House Un-American Activities Committee Research Articles

Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater by Jacqueline O’Connor (review)

Jacqueline O'Connor. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater. Theater in the Americas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 225. $40.00. Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater constitutes a welcome addition to the growing body of research concerned with forms of documentation in the theater. By investigating what she calls the trial O'Connor sets out to explore complicated questions ... about law and the execution of justice, about art and the resolution of emotion (21). Through theatrical reenactment of the procedures of justice, she argues, communities of performers and spectators can symbolically re-open the cases, and can debate their cultural and social ramifications in ways legal proceedings cannot. In close readings of nine such documentary trial plays, first produced between 1970 and 2000, O'Connor deliberates and interrogates the boundaries that (often very tentatively) separate fact from fiction, the courtroom from the theater, and the individual from the social. The documentary trial play, O'Connor states in an initial definition of the genre, comes about through the blending of verbatim excerpts from legal transcripts, media coverage of the events, and first-person interviews, the last compiled either at the time of the trial or, in some cases, months or years later (4). Not all of the trial plays analyzed in the book are concerned with trials in a strictly legal sense; some also deal with judicial hearings such as the infamous congressional investigations conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era. Moreover, O'Connor's notion of the contemporary in her title is relatively broad and reaches back to the 1970s; while the trials that precede the plays even date back as far as the 1890s, the historical, political, and aesthetic territory covered by the book can be roughly delineated as the post-World War II United States. In four main chapters, O'Connor discusses nine plays and the courtroom proceedings they are based on. Importantly, she points out, documentary trial plays hardly ever focus on ordinary trials, but instead dramatize legal action in which broader cultural, social, and political issues are negotiated. In these cases, the rationality of the law is often doubtful, and reflection on it determined to a large extent by political and ideological considerations. This focus on exemplary cases also explains why at times O'Connor seems to say more about the trials themselves and their historical circumstances than about the aesthetics of the trial plays she purports to analyze. The strong emphasis on the historical bases of her theatrical archive is also evident in the larger structure of Documentary Trial Plays: its four chapters are structured along thematic lines (chapter 1 deals with Vietnam War protests, chapter 2 with the McCarthy era, and so on) rather than in terms of formal, aesthetic, or theatrical considerations. While this is not necessarily a flaw, it points to the complexities of writing about documentary art, which is so explicitly entangled with larger historical realities that it is often difficult to foreground aesthetic and production processes and decisions. In the first chapter, Judicial Identification, O'Connor examines two documentary trial plays related to illegal forms of protest against the Vietnam War: Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), about Catholic activists (of whom Berrigan was one) burning draft cards, and Ron Sossi and Frank Condon's The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1979), about protesters who refused to exit public parks during the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago. In her reading, O'Connor focuses on the relationship between law and morality, and the tricky question of the extent to which laws are reflective of moral considerations at all. How can we assess the role of the legal system, she asks, in matters of political dissent? …

DVD Chronicle by Jefferson Hunter (review)

Reviewed by: DVD Chronicle by Jefferson Hunter Jefferson Hunter (bio) One Wonderful Sunday, directed by Akira Kurosawa, in Postwar Kurosawa (Eclipse Series from the Criterion Collection, 2008) The Woman on the Beach, directed by Jean Renoir (Warner Archive, 2011) Quai des orfèvres, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Criterion Collection, 2003) Lady in the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery (Warner Home Video, 2006) Dark Passage, directed by Delmer Daves (Warner Home Video, 2006, and Amazon Instant Video) The Unsuspected, directed by Michael Curtiz (Warner Brothers, 2009) It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer (out of print, but available on the used DVD market) Brighton Rock, directed by John Boulting (Lionsgate, 2012 and Amazon Instant Video) Black Narcissus, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Criterion Collection, 2010) Down to Earth, directed by Alexander Hall (Sony Pictures, 2004). In this Chronicle I’ll be discussing films released in a single year, 1947. Obviously, this will not present motion-picture history in anything like long shot, showing trends over time, but rather in close-up, showing one short span’s cinematic interests. Why 1947? For one thing, it saw significant events in America—Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in baseball, the Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier in aviation, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, hearing testimony on alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood and creating the first black list, broke into new territory of scurrilous politics. The year also witnessed a symbolic transition of film figures. Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947, closing an era of Hollywood elegance which aspired to and sometimes attained European sophistication; Steven Spielberg was born in 1947, a figure destined to preside over a new era, populist rather than elegant, fantastic and imaginative and mega-budgeted, dominated by special effects. I’ll concede that for a few cinema luminaries 1947 was forgettable. As a gypsy vagabond in the World War II melodrama Golden Earrings, Marlene Dietrich gave arguably the worst, certainly the most unbelievable, performance of her career. Hitchcock was off form with The Paradine Case, Chaplin unsuccessful (at least in my view) with Monsieur Verdoux. Abandoning Paramount, where he had produced his great comedies, Preston Sturges brought out The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which has a promising story idea—Harold Lloyd’s character from the silent comedy The Freshman, shown in later life—but a disappointing execution, a lapse into that strenuous whimsicality which was Sturges’s besetting fault. Besides these [End Page 104] misfires, 1947 saw such outright schlock as Mother Wore Tights, Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, Queen of the Amazons, Tarzan and the Huntress, and Copacabana (Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda, the cigar and the fruited chapeau, together on a nightclub stage!), all films it would be enjoyable to mock, but I will limit myself here to works with some claim to still being watchable nearly seven decades after 1947. Luckily, there are a number of them. Two young people, engaged but far too poor to marry, wander about Tokyo on a winter Sunday, trying to amuse themselves on the 35 yen in their pockets. This is the essence of Akira Kurosawa’s One Wonderful Sunday, portraying a 1947 Japan trying without much success to pick itself up from wartime defeat. Trash litters the streets; men go by wearing forage caps left over from their army service; the black market thrives; next to a bomb crater in the street, kids play a scrappy game of basebaru. The country is not just battered and psychologically damaged but culturally confused, with misspelled signs in English all over the place, presumably for the benefit of American Occupation troops. Kurosawa makes his own odd obeisance to the West by putting tunes like “My Blue Heaven” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the soundtrack. In general, he economizes, shooting on location with non-actors or on cheap studio sets with crudely painted backgrounds; he’s nearly as strapped as his pair of lovers, yet accomplishes some remarkable things. In this he’s very like De Sica and other Italian neo-realist directors (whose work Kurosawa greatly admired), using limited postwar budgets to strip filmmaking down to the austere, truth-telling essentials. For a while you...

