History Workshop

The Entertainment Industry and the Blacklist Era

 

“Historians strive constantly to improve our collective understanding of the past through a complex process of critical dialogue—with each other, with the wider public, and with the historical record—in which we explore former lives and worlds in search of answers to the most compelling questions of our own time and place.”

                                                                  AHA Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct

 

Course Description:

 

In 1938, the Dies Committee, a forerunner to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), claimed the first victim of what has commonly become known as the “McCarthy-Era” when they voted to defund the Federal Theatre Project of the Works’ Progress Administration. In 1947, the Committee, now officially HUAC, would call before it artists and leaders of the motion picture industry. These hearings ushered in a period of fear and distrust throughout the entertainment industry (among many others) that would last well into the 1960s. This course will look back at a time when naming or not naming names reflected upon ones ability to work, as well as the group one called friends. It is a time when everything was black or white, and as a result it is a perfect subject for the “critical dialogue” demanded of one entering the historical profession.

 

Through the use of this previously “hot-button” issue for this workshop, students will learn how to ask relevant research questions, how to search for answers, and how to present their findings in both written and oral form. Because this is a subject that prompts a great deal of passion on whichever side one finds themselves, a discussion of bias will be an important component of this workshop. Students will learn to recognize, embrace, and ultimately begin the journey of rising above their biases in order to fully engage in understanding how this period fits into the current historical discourse. Students will be challenged to look at the actors, directors, producers, and other entertainment personalities as well as the unions and organizations affected by the blacklist.

 

This class will have an extra advantage in the area of primary source research as your professor is also an archivist for both the Actors’ Equity Association and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists collections at the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Archives, a major research center on the history of left politics and labor located on the 10thfloor of Bobst Library. Students will learn to use the resources available through the collections in the archives as well as government documents, historical newspapers, oral histories, and published materials.