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For many, the McCarthy era stands as the grimmest time in recent memory. Beset by Cold War anxieties, Americans developed an obsession with domestic communism that outran the actual threat and gnawed at the tissue of civil liberties. For some politicians, hunting Reds became a passport to fame or notoriety. It was the focal point of the careers of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy; of Richard Nixon during his tenure as Congressman, Senator, and Vice President of the United States; and several of Nixon's colleagues on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Ordinary people responded to the anti-Communist fervor by reining in their political activities, curbing their talk, and keeping their thoughts to themselves. Perhaps the essential point is that there existed in Cold War America a broad anti-Communist consensus shared and seldom questioned by most liberals as well as conservatives, by intellectuals as well as plain folk.

Even independent of McCarthy, the years 1950–1954 marked the climax of anti-communism in American life. The Korean stalemate generated both a bruising debate over containment and sourness in national politics. Korea's sapping effect and a series of minor scandals heightened the Democratic Party's anemia. In addition, the 1950 congressional campaign, revealing McCarthyism's apparent sway over the voters and encouraging the GOP's right wing, signaled that anti-communism occupied the core of American political culture. Senate resistance to McCarthy was scattered and weak. In the House, HUAC did much as it pleased. Truman upheld civil liberties with occasional eloquence, but he remained on the defensive. Rampant anti-communism narrowed the range of selection open to associations, utterances, and ideas. People were constrained by both external pressures and the inner checks with which they reactively restricted their own affairs.

This chapter examines the impact of McCarthyism on the production, content, and reception of children's literature, tracing a path from 1946 when the children's literature field seemed particularly receptive to books with social content, to the mid-1950s, when several authors (such as Meridel Le Sueur, Langston Hughes, Helen Kay, Howard Fast, Irving Adler, Leo Huberman, and Franklin Folsom) saw their books banned, were called before investigating committees such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and/or became the subjects of lengthy FBI files. Likewise, publishers became more cautious about publishing books with controversial subject matter, including those with “interracial” themes. Despite these pressures, most leftists were able to continue working in the children's literature field, and found support among editors and publishers, as well as librarians (who were outspoken advocates of intellectual freedom). Moreover, public outcry against books by radical children's book authors was relatively rare, and even FBI files suggest that authors who were targeted for investigation attracted attention not for their books but because of other organizational activity.

Elizabeth Ann Danto examines the experiences of refugee psychoanalysts in the United States under McCarthyism. Danto charts the persecutions suffered by European psychoanalysts who had been forced into exile after World War II. These refugee psychoanalysts carried a triple burden: they were foreigners, leftists (real or alleged), and Jews, and also then obvious targets for Hoover, the FBI, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Danto uses the American contradiction––the land of the free, the land of oppression––to illustrates the irony and contextual paradoxes painfully experienced by refugee psychoanalysts, as well to explore the effects this had on the U.S. psychoanalytic community overall.

Yellin was a youthful member of the Communist Party prior to his enrollment at Illinois as an engineering graduate student and recipient of a paid university fellowship. When he was found guilty of four charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the university suspended him, then later rescinded the suspension, all with no apparent involvement by President Henry. The United States Supreme Court eventually overturned Yellin’s conviction.

This chapter treats Milestone’s life and work from 1945 to 1949. The highly publicized failure of the expensive feature Arch of Triumph, produced by new Enterprise Studios, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in an adaptation of Remarque’s novel about refugees in Paris before the Nazi invasion, damaged Milestone’s artistic reputation. This coincided with Milestone being named by the HUAC as one of The Hollywood Nineteen and accused of pro-Communist sympathies. Although not called to testify, he supported those who were and attended HUAC hearings. A discussion of No Minor Vices and The Red Pony, another Steinbeck adaption starring Robert Mitchum and Copland’s score, concludes the chapter.

The chapter focuses on the impact of the HUAC hearings on Milestone’s personal and professional life. In 1950 the Milestones left Hollywood and travelled between LA and Europe for several years. He was interrogated by a HUAC investigator in Los Angeles and attacked in the press. Fox Studio’s Darryl Zanuck hired him to direct Halls of Montezuma, a WWII picture about an American assault on a Pacific island, starring Richard Widmark as a psychologically wounded officer; Kangaroo, an adventure filmed on location in Australia, with Peter Lawford, Richard Boone and Maureen O’Hara; and a routine adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables back in Hollywood.

This chapter focuses on the prolonged and violent strikes that shook Warner Brothers in 1945 and 1946, and the consequent right-wing backlash within the industry (and beyond). The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had investigated Communism in Hollywood as early as 1940, and the union struggles throughout the 1930s had left indelible traces within the ranks of those opposed to unionisation within the film industry. If the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was the explicitly right-wing manifestation of anti-Communism in Hollywood, its creation in early 1944 was not a purely local phenomenon but a sign of the times. The reaction of Hollywood liberals to its creation was in keeping with the anti-fascist alliance of the war years.

