In
its first three years of investigating the entertainment industry
the House of Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) managed to get a large number of people blacklisted for their
political views. This included Herbert Biberman,
Lester Cole, Albert
Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel
Ornitz,, Dalton Trumbo, Edward
Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John
Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Larry
Parks, Leo Townsend, Isobel
Lennart, Roy Huggins, Richard
Collins, Budd Schulberg, Elia
Kazan, Clifford Odets, Michael
Wilson, Paul Jarrico, Jeff
Corey, John Randolph, Canada
Lee, Paul Robeson, Richard
Wright and Abraham Polonsky.
In 1947 Roy Brewer, a close friend of Ronald Reagan was appointed to the Motion Picture Industry Council. Brewer later commissioned a booklet entitled Red Channels. Published on 22nd June, 1950, and written by Theodore Kirkpatrick, a former FBI agent and Vincent Harnett, a right-wing television producer, it listed the names of 151 writers,
directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive
organisations before the Second World War but
had not so far been blacklisted.
The names included in Red Channels had been compiled from a
variety of sources including a right-wing journal, Counterattack, FBI files and a detailed analysis of the Daily Worker, a newspaper published
by the American Communist Party.
A free copy of Red Channels was sent to those involved in employing
people in the entertainment industry. All those people named in the
pamphlet were blacklisted until they appeared in front of the House
of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and convinced its members
they had completely renounced their radical past.
People listed in Red Channels included Larry
Adler, Stella Adler, Leonard
Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Joseph
Bromberg, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron
Copland, John Garfield, Howard
Da Silva, Dashiell Hammett, E.
Y. Harburg, Lillian Hellman, Burl
Ives, Zero Mostel, Arthur
Miller, Dorothy Parker, Philip
Loeb, Joseph Losey, Anne
Revere, Pete Seeger, Gale
Sondergaard, Howard K. Smith, Louis
Untermeyer and Josh White.
Protest
meeting of Hollywood Ten
Red Channels Blacklist
How the Blacklist Worked by Richard A. Schwartz
Forum Debates
House Un-American Activities Committee
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