Guilty_By_Suspicion

Guilty By Suspicion Which should come first, your friend or your country' Honest people find they can take first one side and then the other - depending somewhat on which friend, and which country. But for the people in “Guilty by Suspicion” who were caught in the Hollywood witch-hunt, beginning in the late 1940s, the decision meant, in many cases, betraying your ideals, or losing your job. The House Un-American Activities Committee, convinced that Hollywood was full of subversion, held hearings into the alleged communist connections of many directors, writers and actors. Many of them had been members of the Communist Party or its front groups, especially in the late 1930s, when Stalin’s Russia was seen as an ally against fascism. Most of those who testified before HUAC admitted their own political activities. Membership in any political party was perfectly legal, then as now, protected by the Bill of Rights. But HUAC wanted more than personal confessions. They wanted their witnesses to “name names,” to list people they had seen at party meetings, or had heard were party members. Since this was hearsay evidence and the committee usually knew the names anyway, this process did not really further the campaign guilty, suspicion, huac, people, hollywood, friends, communism, war, party, names, communist, against, one, named, name, merrill, government, country, before, united, time, take, states, friend, committee, child, blacklisting, world, subversion, story, should, senator, seen, rights, project