Baseball Cinema Challenges the Hollywood Blacklist: Robert Aldrich's Big Leaguer (1953)

Baseball Cinema Challenges the Hollywood BlacklistRobert Aldrich's Big Leaguer (1953) Ron Briley (bio) As the traditional national pastime, baseball played a significant role in the post–World War II consensus in which the only possible threat perceived to an expanding capitalist economy was the alien ideology of communism. The Little League pledge included fealty to God and country, while Ohio Republican US Senator John W. Bricker, a staunch anticommunist, enlisted Organized Baseball in the Cold War. Addressing the second Annual Conference of Minor League Executives in 1949, Bricker asserted, "While the marching hordes in China are spreading the doctrine of communism, officials of the national pastime are helping to make democracy work in this country by giving every youth a chance to carve out his own career."1 Later that same year, Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to refute the alleged statement by activist and entertainer Paul Robeson that black Americans would not serve in a war against the Soviet Union. Acknowledging that he was no expert on communism, Robinson told the committee that while there was still a long way to travel on the path to racial equality, black Americans were loyal citizens who did not need communists to speak for them. Robinson testified, "They'd do their best to help their country stay out of war; if unsuccessful, they'd do their best to help their country win the war—against Russia or any other enemy that threatened us."2 Baseball's anticommunist crusade was also endorsed by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick. Speaking before the Rotary Club of Columbus, Ohio on December 3, 1951, Frick insisted that baseball defined America. He observed, "If Germany had had baseball, World War II would have been prevented, and if Russia had a sports program like the Americans, with a chance to let off steam, there would be no danger of communism." Frick concluded that baseball was doing an outstanding job of instructing youth in the virtues of democracy, and the game would "remain a proud part of our ideal way of life."3 Baseball's anticommunist consensus, however, might be surprised to learn [End Page 57] that the sport played a small role in challenging the Hollywood blacklist of performers, writers, and directors who refused to cooperate with HUAC or were suspected of being members of or sympathetic to the Communist Party. Disenchanted with Hollywood support for the New Deal and America's Soviet ally during the Second World War, prominent members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, such as Walt Disney, invited HUAC to investigate the role of communists in the film industry. In response to the 1947 appearance of the Hollywood Ten before HUAC, Hollywood producers instituted an industry blacklist. The Hollywood Ten, led by screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, refused to answer the questions posed by the committee, insisting that the political identification of American citizens was no business of the government. The Ten were cited for contempt of Congress for their refusal to cooperate with HUAC, and their convictions were upheld in the courts. Fearing possible boycotts by anticommunist organizations such as the American Legion, Hollywood producers and studios instituted a blacklist of industry employees whose political loyalties were suspect—although one could always clear his or her name by appearing before HUAC and identifying associates who expressed sympathy for communism or other left-wing causes. The public confessions set off a witch hunt in Hollywood that resulted in suspicion being cast upon such Hollywood liberals as Edward G. Robinson.4 In the early 1950s, Robinson, a film star in the 1930s and 1940s, was encountering difficulty finding work in Hollywood due to questions about his politics and generous support of numerous humanitarian and anti-fascist organizations. In 1953, however, MGM decided to cast Robinson in a low budget baseball film entitled Big Leaguer. Robinson was to portray New York Giants scout and former major league player Hans Lobert who was in charge of a tryout camp in Florida. The film was to be directed by Robert Aldrich, whose previous experience in the industry was limited to television. Although Aldrich was a...

Hollywood exiles in Europe: the blacklist and Cold War film culture

Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture Rebecca Prime. Rutgers University Press, 2014. 258 pages, $27.95.The Hollywood blacklist has fostered considerable scholarship, with much of it focusing on the ritual naming of names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In Hollywood Exiles in Europe, Rebecca Prime, Libman Professor of the Humanities and an assistant professor of art at Hood College, expands our knowledge about the impact of the blacklist by concentrating on members of the Hollywood film community who refused to compromise their principles and political commitment by cooperating with HUAC. Unable to find employment due to the film industry's boycott of alleged communists and fellow travelers, many in Hollywood elected exile in Europe and hoped to find work within the growing continental film industry. Employing film archives, memoirs, and interviews with blacklisted artists and their family members, Prime argues that despite efforts by Hollywood studios to extend the blacklist beyond the borders of the United States, American filmmakers in exile were able to make significant contributions to the development of post-World War II transnational cinema. Prime focuses primarily on the careers of Carl Foreman, Michael Wilson, Joseph Losey, John Berry, and Jules Dassin, concluding: As Hollywood-trained, European-based professionals, they critically and materially facilitated the transatlantic economic and artistic exchange that had become a fundamental component of American and European film culture by the mid-1960s (180).Prime perceives HUAC interrogations as an attempt to disrupt the radical community that had developed in Hollywood in response to the Great Depression and Second World War. In addition to promoting progressive causes, the Communist Party also provided artists a possible means of rebellion against the materialistic excesses of Hollywood. Thus, Prime acknowledges that communism was appealing to many on the political left in the film capital; she maintains, however, that the studio system limited radical political expression in Hollywood films, and that the Hollywood radicals hardly constituted the type of security threat posed by Soviet spies. Nevertheless, the HUAC investigations succeeded in thwarting the growing production of social problem films that sought to expose the issues of racism and capitalist exploitation in American society.A sense of community developed by the radicals in Hollywood also provided a degree of comfort for the exiles in Europe, who were not necessarily welcomed with open arms by their European comrades. Many on the political left, especially French communists, admired their courageous stand against the oppression of HUAC, and others were excited that the exiles would bring the expertise and prestige of Hollywood to European cinema. On the other hand, advocates of nationalist cinema believed that the Americans represented yet another manifestation of cultural imperialism and a threat to European jobs in the film industry. In addition, the blacklist proved to have a rather extensive reach. European productions featuring blacklisted writers, actors, and directors were threatened with being denied access to the American market. Accordingly, a number of the exiles were forced to work under assumed names on low budget films with little compensation. Thus, the political and economic pressures encountered in America followed the filmmakers into exile.Yet, Prime notes that there were cracks in the blacklist, which was inconsistently enforced. Blacklisted writers such as Howard Koch wrote for independent American television features such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Foreign Intrigue (albeit, not high prestige productions). Carl Foreman signed a contract with Columbia Pictures to produce four films after seeking a clearance from HUAC in which the screenwriter of High Noon (1952) renounced his communist past but refused to name former associates. …

Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II. By Nancy BeckYoung. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. 376 pp.

Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World II. By Nancy Beck Young. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. 376 pp. Nancy Beck Young departs from her previous works as a biographer to pen this in-depth examination of Congress and how it operated during the Second World War--although, to be fair, the book discusses pre-1939 legislative issues, as well. Unlike the majority of the books reviewed in this journal, the author chooses to focus on the legislative branch, noting that too many books focus on the efforts of the imperial presidency and miss what is happening on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Young argues that the Good War provided the opportunity for congressional conservatives to wage a different kind of war on the New Deal. With so much of the Democratic Party's leadership made up of southern conservatives, it was only moderates of both parties who managed to protect and institutionalize the New Deal's economic agenda, as its statism fit well with winning the war. Attempts at pluralism or social justice legislation along the same lines as the New Deal, however, were lost, as moderates sided with conservatives over fears that such laws would hamper the war effort or split the unity of the nation in time of war. Congressional liberals were not helped in the fight for social justice when Dr. New Deal became Dr. Win-the-War, as President Franklin Roosevelt ignored almost all social justice questions before the legislators. This coalition of the moderates meant that welfare state liberalism turned into warfare state liberalism. Young explains in her epilogue that moderates of both parties have disappeared since 1975; this has left twenty-first century Americans with massive congressional gridlock and hyperpartisan battles fought by screaming pundits and politicians alike. The author divides the book into two main sections: the economics of war and pluralism/social justice. The former includes fights on taxation, wage and price controls, extension of some of the New Deal's alphabet soup agencies, and labor legislation. The latter section includes issues such as Jewish refugees, racial equality, and the creation and later reauthorization of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). All of these chapters are solidly researched, with amazing quotes from Time magazine reporter Frank McNaughton detailing extraordinary behind the scenes struggles within the Democratic caucus. …

All Americans Welcome

All Americans Welcome Kai Krienke (bio) In the House Un-American Benjamin Hollander Clockroot Books www.clockrootbooks.com 150 Pages; Print, $15.00 During a recent visit to Algeria for research on Jean Sénac, a poet, essayist, playwright, poetic radio show host, and literary journal editor during one the most transformative and tragic times in Algeria’s history, I found that I was often reminded of America. Algeria’s fight and victory against French colonialism (from 1954 to 1962) had become a model for anti-colonial wars and revolutions throughout Africa and the world. In America it had gained the support of much of the liberal left, that of president John F. Kennedy, and had a transformative influence on the political aims of the African American community during and after the Civil Rights movement. Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), written in Algeria, had become a political manifesto for the Black Panthers. Eldridge Cleaver later sought refuge in Algiers in 1969, joined by Stokely Carmichael and his wife, Miriam Mabeka All were present during the 1969 Pan African Festival with the likes of Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Nathan Hare, Julia Hevre, Don L. Lee, and Ted Joans. Jean Sénac, author of many poems celebrating the Algerian revolution often referenced African American poets and artists in his writings and radio programs, but as a pied noir (European born in Algeria), an outsider to an Algerian nation being defined as exclusively Arab and Muslim despite its multiculturalism, and a homosexual, he became a disturbance and a liability to conservative fringes and was assassinated in 1973. The connection between Algeria and America, suggested by a poets like Sénac who had more in common with Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg than most other Algerian poets of his generation, implies that poets were part of alternate national imaginations. The current situation in Algeria, where Sénac and the revolutionary era of Algerian history are seldom explored in academic, political, and cultural settings has much in common with America’s similar unwillingness to revisit its own poets and alternative cultural narratives of the ’60s. Perhaps this is a move, in both cases, [End Page 24] to solidify a national image against real and threatening popular imaginations that found their expression in the most marginalized arenas. Both countries are particularly resistant to readings that are contrary to the more recent, post 9/11, patriotic rhetoric. Benjamin Hollander’s latest book, In the House Un-American, is such a reading, through a collection of poetry, essays and historical narratives that take us through heterogeneous layers of American culture such as the stories of early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants in New York; the American vernacular in baseball culture; the Kafkaesque trials of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which culminated in the anti-communist witch-hunt in the 1950s; and ruminations on how William Carlos William’s poetry came to symbolize the pragmatism of American language: “no ideas but in things.” In all cases language is a central component to the fashioning and refashioning of a certain American identity. While on one hand Hollander lays the ground for an American narrative that combines immigrant success stories, anti-communist rhetoric, and current day religious evangelism, there are untold counter-narratives to be found in Herman Melville, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Charles Olson, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Leopold Weiss aka Mohammed Asad, and the main narrator of Hollander’s picaresque tale, one Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, who is none other than the heir to Kafka’s main character and sidekick, Karl Rossman, in the novel The Missing Person (1927) (retitled as Amerika by his close friend and post-mortem editor Max Brodt). While pondering on William Carlos William’s middle name, Hollander’s version of Cervantes’s wandering knight remarks that “no one knew or even asked about this Carlos [the poet], who or why his middle name was Carlos, his name later discovered to have come into being after the brother of his Puerto Rican mother.” Why, we might wonder again, was this American poet not writing in the language of immigrant families who had fled from all over Europe to come to America, and...

