McCarthyism & The Red Scare

Daniel Fitzpatrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (February 23, 1947)

Alien Registration Act

Passed by Congress on June 29, 1940

Made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government

Alien Registration Act Law also required all alien

residents in the United States over 14 to file a comprehensive statement of their personal and occupational status, as well as their political beliefs

Within four months, a total of 4,741,971 aliens had been registered

Alien Registration Act

The main objective was to undermine the American Communist Party

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) would investigate people suspected of unpatriotic behavior

House Un-American Activities Committee

It was chaired by J. Parnell Thomas- who later told Miller that he would drop charges against him if he would let Thomas be in a photograph with Miller’s wife, Marilyn Monroe.

(Miller was disgusted and refused) In 1947, they began an investigation

into the Hollywood motion picture industry

Loyalty Oaths Many people were forced to sign loyalty

oaths, or give up their jobs. "I further swear (or affirm) that I do not advise,

advocate or teach, and have not within the period beginning five (5) years prior to the effective date of the ordinance requiring the making of this oath or affirmation, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrow by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America…”

Real communists vs. those suspected Americans were afraid of the communists for

good reason, in light of the atrocities committed by Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. Through American spies, the Commies had gotten the recipe for the Atom Bomb, a truly terrifying prospect. To be suspected of being a communist was worse than being a murderer or rapist.

Just being suspected meant one was considered a traitor, one who hated “the American way.” Anyone who refused to take the pledge was blacklisted, found it impossible to get work, and was harassed by agents for names of other sympathizers.

The BIG SHOW… Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy

often led the questioning in the House Un-American Activities Committee.

He would hold up a list which he said contained the names of [insert whatever number you want here] people who were “card-carrying” communists working in the U.S. government.

It turned out he was making up the numbers, and sometimes the paper was actually blank.

The BIG SHOW…

No one was safe from his probing. Government workers, college professors, playwrights and Hollywood screenwriters, actors, artists, musicians, Jews and intellectuals were targets.  

Many people's careers were destroyed by just knowing the wrong person.

Sign or lose your job Churches were ordered to have their

governing members take loyalty oaths, stating they were not Communists. Most churches caved in.

Unions were forced to take loyalty oaths that none of their officers was a Communist. Many gave in to this pressure and actually expelled officers or members who had fought against corruption, racism or other discriminatory acts within the union. Seamen had to take loyalty oaths or their right to employment was forfeited. Thousands lost their jobs.

Teachers were forced to take the oath All teachers were forced to take the

loyalty oath or lose their jobs. Many were accused of having unpopular political opinions and found themselves unemployed and blacklisted.

Hundreds of the best and most courageous teachers were lost to the schools, and, of course, to the students.

A Big Difference: Ideals vs. Killers But there was a huge difference in

believing in the economic and social potential of socialism, and being a real communist agent, secretly working for the Soviet Union.

Many progressives liked the socialist ideal of equality and saw it as a cure for class wars, racist policies and economic discrimination, all of which had been realities of the recent Great Depression.

Target: Hollywood

The most intensive focus of the Red Hunters was on Hollywood, perceived as the shaper of public thought. Many writers and performers moved to Mexico or Europe to avoid being put in prison. There was great pressure to avoid controversial subject matter in films or on TV, which is one of the reasons why the TV programming of the 1950s is so bland.

The Red Scare Many in Hollywood refused to take the

pledge on principle. They did not believe the government should control the expression of their own ideas.

People like Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Ruth Gordon, Zero Mostel, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Jose Ferrer and Orson Welles were blacklisted.

Some went to jail for not naming people whom they new to believe in socialist ideas. Others broke under the pressure and gave names of colleagues to the HUAC.

Blacklists

More than 320 names were placed on the blacklist, including Arthur Miller’s

Why Miller wrote the playFrom a 2000 interview in The Guardian (U.K.):

It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.

Why Miller wrote the playI refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did. I can’t remember anyone calling it an ideological war, but I think now that that is what it amounted to. I suppose we rapidly passed over anything like a discussion or debate, and into something quite different, a hunt not just for subversive people, but for ideas and even a suspect language. The object was to destroy the least credibility of any and all ideas associated with socialism and communism, whose proponents were assumed to be either knowing or unwitting agents of Soviet subversion.

