Word: huac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hard for those who did not actually live through those post-war years to appreciate the awfulness of that era. The main organs of villainy were the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. And among their agents were Representatives J. Parnell Thomas and Richard M. Nixon, Senators Pat McCarran and James O. Eastland. Citizens by the carload were hauled before the committees; and, as a result, dozens of writers, performers and other professionals were blacklisted and for years could not secure work in films, theatre, radio, television and other fields...
...before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Playwright Lillian Hellman made a firm decision. She would tell committee members whatever they wished to hear about her own political views and activities, but she would not discuss the real or imagined subversions of anyone else. In a letter to HUAC Chairman John S. Wood 1 she declared: "I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive ... to hurt innocent people whom I knew...
Laconic Anticlimax. Her moment of truth with HUAC forms the heart of this slim memoir, Hellman's first-and long-anticipated-public word on her brush with McCarthyism. Two earlier autobiographical volumes, An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973), ignored this subject. Yet when the crucial scene in Scoundrel Time comes, it is a laconic anticlimax. The committee seems flummoxed by Hellman's strategy. When the chairman asks that her letter be read into the public record, Hellman's lawyers leap to distribute copies to the assembled reporters. Minutes later a voice is heard in the press...
...sell her beloved farm in Pleasantville, N.Y., and, at a particularly low ebb, clerk in a Manhattan department store. Scoundrel Time does not dwell on these privations or, for that matter, anything else. It can be read in roughly the same amount of time Hell man spent with HUAC. Yet its understated fury is unforgettable...
...late '40s and early '50s. The witnesses are exclusively from the Hollywood and Broadway communities and include, among others, such figures as Larry Parks, Jose Ferrer, Abe Burrows, Elia Kazan, Jerome Robbins, Lillian Hellman, Lionel Slander, Arthur Miller and Paul Robeson. (Bentley seems no less inclined than HUAC to sprinkle Stardust in order to germinate publicity...