The Korean Independence News group who were summoned to the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and their deportation cases in the 1950s

The Korean Independence News group who were summoned to the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and their deportation cases in the 1950s

The Tallest Tree in the Forest by Daniel Beaty (review)

Reviewed by: The Tallest Tree in the Forest by Daniel Beaty Jocelyn L. Buckner The Tallest Tree in the Forest. By Daniel Beaty. Directed by Moisés Kaufman. La Jolla Playhouse, Potiker Theatre, La Jolla, California. 19 October 2013. Paul Robeson (1898–1976) was an African American stage and screen actor, attorney, and activist dedicated to identifying and eliminating prejudice around the world. Best known for his leading roles in the films The Emperor Jones (1933) and Show Boat (1936), Robeson broke theatrical racial barriers as the first black man to perform Othello on Broadway (1943). His artistic fame and passion for social justice led to multiple tours to Europe and the USSR. Due to his outspoken criticism against stateside segregation and post–World War II racial violence, he was questioned in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and suffered the revocation of his passport for eight years, curtailing his career both at home and abroad. Playwright and actor Daniel Beaty’s solo performance as Robeson in The Tallest Tree in the Forest, commissioned by Tectonic Theater Project and coproduced by La Jolla Playhouse and Kansas City Repertory Theatre, was a tour-de-force biographical tribute. Tallest Tree dramatized Robeson’s career and advocacy and illuminated his artistic contributions to the theatre amid a cultural and political context that was often hostile. Multi-character scenes from his life performed by Beaty with accompaniment from three onstage musicians created an intimacy and immediacy that are not apparent in historical texts or the 1977 documentary film that shares this project’s name. The show’s program notes by Charlene Baldridge compare Robeson’s humble beginnings as the son of a runaway slave to that of Beaty, the son of an often-incarcerated heroin addict. By showcasing the heights to which each artist has soared, Tallest Tree aimed to capture Robeson’s genius while infusing the contemporary theatre with an awareness of its African American lineage and the message that individuals can overcome adversity to become the voice of change. Tallest Tree mirrored the solo performance practices of other contemporary artists, such as John Leguizamo and Anna Deavere Smith, wherein one artist embodies multiple characters in a full-length production dealing with themes of intersectionality, identity, and ideology. Beaty’s performance combined music, words, and movement to swiftly shift seamlessly from one character to another to not only depict multiple individuals, but also to create scenes among characters of varying ages, races, genders, nationalities, and ethnicities. He incorporated extensive dialect work, designed and coached by Paul Meier, to distinguish characters aurally and [End Page 272] to immediately locate the scenes geographically as they ranged from Alabama to Paris. Click for larger view View full resolution Daniel Beaty as Paul Robeson sings spirituals, show tunes, and wartime victory songs in The Tallest Tree in the Forest. (Photo: Don Ipock.) Music and singing comprised a third of the show, adding additional layers of cultural reference to the play. Spirituals, show tunes, and wartime victory songs infused the performance with a sense of the social ideology and politics of race that underscored Robeson’s popularity as an artist and his precariousness as a political activist. Robeson struggled to accept and harness a fame achieved by performing material he considered a mixture of familiar African American folk tunes and racial stereotypes. Beginning the play with the star’s signature “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat and retaining the uncensored lyrics “niggers all work on the Mississippi,” Beaty’s dramaturgy directly confronted the racism and prejudice that Robeson navigated throughout his career, thus requiring the audience to do the same. Tallest Tree proceeded to challenge the stereotypes that underpinned Robeson’s earlier work by reclaiming the empowering message of spirituals. Beaty poignantly sang “Battle of Jericho” and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” at points in the performance where Robeson’s character and career were under attack, and ended with a defiant and defensive rendition of “Scandalize My Name.” Beaty and director Moisés Kaufman juxtaposed the performer’s constant stage presence with an understated, yet elaborate projection design by John Narun that announced shifts in locales, decades, and performance venues—from Harlem to Moscow, from the...

