John J. Gladchuk - Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935-1950

STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR
HISTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by
Jerome Nadelhaft
University of Maine

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

Jerome Nadelhaft, General Editor

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Nancy Hathaway Steenburg

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MISTRESSES OF THE TRANSIENT HEARTH
American Army Officers Wives and Material Culture, 18401880
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THE FARM PRESS, REFORM, AND RURAL CHANGE, 18951920
John J. Fry

STATE OF THE UNION
Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s
Sandra Ellen Schroer

MY PEN AND MY SOUL HAVE EVER GONE TOGETHER
Thomas Paine and the American Revolution
Vikki J. Vickers

AGENTS OF WRATH, SOWERS OF DISCORD
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Timothy L. Wood

THE QUIET REVOLUTIONARIES
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CLEANING UP
The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth Century New York City
Alana Erickson Coble

FEMINIST REVOLUTION IN LITERACY
Womens Bookstores in the United States
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GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 19291941
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LABOR AND LABORERS OF THE LOOM
Mechanization and Handloom Weavers, 17801840
Gail Fowler Mohanty

THE FIRST OF CAUSES TO OUR SEX
The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 18341848
Daniel S. Wright

US TEXTILE PRODUCTION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
A Case Study from Massachusetts
Susan M. Ouellette

WOMEN WORKERS ON STRIKE
Narratives of Southern Women Unionists
Roxanne Newton

HOLLYWOOD AND ANTICOMMUNISM
HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 19351950
John Joseph Gladchuk

HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935-1950

John Joseph Gladchuk

Routledge
New York & London

2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-95568-8 (Hardcover)
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95568-3 (Hardcover)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gladchuk, John Joseph.

Hollywood and anticommunism: HUAC and the evolution of the red menace, 1935-1950 / by John Joseph Gladchuk.

p. cm. -- (Studies in American popular history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-95568-8 (alk. paper)

1. Motion picture industry--California--Los Angeles--History. 2. Communism and motion pictures--United States. 3. United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities. I. Title.

PN1993.5.U65G554 2006
791.430979494--dc22

2006025544

ISBN10: 0-415-95568-8 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-80576-7 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-95568-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-80576-6 (pbk)

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Three and a half years ago I wrote an article in defense of a book that had a profound impact on me as a person and as a scholar. Daniel Gold-hagens Hitlers Willing Executioners proved utterly provocative and, to a degree, inspirational. Goldhagens candid accounts of Nazi aggression motivated me to confront an issue that is unfortunately still very much a part of present day society. Although possessing a highly controversial thesis and the subject of much hostility within the academic community, Goldhagens work forces the reader to confront the power of racism and impact that it can have on societies infected with it. Although racism is indeed present in one form or another in virtually every country in the world, it is saliently noticeable in the United States as it has played an integral role in the development of the nation. As seen in Goldhagens work, it is one thing to have a society comprised of racists individuals. It is another, however, to govern such a society with an institution born of such pernicious insularity. The fusion of a racist population with a demagogic government creates an organ of repression capable of inconceivable physical and emotion destruction.

When looking at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, its history, its people, and the environment within which it operated, it is not too difficult to draw a faint parallel between its evolution and the development of the arm of repression that perpetrated near apocalypse in Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s and 1940s. This is not to say that the Committee was in any way privy to genocide, but its emergence, its function, and its environment are all reminiscent of the exact tyrannical concoction that it supposedly endeavored to eliminate. This work sets out to place the Committee in the context of the Red Scare environment as a means of demonstrating what is possible, even in the worlds cradle of liberty, when an ultraconservative governmental institution is allowed to operate within the confines of an ultraconservative societal atmosphere. These two forces coalesced in Washington in 1947 as HUAC placed Hollywood on trial in arguably the most publicized episode in the Committees career. This work attempts to demonstrate that it was the combination of the Committee and the incendiary environment nourishing it that allowed HUAC to condemn the Hollywood Ten and in turn, usher in the blacklist age. What is unique about the Hollywood hearings, however, is that given the events publicity value, had the Ten been afforded an adequate forum within which to defend themselves they may have been able to expose the Committee as the undemocratic body that history has proven it to be. Success in such a quest would have been accompanied by ramifications that would have undoubtedly influenced the evolution and trajectory of the anticommunist age. Derailing the Committee would have slowed the momentum of the un-American campaign, divesting the contentious atmosphere of critical anti-Red energy by calling into question the integrity, aims, and intentions of the ultraconservatives engineering the effort. The validity of the Red Menace moniker may have also faced scrutiny as a successful challenge would have been levied against the flawed Committee theory that leftists or radicals were incapable of patriotism. HUACs ability to avoid such a predicament, however, allowed it to use Hollywood as a catalyst, a vehicle which arguably saved the Committee and in turn, perpetuate an investigation that would eventually morph into an era infamously known as McCarthyism.