House Committee On Un-American Activities

Introduced in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was created to investigate alleged disloyal and incendiary activities on behalf of citizens, employees and any organizations that were politically tied to Communism. Nine years later, in 1947, the HUAC Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas strongly suggested that individuals in the entertainment industry to answer questions about their own colleagues’ past and present communist affiliations. In the editorial Photoplay, Hollywood Ten, by John Simkin, listed that Hollywood Ten refused to answer questions as they based their refusal not on the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination but on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and association.