On Casty’s <em>Robert Rossen</em>

On Casty’s Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist Vincent Brook Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist. By Alan Casty. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012. 276 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6981-9 (pbk). US $45. Alan Casty is on a mission—an important (if not particularly Jewish) one, in more ways than he may have been aware. Casty’s declared purpose in Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist is twofold: first, to raise writer-director Rossen from comparative cinematic obscurity to the pinnacle of the auteurist Pantheon; and second, more controversially, to reassign the brunt of moral turpitude from those who, like Rossen, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to those who denounced cooperation with the HUAC yet remained silent about the far graver depredations of the Soviet Union. Along the way, Casty also manages to enhance our understanding of the creative process during the classical Hollywood period. The revising upward of Rossen’s filmmaking reputation is a bit of a stretch—not because his work is not worthy of major accolades but because it has not been denied them to the extent that Casty claims. Casty himself quotes glowing reviews of several Rossen films and cites Cahiers du cinema’s posthumous dedication in 1966 (he died earlier that year) of a “special issue to Rossen’s work” (213). Nor is Casty’s complaint that such praise was limited to Europe borne out by even a cursory gloss of the literature. In regard to the post–World War II “change in style and content that would be as radical as the economic and social dislocations of [End Page 217] the changeover to sound,” Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman assert in Flashback: A Brief History of Film (1986), “No single film demonstrated this change in attitude quite as succinctly as Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul [1947].”1 Thomas Schatz, in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1999), calls Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) “a stylistic tour de force” that “injected a new energy and social awareness into the American cinema.”2 Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren’s Light and Shadows: A History of Motion Pictures (1983) includes Rossen in a select group that “influenced and set the tone for American film of the sixties.”3 And Paul Monaco’s History of American Cinema: The Sixties (2001) singles out Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) for challenging “the best of the French New Wave films.”4 Casty’s alleging “more than a half century of the denial of [Rossen’s] legacy” (11) is thus clearly overstated, and his claiming that Rossen created “the most complete realization in cinematographic form of the indefinable” is hagiographic to the extreme. It is true, however, that no one other than Casty has written a full-length study of Rossen’s oeuvre, first with a short monograph for New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1969 and now with this extremely comprehensive and perceptive analysis. His treatment here, of Rossen’s body of work in relation to his life experiences, is especially impressive, fully justifying his contention that “the creative inter-action between [Rossen’s] life—and particularly his political beliefs and conflicts—and his films was (and remains) unique among American directors” (8). Casty compellingly demonstrates that leftist ideals course through Rossen’s work from his earliest New York stage writing and directing in the 1930s, and that disillusionment with the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which began in the late 1940s after more than a decade’s active membership and climaxed with his 1953 HUAC testimony, colored his remaining corpus to an uncommon degree. Though not Rossen’s first or only film to confront the HUAC controversy, The Hustler crystallized it in the archetypal titular figure, who embodied the idealistic betrayal that Rossen attributed to the CPUSA and for which he himself was (and continues to be) blamed by the political left. Casty’s most explosive sections deal with the HUAC period (1947–1955). Though he has no truck with the committee and the blacklist that followed on its heels, he...

Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge by Marjorie Heins

Reviewed by: Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge by Marjorie Heins Richard Flacks Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. Marjorie Heins. 2013. New York: New York University Press. 385pp. Hardback ISBN: 978–0-81479051–9 ($35.00). Heins is a civil liberties lawyer and her particular aim in Priests of Our Democracy is to examine the Supreme Court’s role in defining a constitutional foundation for academic freedom, especially during the McCarthy years. She shows that the Supreme Court, in the 1960s, reversed decades of precedent, to assert that academic freedom is essential for the maintenance of democracy and that punishment of professors for political advocacy undermined the capacity of academics to engage in free scholarly inquiry, The familiar history of academic freedom begins in the late 19th century, when well-known professors were dismissed from prominent universities because they advocated rights of labor and other socialistic ideas. Such cases provided impetus for the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in order to advocate that academic freedom was a crucial, defining feature of the university. The AAUP declared that duly appointed professors must have freedom to conduct research—to write and to teach without interference from non-academics (whether they be trustees, public officials, or other citizens). If there was to be an academic profession, then those certified as members of the profession were the ones responsible for setting the standards for and evaluating fellow members’ scholarly and educational activities. AAUP, especially during World War I, typically accepted limits on professors’ public advocacy of unpopular causes, stressing that professors had an obligation to be responsible in their extramural utterances—“to refrain from intemperate or sensational modes of expression” (p. 24). Academic freedom, AAUP claimed, was the right of professors to create knowledge and employ reason in their scholarly pursuits, not to merely express themselves or advance their own beliefs. In short, whether academic freedom extended to extramural political expression was, even for the organized professoriate, a matter of contention. In the same period, the Supreme Court majority tended to the view that the First Amendment did not protect employees from being fired for their speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes, among other justices, distinguished between the right to speak and the privilege of a job. It is the employer’s right to set the conditions of employment, and therefore firing an employee for his or her political acts did not infringe on First Amendment rights. The court for decades applied that reasoning to universities as well as other institutions. [End Page 277] The question of faculty members’ political affiliation and activism was revived in the 1930s as economic conditions and threats of war and fascism inspired social movements in which some students and faculty were passionately engaged. Teacher unionism, in both K–12 and higher education, grew. Heins informs us that it was in the public schools and colleges of New York City that faculty activism was most evident, and strong efforts to quell it gathered force. By the late 1930s, the FBI was actively penetrating the United States Communist movement. Congress passed laws aimed at criminalizing the party and its followers, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its inquisitorial career. A New York state legislative committee—the Rapp- Coudert committee—was established on the HUAC model, and it specifically targeted Communism in the New York public schools and colleges for investigation. The Board of Higher Education, after initial resistance, cooperated with this process on the grounds that Communist Party membership inherently was disqualifying for college teaching. In the months just before the Second World War, dozens of New York college teachers and staff were purged. In New York, what became ‘McCarthyism’ began before World War II. The war time USUSSR alliance put a stop to the NY anti-Communist purge, but it resumed with much greater intensity as the Cold War got underway. Heins provides a detailed account of how the post-war school purges were instituted, culminating in passage of the Feinberg Law in 1949. That law, in effect, banned members of the Communist Party from teaching...

“An Amorphous Code”: The Ku Klux Klan and Un-Americanism, 1915–1965

On 1 June 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) announced that it would hold hearings into the Ku Klux Klan, fifty years after the organization had appeared before the House Rules Committee. Whereas the 1925 investigation allowed the Klan to continue to claim a “100% Americanism,” HUAC unequivocally declared the Klan of the 1960s to be entirely un-American. This essay seeks to explain that turnaround in the understanding of the Klan and its activities, on the one hand, and the contested ideas of un-Americanism and Americanism on the other. It is only within the context of that struggle over un-Americanism's evolving definition, it is argued, that the official decision of civil rights organizations such as COFO and SCLC – whose members had suffered personally from Klan violence – to oppose the proposed HUAC investigation of the Klan can be understood. Similarly, that ongoing contest explains how it was that, after almost three decades of investigating left-wing organizations that often included those fighting for greater civil rights, HUAC was finally moved to turn its attention to the right. Finally, this essay seeks to determine what it was, precisely, about the Klan in 1965 that was deemed “un-American” rather than simply criminal.

