The Red Scare And Hollywood In The 1940's

The Red Scare caused a large dispute between the Un-American Activities Committee and Hollywood in the 1940’s. The Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors, were sent to jail, “for contempt of Congress after they refused to testify about their past associations.”(Henretta, pg.746) This very well known event in history was one I had known about, but was unsure of the exact details. I went in search of the events that lead up to arrest of the Hollywood Ten.

During my research I read many articles about the Red Scare and the Hollywood Ten. When learning about the Hollywood ten I also found out about the Committee for the First Amendment. Within finding out more about this committee I came across this article that told the story of the Hollywood Ten and the involvement of Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and other A-list actors of the time.

Within our text we briefly learned about the Red Scare and a mention of the Hollywood Ten’s arrest. Yet, we don’t learn about the Committee for the First Amendment and how that tied into the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklists that continued until 1960. The events that lead up to the trip to Washington is what is left out of the text but very
Bogart prided himself for being a man that couldn’t be conned. He actually made the statement, “we carefully screened every performer so that no red or pink could infiltrate and sabotage our purpose.”(Kengor) So when he came back from the trip to Washington he was humiliated. The press was having a field day with headlines like, “Was Bogart’s Face Red?” and “Don’t try to fox me again.”(Kengor) He immediately set out to repair his image by releasing statements denying any involvement with the Communist Party. But just like Bogart, all movie stars that participated in the committee had a negative light on their image that they had to