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Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

This introductory chapter opens with Howard Fast's Tony and the Wonderful Door (1952), which Fast wrote and self-published when he was blacklisted from most media because of his association with the Communist Party. Fast's tale, about a boy who can travel through time, is likewise an entry point for exploring the questions of why and how radicals, including those suffering from blacklisting, were able to publish children's books at the height of the McCarthy era. Although it is true that children's literature tends to support the dominant power structure, in the mid-20th century, children's literature became a key outlet for the Old Left, or people radicalized in the 1930s and marginalized in the 1950s. The Old Left's prominence in the children's literature field in the years following World War II points to their broader influence on American culture during a period usually seen as closed off to dissent.

John Howard Lawson's freedom had a price. He and virtually all of Red Hollywood were now “blacklisted,” barred from the industry they had helped to construct. Lawson entered the netherworld of the “blacklist,” where credit could not be taken and responsibility had to be shared. Lawson may have been barred officially from filmdom, but he remained a vocal and active presence in cinema, not least in commenting on Hollywood trends. The “blacklisting” process was designed to thwart the best efforts of those most determined to subvert this banning method and crafted to drive those affected to the depths of despondency. After being barred from screenwriting, Lawson not only turned to history and film criticism but returned to playwriting, although his experience here was frustrating. Lawson's dalliance with Negro theater was consistent with his Party's notion that African Americans constituted a formidable foe against the status quo.

To fight the system (men’s power to hire), the Stuntwomen’s Subcommittee distributed a survey to Los Angeles and New York stuntwomen to prove to SAG that there were problems. After actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed during the filming of Twilight Zone, a grand jury indicted director John Landis, among others. The traditional “code of silence” that had prevented stunt players from reporting injuries or complaining about unsafe conditions, under the threat of being blacklisted, was being challenged. Results of the stuntwomen’s survey indicated a lack of stunt safety, ongoing sexual harassment, low annual incomes, and increased drug use.

The introduction explores reasons for the relative scholarly neglect of Lewis Milestone and his films: his diverse body of work, his troubles during the Blacklist period, the serious nature of most of his films, his difficulty getting along with studio bosses, his distaste for the “star system,” changing Hollywood tastes. It provides an overview of his career, from the silent to the sound era, and his huge early success with All Quiet on the Western Front, which came to haunt him in later years. Milestone was drawn repeatedly to the theme of war, especially its impact on ordinary soldiers. Also discussed is how Milestone’s life embodies the “rag-to-riches” American dream of millions of immigrants.

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.

The adoption by the Security Council of counter-terrorism measures targeting specific individuals and entities is a fairly recent phenomenon. The original Charter scheme contemplated the adoption of sanctions ‘not involving the use of armed force’ only in relation to Sates. Article 41, even more restrictively, provided that only States that are ‘Members of the United Nations’ may be called upon ‘to apply such measures’. The practice of ‘targeted sanctions’ has changed this paradigm. Even if the addressees of the measures formally remain the States, de facto the Security Council bypasses the States and aims directly at individuals and entities suspected of involvement in, or association with, terrorist activities or organizations. This results in the inclusion of suspected names in the Security Council terror ‘lists’, with consequent freezing of the assets of targeted persons and possible limitations on their freedom of movement for an indefinite period of time. It is not surprising, therefore, that this practice has been met by academic concern about the human rights implications and, more important, by legal challenges in courts of the implementing measures adopted at national and European levels. The high water mark of this challenge is represented by the string of cases brought before the European Community (now European Union) courts and ultimately adjudicated by the European Court of Justice in the now famous Kadi decision of 3 September 2008. The judgment of the Court has stimulated passionate reactions and conflicting views about the relationship between the United Nations (UN) system and the Community legal order. This chapter focuses on the specific legal issue of whether individuals and entities which have been blacklisted by the Security Council for their alleged association with terrorist activities or organizations may be totally deprived of their right of access to justice to challenge counter-terrorism measures that may have been adopted on erroneous or faulty grounds. Before it addresses this question, it points out several paradoxes that surround the Kadi saga.

