number of books, chapters, and articles have explored this turbulent and fascinating decade, including ‘Scoring East of Eden: The Division of the “One”: Leonard Rosenman and the Score for East of Eden’, in Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York, 2009); Stanley C. Pelkey II and Anthony Bushard (eds.), Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age (New York, 2015); and James Wierzbicki, Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties (Chicago and Springfield, IL, 2016).

Incident at Vichy

Incident at Vichy

Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco

Reviewed by: Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco Katherine Bynum Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights. By Cynthia Orozco. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. 537. Notes, selected bibliography.) Scholarship on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has generally focused on the organization’s assault on school desegregation cases and the landmark Hernandez v. Texas Supreme Court decision in 1954. Chicana/o historians have either ignored or denigrated the work of Alonso S. Perales, who was not only the founder of LULAC, but also a lawyer, public intellectual, Pan-American ideologue, and a United States diplomat. Cynthia Orozco’s biography of Perales argues that the Mexican American civil rights activist was one of the most important figures [End Page 409] in Texas throughout the twentieth century. By embracing “Mexican Americanism” as early as the 1920s—well before Mexicanas/os began using the term—“the Mexican-American male middle class of the 1920s of which Perales was a major leader” was “the first truly bilingual, bicultural sector . . . which consciously asserted citizenship and membership in the United States” (xxxi). The book builds on the author’s previous publication No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed (University of Texas Press, 2009), in which she argues that LULAC was more diverse than the assimilationist, conservative, and anti-immigrant tropes long associated with it. Being born in 1898 to poor Mexican immigrants in South Texas—an area rife with anti-Mexican racism—did not prevent Perales from ascending the socioeconomic ladder throughout his life. He worked hard, entered the middle class through his education and profession as a lawyer, and always kept Mexican Americans, regardless of class, at the forefront of his civil rights organizing. Orozco credits Perales with keeping LULAC alive throughout the Great Depression and managing to help working-class Mexican Americans benefit from defense industry jobs with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. He also later prevented braceros from Mexico from working in small towns in South Texas because of widespread racism. Perales built relationships with other Mexican American political leaders, notably Henry B. González and Albert Peña from San Antonio and United States Senator Dennis Chávez from New Mexico. Orozco argues that Perales embraced candidates who worked to uplift La Raza (the people). She also details the numerous political positions in which he served at city, state, national, and international levels. Although the book is well researched, Orozco is overly apologetic for many of Perales’s shortcomings. He was a proud supporter of ultraconservative politicians like Representative Martin Dies (founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Governor Allan Shivers, both of whom disguised their bigotry against Black and Mexican residents in the name of anti-communism. Perales was an ardent anti-Communist and only supported the San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike in 1937 once its Communist leadership stepped away from the movement. Racism prevented him from supporting unionization or working in solidarity with Black activists. Furthermore, Orozco ignores the fact that Perales was a light-skinned Mexican American, and although he may have embraced La Raza, he ascended into the middle-class because of his privileged connection to whiteness, not just because of his ability to work hard for an education. Orozco criticizes Perales for his emphasis on homosocial spaces that separated Mexican women into LULAC auxiliary chapters, but the author had previously detailed this thoroughly in No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed. Her chapter on his time as a United States diplomat to several Latin American countries is where she is most critical in this volume. [End Page 410] Orozco reveals that he often followed orders and never spoke out in favor of democratic movements in Latin America, more than likely because they involved leftist politics. Altogether, the biography reveals that Alonso Perales dedicated his life to a limited civil rights cause, often at the expense of others. Katherine Bynum Arizona State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

The UnAmerican

The UnAmerican

The Late Cultural Cold War

A few days before the Thanksgiving holiday in 1983, nearly half of U.S. households with television sets—more than 100 million viewers—tuned in to watch the obliteration of Lawrence, Kansas in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. A made-for-TV movie that aired primetime on ABC, The Day After climaxed with fictional footage of the bombs bursting in air: a grinding four-minute segment replete with a trio of mushroom clouds towering over humans seared instantaneously to the bone amid the horrified screams of the cowering not-yet-dead. Three years later, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan worked to secure a historic arms control agreement with Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, the president sent a telegram to the director of The Day After, Nicholas Meyer. “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did,” Reagan wrote. The incident is a highlight in Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan. Having set out to write a book “that functioned as a sort of sequel” to Stephen J. Whitfield’s pioneering 1996 study Culture of the Cold War, Hunt contends that because of cultural change and social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War culture in the 1980s “bore little resemblance to its early postwar era ancestor.” Unlike the restrictive early Cold War environment of Hollywood blacklists, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, and Hoover’s crusading G-men, in the 1980s an anti-Cold War culture thrived, Hunt argues, “oftentimes eclipsing the dominant Cold War culture in which it rebelled” (2–3).

