Bogie and Bacall Risked their Careers in 1947 going to DC and Opposing HUAC with.

[gratuitous]

31. Yes . . . but also no

HUAC was one of the high points of conservative devious tactics. When the first batch of people subpoenaed arrived, there was some discussion among them what the best approach was. (HUAC had gone after writers first in the Hollywood community, correctly surmising that they would have the least support in the industry.) Some of the writers felt the best defense was to invoke the First Amendment, and their right to speak freely without prior governmental restraint. That came a cropper, as HUAC nailed them for voicing an opinion in support of the Communist Party, which was outlawed at the time.

It was at this time that the Hollywood community began rallying in support of their own, but when people started getting whisked off to prison based solely on their thoughts, many of them ducked out of the spotlight, including sadly Bogart and Bacall. When the next bunch of writers was brought before HUAC, they invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. They stymied HUAC, but only briefly. HUAC quickly conjured a rule that if a witness answered any question, he had to answer every question, or be cited for contempt and whisked off to the hoosegow. Since most of the witnesses had answered the pro forma question about identifying themselves (i.e., Please state your name for the record), they were already trapped.

After that, as HUAC took its show on the road to enclaves of the entertainment industry, the best tactic was simply not be home when the subpoena server arrived. Which meant that HUAC heard mostly from friendly witnesses, who gladly paraded through the public hearings to extol their own virtue in testifying and congratulate HUAC on its mission to subvert the Constitution.

It was in "executive" session, though, where the real skullduggery of HUAC got rolling. These were private sessions featuring just the committee and the witness, and no transcripts were published. Here, such stalwarts of liberty as Ronald Reagan named other people in the movie business as possible Communist agents, dupes, spies, fellow travelers or just because they wanted to exact a little revenge, perhaps clear a rival for a role out of the way. Reagan steadfastly denied ever naming names to HUAC, but Seth Rosenfeld's research in his excellent book "Subversives" puts the lie to that.

Once a person was named to HUAC, their choices were quickly limited: Go before the Committee to attempt to clear your name of nebulous, anonymous charges, or be branded a Red, and your career would be over. If a person didn't make a craven apology and name other people, the Committee would get in touch with the studios and that person, whether a star actor or just an assistant on the set, would find that all demand for their work had dried up.

A lot of people tried to take the high road and resisted the Committee initially. Some of them, like writers, could still ply their trade under a pseudonym. Actors weren't so fortunate, and some of them had to crawl back to the Committee, seeking exoneration. Some of them had to name names, and tried hard to name people they knew the Committee had already blacklisted.

A good dramatization of the time is a movie called "The Front." Woody Allen stars as a nebbish cashier at a deli who is approached by a writer to front for him in submitting television scripts. For a cut of the pay, Allen would pass the script off as his own. The movie shows quite well how people were sucked into the machinery of HUAC, the suspicion rampant in the entertainment community, the accusations and counter-accusations, and careers and lives ruined. The real knock-out for me has always been the closing credits.