About the Hollywood Blacklist using one Online Source of Reference (Essay Sample)

Josephine Sarange
Essay
October 10, 2016
The Hollywood Blacklist.
The word "blacklist” can put fear in many people. Thinking of it alone makes you receive it as a term you would never want to be tangled with. In the early 1950's Hollywood knew this term “blacklist” and it was part of their lives and influenced their decision making. To this day many recall it as an example of a horrifying blunder that costed many people their careers, families and friends and after that Hollywood was never the same.
In 1947, the Un-American Activities House Committee suspected that certain Hollywood entertainment professionals’ work was communist-inspired. The committee then started summoning the professionals for questioning. This is how the Hollywood Blacklist came into existence. This investigation was a continuation of pressures exerted in the late 1930s by the then state senator Jack Tennely’s California Joint Fact-Finding Committee and the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities. Some directors, producers and writers became identified as the "Hollywood Ten" because of the media’s extensive reporting of the events. The Ten included Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Robert Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Sam Ornitz, Edward Dmytryk and John Howard Lawson.
Due to their lack of cooperation and failure to tell the committee whether or not they were affiliates of the Communist Party, the alleged entertainment professionals were all “blacklisted”, fined and served imprisonment in 1950 for up to a year. Even though the ten paid for their alleged crimes, the witch hunt did not end there, a second upsurge of summons with the Mephistophelian "graylist," appeared in 1951. In total 500 people from the entertainment industry were gray or blacklisted. The graylist was an additional list of entertainers alleged to have been "subversive." Eventually the blacklist grew up to 150 names and continued to the 1960s. From that time, the ten had a hard time finding jobs anywhere in media related industries. Performers who were beginners in the industry, unlike their colleagues who were established, had few or even no options. Those that had a more difficult time were the technical workers as there was no alternative industry for them to turn to.
Some of those in the blacklist proved to be so resilient, however, no more than 10 percent were able to reappear to their careers in Hollywood. the biggest names were as well vulnerable. Charles Chaplin for example, one of the most eminent faces in the world, remained a strong believer in the Popular Front and a British citizen. Although he had never been in the Commun...