Bogie and Bacall Risked their Careers in 1947 going to DC and Opposing HUAC with.

[Cha]

Last edited Wed Aug 13, 2014, 03:27 AM - Edit history (1)

Rep. J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) presiding..

One of the most powerful New Jerseyans to ever serve in the U.S. House of Representatives was J. Parnell Thomas, a Bergen County Republican who was elected to Congress in 1936. When the GOP took control of the House after the 1946 elections, Thomas became the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee -- where his investigation into the Hollywood motion picture industry made him well-known across the nation. Thomas was one of the architects of Hollywood's so-called "Black List."

http://www.politickernj.com/wallye/35228/story-j-parnell-thomas


The Bowery Boys NYC @BoweryBoys
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Bacall and Bogart risked their careers in 1947 by going to DC and opposing HUAC
3:49 PM - 12 Aug 2014 Manhattan, NY, United States 611 Retweets 367 favorites

TOD

"The Hollywood blacklist began in 1947 when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began to subpoena artists, producers and screenwriters to investigate communist sympathies in Hollywood. Over the next thirteen years, it came to include Charlie Chaplin, Leonard Bernstein, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Miller, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger and Orson Welles.

"Friendly witnesses" included Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney, who claimed the League of Women Voters was a Communist front. HUAC critics, on the other hand, formed the Committee for the First Amendment in support of the Hollywood Ten. It included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. The group flew to Washington D.C. in October 1947 to protest HUAC hearings."

Edited: It was J Parnell Thomas instead of Joe McCarthy who was in charge of HUAC when Bacall and Bogart went to DC. Journeyman

This gets me all Verklempt and gives chills!

[Uncle Joe]

1. Yes they did, kudos to them and the other actors that formed the Committee for the First Amendment.

Thanks for the thread, Cha.

[Cha]

2. It's so heartwarming to hear about people you've

loved on screen to be courageously awesome in real life.

"League of Women Voters".. according to some like Ronnie Reagan.. "Communists" And, he was suppose to be a Dem at one time? Sounds like a tool all the time.

Mahalo Uncle Joe~

[Uncle Joe]

4. Mahalo to you, Cha, I'm glad you didn't get damaged by the Hurricane (s).

[Cha]

12. Thank you UJ.. we dodged not one but two hurricanes and

we're so Hap-py!

[Enthusiast]

15. Heartwarming and downright inspirational.

[Cha]

21. Definitely, Enthusiast~ :)

[Brother Buzz]

23. Reagan crashed a Committee for the First Amendment meeting

According to Sterling Hayden:

I met him at a meeting of the Committee for the First Amendment, which was formed by Bogart and "Betty" Bacall and Ira Gershwin and Judy Garland and James Mason and Danny Kaye and John Huston. I was asked to chair a fundraising meeting at Ida Lupino's house. Unannounced, in walked Reagan to present his side. He was enormously effective. He just took over. He was obsessed. Of course, he was locked into the producers' position, the conservative position.

http://www.geraldpeary.com/interviews/ghi/hayden.html

[Cha]

3. ..

Lauren Bacall

[Journeyman]

5. Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with the House Un-American Activities Committee. . .

and didn't come to prominence until 1950.

The name you're looking for is Rep. J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ).

Thomas would later be convicted of corruption and fraud. He was imprisoned in the same federal lockup where two of the Hollywood Ten, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr., would serve their time.

[Cha]

7. Oh dear.. the Tweet got it wrong then and I didn't

research it.. thank you, Journeyman. Will change the OP to reflect history.

[Journeyman]

9. As admirable as what they did was, the Committee backed down when challenged. . .

and had no appreciable effect on the madness. The Ten were convicted of contempt, the witch hunt continued, and the Blacklist claimed an ever-widening circle of people.

It was a nice gesture, but it's all it was.

[Cha]

11. Well, damn! I finally edited it.. that took a while..

I'm going on 4 hours sleep last night.