The implications of the congressional hearings that took place in Washington in October 1947 and which were to usher in a period of fear, betrayal and a concerted attack on civil liberties cannot be fully grasped without a brief discussion of the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) during the period 1938–1944, when presided over by Martin Dies, a conservative Democrat from Texas. Dies is notorious for his denunciation of Hollywood in 1938 as a den of ‘premature anti-fascists’, meaning that he was not opposed to fascist regimes until they waged war on the United States. Research has shown that he maintained close relations with various organisations which supported fascism and anti-Semitism, and which were in favour of his singleminded attacks on subversives (read: Communists). The Ku Klux Klan, the pro-Nazi American Bund, a convicted Nazi agent and William Dudley Pelley, founder of the fascist Silvershirts, all expressed their agreement with Dies' anti-Communist agenda.

There was little cause for optimism in Hollywood in 1948, yet the events that came to pass within three years must have exceeded the worst fears. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb and the Communists seized power in China. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed the State Department was harbouring 205 Communists and four months later, the Korean War erupted when the Communist North invaded the pro-American South. Korea was the icing on the cake for Cold War warriors, yet it was simply the culminating point in their ideological war and its concomitant repression. The Internal Security Act was voted in 1950, during the Korean War. It was sponsored by three members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): Richard Nixon, Harold Velde (a former FBI agent) and Francis Walter. This chapter examines the HUAC hearings conducted during 1951–1953 and how the Hollywood blacklist of alleged Communists was conjured during that time.

In December 1950, just weeks before the House Committee on Un-American Activities's (HUAC) return to Hollywood, there opened a film that was one of the Left's most remarkable and prescient criticisms of the way American society was going – and one of the last: The Sound of Fury, written by Jo Pagano and directed by Cyril Endfield, whose previous film The Underworld Story was an extended allegory on witch hunting. J. Edward Bromberg, Mady Christians, John Garfield, Canada Lee and Philip Loeb did not have the opportunity to live out the blacklist. Fortunately, the vast majority of HUAC's victims were healthy. All they had to endure was a form of ‘living death’: their transformation into non-persons.

This chapter chronicles the stormy history of Carrie, Wyler's film version of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Also discussed is an early script version written by playwright Clifford Odets (for another production that had been abandoned) — it was utilized but mostly discarded by screenwriters Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Also detailed are Wyler's wooing of Laurence Olivier to play Hurstwood and his contentious relationship with David O. Selznick, husband of co-star Jennifer Jones. The film was compromised by HUAC's influence on Hollywood — its release was delayed (because it was perceived as un-American) and the film was re-edited by the studio while Wyler was in Italy filming Roman Holiday.

This chapter details Wyler's involvement in political activities that were organized to protest HUAC's influence over the content of motion pictures and its blacklisting of film artists accused of being subversive. Along with three others, he co-founded The Committee for the First Amendment, which sent a delegation to Washington, D.C. There is also a detailed accounting of government activity against Wyler and of his attempts to clear his reputation with Paramount. The chapter also provides production histories of three films made by Wyler that deal, directly or indirectly, with that political situation: Detective Story, based on a play by Sidney Kingsley, which deals with a fascistic police officer; The Desperate Hours, based on a best-selling novel, which stars Humphrey Bogart and Frederic March; and Wyler's remake of The Children's Hour, which centers on the persecution of two teachers fueled by the accusations of a child. Also touched on is Roman Holiday, which was written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (whose name was removed from the film but restored after his death).

The introductory chapter lays out the book's major themes. It quarrels with André Bazin's argument that deep focus “democratizes the frame” and argues instead that Wyler self-consciously organized his frames to elucidate theme. While accepting Bazin's labeling Wyler as a realist, the introduction goes on to consider the social dimension of his films and the ways in which they illuminate the major social issues of his times, most notably, the Depression, World War II, and HUAC.

This chapter looks at the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC had shown occasional interest in Hollywood since its inception in 1938, but the committee largely neglected the film industry until postwar labor unrest in Hollywood drew national attention and red-baiting became prevalent. The labor strife, the cooperation of anti-Communist allies in the Motion Picture Alliance and the FBI, and the conservative victories in the 1946 midterm elections all encouraged HUAC to finally prepare for public hearings on the question of Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Subsequently, acknowledging that the FBI had a far more thorough surveillance program, HUAC appealed to the bureau for assistance. The FBI's documentary proof of the existence of Communist members in the film industry would be used to support the ideological claims of the existence of Communist propaganda in the films.