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

Jeremiah Stamler, MD (1919-2022).

Jeremiah Stamler, MD (1919-2022).

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

Caricature and National Character: The United States at War

Performing Dissent: Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson before HUAC (1955-1956)

In this paper, I argue that the testimonies delivered by Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) shed light on how left-wing artists performed their radical identities in response to allegations of un-Americanism during the height of McCarthyism. Situating Seeger’s and Robeson’s testimonies within their respective biographical contexts, I offer a close reading of these two documents in juxtaposition, analyzing them not only as historical archives but as rhetorical performances that illustrate how Seeger and Robeson conceptualized national identity while also addressing internationalist concerns. The methods that Seeger and Robeson employed to attack the committee are historically significant. While Seeger’s testimony in August 1955 championed individual liberty and freedom of speech, using the First Amendment as the foundation for his position, Robeson’s testimony delivered in June 1956 invoked an internationalist sense of social justice, linking left-wing politics, the civil rights movement within the United States, and decolonization efforts around the world.

“The Only Thing Red About Her”: Personal Intertextual Palimpsests in Lucille Ball’s HUAC Testimony

Lucille Ball’s 1953 testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee is a rhetorical puzzle. How was a woman with documented Communist affiliation able to avoid being blacklisted? The intertextual conflation of Lucille Ball with Lucy Ricardo provided resources to answer the charge against her and transform the conversation from one of anti-American threats to the republic to one of personal familial duty and responsibility. We argue that only through an intertextual reading of Ball’s testimony can rhetoricians understand its effectiveness. We analyze the text of her September 1953 HUAC testimony alongside episodes of I Love Lucy to reveal a Lucy Ricardo/Lucille Ball palimpsest and reveal how Ball made her innocence-because-of-feminine-ignorance argument achieve narrative fidelity and probability. The case also presents an interesting example of where a retreat from the political to the personal served to thwart public persecution for political actions.

The HUAC Othello

Paul Robeson was a remarkable singer, a brilliant actor, and an engaged political activist. In his college years he was a football star. Throughout his life he campaigned for the rights the poor, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed. His most famous theatrical role was Othello; when he played the part in London and in New York he was one of the first black actors to do so. The New York production ran on Broadway longer than any other William Shakespeare play had done. But Robeson’s life, which included political and racial attacks, the loss of his US passport, and claims that he was “un-American” (he visited the Soviet Union and compared its treatment of minorities favorably to that of the United States) led to a series of encounters in which Othello, both the role and the play, was in effect reenacted in public, culminating in Robeson’s eloquent testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This essay traces the connections, and the sometimes-uncanny crossovers, between Robeson’s life and Shakespeare’s play.

Revisiting the Blacklist Western: A Reception Study of High Noon

This article deploys primary archival research into local newspaper articles, to assess the extent to which High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) was received as a film with a contemporary political message pertaining to the Hollywood blacklist on its initial cinematic release. Various pre-existing assumptions surrounding the film’s entry into the public sphere are interrogated: by revealing that the film was overwhelmingly hailed as an instant genre classic; by examining the levels of awareness around writer Carl Foreman’s role; and by analysing concordances between news coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee and that of High Noon. The article thereby seeks to illuminate the fragmentary nature of political discourse in Cold War-era popular culture.

