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As for HUAC, it continued its work going after people from the movie
industry, especially the Hollywood 10 , writers and actors accused of being
Communist or somehow un-American. These men were called before
Congress to testify about their association with Communist groups. Most
refused to answer based on their 5th Amendment rights, and they would not
“name names,” give out information about others they may know who were
involved in left-wing politics. The Hollywood 10 were imprisoned, and could
not find work after that, put on a “blacklist,” a list of writers and actors alleg-
edly subversive. Hundreds of others in Hollywood lost their jobs, and many
began writing scripts under fake names for much less money. One of the more
vocal victims of the blacklist was Dalton Trumbo, who wrote a famous antiwar
novel about World War I, Johnny Got His Gun, and wrote several movie scripts.
Trumbo did not cooperate with HUAC, refusing to answer its questions about
his views on Communism or to name names. Trumbo, naturally, was black-
listed and began submitting screenplays under assumed names, but, worse, had
to spend a year in federal prison, for his ideas and for refusing to answer
HUAC’s questions, not any deeds he had committed. Lillian Hellman, a play-
wright and screenwriter, was similarly blacklisted in 1952 when she refused to
name names to HUAC. She was willing to talk, she said, but “to hurt innocent
people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhu-
man and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience
to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that
I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any polit-
ical group.” In fact, the situation became so extreme that many Hollywood
studios began to show scripts for upcoming movies to the CIA to get govern-
ment approval that it was a pro-American film before shooting began.
HUAC also went after political figures. Most notably, it accused one of
Franklin Roosevelt’s close associates when he was president, Alger Hiss, of
being a spy for the Russians. The controversy over Hiss’s innocence or guilt
continues to this day, but the impact of the charges against him was clear.
Hiss’s career was ruined, but a young Congress member from California used
the Hiss case to make a national reputation for himself. His name was Richard
Milhous Nixon, and two years later, in 1950, he would be elected to the U.S.
senate from California by accusing his Democratic rival, Helen Gahagan
Douglas, of being a communist dupe. The politics of smearing people with
charges of disloyalty clearly worked and the power of anti-communism as a