Word: huac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...House Unamerican Activities Committee was an inexcusable aberration (rather than a legitimate response to the Communist threat) with a long series of attacks on Hellman's own conduct during the '50s. In a long and turgid footnote, Trilling implies over and over that Hellman was a communist, and that HUAC was therefore completely justified in its witchhunt. The logic is shaky, at best...
...name Alger Hiss sounds familiar, but you can't really place it, he was the center of a national crisis of sorts in the late 1940s over whether Communists had penetrated into high levels of the government. In 1948, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a man named Whittaker Chambers had accused Hiss, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace and a respected New Dealer with stellar legal and social credentials, of being a Communist. Later Chambers, a self-admitted former Communist spy, added that Hiss had passed State Department documents to the Communist...
Still, we are given a fair share of fresh insights into the motivations of Alger Hiss throughout the living nightmare of the HUAC accusations and the trials. For one thing, his father's originally incredulous attitude towards the charges, perceived by some as patrician arrogance, is cleared up by Tony Hiss--until the vote of the jury in the first perjury trial (8-4 for conviction) Alger Hiss honestly thought no one could take Chambers seriously. And more importantly, Hiss, we discover, had to face not only the immense pressure of the trials but also that of keeping his marriage...
Hollywood on Trial, which concerns the HUAC investigations and the subsequent blacklisting of several hundred writers, directors, producers and performers in both movies and television, focuses primarily on the men who went to jail for contempt of Congress. These ten - the group included Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and Director Edward Dmytryk - declined, sometimes indignantly, sometimes bemusedly, to answer the persistent questions of the committee chairman concerning their alleged Communist Party affiliations. "I could answer your question," Ring Lardner told the committee, "but I'd hate myself in the morning." Since Communist Party membership was not illegal...
...community could have fought McCarthy much more cohesively if it hadn't been as divided as it was over this case, over this symbol of how far you go and whether you believe Alger Hiss or you don't believe Alger Hiss. People instead of collecting themselves to battle HUAC and McCarthy and any excesses of the executive branch were busy arguing in the prints over the guilt or innocence of this man. The one thing I will say about Alger Hiss is that if in fact he is not aware of some of the contradictions between his version...