Report on blacklisting : 1 Movies ([1956])

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Parnell Thomas' pursuit of Communist propaganda in films ad- mittedly had led the Committee up a blind alley.* In Nixon's opinion, the 1947 Committee could have centered a more perti- nent and fruitful enquiry on the "prestige, position and money" the Communist Party picked up in Hollywood. And that is what the Committee went looking for in 1951. Hollywood was chosen for a "broad base investigation," Nixon explained to a reporter, because of the volume of cooperation the Committee got there. But a critical Democratic Congressman whose district borders on the movie capital once suggested another reason. "The yearning for publicity on the part of some members of the Committee," he said, "could only be satisfied by the famous names a movie hearing would produce." Nixon recognizes that such charges were made against the Committee but argues that it was the newspapers rather than the Committee itself which put the emphasis on big names. "We couldn't overlook our responsibilities just because prominent people were involved." By 1951, a number of prominent persons were begging the Com- mittee for a chance to testify and the Committee had to disappoint some of them. There were, first of all, the ex-Communists, who by now looked upon the hearings as the only public forum open to them. If they wanted to prove to the world that they had broken with the Party, they had to testify. And until they did prove this, they were unemployable in the studios. The Committee welcomed them. But another class — persons who had never belonged to the Communist Party but suffered from unfavorable rumors — were also eager to go on record as anti-Communist. Many wanted to be heard but, according to Nixon, Edward G. Robinson, Jose Ferrer * At the close of the 1947 hearings, J. Parnell Thomas announced that "at the present time the committee has a special staff making an extensive study of Communist propaganda in various motion pictures." The study was abandoned. Thomas also announced that at the next hearing the Committee would have "a number of wit- nesses who will deal with propaganda in the films and techniques employed." These witnesses never materialized.