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999): Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s

Bulworth (1998) and Cradle Will Rock (1999):Critiquing Capitalism in the Late 1990s Martin Halpern The 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 produced wide-ranging discussions about the failings of the existing capitalist order and the need to imagine alternatives to it. Since the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a national figure, the term "socialist" has been a focal point of discussion. Some of the debate involves little more than redbaiting. Indeed, the combination of climate change, the coronavirus, and the presidency of Donald Trump brought a continuous stream of worrisome news that has left little room for optimistic reflections. Searing film portraits of our anxious times such as Sorry to Bother You seek to awaken viewers to the depths of malevolence through which we are living. Rather than examine the dystopian visions in recent films, I will look back at two films from the late 1990s that explore socialist and communist ideas. Indeed, artistic critiques of capitalism and imagining of alternatives to it have been features of cultural life even in quiescent and conformist periods such as the 1990s. Despite the disarray in progressive circles resulting from Clintonite centrism in the 1990s, two major film stars, thanks to their ability to leverage financing for major film projects, gave movie audiences an opportunity to critique a social system that was seemingly stable. Set, respectively, in the 1990s and in the 1930s, Warren Beatty's 1998 film Bulworth and Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock grappled with the dilemma of how one can both survive within an unjust social order and perhaps even transcend it. Each film focuses on the preservation of individual dignity and either explicitly or implicitly contributes to the strengthening of collective struggle against late capitalism. As well-financed feature films appealing to a mass audience Bulworth and Cradle Will Rock provide critiques of elite capitalists and the capitalist system and offer sustenance and support for the idea that "another world is possible."1 Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock provides a window on the New Deal. At the center of the film is the 1937 effort to stage Marc Blitzstein's pro-labor opera The Cradle Will Rock while the film's rapidly shifting scenes provide insightful glimpses on the mural movement of Diego Rivera, the struggles of steel workers and the unemployed, women's leadership roles, new opportunities for African Americans, and the roles of anti-communist, pro-fascist, and big-business opponents of the New Deal. The film's central focus is on whether impulses for solidarity and human caring, by artist or worker, may overcome the power of money.2 The danger that capitalists are able to use money to corrupt agents of change is evident in both the play within the movie and in the movie's story. In Blitzstein's play, we see that Mr. Mister, the dominant figure in Steeltown and a symbol of capitalist power, has successfully corrupted the clergy and the media. He also attempts without success to buy off Larry Foreman, the union leader. In the movie story, Blitzstein highlights to Orson Welles, who is about to direct his play, the vulnerability of the artist to the blandishments of capital. Welles is the host of a [End Page 37] successful national radio show and Blitzstein asks him, "How long can you whore your talents before you're used up unwanted?" Acknowledging that everyone needs money, Blitzstein probes, "The question is what will you do for the money? Where do you draw the line?" Robbins's film opens with the words "a (mostly) true story," a reference to the fact that most of the film's characters are historical personalities and to the film's culmination with the depiction of a historic event, the runaway opening night performance of The Cradle Will Rock on June 16, 1937. The film's shifting focus on other historical events that happened earlier and later–the painting and destruction of Diego Rivera's mural at Rockefeller Center in 1933 and 1934, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on the Federal Theatre Project in 1939...