John Howard Lawson's initial “blacklisting” came in the 1930s with the organizing of the Screen Writers Guild, though the intervention of courageous producers like Walter Wanger and conditions at that point that were not favorable to ostracizing of leftwingers precluded his being totally banished. Lawson's interest in the literature of revolution had not dulled his taste for the good life. Lawson's formal affiliation with the Communist Party seems to have emboldened him as a theorist. The political pressure inexorably impinged on Lawson's creativity as a screenwriter. Blockade was seen as celluloid dynamite by its more unforgiving critics. The experience with Blockade had taught him that expecting to produce radicalism on celluloid consistently was wildly naive. After Blockade, Lawson would attempt to implement his ambitious cinematic vision, but his equally and fiercely held political commitments would complicate enormously his creative compulsions.

Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman was a “premature pro-feminist” film written under John Howard Lawson's own name before the clampdown of the “blacklist.” It is a remarkable story that focuses on a subject Lawson knew well—the intersection of substance abuse and show business—which was a recurrent real-life theme of Red Hollywood. The film was far from being a runaway hit, though it received respectful consideration. Counter-Attack was produced as the war was expiring and was in tune with the then prevailing ethos. The “threat” from the Hollywood Independent Citizens Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP) had become so powerful that U.S. Army intelligence, headquartered in downtown L.A., began to monitor the group's activities. Robeson thought that it was Lawson's activism with the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the League of American Writers (LAW), and the Hollywood Democratic Committee (HDC)—not simply his screenplays—that had led to the anticommunist persecutions.

The roasting encounter endured by John Howard Lawson in Washington in the fall of 1947 was a turning point for this writer. He was blacklisted from Hollywood. Red Hollywood was disintegrating; as early as 1949 the L.A. writer Carey McWilliams had detected a “great decrease of political interest and political activity in Hollywood.” Since Lawson was on the fast track to a tiny, cramped, and dank prison cell, his fate seemed decidedly undesirable. He turned abruptly toward the writing of history. He expanded his critique to encompass the entire apparatus of the cold war. The “Maltz affair” and similar incidents probably said more about Lawson's personality than they did about Communist Party praxis—though, inevitably, it was the reputation of both that suffered grievously as a result. Though Lawson was “profoundly optimistic about the future,” he ruefully conceded that his being behind bars was a “fantastic low comedy situation”.

Hollywood's “blacklist” was simply the opening wedge in an all-sided assault against the now fading grandeur of Red Hollywood, a precinct once presided over by John Howard Lawson. Suggestive of the fall of the alliance between Red and Liberal Hollywood was that Walter Wanger “became one of a three man committee to enforce the blacklist.” Lawson was driven deeper into the “blacklist,” scurrying to secure an undetectable front so that funds would continue streaming into his shriveling bank account. Lawson was beginning to seem like a man without a country, uncomfortable in the United States and the Soviet Union alike. Lawson never published his book, which served to diminish understanding of the Red Hollywood he had done so much to construct—not to mention to weaken comprehension of his own life and career.

John Howard Lawson is constructed as the epitome of the humorless, rigid, dogmatic, unsmiling, doctrinaire Communist, mixing ruthlessness promiscuously with insensitivity. He may very well be the most notorious U.S. Communist; therefore, the inexorable gravity of anticommunism may help shed light on why this screenwriter's image has been so tarnished. Lawson had a complicated family life due to his difficult relationship with his son (Jeffrey), and perhaps his brother, and also Jeffrey's mother, Sue. Lawson's heavily criticized reluctance to acknowledge his party membership in congressional hearings and elsewhere has been subject to retrospective reevaluation. Lawson was convinced that the “blacklist” played a major role in Hollywood's manifold postwar problems. One cannot comprehend the ferocity unleashed against this man and his community unless one begins to understand how both came to be.

It has become almost commonplace to state that, in the context of the EU's Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), freedom and justice are being sacrificed to the needs of security. This means, among other things, that important human rights are sacrificed. The EU has been slow to adopt measures on rights, and too quick to adopt more coercive and potentially rights-violating measures such as the European Arrest Warrant, or the extremely broad EU definition of terrorism. The performance of the European Court of Justice has been disappointing and there has been little input from the European Parliament. This chapter discusses two specific cases relating to US access to Passenger Name Records and terrorist blacklisting (Kadi), which are more to do with the autonomy of EC law than with human rights protection. It examines the current situation and argues that judicial review by the European Court of Justice has not improved the situation.

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.