The Hollywood Blacklist was a list of entertainment professionals suspected of having Communist beliefs, leading to the end of many careers. It began in the 1930s and was enforced by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The blacklist affected not only Hollywood but also screenwriters, musicians, and minor actors. It was applied on and off and attracted public attention. The collapse of the blacklist began in the late 1950s on television.
The Hollywood Blacklist was a list of professionals who were not allowed to participate in the entertainment industry due to their suspected or confirmed political beliefs. As you can imagine, it had a profound and far-reaching impact on the history of entertainment in the mid-20th century and continues to be a topic of discussion and debate. Unfortunately for many of the blacklisted people, this largely unofficial blacklist ended the careers of many entertainment professionals and severely damaged the reputations of many others.
It would be more accurate to call the Hollywood blacklist the “entertainment industry blacklist,” because it hasn’t just impacted Hollywood, although the homeland of the American film industry has certainly been hit hard. The roots of the Blacklist can be found in the 1930s when fear of communism began to arise in America and the government responded. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), charged with finding and dealing with Communists in the United States, summoned several entertainment professionals to testify.
The “Hollywood 10,” as they came to be known, refused to testify, igniting the American government and leading to an official statement from the film industry that became known as the Waldorf Statement. The signatories to the statement announced they were firing the Hollywood 10 and indicated a desire to purge subversives from the entertainment industry, leading to the Hollywood Blacklist, which would dominate the industry for over a decade.
Many people think of high-profile artists like Charlie Chaplin when viewing the Hollywood blacklist. However, it has also affected screenwriters, technicians, authors, musicians, minor actors and an assortment of other entertainers. Being blacklisted meant seeing the potential end of one’s career, often based on questionable and unverifiable information.
Many people on the Hollywood blacklist were suspected Communists or Communist sympathizers. A large number of them were official members of the Communist Party of America, making them easy targets, but others were blacklisted simply on the basis of association with known Communists or public statements. Others have been blacklisted for their involvement in liberal causes, ranging from the animal rights movement to humanitarian organizations.
The names on the Hollywood blacklist were not made explicit and it was applied on and off, but it attracted a great deal of public attention at the time and continues to do so. A number of high-profile and well-known people have been blacklisted, much to the interest of their biographers, and some people have also been intrigued by the cases of minor blacklisted individuals, looking to their fate once their careers Have been destroyed. The collapse of the Hollywood blacklist began on television in the late 1950s, when blacklisted people were hired by nice people like Alfred Hitchcock and Betty Hutton, and it snowballed from there, quickly becoming unsustainable.
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