Interviewer: Robert Cohen. A documentary exploring the legacy of McCarthyism on the Chinese American community. For the first time, Chinese American men and women who were hunted down, jailed and targeted for deportation speak out on how they and their friends were investigated and persecuted by government agents during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the fifties.
At the height of the hysteria, thousands of Chinese immigrants and American citizens of Chinese descent were investigated because of their ethnicity and alleged risk to national security.
In the late 's, while the Soviet Union and the U. This program reveals a time of McCarthyism and career-ending blacklists, a time when freedom of speech itself became a casualty in the desperate fight to protect democracy from "The red menace. A biography of the civil rights lawyer, Arthur Kinoy, from his attempt to stay the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, through the civil rights movement, to the unanimous Supreme Court decision on wiretapping. Narrated by Walter Cronkite, this documentary turns back the clock to the s, a time when the country lurched into a murky period of blacklists and witch-hunts for alleged communists, all led by a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy.
Murrow made a controversial series of broadcasts that challenge McCarthy's abuses of power, which -- as this program investigates -- signaled the emergence of television news as a highly influential force in American life. Skip to main content. On March 19, a front-page Washington Post article reported the Court's inaction had paved the way for issuance of an order by Truman that federal officials had "been told for nearly a month" would be "issued momentarily" and would lay down a clear-cut Administration policy to cleanse the Government of disloyal employees.
Executive Order received nationwide front-page coverage on March 23, with screaming newspaper headlines such as "Purge of Disloyal on U. It added that the "presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic processes" and required loyalty screenings of all present or prospective government employees, using the "reasonable grounds" standard and all of the specific loyalty criteria recommended by the TCEL, including the exact text of its suggested AGLOSO criteria.
The order also established a Loyalty Review Board LRB , which would have the power to advise all federal agencies in making loyalty determinations, with the Justice Department directed to furnish the LRB with a listing of all organizations "which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination," designated as belonging to one of the six categories, and the LRB charged with disseminating "such information to all departments and agencies.
Each employee was granted the right to a hearing if "charged with being disloyal," as well as to written notice informing him "of the nature of the charges against him in sufficient detail, so that he will be enabled to prepare his defense.
Many relevant department documents have apparently been destroyed, were never transferred to the National Archives, or remain classified. Nonetheless, the process by which the Truman AGLOSO was compiled can be at least partly patched together from surviving documents and statements made by Justice Department officials after the list was first published in December These sources suggest that the FBI and the Justice Department devoted massive resources to compiling AGLOSO under what was perceived as enormous political pressure, that both agencies felt overwhelmed by the task and that, ultimately, decisions were made in a unclear and time-pressured manner that paved the way for years of subsequent chaotic confusion and contradiction.
FBI documents obtained almost six decades later under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that on or about April 3, , the bureau, in response to a March 27 request from Assistant Attorney General Vanech for a compilation of "organizations thought to be subversive," provided a list, without any accompanying write-ups, of 41 organizations which were "thought to be most dangerous within the purview of the recent Executive Order.
In an April 3 memorandum to Attorney General Clark, the FBI reported that it had previously sent the Justice Department "complete reports" on the Communist Party and "all of the major Communist front organizations," totaling "some 50 organizations," a grouping that presumably overlapped with the 41 organizations listed in response to Vanech's request.
As the spring of turned into summer and fall, the FBI kept adding to its list of organizations for Justice Department AGLOSO consideration while increasingly groaning about the workload required for compiling the reports. By fall, with Hoover's agreement, the FBI quit preparing further proposed listings. In originally setting an October deadline for AGLOSO determinations, the Justice Department was probably responding to pressure from government officials charged with implementing Truman's executive order.
Thus, on April 24, CSC President Harry Mitchell wrote to Clark reporting that it was "essential" that the CSC be furnished the "list of organizations" designated under the order "promptly," so that agency loyalty boards could take "immediate action" under Truman's order. Only the sketchiest information about the Justice Department's internal processes concerning AGLOSO determinations was made public when the first Truman list was published in early December, but additional relevant information survives in archival material and in congressional testimony by department officials.
