McCarthyism and America's Red Scare

Hello, welcome to We Are History. This is the most serious history podcast on the worldwide webnet. Oh yeah, you'll basically get a PhD from listening to this. I'm Jodo Farrell. And I'm Angela Barnes. And we're just two people very interested in history and we're going to be talking about various backwaters of history that interest us, amuse us, think are worth discussing for 40 minutes or so. If you want to contact us, say... Yeah, you can contact us on the old social media. On the worldwide web. On Twitter @WeAreHistoryPod. Yes. Or same on Instagram @WeAreHistoryPod or you can email us @WeAreHistory... no, what is it, John? We are [email protected] or you can write a letter to number two of the mules. No, don't write a letter. Oh, do I really want to think we're old, John? Don't be ridiculous. Anyway, we remember most of the things we're talking about. Today, we are going back to the late 1940s and the early 1950s in America. And we're talking about the Red Scare. Communists infiltrating everything. The Red Under the Bed. The Red Under the Bed. Now, the way I came to learning about McCarthyism, the House of Un-American Activities and the whole Red Scare in America was via the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. So we studied that at university. I was in the production of that when I was younger. Were you goody proctor? I know. I was a weirdly titular, the Barbadian slave girl, which I think was a cut. In many ways. Okay, did you black up? Did you black up? No, blacking up. Let me categorically say. That's the new thing, you know, if you're suddenly found to be racist, you can be drummed out of the media, and so that's the modern equipment, maybe we'll come on to that later. But obviously, you shouldn't be racist. Don't be racist kids. But anyway, anti-communist hysteria, I mean, it really was the reason that the Arthur Miller chose to write a play about the Salem witch trials and about the paranoia and about the execution of young girls in America in the late 17th century was because the parallels are there. But people went mad in America in the late 40s, early 50s about communism, about this really specious threat. People going mad in America, who could imagine such a thing? Well, it was bizarre that the Western democracy with the smallest Communist Party, the least number of, you know, Communist Party members per capita, was the United States. In Britain, we had two Communist MPs sitting in the House of Commons, were elected in 1945. But people were pretty relaxed about, you know, Communist socialists, social democrat, you know, they all sort of rubbed along. We thought we were there, you know, the Labour Party thought the Communist Party were annoying and the Communist Party thought the Labour Party was sell-outs, but they didn't think that they were going to try and pull down the whole country. But so let's set the scene for, you know, the end of the Second World War, Soviet Union had of course been an ally. So under the terms of the House of American Activities, the fact that Roosevelt had sat at Yolter or, you know, was it Truman or whatever, at the end of the war, having conferences with the leader of the Soviet Union would have been enough in their eyes to condemn him. Lots of people had supported the Communists because they were the first to oppose the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, when the West had been a bit slow to condemn Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the, you know, 37, 38, the rise of Hitler, they'd been trying to accommodate the Nazis in the West and not have war. The Communist War was very strident about opposing fascism. And so many young radicals were attracted to Communism. Dennis Healy in this country, a sort of Labour Chancellor, had been a member of the Communist Party and lots of… Many artists and liberals in this country were respected. The stand against Communism should also be said that the only people, the only political party in America opposing racism in the South vocally were the Communists. And so it was a respectable thing to be. But then the Cold War happens after the, after the end of the Second World War, China goes communist in 1949 and America had put a lot of money into the, trying to uphold the old regime in China and failed. And so Truman, the Democrat-American president, got a lot of flak for that for Republicans saying that it was his fault that China had gone commie. Then you have, Russia gets the atomic bomb. Which is the big, I mean, around this time as well you have the big trials of Soviet agents in America. So you had Karl Fuchs and the Rosenbergs and… So there were spies, of course. There were spies, and the fact that Russia had the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, that's the… That sort of made people terrified. Then the Korean War happened. And so suddenly there was this, this scare or the danger of Communism. But it was the Republicans, really, who'd been on the back foot, politically, right through the Roosevelt New Deal years in the 1930s, and Roosevelt had won four presidential elections in a row. Unprecedented, you can't do that anymore in America, you can only serve two terms. But they were very much on the back foot. But they had a sweep in the 1946 Congress elections and became very powerful in America. And they weren't going to let this happen again. And they sort of built up this idea of the Communist