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, Contiguous Roth

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, <i>Contiguous Roth</i>

Book Review: Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete, by Abraham Iqbal Khan

Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete. Abraham Iqbal Khan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 208 pp. $55.00 hbk.Many communication efforts have gone astray largely because the organizers have thought primarily about the short-term consequences of what they did and said. They focused on handling crises or fending off threats without regard to thinking long-term about basic principles. As a result, the organizations involved have won battles but lost wars.This volume reports a case of losing a battle but winning a war. Curt Flood, a star outfielder with the St. Louis Cardinals, challenged Major League Baseball's reserve clause in the fall of 1969. That clause in a player's contract made him the property of the team he played for, in perpetuity, unless and until the team released, sold, or traded him.Flood lost his appeal in the courts, including a 5-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. He sat out the 1970 season, apparently contributing to a decline in skill. He then retired after playing only thirteen games in 1971. However, the reserve clause was doomed by the public uproar that the case had caused. Many said Flood led the way to economic justice for blacks much as Jackie Robinson had paved the way for them to play in the big leagues in 1947. Some even referred to the Cardinal star as a Abraham Lincoln.In 1974, an arbitrator granted free agency-the right to negotiate with other teams-to pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos. Both had sat out a year. And, in 1976, club owners agreed to a modification of the reserve clause that allowed players to negotiate with other teams after playing for six years with one club.This book, Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist- Athlete, presents a rhetorical analysis of media coverage of the Flood case and its context by Abraham Iqbal Khan, an assistant professor of communication and Africana studies at the University of South Florida. Khan looked at the mainstream media (pri- marily the New York Times), sports publications (especially the Sporting News), and the black press in America (with special emphasis on the Chicago Defender and Baltimore Afro-American). He also quoted at length academic writing about blacks in athletics-particularly sociologist Harry Edwards-and Flood's own memoir, The Way It Is.Khan notes that Jackie Robinson changed the status quo in baseball by assimilating with the white establishment. Called the patron saint of black activists, Robinson broke the color barrier when, with the encouragement of Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, he often turned the other cheek in the face of prejudice and discrimination. He illustrated a neo-liberal view-working within the system so blacks could advance by being represented in a single public sphere. Ultimately, according to this view, skin color should not matter.Robinson had little to say about politics. In testimony before the Red-hating House Un-American Activities Committee, he did take issue with a widely quoted statement by leftist activist Paul Robeson that black Americans would refuse to fight for their country if World War III were to break out because of the injustice they and their ancestors had suffered.In the 1960s and 1970s, America saw growing protests against various forms of injustice. Black athletes joined the fray. In an oft-noted case, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists, covered with black gloves, in giving a black- power salute on the medal stand at the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City. …

Operation Abolition: Defending the Civil Liberties of the “Un-American,” 1957–1961

In response to the House Un-American Activities Committee's attacks on legal defenders of political nonconformists, the six-year-old Emergency Civil Liberties Committee organized a publicity and test-case campaign to highlight the dubious constitutionality of HUAC's methods. Their drive to abolish HUAC helped to transform the defence of the constitutional rights of suspected subversives or “un-Americans” by undermining the governmental structures of the Second Red Scare. The ECLC's activity also prompted a shift in the policy of the nation's largest civil liberties group, the American Civil Liberties Union, in favour of abolition. HUAC's response of a mass propaganda campaign represented the culmination of a period when they sought to crush “un-American” dissent, inadvertently elevating the ECLC to a position of national prominence in the struggle for Cold War civil liberties.

A Conversation with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Professor Gillian Metzger: Katherine, thank you for that wonderful overview of all that the Justice has achieved and the history of Columbia Law School. And I want to apologize for those to whom I am showing my back, but this will allow us to have more of a conversation with the Justice. Justice, thank you so much for being with us today. It is a real privilege for us to get to talk to you this way, and we know for the entire audience. You have had--as you have now heard (LAUGHS)--an amazing and just tremendously varied career, spanning so many different roles of academic, public interest advocate, judge, now Justice. We can't possibly cover all of this in the time we have this morning, but what we are hoping to do is talk a little bit about each of these roles, how each step you took influenced the rest, and then we will be throwing it open after our conversation for questions from the audience. We thought we'd begin at the beginning or reasonably close to it. You grew up in Brooklyn and you attended Cornell on a full scholarship, graduated in 1954. And then you went to law school, and you spent your first two years at Harvard where you were one of nine women in a class of more than five hundred. Then came to Columbia where you were one of twelve women--you gained three female cohorts--but out of a class I believe of more than two hundred and eighty. So one first question is what made you decide to go to law school and what was it like being at law school in a group of so few women? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Gillian, may I just make two footnotes to the splendid introduction that was given for me? I was not the first woman on the Columbia Law faculty. I was the first tenured woman, but Harriet Rabb was here, she came the year before I did, and she started up an employment discrimination clinic with George Cooper. That was the clinic that took on AT&T, The New York Times, and the major Wall Street law firms, and many more. (APPLAUSE) The second footnote is a question for you. I do work terribly hard, you know that, but don't you think that David Souter was number one in how many hours of the day he worked? (LAUGHS) Metzger: I have to say my recollection is that everybody worked ridiculous hours at the Court (LAUGHS), but yes. Ginsburg: But now let me turn to your question. You asked how I became interested in the law. One big turn-on for me was that I was going to college at a time that was not very good for the United States. It was the 50s, the heyday of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who saw a communist in every corner. I was working for a professor of constitutional law, Robert Cushman, as a research assistant. He wanted me to understand how far we were straying from our most fundamental values. And in the course of my work with him, I saw that there were lawyers, brave lawyers, standing up for the people who were called before the Senate Internal Security Committee, the House Un-American Activities Committee. So I thought, well, maybe that's what I would like to do. The other powerful influence was my dear spouse. We had decided that we would do together whatever it was. Medical school dropped out early on, thank goodness, because the chemistry labs interfered with golf practice. (LAUGHS) So then it came down to business school and law school. Well, Harvard, the university Marry set his sights on, made that decision easy for us. Women were not admitted to the business school until the 60s. The law school just started admitting women in 1950, '50-'51 was the first year. I think my father was rather concerned about my interest in becoming a lawyer because, realistically, there wasn't much of a demand for women lawyers. (LAUGHS) But then, when I got married, then it was fine because, after all, I would have a man to support me. (LAUGHS) So did I leave out any part of your question? (LAUGHS) Professor Abbe Gluck: No, that was perfect. So Justice, you graduated from Columbia in 1959, and by 1963, you were teaching in academia. …

