In the 1950s, a Hollywood blacklist changed the American film industry for the worse, forever.
Note: this piece is an incredibly abridged version of historical events pertaining to the Hollywood blacklist. For more detailed accounts of these events and the people they impacted, please check out books like The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later by Larry Seplair.
The first major Hollywood figures to be called before HUAC about their ties to Communism were ten major artists in the American film industry. These people, which consisted of Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Sam Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo, all refused to speak about their affiliation to the Communist Party. Deemed to be in contempt of court, they were all given a brief prison sentence.
The fact that support from the film industry didn't last long speaks to a larger problem that helped the Hollywood Blacklist flourish. Many of the most powerful people in the land of "Liberal Hollywood" were all too happy to cooperate with HUAC since they too despised Communism. Walt Disney, for instance, a titan in the film industry, gladly testified before Congress about his hatred for Communism while also naming employees he believed subscribed to the ideology.
By 1951, HUAC continued its investigation of leftist activity in Hollywood kicking off the Investigation of Communism in the Entertainment Field. Countless high-profile individuals in the entertainment industry were called forward to be put on trial for their alleged Communist ties. Some, like Sterling Hayden or Will Greer, stood up against the question of HUAC, but many others kowtowed to the organization out of fear of losing their standing in the film industry. With the U.S.
Several factors finally broke down the Hollywood Blacklist by the end of the 1950s, but a key one came from John Henry Faulk. A radio personality that had been blacklisted in the mid-1950s, he sued AWARE for libel and slander. A key detail here was that Faulk maintained that AWARE had ruined his reputation not out of patriotic loyalty, but because of ulterior means related to gaining more influence in the world of broadcast. Faulk won the lawsuit, scoring a $3.
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