threat within the United States, that America was crawling with Communist sympathizers in the areas of media and government, and that they had to be flushed out. And so various dodgy characters who themselves were anti-Semitic, misogynist, immoral, dreadful people started to bang on about Communists in every area of American life. What better way to deflect from your wrongdoing than to pick on the bogeyman over there? So this country that had very few, you know, relatively speaking, active Communists suddenly became absolutely paranoid about Communism and people lost their jobs. I read about students at the University of Chicago were asked if they'd like to sign a petition for a new Coke machine. And they didn't want to put their names on this bit of paper in case their names made on a list and they were seen to be political agitators. So that was the atmosphere in America in 1950. Well, it was all about names on lists, wasn't it? So you had the House of Un-American activities, which was a sort of committee of Congress. Yes. And you could be brought before them if you were thought to be subversive in nature, particularly it seems in the arts and filming, you know. I think that got the most attention. It did happen across academia and it happened inside government, you know, in public works. But this was a committee that took upon itself to be the prosecutor, the accuser, the judge and jury of whether you were a Communist or not. And the very setting made it dramatic TV. It was a packed room. There was a lot of banging of the gavel by the chairman and very aggressive questioning of people who'd committed no crime. There wasn't a crime, was it, to be a member of the Communist Party? No, you were allowed to be a member of the Communist Party and it's in the, you know, the freedom of association is in the American constitution. But the gavel was banged and it's, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? And they would say, I don't think this is a fair answer to the question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? And just to be called by this committee was enough for you to, your employees to go, yeah, we're terminating your contract. So people lost their jobs. One of the, the author of one of the books I've read about this Shrecker talks about his high school teacher just disappearing and he didn't know why his teacher had ceased to be his teacher at school until he realized years later that he had been, his name had been put on a list. And it's terrifying to think that these self-appointed judge and jurors could take away someone's of earning a living but also make them social outcast as well. So nobody wanted to associate with them. So it had many tentacles, this syndrome. It did indeed. But I suppose as you, as you picked up most famously within the world of Hollywood, you've got a burgeoning film industry by this point in the fifties and fifties. So the, if you were a member of the screenwriters guild, if you were thought to have any sort of union affiliations or, or indeed membership of Communist Party, or if it was felt that your films, your scripts that you were writing, your performances were in some way conveying a communist message, and you could be brought up against the House of Un-American Activities. And in fact, there were the famous Hollywood 10, were 10 actors, screenwriters. Yes. Mostly writers I think. Mostly writers. And there were, I believe there were initially 70 old people on the list, but 10 that actually were brought up. Yes. And they were, they were singled out and they refused to testify and name names. I mean, basically what you either, it was a lose, lose situation because if you testify, well, as soon as you're on this committee, you were basically tainted with the idea of communism and you were not going to work again. And so if you wanted to keep your dignity and your honor by not naming names and saying who you think might have been a communist or had communistic leanings, communistic was a word they kept using. That's one that the chairman of the House of Un-American Activities kept using. If you didn't name, which I, you know, we all hoped we wouldn't do, but some of them had a chance for survival if they'd named names, if you were a friendly witness. So people like Ronald Reagan, who was then an actor, of course, and the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he went, he was there as a friendly witness saying he's had concerns about communism in the, in Hollywood and that these people had to be chased out. And he didn't stand up to the House of Un-American Activities. He was on the side of the prosecutors, as indeed was another future president, Richard Nixon, who was very busy on that committee. And it suited his purposes very well to stir up the fear of communism and the notion that this was one of the greatest threats to America at this time. Scary stuff, isn't it? I'm just thinking the world we're living in now with them, you know, we're being on the left in America. Yeah. Well, one of the things I took away from it was it sort of crushed the left in America really, which never really recovered. If you think about the Democratic Party, you know, from our perspective, seems somewhere to the right of the liberal Democrats. Absolutely. It's like soft conservatism versus hard conservatism over there. There were, you know, there were socialist parties in America. There was a popular front candidate in the