“Don’t Turn Back”: Langston Hughes, Barack Obama, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. consistently allotted Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” a significant place in his public speeches and sermons from 1956 to 1967. Charting no less than thirteen overt references to this poem reveals that it has been overlooked despite the fact that it even appears in King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963. In addition to tracing the trajectory of this poem within King’s speeches, this article also documents the political tensions that persuaded King to alter between referencing Hughes’s poem overtly and submerging his words quietly through allusion. These clear and abrupt shifts result in part from false yet potent communist accusations against both Hughes and the civil rights movement. Charting King’s use of this poem provides the means to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s poetry became a measurable inflection in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Because of King’s repeated use of this poem, this essay’s conclusion locates and then briefly discusses an inadvertent allusion to “Mother to Son” in Barack Obama’s Presidential nomination acceptance speech delivered at the 2008 Democratic Convention. This speech provides an opportunity to revisit both the continuing effect the House Un-American Activities Committee had on Hughes’s reputation well into the mid-1960s and the rhetorical courage King demonstrated by continuing to embed Hughes’s poems in his speeches.

Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman (review)

Reviewed by: Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman Ellen Schrecker Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism. By Carol Sicherman. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2011. Pp. xiv + 381. Paper $28.00. ISBN 978-0983689980. When the author of this review interviewed Harry Marks, the subject of this biography by his daughter, she was mainly interested in his experiences during the McCarthy era. He had been called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Questioned in an executive session, Marks described his brief sojourn in the American Communist party, named a few names, and then discoursed at length about the evils of the Soviet system. Marks anticipated that HUAC would keep his testimony secret, as it did with many of its friendly witnesses, but this was not the case. But because the committee did not publicize the release of its transcript, few of Marks’s colleagues at the University of Connecticut, where he taught European history, knew about his brush with the Cold War Red Scare. Though distressed by the prospect, Marks had felt he had no choice but to answer the committee’s questions. By 1953, the academic establishment had made it clear that college and university teachers who refused to cooperate with the witch hunt would lose their jobs. In fact, the University of Connecticut had already dismissed a number of politically tainted individuals, including a highly regarded and tenured professor of physics. Marks retained his job, serving the university as a popular and widely respected faculty member until his retirement in 1978. What Carol Sicherman’s account of her father’s life reveals is that Marks’s appearance before HUAC was not his first encounter with political repression. He had lived for a while under the Nazis. An assimilated American Jew from a solid bourgeois background, he had grown up in New York City during the 1920s in the comfortable world of German Jewish professionals and businessmen. After graduating from Fieldston, a private school catering to that milieu, he went on to Harvard, where he found his intellectual vocation as a historian. Determined to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of the country about which he was about to write his dissertation, Marks took off for Germany—just at the moment when the Weimar Republic was about to collapse. Young and somewhat naïve, Marks was nonetheless a quick learner who soon [End Page 467] grasped the significance of what he was observing. He recorded his impressions of the early months of the Third Reich in a diary, as well as in the many letters he exchanged with correspondents in both Germany and the US. This trove of sources forms the core of the book. They not only offer yet another firsthand glimpse of the way in which the Nazis shattered the affluent and cultured world of German Jewry, but also help us understand why someone like Harry Marks would then gravitate to the communist orbit. Marks was both an outsider and an insider. Once he reached Berlin, his family and academic connections brought him into a circle of upper-middle-class assimilated Jews, not all that different from the folks back home. As his command of the language improved, Marks found himself ever more comfortable in this environment, one which prized the highest forms of German culture. Most of the men and women Marks associated with were on the left politically, sympathetic to the social democracy of the SPD, though not (with a few exceptions) to the more rigorous Marxism of the German Communist Party. What seems most striking about Marks’s experience, at least as Sicherman has portrayed it, is that, for all his Berlin friends’ enthusiasm for German culture, they remained a group apart. Though they saw themselves as preserving the finest elements of their nation’s intellectual and artistic heritage, they were actually developing a separate German Jewish culture—one that the rest of their countrymen did not share. Since Marks seems to have operated within an almost entirely Jewish world, he was in a good position to observe how the Nazis set about...

Tom Clark under Fire: The Consequences of Congressional Investigations of Supreme Court Justices

