They Admit It!

Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (New Press, 448 pp., $29.95)

ALONG time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a bunch of evil white male right-wing racist Republican congress-men (pardon my redundancy) started a committee whose sole purpose was to libel liberals. No sooner did it come to the attention of these evil white male right-wing racist Republican congressmen that Hollywood harbored a lot of liberals than they held hearings designed to prove that the film industry was full of card-carrying Communists who were brainwashing innocent American citizens by filling their movies with Red propaganda. Of course they couldn’t prove it, because it wasn’t true, but they did succeed in smearing the good names of hundreds of fine upstanding artists whose only sin was that they exercised their Godgiven constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment rather than rat on their friends.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (New Press, 448 pp., $29.95)

ALONG time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a bunch of evil white male right-wing racist Republican congress-men (pardon my redundancy) started a committee whose sole purpose was to libel liberals. No sooner did it come to the attention of these evil white male right-wing racist Republican congressmen that Hollywood harbored a lot of liberals than they held hearings designed to prove that the film industry was full of card-carrying Communists who were brainwashing innocent American citizens by filling their movies with Red propaganda. Of course they couldn’t prove it, because it wasn’t true, but they did succeed in smearing the good names of hundreds of fine upstanding artists whose only sin was that they exercised their Godgiven constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment rather than rat on their friends.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.