ABSTRACT
In June of 1950, members of the infamous Hollywood Ten headed off to various eastern United States prisons to begin serving out their one year contempt of Congress sentences. Their collective road to that point was riddled with controversy, blackmail, treachery, and deception. Ten men who had risked their careers for the sake of standing firm in their beliefs now faced a most uncertain future permanently stained by an ever tainted past. The contempt citations issued by HUAC chair J. Parnell Thomas in 1947, however, were not simply the product of in-court obstinacy on behalf of the Ten. The citations were the culmination of years of anticommunist build-up which began with the Palmer raids in 1920, picked up steam with the evolution of the Dies Committee in the 1930’s, and climaxed with the Thomas Committee and its investigation of Hollywood in 1947. The citations can also be traced to the massive media campaign waged on behalf of the American Press throughout the “scare years.”
