Red Scare

Hollywood on the Hill
Time Magazine, Nov. 3, 1947

It's '47 and they're trying to weed the Communists out of Hollywood - one DC hearing at a time...

...Next day, as all Washington knew, Robert Taylor would appear. The crowds were even bigger and earlier. Handsome Actor Taylor had a point to clear up. When Chairman Thomas had sleuthed out to Hollywood last summer for a preliminary sniff, Taylor had announced that he had been forced by New Deal pressure to appear in MGM's Song of Russia. Said he now: "I wasn't forced because they can't force you to make any picture."

But he was sure that Communist pressures were rising in Hollywood, and he offered the same cure-all as Menjou: "If I had my way about it, they'd all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place." He was a success: when he had finished, more than half the spectators stamped for the door, clustered happily around him and followed him triumphantly more than a block down the street to his automobile.

The witnesses, famed and photogenic, the heroic, romantic faces known to all the U.S.—and to all the world as representing the U.S.—kept coming. Robert Montgomery turned up, looking like a handsome, but not incredibly handsome, broker. Said ex-Naval Commander Montgomery: "I gave up my job to fight totalitarianism called Fascism, and I am ready to do it again to fight totalitarianism called Communism." Dancer-Actor George Murphy and lazily-drawling Actor Gary Cooper followed him to the stand. By week's end the committee had heard testimony from 21...