Why Miller wrote the play An ideological war is like guerrilla war, since

the enemy is an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people to death. To call the atmosphere paranoid is not to say that there was nothing real in the American-Soviet stand-off. But if there was one element that lent the conflict a tone of the inauthentic and the invented, it was the swiftness with which all values were forced in months to reverse themselves.

How is this like The Crucible?

Why Miller wrote the play As for the left, its unacknowledged truth was more

important for me. If nobody was being shot in our ideological war but merely vivisected by a headline, it struck me as odd, if understandable, that the accused were unable to cry out passionately their faith in the ideals of socialism. There were attacks on the HUAC's right to demand that a citizen reveal his political beliefs; but on the idealistic canon of their own convictions, the defendants were mute. The rare exception, like Paul Robeson's declaration of faith in socialism as a cure for racism, was a rocket that lit up the sky.

Paul Robeson Robeson was born in Princeton, N.J. His father

was a runaway slave who graduated from Lincoln University. His mother came from an abolitionist Quaker family. His roots were working class.

At Rutgers University from 1915-1919 he won an astonishing 15 varsity letters in baseball, basketball, football and track and was named twice to the All-American Football team.

He survived the racist attacks of his white teammates who even attempted to kill him.

Only in 1995 was Robeson finally inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Paul Robeson What made Robeson so extraordinary was that he

understood that protest and resistance were the most effective means to overcome the obstacles he faced living in a country as racist as the U.S.

After attending Columbia Law School, he found a job at a law firm. But he abandoned the idea of becoming a lawyer when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him.

At this point Robeson sought a career in the theater and on screen as an actor and singer.

He won acclaim throughout the world with his performances in Shakespeare's Othello. Yet Hollywood refused to bring this role to the big screen.

Paul Robeson Robeson always fought to bring dignity to

his characters at a time when Hollywood studios thrived on promoting racist stereotypes of Black people and other nationalities of color.

In the 1939 film Proud Valley, about coal miners in Wales, Robeson's character promotes black and white worker solidarity, but the film was an exception to the Hollywood norm.

With so few positive roles for him or other black actors, he eventually walked away from Hollywood.

Socialism seen as a remedy for racism and other inequalities Racist and anti-communist reaction to

Robeson's outspoken criticism of U.S. racism limited his opportunities to perform in the U.S. He then brought his unique bass voice to concert halls throughout the world.

Robeson was an international ambassador of African American culture. He also developed into an activist and fighter for civil rights, the socialist liberation of Africa and for organized labor.

Paul Robeson During the 1940s, he challenged then-

President Harry Truman to sign an anti-lynching bill. He asked publicly why black soldiers should fight for a country where segregation was the law of the land.

He fought against the Cold War and tirelessly promoted organizations that sought friendship and cooperation between the peoples of the Soviet Union and the United States.

Robeson & the HUAC The House Un- American Activities Committee

charged Robeson with being a communist. The U.S. government and police authorities considered an African American communist with such recognized talents a real threat.

When the members of the committee asked Robeson why he did not just stay in the Soviet Union, he replied:

To Congress: Is that clear?

“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/resources/paul-robeson-sings-ol-man-river

The Mighty & the Mediocre Charlie Chaplin, the great British comedian,

who had made his residence in this country, where he made some of the world's most outstanding movies, was deported to England.

Ronald Reagan, who was then a B-rated

movie actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, led a movement to blacklist actors and technicians. The blacklist threw hundreds of them out of jobs with no hope of finding others in the movie industry. When he became president, he tried to have the records of his actions sealed.

Why Miller wrote the play Turning to Salem was like looking into a petri dish,

an embalmed stasis with its principal moving forces caught in stillness. One had to wonder what the human imagination fed on that could inspire neighbors and old friends to emerge overnight as furies secretly bent on the torture and destruction of Christians. More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin.

Why Miller wrote the play In the stillness of the Salem courthouse,

surrounded by the images of the 1950s but with my head in 1692, what the two eras had in common gradually gained definition. Both had the menace of concealed plots, but most startling were the similarities in the rituals of defence, the investigative routines; 300 years apart, both prosecutions alleged membership of a secret, disloyal group. Should the accused confess, his honesty could only be proved by naming former confederates. The informer became the axle of the plot’s existence and the investigation’s necessity.