McCarthyism, Elia Kazan & On the Waterfront

1. McCarthyism, Elia Kazan & On the Waterfront Yr 12 English, 24th August

2. Joseph McCarthy

3. American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. • Claimed there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. • Granted almost unlimited powers to investigate alleged communist subversion in the government. • Ultimately, his tactics and inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.

4. McCarthyism • The practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. • (The 1952 Arthur Miller play The Crucible used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for McCarthyism, suggesting that the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time or place. The play focused on the fact that once accused, a person had little chance of exoneration, given the irrational and circular reasoning of both the courts and the public. Miller later wrote: "The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties.“)

5. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) • An investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. • The committee's anti-Communist investigations lead to the Hollywood Blacklist. • Blacklisted artists lost their jobs and were ostracised by the entertainment industry, some, like Charlie Chaplin, even fled America. (No direct involvement of McCarthy)

6. Elia Kazan • Was a member of the American Communist Party in New York, for a year and a half in the 30s. • Was called on by HUAC to identify Communists from that period under oath. • He initially refused to provide names, but eventually named eight former Group Theatre members who he said had been Communists. • Kazan later explained that he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong"

7. On the Waterfront •  "On the Waterfront'' was, among other things, Kazan's justification for his decision to testify before the HUAC. In the film, when a union boss shouts, `You ratted on us, Terry,' the Brando character shouts back: `I'm standing over here now. I was rattin' on myself all those years. I didn't even know it.' That reflects what some feel was Kazan's belief that communism was an evil that temporarily seduced him, and had to be opposed." (Roger Ebert)