HUAC History

In foreign affairs, the President and his advisers established many of the basic foundations of America foreign policy, especially in American-Soviet relations, that would guide the nation in the decades ahead. The all-male group of screenwriters, producers and directors (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Larson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo) refused to cooperate with the investigation and used their HUAC appearances to denounce the committee’s tactics. Legislators defeated, for instance, a measure for national compulsory health insurance. The most infamous case began in August 1948, when a self-confessed former member of the American Communist Party named

Under pressure from the Comintern, however, the party broke off relations with both groups in 1924. As far back as 1848, when Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, many Americans viewed communism as an alien ideology. His reign of terror came to an end in 1954, when the news media revealed his unethical tactics and he was censured by his colleagues in Congress. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC’s relevance was in decline, and in 1969, it was renamed the Committee on Internal Security. The suggestion that Communist agents had infiltrated senior levels of the U.S. The House of Representatives had a group called the House Un-American Activities Committee to deal with this, and Joseph McCarthy led hearings in the Senate. Many actors and authors were put on blacklists, which meant they could not get jobs in movies or get credit for their

In 1925 the Comintern, through its representative Sergei Gusev, ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's faction; Foster complied. Other people, only accused of being communists, lost their jobs. Based on allegations and evidence provided by Chambers, Hiss was found guilty of perjury and served 44 months in prison. government also added to the widespread fear that “Reds” (a term derived from the red Soviet flag) posed a serious threat to the nation. At the Democratic convention of 1948, they withdrew from the party to form a states’ rights party, the Dixiecrats. Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. Most scholars admit that the President faced enormous challenges domestically, internationally, and politically. While he occasionally failed to measure accurately the nation's political tenor and committed some significant policy blunders, Truman achieved notable successes. McCarthy led an aggressive anticommunist campaign of his own that made him a powerful and feared figure in American politics. HUAC’s work served as a blueprint for the tactics employed by U.S. In addition, many of the major studios imposed a strict blacklist policy against actors, directors, writers and other personnel implicated in Communist activity. Yet the anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s extended both in time and scope well beyond the activities of the junior