ABSTRACT
By the time that the House Committee on Un-American Activities had relaunched its hearings on Hollywood, in March 1951, the country was in the grip of something like a national panic over the international and domestic threat of communism. In February 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech at Wheeling, West Virginia—in which he began his campaign against communists in the State Department—came in the immediate wake of the conviction of Alger Hiss and the arrest of Klaus Fuchs. Hiss, the former State Department official who had been accused by HUAC in 1948 of passing secrets to a communist spy ring, had lost his appeal and was beginning a five year sentence for perjury. To Pells, the conviction of Hiss lent credence to ‘the theory that all communists should be regarded as potential foreign agents’. Fuchs, the former Manhattan Project physicist, confessed to having been a Soviet spy; later the same year the war in Korea began, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage.