elections in the 40s, but to have campaigned for him, campaigned for Wallace, I think it was, was used against you. That was like you were campaigning for this candidate for a president. Well, he was not, you know, he wasn't a communist candidate. Yeah. It was suggested back, back in the, about 1946, it was suggested to the California American activities that they might investigate the Klu Klux Klan, who were actually killing American citizens and assorting what they then called... You can't get more un-American. Yeah, exactly. Back then, they were what they were called Negroes. We would now say, though, African Americans were being lynched and killed, and they decided not to investigate that, but to investigate this mythological danger of communism, which shows you just how sinister the whole thing is. Absolutely. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit a bit more about the Hollywood 10. The most famous member of the Hollywood 10, there was a film about in 2015, was Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo. He was a screenwriter, and his name appeared on the list alongside the other nine people who were brought up against the House of Un-American activities, and like the others, he refused to admit to any... I think it had been a member of the Communist Party, Trumbo. I think he actually had been. Yes. I think several of them had been members of the Communist Party. Which is his right. Which is his right, and not illegal, and so they, you know, they weren't trying to cover up that they'd done anything. They were just trying to point out it was unconstitutional what they were being asked. Absolutely. And in doing so, that got them blacklisted, it meant that his career as a screenwriter was essentially... Yes. Well, it was over, except it wasn't, because he continued writing under a pseudonym. Yes. And I believe the whole thing sort of came to an end, really, with the Hollywood 10, particularly when, eventually, he just put his name back on a script. Right. I think the film Exodus, I believe it was. Right. But his name was missing from films he had written. So if you think about the film Roman Holiday, the sort of, that well-known piece of Marxist propaganda where Audrey Hepburn is riding around Italy on a scooter and trying to bring around a dictatorship of the proletariat, and didn't she kill the Russian royal family at the end of that film in a massacre at St. Petersburg? Definitely. That's what happened. Yeah. So his name wasn't on the credits of that, even though he wrote that in 1953. And this was the start, really, of Paranoia really ramping up. Yeah. Because you then had what they called the Red Channels, which were pamphlets that were produced that named people in Hollywood that were suspected of un-American activities. And of course, it's like anything, once your name's on a list, it's very hard to... And there were people on their Orson Welles was on the list, Arthur Miller, who we mentioned earlier, which led to him writing The Crucible, Bert Ives, Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Sam Wanamaker was on the list, Richard Attenborough. Richard Attenborough. Was in the Red Channels. Darling, I'm so honored. Yeah. This slur doesn't belong to me. So, yeah, it was widespread. And Trumbo's son campaigned for his name to be put back on the credits of these films years after Trumbo's death. Yeah. And it was finally put back. And very recently, I think the film actually, the film Trumbo helped sort of in the restoration of his credits. Yeah. Do you watch it? It's a good film. It is a good film. There's another good film about all this, which is, believe it or not, it's starring Woody Allen, who's clearly, you know, not in fashion at the moment, but he played a serious role in a film in the '70s called The Front. And that is about, he plays an ordinary guy working in a shop, I think, or a bar or something, who's approached to pretend to be the writer of these scripts, because the guys who were the screenwriters couldn't get their stuff used, and, you know, they had to split the money. And Woody Allen starts to enjoy the credit. That's not a good job, though. Yeah. But there's a great scene where he's, as somebody who isn't a writer, is put in a room with a typewriter and blank paper and told to do a rewrite. And it's like, I know that fear myself as a writer, but imagine if you had never written anything, how terrifying that was. But the character eventually becomes politicized by the, because his scripts start to be perceived as a bit left-wing, he's put on the stand himself, and it's a great ending, this film. So do watch it. And it's written and directed by people who themselves were blacklisted back in the early '50s. Zero Mostel is in it. And at the end of the film, it credits all the people who had been blacklisted who helped make this film The Front. So check that out. But this was going on quite a lot. And of course, people could get, British studios were thinking, oh, we can get these guys on the cheap. So some of them came to England and wrote films over here. The film Genevieve was written, I think Matt might have even been, no, the film Genevieve was used the music by Larry Adler, the harmonica player who was blacklisted. And the music was nominated for an Oscar, but he couldn't have his name on the credits of the film if it was going to be distributed in America. So they just used the name of the conductor of the orchestra and