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

On Ceplair and Trumbo's Dalton Trumbo and Doherty's Show Trial

On Ceplair and Trumbo's Dalton Trumbo and Doherty's Show Trial Shaun Cullen Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical. By Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 716 pp., ISBN 978-0-8131-6973-6 (pb), $29.95 Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist. By Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 424 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-18778-7 (hc), $28.99 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, two political ideologies, once thought extinct in the United States, have proven themselves to have just been dormant. On one hand, as reported in the Washington Post, recent Pew and Harvard University polls have found young Americans (between eighteen and twenty-nine years old) to be more receptive to the political ideal of socialism than older generations, the latter of whom were certainly discouraged by what scholars call the "containment ideology" of the Cold War.1 On the other hand, neofascist ideology and its constituent planks of antisemitism, racism, and sexism, have recently asserted themselves in U.S. public life in a manner unfamiliar since the darkest days of Jim Crow or the anti-immigrant 1920s. In other words, since the postcommunist thaw, at least [End Page 239] in the United States, liberal capitalist ideology has not been as triumphant as postmodernists predicted in the early 1990s. In this context, the arrival of two recent books on the Cold War atmosphere of dissent and reaction are timely. The first is a lengthy biography of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, titled Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, which was written by Trumbo's son Christopher and film historian Larry Ceplair. (Ceplair has written extensively on the blacklist and Hollywood Marxism elsewhere.) The other is a shorter and in many ways brisker account of the congressional hearings that led to the founding of the blacklist, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, by Thomas Doherty. Despite their many differences, these books remind readers of the extraordinary measures taken by US politicians in the Cold War to render "socialism" (democratic and otherwise) a dirty word, and they elucidate the important role that Hollywood (as metonymy for US culture industry in general) played in this ideological process, a process that is probably misunderstood or overlooked by the third of young Americans who now say they are supportive of socialist values, not to mention their neofascist peers. Ceplair and Trumbo's biography of Dalton Trumbo, part of the University Press of Kentucky's Screen Classics series, is as exhaustive an account of the great screenwriter's life as one might imagine reading. Over 700 pages, it is the longest book in the Screen Classics series, twice the length of many other entries, including texts on subjects whose work film fans would probably consider more significant, such as Jack Nicholson or Alfred Hitchcock. Nevertheless, the book is compelling reading and makes a strong case, implicitly, for more academic attention on screenwriters as part of cinematic history and analysis. Indeed, the contributions of a figure like Trumbo and many other screenwriters were largely written out of history, in part because of their very political persecution, a result of Hollywood's complicity with right-wing reactionaries in Washington and elsewhere to stifle dissent during the Cold War era, not to mention the latter's antisemitism, a recurring theme in both texts discussed here. Trumbo's co-written biography narrates all phases of the subject's life, from his birth in Colorado in 1905 and sometimes tempestuous childhood and young adulthood in Colorado Springs and Los Angeles, to his career as a novelist and screenwriter, to his death from a heart attack, after a bout with cancer, in 1976. Unsurprisingly, the book focuses most on Trumbo's political activism, which began in the 1930s and infamously resulted in his being held in contempt of the [End Page 240] Congress in 1947, after his refusal—with ten other Hollywood figures, mostly writers and mostly Jewish—to testify before a pre–Joseph McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee about their membership in the Communist Party. As is the case in the...

The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: Mass Media and Democratic Participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s One-Third of a Nation

ABSTRACT In a 1938 hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), director Hallie Flanagan claimed that the U.S. Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-9), which she led, disseminated “propaganda for democracy.” In this paper, I explore the possibilities of propaganda for democracy to describe FTP rhetoric. My focus is a body of work that greatly concerned HUAC. Living Newspapers were full-length, documentary plays about hot-button issues. At the New York Living Newspaper Unit (NYLNU), where journalists and theatre-makers worked side-by-side, Living Newspapers wove original reporting into dramatic narratives. Using theatrical conventions, they reimagined democratic communication for a mass society. My case study is the NYLNU’s most popular Living Newspaper. “One-Third of a Nation” was most explicitly about the lack of affordable housing across the U.S. It was also, however, about how to participate in democratic life. More specifically, it was about how to look at, listen to, and speak up about social issues. One-Third of a Nation addressed these themes by way of two recurring characters: a resounding Loudspeaker, and a plucky Little Man who represented the “average” citizen. Their interplay modeled propaganda for democracy as a dynamic relationship between responsive mass media and self-conscious public speech.

The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: Mass Media and Democratic Participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s One-Third of a Nation

ABSTRACT In a 1938 hearing with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), director Hallie Flanagan claimed that the U.S. Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935-9), which she led, disseminated “propaganda for democracy.” In this paper, I explore the possibilities of propaganda for democracy to describe FTP rhetoric. My focus is a body of work that greatly concerned HUAC. Living Newspapers were full-length, documentary plays about hot-button issues. At the New York Living Newspaper Unit (NYLNU), where journalists and theatre-makers worked side-by-side, Living Newspapers wove original reporting into dramatic narratives. Using theatrical conventions, they reimagined democratic communication for a mass society. My case study is the NYLNU’s most popular Living Newspaper. “One-Third of a Nation” was most explicitly about the lack of affordable housing across the U.S. It was also, however, about how to participate in democratic life. More specifically, it was about how to look at, listen to, and speak up about social issues. One-Third of a Nation addressed these themes by way of two recurring characters: a resounding Loudspeaker, and a plucky Little Man who represented the “average” citizen. Their interplay modeled propaganda for democracy as a dynamic relationship between responsive mass media and self-conscious public speech.