Tom Clark under Fire: The Consequences of Congressional Investigations of Supreme Court Justices CRAIG ALAN SMITH Introduction President Harry Truman’s nomination of Attorney General Tom Clark to the United States Supreme Court on August 2, 1949, following the unexpected death of Justice Frank Murphy, was regarded as a political appointment, one bom offriendship or loyalty rather than ability or stature. Though not a complete surprise—the Attorney General’s office was then regarded as a stepping-stone to the Court—news commentators expected Truman to choose a Catholic to replace the only Catholic Justice.1 When the United States Senate confirmed Clark’s nomination (73 to 8), Republicans cast all the “nay” votes. Opposition leader Homer Ferguson drew attention to numerous suspect instances while Clark served as Attorney General, but the most compelling reason for some Senators to vote against Clark was his failure to testify at his own confirmation hearing. Calling the nomination “transparently political,” Fergu­ son made no effort to hide his displeasure that Clark was not called for questioning, and when the Judiciary Committee approved Clark’s nomination (9 to 2) without inviting Clark to testify, the two “nay” votes princi­ pally protested his absence at the hearings. From the floor of the Senate, Robert Taft called Clark’s nomination “outrageous” because the Committee reported it favorably without Clark’s testimony.2 By the time of Clark’s nomination, a nominee’s personal appearance before the Judiciary Committee was not a wellestablished practice, but neither was it unprecedented. In 1925, Harlan Stone became the first Court nominee to testify, but the next five nominees were not invited. Not long after 140 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed Court “packing” plan, the Committee heard from five successive nominees, including Attor­ neys General Frank Murphy and Robert H. Jackson. Clark’s nomination, on the other hand, followed five successive nominees who were not invited, thereby blunting Taft’s charges.3 The first and only nominee (to date) to refuse to testify was Appeals Court Judge Sherman Minton, who Truman nomi­ nated shortly after Clark following the unexpected death of Justice Wiley Rutledge. As a Senator, Minton had defended Roose­ velt’s Court “packing” plan, but, as a nominee, Minton refused to testify based upon the separation ofpowers,4 a view Clark later adopted when Congress sought testimo­ ny about his work as Attorney General. Whether Clark should testify or whether he could refuse once he was on the Court became increasingly contentious for the next four years. Clark’s absence at his confirmation hearings did not halt further inquiry into his Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley F. Reed appeared as character witnesses at the first perjury trial of Alger Hiss (above), a former State Department employee suspected of spying for the Soviets and accused of lying in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Frankfurter and Reed were subpoenaed to testify, but some news accounts reported that their trial appearances were voluntary, leading to congressional proposals prohibiting Supreme Court Justices from serving as character witnesses. Justice Department service. He was subjected to incessant probing by congressional com­ mittees investigating old Justice Department cases. It is doubtful any sitting Justice faced such protracted investigations oftheir off-thebench record until the failed 1968 nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice and his subsequent resignation eight months later. Tom Clark endured threats ofimpeachment or requests for his resignation, demands for his testimony, and intense public scrutiny of his conduct as Attorney General. This essay examines congressional efforts to compel Clark to testify and whether his refusal based on the separation ofpowers was convincing. It highlights news coverage of these investiga­ tions and compares it to secondary historical scholarship, much of which overlooked Clark’s part in Truman administration scan­ dals or their implications for future congres­ sional inquiries of sitting Justices. On several occasions congressional committees consid­ ered or expected Clark’s testimony on matters unrelated to his judicial duties, and each time Clark avoided appearing before lawmakers. Historical circumstances made it possible for Clark to maintain the separation of powers, but questions over whether Congress could compel a Justice’s testimony or whether a...

Woody Guthrie, American Radical

Woody Guthrie, American Radical

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (review)

Reviewed by: An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War Jonathan Kirshner (bio) An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman. New Press 2011. $29.95 cloth. 383 pages In An Army of Phantoms, J. Hoberman, formerly the senior film critic for the Village Voice, offers an overview and interpretation of Hollywood films in the first decade of the Cold War, 1946-1956. As such, he offers the book as a prequel to his invaluable The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, published in 2003.1 This new book is a worthy and highly readable follow-up to the earlier book. For Hoberman, born in 1948, the sixties were observed firsthand, and Dream Life was a hip, fast-paced, and implicitly personal as well as critical history. Army of Phantoms is a work of more scholarly detachment; well researched, the book reflects hours logged at archives and libraries and close readings of FBI files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. As with many great books, the footnotes are littered with priceless gems. Phantoms is dedicated to John Garfield (and Marilyn Monroe), the charismatic left-wing actor whose massive heart attack, which took his life at the age of thirty-nine, was considered by many to be the result of his being hounded during the hysteria of the anticommunist witch hunts. But despite this tipping of loyalties, Hoberman's analysis is evenhanded—at times to a fault, as when the book suggests but ultimately underemphasizes the extent to which Elia Kazan's infamous friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was motivated by fears for his own career. Phantoms starts before the beginning, with the origins of the left-leaning message movies of the immediate postwar era that attracted the attention of HUAC after the Republicans were swept into power in 1946. Hoberman nicely juxtaposes the sudden, new vulnerabilities faced by Hollywood and America: the United States lost its nuclear monopoly just as the studios lost their own monopoly power, forced by the Supreme Court to divest themselves of their theater chains. With a dwindling audience, the [End Page 215] existential threat of television, and uncertain economic prospects, Hollywood cowered before HUAC, enforcing the blacklist and churning out a tidal wave of (mostly awful) anticommunist potboilers in an effort to prove its patriotism. Hoberman dutifully puts these turkeys under the microscope; one drawback of this diligence is that readers are left spending more time with these films than they might desire. The book gets off to a slow start; its first major chapter, on 1946-1947, is handicapped by covering this most familiar part of the period. The first round of HUAC hearings, the Hollywood Ten, and the emergence of the blacklist are well retold, and, throughout, there is an excellent accounting, especially in the footnotes, of who comported themselves honorably during those difficult times and who did not. The early part of the book is also written at a breathless pace; in one paragraph Charlie Chaplin is threatened with deportation, Bugsy Siegel is rubbed out, the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act is passed, and Orson Welles begins shooting Macbeth (1948). But the book soon finds its more scholarly (though still entertaining) voice, with chapters grouped around clusters of years. The history is well handled, although, for the late 1940s, Hoberman underplays the extent to which the pathological anxieties that led to a mob mentality in America were at least rooted in real-world, plausibly frightening events. As he recounts, within one week in 1949 the Soviets surprised the world with their A-bomb test and China "fell" to the communists. Moreover, a few months later North Korea would launch its surprise attack on the South, and it did not help matters that 1949 was a recession year in the United States. Phantoms does viscerally capture the vehemence of the new burst of anticommunism that came with the Korean War and the intensified browbeating of suspected Hollywood leftists that followed. The book's most novel contributions come here, in the 1950s, as it engages genres such as science-fiction and alien...