he, I can't remember if he won or not. Sorry, I ought to know the end of that story, but there's no credit on that film for music composed by, but it got a nomination for the Oscar. And there's a little film about the London to Brighton vintage car rally. And again, another piece of dangerous Soviet propaganda, which is ridiculous. If you think about Larry Adler, he was a, he's a mouth organ player, a harmonica player. They are all the most subversive musicians. How you incite revolution with a mouth organ they never really explained. So yeah, these guys, sort of, they had some people in Hollywood stand up for them. People like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and others made a sort of, I think Danny Kay made a stand and protested. I suppose then in standard against them, you're putting yourself firmly in the firing line. Many others didn't. And if you put your neck above the parapet, the phone stopped ringing and you just did not get work. So there's a blacklist, but there's also a gray list. There was a list of people whose names have been mentioned, associations that have been made. And those people just weren't asked to work anymore. Such was the atmosphere of fear in the whole industry. So we're in 1940s, 1950s America. The Red Scare is happening. Everyone's paranoid. Let's leave it there for a cup of tea and we'll see what happens next. Welcome back to We Are History. We're talking about the Red Scare in America in the very early 1950s. And there's one name, of course, that people associate with this, even though it was very widespread. And talk us about... Joe McCarthy. Boo. Boo. We're not fans. No. No. No. No. No. Yes. Senator for Wisconsin. Yes. He was elected, I believe, in the late 40s. He'd been...during the war, he'd been a gunner, a rear gunner. Had exaggerated the action he had seen. As did many. Yeah. He'd lied about it. He'd lied about it, I think. A Republican politician. Lying about his role in the war. Exaggerating their role in the war. Surely not, Joe. And anyway... So tell us more about him. He was a senator. He was elected during the latter stages of Truman's tenure. Truman was not a fan. No. Of Joe McCarthy. It has to be said, Truman actually was not a fan of the whole, despite, you know, this atmosphere. He wasn't someone who was supportive of this thing. He was forced to sort of accommodate it. Yeah. Well, he was a Democrat, but with a, you know, a Republican Congress that was pressuring. Very much so. And, you know, he was, you know, in a standoff with the Soviet Union. But he did say, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have." Which I think is the sort of key point here, that people were being prosecuted, sent to jail for contempt of Congress for opinions that they were alleged to have held. And the biggest sort of red beta of all was Senator Joe McCarthy. So Joe McCarthy did a speech in 1950, and it was called the "Wheeling" speech. It was in, I'm trying to remember where Wheeling is. It's in America. Thanks, John. West Virginia. There we go. So he did a speech in February the 9th, 1950, and it was, it was a speech to, basically, Republican wives. Right. It wasn't, you know, a big speech with a big audience. It wasn't an important one. Don't put down Republican wives, Angela. They're as important as any other Republicans. But it wasn't even recorded for the speech. But during the speech on February the 9th, 1950, he claimed that he had a list of people that worked for the State Department, the State Department being the sort of US equivalent of the Foreign Ministry, that people, yeah, people that worked for the State Department who were Communist Party members or had Communist leaning. This was very inflammatory. He said he had 205 names. I've got them here. You know. He said, yeah, well, the number of names seems to wildly vary. Well, this is, this is, this is what I loved about him. He, well, not loved about him. It's so fascinating about him. When he was challenged, so you think, give us the names then. Who are these people? The number's gone up. The number's gone up. He went and he's like, it's got worse. So he's doubled down each time. Yeah. Well, he just, but then, you know, one minute it was 205 people on the list, then it was 71 people on the list, then it was. Yeah. And he never actually sort of produced these names. No. No. So we were going, this is a U.S. Senator saying there are communists in our government. And. Absolutely. And obviously the media picked up on this. Yeah. And it served their purposes. They were big corporations. They'd had problems with unions and strikes. And if, you know, you could say that there was a problem with militancy, then that, that, you know, they were happy to report the first corporation, you know, lapped this up. Absolutely. And, and gave it a prominence. And that's the one thing I should say about the whole thing is it was great theater. If you've got, um, house-run American activities, banging gavels, shouting down, um, people trying to say that this was unconstitutional. And you've got, you know, photographers taking pictures of accused men, uh, been in Hollywood. It sort of grabbed the front pages. And so it was very dramatic. Well, these are film stars and, and high-ranking government officials that, uh, you know, it's, it's tabloid fodder. Yeah. Absolutely. So, but yeah, McCarthy became the sort of, uh, uh, which finder general, didn't he? Yeah. Well, basically the