1 Note from the Crisis Director Hello delegates! My name is Amelia Benich and I’ll be your CD for FCMUN. I am ecstatic to finally get to run this JCC and I hope you are as excited as I am. This is my final FCMUN as I graduate in May and I am determined to make it the best crisis committee to ever be run...or close. I have done Model UN every year I have been in college and have been in so many crisis committees as a delegate I recently had to be reminded of all of them. With this experience both as a delegate and having run 3 committees before both at FCMUN and abroad at LSE’s conference, I can assure you I’ve seen it all and am preparing to stop the common committee frustrations before they begin. As you prepare for the conference, I want you to be fully aware of the parameters of our note system before you plan out a crisis arc. Electronic notes will speed things up, however for this committee to keep things running smoothly, there will be an approximate word limit for notes. Try to keep all notes around 250 words or less (about two paragraphs/a page double spaced), and expect each committee session to get approximately 3 notes answered, meaning your crisis arc should be accomplished in 12-15 notes, assuming notes get shorter and more direct towards the end. Of course, I will do my best to answer faster and get more notes through, but this is to help you both plan effectively and also stay engaged in-room as well. We have our own committee arc and we’d love to see you have fun with it too! To speak on in-room, this crisis is obviously separated into two separate committees. First, the House Un-American Activities Committee (“HUAC”, pronounced “HOO-ack”), a ​ ​ Senate sub-committee that held hearings, wrote reports, and under the table directed the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and the FBI/CIA. The committee is free to call in members of ​ the Hollywood committee to testify, free to call in unrelated characters to testify, free to direct the ​ notorious J. Edgar Hoover to act on committee suspicions with powers of the FBI, and finally, free to work with the sympathetic press to publicize your findings. The Hollywood Committee ​ is more vaguely defined as an organization of notable screenwriters, directors, and actors who were put on or protested the existence of The Blacklist. With a more open format, the committee is free to write directives to start their own activist organizations, remake their respective working unions, take direct action in the filmmaking process as protest, and more. They could demand transparency from HUAC, run an electoral campaign, call upon foreign leader, or whatever other reasonable combined power they wish to direct. The chairs of our two committees are Zenia Saqib and Emma Rubin, who I have full faith will direct the flow of debate, voting, and crisis with excellence and grace. We will begin the committee with some ground rules about directive length and number limits, but for now, prepare to have your directives be just that--direct. Concise in language without being vague is exactly what we’re looking for. 2 Finally, I wanted to illuminate my interest in this topic. I am an economics major, specializing in Political Economy, which basically means I am interested in power, resources, and philosophical thought on how society is structured and the historical struggle between competing material interests. In short--I’m not here validating neoclassical models and monetary theory, spending all day on STATA. I also study film extensively and hope to one day be a filmmaker. Some of my favorite films from the past two years (and by no means an exhaustive list) include Parasite, Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, Midsommar, The Favourite, and ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. The history of how movies get made, what movies get made, ​ and the censorship and political nature of film is a natural merge of these two interests of mine. I hope if nothing else from this committee, you have a chance to explore the way the era of red scare impacted the film industry in the United States even to this day. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions before the conference. My email is [email protected] and because of the last minute release of this guide, feel free ​ ​ to text me directly through iMessage or WhatsApp at +1 (630) 740-3991. -Amelia Benich 3 Table of Contents 1. History of HUAC ………………………………………………5-7 2. History of the Film Industry …………………………………....7-9 3. The Communist Party of the USA……………………………...9-10 4. The Hollywood 10 …………………………..…………………….11 5. Non-Congressional Blacklists…………………………………...12-14 6. Committee Start/Current Situation……………………………….15 7. Executive Summary and Questions To Consider………………...15-16 8. Character Profiles: HUAC ……………………………………….17-18 9. Character Profiles: Hollywood…………………………………...19-21 10. Further Resources………………………………………………..22-23 4 Disclaimer: This portion is adapted from various sources, some listed under “Further Reading”. FCMUN claims no authorship of this italicized text, merely adaptation for the purposes of this committee. History of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the U.S. Government’s Anti-Communist Efforts Targeting Hollywood On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties; however, it concentrated its efforts on communists. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.), and therefore known as the Dies Committee. The Hollywood blacklist was rooted in events of the 1930s and the early 1940s, encompassing the height of the Great Depression and World War II. Two major film industry strikes during the 1930s increased tensions between the Hollywood producers and the unions, particularly the Screen Writers Guild. The U.S. government began turning its attention to the possible links between Hollywood and the party during this period. Under then-chairman Martin Dies, Jr., HUAC released a report in 1938 claiming that communism was pervasive in Hollywood. Two years later, Dies privately took testimony from a former Communist Party member, John L. Leech, who named forty-two movie industry professionals as Communists. After Leech repeated his charges in supposed confidence to a Los Angeles grand jury, many of the names were reported in the press, including those of stars Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, Melvyn Douglas and Fredric March, among other Hollywood figures. Dies said he would "clear" all those who co-operated by meeting with him in what he called "executive session". Within two weeks of the grand jury leak, all those on the list except for actress Jean Muir had met with the HUAC chairman. Dies "cleared" everyone except actor Lionel Stander, who was fired by the movie studio, Republic Pictures, where he was under contract. In 1941, producer Walt Disney took out an ad in Variety, the industry trade magazine, declaring his conviction that "Communist agitation" was behind a cartoonists and animators' strike. According to historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, "In actuality, the strike had resulted from Disney's overbearing paternalism, high-handedness, and insensitivity." Inspired by Disney, California State Senator Jack Tenney, chairman of the state legislature's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, launched an investigation of "Reds in movies". The probe fell flat, and was mocked in several Variety headlines. The subsequent wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union brought the CPUSA newfound credibility. During the war, membership in the party reached a peak of 50,000. As World War II drew to a close, the neutral to favorable view of the CPUSA held by a significant number of citizens was of grave concern to the ruling elite. In 1945, Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the neofascist America First Party, began giving speeches in Los Angeles 5 assailing the "alien minded Russian Jews in Hollywood ''. Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin, a member of HUAC, held a press conference to declare that "one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this Government has its headquarters in Hollywood ... the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.” The growth of conservative political influence and the Republican triumph in the 1946 Congressional elections, which saw the party take control of both the House and Senate, led to a major revival of institutional anticommunist activity, publicly spearheaded by HUAC. The following year, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, issued a pamphlet advising producers on the avoidance of "subtle communistic touches" in their films. Its counsel revolved around a list of ideological prohibitions, such as "Don't smear the free-enterprise system ... Don't smear industrialists ... Don't smear wealth ... Don't smear the profit motive ... Don't deify the 'common man' ... Don't glorify the collective". On July 29, 1946, William R. Wilkerson, publisher and founder of The Hollywood Reporter, published a "TradeView" column entitled "A Vote For Joe Stalin". It is named as Communist sympathizers Dalton Trumbo, Maurice Rapf, Lester Cole, Howard Koch, Harold Buchman, John Wexley, Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Salemson, Henry Meyers, Theodore Strauss, and John Howard Lawson. In August and September 1946, Wilkerson published other columns containing names of numerous purported Communists and sympathizers. They became known as "Billy's List" and "Billy's Blacklist".