Well, even if it made no difference back then.. they were still on the rw side of history and were not snitching on their fellow citizens. That sounds like such a queasy time in history.. but look at ours now and how our descendants will look back at the ugly spirit of the teabagger congress that did nothing but lie.

[gratuitous]

31. Yes . . . but also no

HUAC was one of the high points of conservative devious tactics. When the first batch of people subpoenaed arrived, there was some discussion among them what the best approach was. (HUAC had gone after writers first in the Hollywood community, correctly surmising that they would have the least support in the industry.) Some of the writers felt the best defense was to invoke the First Amendment, and their right to speak freely without prior governmental restraint. That came a cropper, as HUAC nailed them for voicing an opinion in support of the Communist Party, which was outlawed at the time.

It was at this time that the Hollywood community began rallying in support of their own, but when people started getting whisked off to prison based solely on their thoughts, many of them ducked out of the spotlight, including sadly Bogart and Bacall. When the next bunch of writers was brought before HUAC, they invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. They stymied HUAC, but only briefly. HUAC quickly conjured a rule that if a witness answered any question, he had to answer every question, or be cited for contempt and whisked off to the hoosegow. Since most of the witnesses had answered the pro forma question about identifying themselves (i.e., Please state your name for the record), they were already trapped.

After that, as HUAC took its show on the road to enclaves of the entertainment industry, the best tactic was simply not be home when the subpoena server arrived. Which meant that HUAC heard mostly from friendly witnesses, who gladly paraded through the public hearings to extol their own virtue in testifying and congratulate HUAC on its mission to subvert the Constitution.

It was in "executive" session, though, where the real skullduggery of HUAC got rolling. These were private sessions featuring just the committee and the witness, and no transcripts were published. Here, such stalwarts of liberty as Ronald Reagan named other people in the movie business as possible Communist agents, dupes, spies, fellow travelers or just because they wanted to exact a little revenge, perhaps clear a rival for a role out of the way. Reagan steadfastly denied ever naming names to HUAC, but Seth Rosenfeld's research in his excellent book "Subversives" puts the lie to that.

Once a person was named to HUAC, their choices were quickly limited: Go before the Committee to attempt to clear your name of nebulous, anonymous charges, or be branded a Red, and your career would be over. If a person didn't make a craven apology and name other people, the Committee would get in touch with the studios and that person, whether a star actor or just an assistant on the set, would find that all demand for their work had dried up.

A lot of people tried to take the high road and resisted the Committee initially. Some of them, like writers, could still ply their trade under a pseudonym. Actors weren't so fortunate, and some of them had to crawl back to the Committee, seeking exoneration. Some of them had to name names, and tried hard to name people they knew the Committee had already blacklisted.

A good dramatization of the time is a movie called "The Front." Woody Allen stars as a nebbish cashier at a deli who is approached by a writer to front for him in submitting television scripts. For a cut of the pay, Allen would pass the script off as his own. The movie shows quite well how people were sucked into the machinery of HUAC, the suspicion rampant in the entertainment community, the accusations and counter-accusations, and careers and lives ruined. The real knock-out for me has always been the closing credits.

[LeftishBrit]

6. k&r

[Cha]

13. Mahalo LeftishBrit~

[littlemissmartypants]

8. I love you, Cha. Great catch.

Good night.
RIP

[Cha]

14. G'nite, lmsp~

[msongs]

10. they put on their comfortable shoes...that was not just a statement for PR benefit nt

[Enthusiast]

16. Kicked and recommended!

[ellenrr]

17. thanks. great article and great picture. nt

[ellenrr]

18. Cha, do you have a link to the top picture, so I cd share it? thanks.

[Cha]

19. The link is in the "TOD" under the pic, ellenrr.. It's in a tweet but you have to scroll down.. so,

found it here, too.. And, some interesting news..



snip//

"Meanwhile, with the end of Mad Men on the horizon, AMC is developing another new period drama to potentially fill the impending void. Ashland is a drama series set in the early 1950s in a titular small mining town in Kentucky. The story follows the Evans family who has just moved East from California and the mother Del must protect her three children and hide her family’s secrets after her screenwriter husband is blacklisted.