Senate voted to investigate because this panic had been stirred up. So they couldn't be seen to just, oh, ignore McCarthy. He's mad. You've got the Senate doing it. You've got the house-run American activities, which is not, um, McCarthy because, uh, that was, uh, Congress. That was the House of Representatives. So both houses are concerned about this. Both houses controlled by the Republicans, even though there was a Democrat president. And obviously the Democrats are pretty pissed off. They are pissed off, but they're on the back foot and they're having to appear, uh, anti-communists as well. Uh, there's a report from a Senator, Democrat Senator, Miller Tidings, who, um, so the Tidings committee was formed to investigate these claims and he's said to have said, let me have McCarthy for three days in public hearings and he'll never show his face in the Senate again. Right. Um, so I think they were hoping that they would be able to demonstrate that this was fear mongering and panic. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit of Donald Trump to this, isn't it? McCarthy would just say a lie and then question the lie and he'd say a big lie. Yeah. Uh, which would make everyone gasp and sort of continue ramping up the sort of. I think they expected to be able to expose his lies, but all he did was double down and lie some more and start accusing. Yes. More people. And then it got particularly vicious really with what has now since been, this term wasn't coined until 2004, but they've called it another lavender scare. Oh, yes. Um, which is there was a theory amongst sort of right-wing Republicans that, uh, homosexuals, which bearing in mind homosexuality was illegal in the United States at this point, that if you were homosexual, you were particularly susceptible to, uh, being recruited as a Soviet spy because there was potential for blackmail to be used against you. So if you, um, were homosexual, you were thought to be a target. Yes. I mean, there's a relation here between, um, the, um, the, the British spy scandals of the 1950s. There's a Burgess McClain. There was a sort of notion in the air at that time that to be, uh, a traitor to your country and a traitor to your gender was all sort of mixed up. So the other, and of course the, the Burgess McClain, King Philby, uh, British spies had been, uh, responsible for leaking secrets to the Soviets, which included, it was thought, uh, how, you know, the, uh, how the nuclear bomb got to Russia. So that was a bandit around that accusation. So the idea of being unfaithful to your country and unfaithful to women or, uh, traditional Christian norms was all sort of mixed up in the air in there in this sort of rather weird. It was all sort of seen as subversive, sort of dangerous communist, uh, gay, probably Jewish as well. They would just put them all in a pot and stir them all up. Yeah. That was, you know, and of course all this time, Edgar J. Hoover was, uh, uh, leading this anti-communist charge and dressing up as a lady when he was in his bedroom at home. Yes. Which he has every right to do, of course, but, uh, perhaps not to judge the judgment of others. It's funny isn't it? The ones that shout the loudest. I know. I know. So of course, uh, calm 1953, Eisenhower. Yes. Is elected. Yes. Uh, so we now have a Republican president, and McCarthy is made chairman of the Senate committee on government operations, which then gives him power to expel, uh, basically thousands of people lost their jobs because similarly as what happened in Hollywood with the House of Un-American activities. But now it's happening across the state department and government departments. Yeah. Just by being on a list from being... For being on a list, or for being homosexual, um, or thought to be homosexual, um, because they were seen as a threat because of the potential for blackmail. When these sort of persecutions happen, there's a, there's a, there's a, what happens is that the people in power present themselves as victims. So, uh, there's a psychology that goes on and it's again a bit like Trump now, or a bit like white men now going, you know, "Why isn't there an international Wednesday?" It's that same thing where powerful people try to present themselves as victims and so that they can persecute others. Absolutely. And also when you're sat at the top of a tree, and you know deep down that there's no reason why you should be at the top of the tree ahead of any of these other people, then you have to find that reason. Yes. And invent one. And invent one. And that, we see it happening all the time. Yes. So this is, that's why it's, so this is such a sort of, uh, it seems like such an extreme episode of sort of, uh, mass hysteria and prejudice and unjust persecution, but it's actually part of a pattern throughout our history, I would say. Uh, it's just, this is just a particularly interesting one, I think. Absolutely. So at this point you've got, you've got McCarthy, you've got Edgar J. Hoover, working together, um, You've got Nixon as a young congressman doing his utmost to, uh, I think actually it wasn't Nixon, uh, became vice president, uh, in the fifties and so, uh, was rising on a tide of anti-communism, uh, that would, would eventually cut port into the, to the White House. And this is a direct quote from McCarthy, which sort of gives you an idea of what he was like. Uh, this is something that he announced to reporters at the time of the Red Scare, Stroke