At a December congressional hearing, Raymond Whearty of the Criminal Division reported that Justice Department attorneys had thus far considered a total of organizations for AGLOSO designation and that the 33 attorneys detailed to this mission had worked "full time and including in some instances Saturdays and Sundays" between September 19 and October Thus, according to an October, memorandum by Assistant Attorney General Charles Murray, head of the Criminal Division, "no reexamination of [the Biddle] cases was made prior to their re-designation in ," and with regard to many of the "Fascist" organizations, "incomplete or no files whatever have been located in the department and the basis upon which they were designated originally is unknown, save as summary memoranda prepared at the time may still be in existence.
Touching on what would soon become one of the most controversial aspects of the "list," Clark related in December congressional testimony that making AGLOSO designations was "a hard job and it is a trying job for the reason that we did not have any hearings," a procedure "a little bit contrary to our usual conception of democratic process so I wanted to be careful about it. That is why I put these lawyers on it. A March 31 internal FBI memorandum from Assistant Director Louis Nichols, reporting the views of the FBI "executive conference" most top bureau officials aside from Hoover , reported a "unanimous" recommendation that the bureau take "no position" concerning whether hearings should be granted before declaring an organization "subversive or not subversive.
It added that Clark had been advised through a subordinate that he should give this matter "his most mature and considered reflection, bearing in mind that Attorney General Biddle did not give such hearings" and that, if hearings were granted, the attorney general "probably would not have time for any list and would be confronted with the possibility of facing court action, of having writs served upon him, of a constant round of bickering, vilification, pressure and abuse.
In a speech at Columbia University, Clark, by then a Supreme Court Justice, reported to law students that he had reached the same conclusion, namely that if hearings were granted, organizations proposed for designation would in the words of a reporter's summary of his presentation "so contest and delay the list that it would never be gotten out. The fragmentary remaining evidence strongly suggests that Clark originally decided in the early spring of not to publish AGLOSO but subsequently changed his mind.
According to Nichols's March 31 FBI memorandum reflecting the executive conference's views, a top Justice Department official had "rather excitedly" asked him about the FBI's views concerning AGLOSO publication in the light of "a lot of pressure" coming from two newspapers, and the conference had subsequently unanimously expressed "no objection" to public release of the list.
In his April 1 memorandum to Tolson, Nichols reported that Hoover's view was that Clark would be obliged to transmit the list to the CSC as soon as it was completed and "that when that was done serious consideration would have to be given to the propriety of making such a list public.
However, Nichols added that a top Justice Department official he had spoken to had reported, after talking to Clark, that the latter "was going to go very slow and doubted whether he would give out such a list. Still, her taste for politics was not so easily intimidated. When the Civil Rights Movement of the s emerged, Horne was a prominent supporter of the cause.
Instead, he had to sell his scripts under various pseudonyms. But unlike many of his Hollywood colleagues, Trumbo was once a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Still, when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC for his political ties, he defiantly refused to answer their questions and was subsequently held in contempt, thrown into federal prison for a year, and banned from the industry.
It wasn't until that Trumbo's official re-entry into Hollywood was made complete, and that was thanks to colleagues like actor Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger who were adamant he receive credit for his work in Spartacus and Exodus. One of the wittiest writers of her time, acerbic poet and critic Dorothy Parker got a real taste of activism when she was arrested at a political rally in support of Italian anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, who were tried and convicted of murder on dubious evidence.
Parker's arrest inspired her to continue fighting for a number of political and activist causes, including the Screenwriters Guild and the Anti-Nazi League, which were considered "Communist fronts" by the FBI. Although Parker was never a member of the Communist Party, she was known to be sympathetic to its ideology and had no qualms associating with local organizations. When McCarthyism was in full force, Parker was at the apex of her writing career.
With her name on the blacklist, she was still able to get work but sensed her services were not in high demand. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government? Parker was in her 60s when the FBI finally decided she wasn't a potential national security threat.
McCarthy earned more notoriety via these televised Congressional hearings. McCarthy had turned his investigations to army security, but the army in turn Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.
In , the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he named Joseph Goebbels , his trusted friend and colleague, to the key post of minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. In this capacity, Goebbels was charged with presenting Hitler to Joseph Hooker was a career U. Hooker entered the Civil War in as a brigadier general and gained a reputation as a reliable combat Joffree rose to general of division in and then chief of the French general
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