http://screenrant.com/ballistic-city-ashland-amc/

Looks like a better pic in the OP but I still like finding out this news about the pending show from AMC. Such a strange time in history to me.. "Blacklisted"

[ellenrr]

24. Interesting. I think the Blacklist will be new to many people. nt

[Buns_of_Fire]

33. Robert Vaughn (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) did his Ph.D. dissertation on the Blacklist.

"Only Victims" -- it gives a good background of the workings of the HUAC, the good guys, and the villains.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-f-vaughn/only-victims-a-study-of-show-business-blacklist/

[Cha]

38. Thank you so much for that, Buns_of_Fire! Will check it out when I have some TIme!

[malaise]

20. Nice thread

K & R

[Martin Eden]

22. HUAC was aptly named

The activities of that committee was most decidedly un-American.

[Cha]

27. Exactly Martin.. "Assholes of History".. in the Asshole Hall of Infamy as it were..

Parnell Thomas will always be remembered as the most notorious Chairman of the HUAC which began the blacklisting trials. He managed to screw up the lives of countless innocent people--especially those in the arts--and their families.

•He worked in cahoots with Hollywood studio bosses who wanted to get rid of certain movie stars.

•He hated FDR and considered him a Communist.

•He hated FDR's New Deal and considered it a Communist plot.

•Thomas was later convicted of corruption and fraud, and sent to the same prison in Connecticut as the men he prosecuted. Ironically, he refused to answer questions at his own trial.

•A Republican (what a surprise!) and a real SOB.

•Encouraged people to rat out their closest friends, which finally worked with asshole director Eddie Dmytryk.

http://assholes-of-history.blogspot.com/2008/10/j-parnell-thomas.html

[joeybee12]

25. Good for them...I didn't realize Cooper was scum like Reagan and Disney...knr

[Cha]

28. If I knew I had forgotten.. I heard him speak in the Vid and it wasn't very pleasant :(

[joeybee12]

29. Thanks...that will keep me from watching it...nt

[UTUSN]

26. R#44 & K n/t

[Cha]

30. Mahalo UTUSN!!

[UTUSN]

32. What gorgeous peeps we are (you, me, Betty, Bogie, & all the rest of us HERE!1) n/t

Last edited Wed Aug 20, 2014, 10:00 AM - Edit history (2)

[Cha]

35. I'll toast to that!

[niyad]

34. k and r

[Cha]

36. Mahalo, niyad!

[sheshe2]

37. "Bogie and Bacall Risked their Careers in 1947 going to DC and Opposing HUAC with."

Kudos to them for their bravery.

Excellent OP Cha!

May Lauren Bacall RIP~

[Cha]

39. Mahalo, she! Just a great iconic pic of the two of them and it looks like they're

talking to Orson Welles. Could be so wrong, though!

Lauren Bacall

[sheshe2]

40. I believe you are right!

That is Orsen Welles.

She sure was enchanting, Cha.

[Cha]

41. My sister, Cindy, in New York said today that Lauren Bacall always

reminded her of our Mom.. I so agreed.

Enchanting, yes, she~

[sheshe2]

42. That is so cool Cha!

And a happy Birthday to you~

[Cha]

43. Mahalo, she..

it's been an awesomely great day.. and thank you for being a big part of that!

[sheshe2]

44. I just found this~

Cha!

[Cha]

45. Oh wow! Brilliant, she.. some enterprising person put the pic of Truman and Bacall

together with her quote on the "L word"!

I also told my sis about that quote and she Laughed!

Mahalo, she~

[sheshe2]

47. Well your sister is brilliant! Brava~

How they photo shop these things , I for one will never know.

Cha!

[Cha]

48. It's magical, she.. but who

knows.. it might be revealed someday.

she~

[book_worm]

46. However, Bogie later recanted and said it was a foolish thing to do when Warner Bros.

put pressure on him--claimed he ws "duped" and the trip was "ill advised"