Lavender Scare. He said, if you want to be against McCarthy boys, you've got to be either a communist or a cocksucker. That's lovely. Isn't that lovely? Thank you for coming to speaking to the Republican wives. Yes. What a charming gentleman. Um, now in 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower actually signed an executive order, um, which meant the homosexuals were barred from working in federal government. Wow. So that was an executive order that was signed, um, thanks to McCarthy. And it was overseen by, uh, the council, um, a man called Roy Cohn. Right. Uh, he was at this time a young lawyer, I think it was in his early twenties. Yes. He claimed to be a Democrat, but he seems to have worked with a lot of Republicans. Yes. Um, and he helped push this executive order and, um, was part of the, the committee that what happened to him. Um, he went on in, uh, future times to, um, represent Donald Trump in the 1970s. So he came good in the end, came good in the end represented Trump. He's represented Murdoch as well. Um, interestingly, for somebody who was so vocal, uh, about the barring of homosexuals from federal government and how dangerous some subversive they were, uh, Roy Cohn died of AIDS related diseases in the 1980s. It's always the ones who made the most noise. Never explicitly said that he was a homosexual, but it is largely thought that, uh, he certainly dabbled. Okay. So, um, 300 people were blacklisted by Hollywood studios. Uh, and that's just the ones that have, you know, officially, uh, blacklisted. There were many others that didn't get the phone calls and whose work dried up. I mentioned Larry Adler, uh, Paul Robson really had his, the great, uh, the great, uh, black American singer basically had his life ruined by being put on the stand by the house of un-American activities. He was, uh, not allowed to work again, but he also had his passport taken away and he was very popular in England and in Europe. He could have come here and sung, but he was denied that opportunity and he died before his passport was returned to him or he was able to, um, work again. Um, there was a paranoia about the secrecy of the Communist party and, but that secrecy had come about because of previous, um, uh, waves of persecution, uh, earlier on in the 20th century. So this is the second Red Scare, isn't it? And there was a Red Scare after World War I. Yes. That's right. In 1919, I think there was a big scare as well. Uh, and, and about the beginning of the century as well. It's almost like if you, uh, create this sort of level of paranoia and panic over something, it's almost like you drive it to secrecy. Absolutely. That's what happened. It was chicken and egg really. Uh, so, um, Charlie Chaplin, of course, he didn't actually get on the stand, but as he was leaving for Europe to, uh, promote one of his films, he was told that his, uh, visa or whatever had been rescinded and he decided there and then to never go back. His film was not publicized in America. His name was tainted in the States and he decided to move to Switzerland and never, uh, and never moved back to America. He came back to get, uh, an honorary Oscar in 1972, but he was still very bitter about that. And it basically, uh, obviously his greatest filmmaking days were behind him anyway, but, uh, he was, you know, perhaps the greatest movie star of all time and they were quite happy just to, just to completely accuse him of being un-American when he came from South London, like where we are right now, uh, Bertolt Brecht had to face the House of Un-American Activities who was that well-known, uh, college frat boy from West Virginia. No, uh, he was put up on the stand and they read one of his, uh, poems to him and said how socialist it was and he said, "Oh, it's just a bad translation." He goes, "No, that's not the German word." They said, "Have you plotted to overthrow the government?" He goes, "Yes." And there was gasps. I plotted to overthrow the government of, uh, Nazi Germany, uh, which this, uh, America was at war. And, um, that was what I said weird about this because the Russians had been allies until very recently. I think ten years before this, seven years before this, and, um, uh, and yet to have been, uh, to pro-Soviet events in the fort, early, the early forties during the war was seen as being a communist sympathizer. It was sort of a distortion of history. Well, that was tied in, wasn't it, as well with the sort of, um, appeasement. What's the deal that Stalin had with Hitler? Well, the Nazi-Soviet pact, it's called, I think. Is that what, yeah. I think it had a different name. Oh, it's called Simon. And Simon the Nazi-Soviet pact. That's, you've lodged that in my head now, that's. Let me read to you. This is another actor who was, um, uh, put up against the House of Un-American Activities. His name was, uh, Lionel Sander, who was like a gravelly voiced actor, character actor, who was, um, put on a stand and said that he did know of some subversion. And they were like, "Oh, the court's set up." He said, "I know of a group of fanatics who are desperately trying to undermine the constitution of the United States by depriving artists and others of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process of law." Interesting. If you're interested in that, I'd like to tell you about it. I can tell names and I can cite instances. They are a group of ex-bundists, American fosters, and anti-Semites, people who hate everybody, including Negroes, minority groups, and most likely themselves. And they were banging their gavel and going, "No, Mr. Sander, no." But he was basically turning the, you know, he's doing sort of jiu-jitsu, uh, uh, accusations back onto them. Because, you know, these accusations were being made by a load of far-right un-American, and there's nothing more un-American, really, than discounting the freedom of speech. Many people who took the stand swore the Fifth Amendment, which is the right to not say anything, but that was seen to be self-incriminating, and you must be a communist if you're not prepared to name other people you think are communists. So it was, you know, incredibly damaging for a great many people, and it was very slow to evaporate. It was. But evaporate it did, to a certain extent. Eventually. Yeah. McCarthy was brought down when he decided to take it on the army, I think was his downfall. Was a specific incident, wasn't it, of him trying to help some mate or something? Well, there was. Back to our friend Roy Cohn, the legal counsel, who, um, was representing McCarthy during this army hearings, and they were accusing, the army were accusing McCarthy and Cohn of requesting special treatment for, um, a inverted commas friend of Mr. Cohn. Okay. I put it in inverted commas. There's no actual evidence that they were romantically involved, but it's heavily implied that they might have been. But anyway, these army hearings essentially were the start of the downfall for McCarthy, because if there's one thing that America is prouder of than their republican politicians, it's their service. Absolutely. So McCarthy's fall was rapid. And he was a very heavy drinker and he, um, sort of died in an alcoholic haze a few years after this. He did. But, uh, that's not to say that the, the, the people all rushed back to work. Many of them stayed out of work in the whole of the sixties. Uh, Disney was some, one of the, uh, employers who had been very keen to push this, uh, communist problem. He'd had a strike of animators and cartoonists, and, uh, we all know how militant they are, those guys. I mean, basically he was a very, um, uh, mean employer and someone who didn't want to recognize unions and didn't want to, uh, stand by fair contracts. And so, um, he would build up the notion of communist infiltration in the unions when, you know, the, you don't get Bambi as really, as a, it's not really a Trotskyite figure really, or Thumper isn't really agitating. I mean, they do shoot her mother. They do shoot, yeah, but that's the communist, is it? Um, but so, um, if you look at the working conditions in Disney, those seven dwarves, look at the diamonds, the amount of diamonds they produced, they were sharing one bedroom between them. I mean, someone there is getting a rake off and I bet it's old Walt himself, seven to a bedroom. And the money they were bloody digging up. Yeah. They thought of it like that. Well, there you are. So that's, uh, so the, um, uh, you know, you've got this happy little Tweety Bird song films he was producing with dancing animals. And all the time he was, uh, whipping up red scare and stirring up poison against innocent people. He didn't have to pay decent wages and, uh, uh, yeah, so, so, uh, this was true. This was true right across, uh, Hollywood. All the major studios, uh, collaborated, uh, with the, uh, red scare, none of them stood up to the Republican, uh, paranoia. And it must be said, most of the American people were, uh, went along with it and felt it. So they didn't want to watch Charlie Chaplin's film when it was released, it bombed in the United States. Well in Europe, limelight, um, uh, and because it had Chaplin's name with it and he's a communist and we don't want anything to do with that. Which you get, it shows, doesn't it? The power of media and it's, we're sitting here now in what month, January 2019. Yeah. You know, with Brexit, possibly just around the corner. Fear of foreigners, fear of others, the Americans, fear of Mexicans coming over, bringing drugs and as, as, as Trump saying they, they, they bring rapists, they bring, it's the same. The fear of outsiders, the fear and all the while actual, you know, actually starving and using food banks and what so ever, but we're more worried about a perceived, yeah. So whilst terrible things were happening in America and the deep South and in, and terrible working conditions, this myth, this specter of communism was put up as a sort of smoke screen, uh, for, for what was really needed to happen. And I think, you know, throughout history, if you think of time, there are other times when societies go mad, we talked about Arthur Miller and the, and the, uh, the witch hunts in Salem, but in Britain, there's been times when you thought people have gone mad. I mean, if you think, I think people have gone mad about, we went, we went, we went mad during the Brexit, uh, vote, they didn't stop and think about what it meant. And now we're starting to realize what it meant. I think during the death of Diana that week, Britain went slightly bonkers and copies of the private eye were taken down from the magazine shelf in W.A. Smith, because they made jokes about it and people were weeping about somebody they'd never met and every corner had flowers in the town square. And you just think mass hysteria is this thing that grips a whole society about the most bizarre things. Communism was a, you know, there was a cold war between America, but communism was not a problem in America. No. They've been very little. I think we should probably be clear. We're not, you know, advocating. I did go to a CP meeting once in my youth, I'm taking the stand now, when I was, before I joined the Labour Party, I thought maybe I should join the Communist Party and this, the captain of my pub quiz team was a communist and he got me down to his house. I put this in my first book, things can only get better and, um, nice little plug there. Yeah. And the things they had available in all good bookshops and some crap ones too. And, um, uh, we sat around about four of us and there was just this woman who read out this, um, this list of fraternal greetings from, uh, our comrades in Bulgaria and there are fraternal greetings from our comrades in Poland and that is how far, how far back it was. And I gradually became aware that the captain of my pub quiz team was nuts. He said the important thing for the Communist Party of Great Britain, we must restore the reputation of comrades Stalin. And there was this, there was this awkward shift shifting in the seats that everyone knew that this guy always went on about this and they're going, oh no, we're not really on Stalin's side. We're in post, post 1953, we're sort of with Khrushchev and I'm sitting here going, what the hell is going on? No, no, this is a bust of Stalin on the mental piece and there's pictures of Stalin above the fireplace. I'm going, the captain of my pub quiz team is nuts. And I think it's fairly soon after that, he said to me, are you, um, are you, um, gonna join the Communist Party? And I said, uh, no, I think I might give the Labour Party a go, and, uh, and there began my rather, um, unglamorous career of, uh, in the 30 years in the Labour Party, but that would have been enough. One meeting, uh, going to that one Communist Party meeting would have been enough to stop me writing all those TV shows and getting my books published. I would have not been able to have a career as a writer in this country for decades if I had had to, um, uh, confirm or deny that I'd been at that meeting. My name would have been on a list and, uh, and that's what a many, many American writers had to, uh, had to endure. They came to Britain, some of them. So Lucky Eldust had some great American screenwriters, um, and, uh, but many of their lives were ruined and they, uh, they had to sell their houses and they had to, um, move their families. Uh, And of course a great irony of it being, you know, those Communist regimes, yeah, it needs to do, it's, we're doing exactly the same thing to their artists and writers and they're behaving exactly the same way as a totalitarian state. So in fighting and purporting to fight totalitarianism, uh, the, uh, Republicans in America, uh, behaved in utterly totalitarian way, being judge, jury, prosecutor, uh, and of, of people on very, very scant evidence, um, I think that probably covers all of it. If there's, um, more books you would like to read about this, um, I can recommend McCarthyism, the great American red square, which is, uh, compiled a documentary history by Albert Fried Fried, and I hope I've announced that I've got, um, inside out by Walter Bernstein. He was actually one of the Hollywood 10. Oh, that's good. Um, so, yeah, a memoir of the blacklist. I've got, uh, many of the crimes here, McCarthyism in America by Ellen Shrekker. I haven't quite finished that one yet, but I sort of see what happens at the end. Um, and then if you want to watch a movie, watch Trumbo, watch The Front, despite Willie Allen being the lead. It's not like a Woody Allen Colony. It's a serious film. Uh, there's a Barbara King-Solver novel called The Lacuna, which is set in this period, which was probably worth, uh, uh, checking out. And also, of course, The Cruise Boys. You haven't seen it. It's a great play. It certainly is. Um, and, um, I think we've, I think we've, we've sorted the red square. I think we, we've been there at the time. We've been there at the time. I would have named names. I would have said Angela Barnes. She's one of them. She did a benefit. Anything to save his own skin. She did a benefit for some good cause or other. That would have been enough, Angela. It was on my Wikipedia page for ages. It's finally gone now that I did, uh, that I supported Jeremy Corbyn on his Jeremy Corbyn for PM tour. I didn't. I never, never did one of those gigs, but it was on my Wikipedia for ages and I was getting people asked me about it in interviews with your Corbyn Easter. I'm really not. I had things, John, I found this Republican. Well, I probably, you know, don't care much about Republican. I probably am. If I drill down, but I've never said in public, I was a Republican, I made some joke on Grumpy Old Men, I think. And now it is on my Wikipedia page, but that, that's what we use as evidence now. Yeah. Are you now? We are comedians. And sometimes we lie. We make jokes. We lie for humorous, humorous purposes. That's all from We Are History. It is indeed. Don't forget if you want to get in touch with us, you can do it on Twitter @WeAreHistoryPod. On Instagram @WeAreHistoryPod. Yes. Or you can email us @WeAreHistoryPod at gmail.com. And, but only if you're not a contest. Absolutely. And if you're not a contest, we will name and shame you and give your name to the lobe bar. Enjoy that. Until next time. Bye. [Music] [End of Audio]