EAL Holiday HW

The Crucible

1. Communism: a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the
community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.
Many Americans, including high government officials, suspected that the Soviet Union had
spies at every level of American government. J. Howard McGrath, President Harry Truman’s
attorney general, said there were ‘many communists in America,’ each bearing ‘the germ
death of society’. These domestic fears reflected a very real concern about the reach of the
Soviet Union abroad, as it expanded in Eastern Europe and developed its own atomic bomb
in 1949. With Great Britain severely weakened by the war, it fell to America to become the
main western defense against communism, particularly after 1950, when the Americans
engaged Chinese communist forces on the Korean peninsula
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the President of the United States during this time.
3. Containment: the action of keeping something harmful under control or within limits.
Domino theory: a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation
would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a perfectly
aligned row of dominos.
4. Joseph McCarthy (1908-57): An American politician and attorney who served as a
Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.
Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period of intense anti-
communist suspicion inspired by the tension of the Cold War. He made claims that there
were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal
government and elsewhere. The term ‘McCarthyism,’ coined in 1950 in reference to
McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to anti-communist pursuits.
5. He was made ‘Lincoln Day’ speech that lead the people into thinking that communists were
figuratively lurking around corners and this began the ‘witch hunt’
6. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): a committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early
years of the Cold War (1945-91). Upon its formation in 1938, the official role of the HUAC
was to investigate Communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the
Great Depression, though it also examined the activities of other groups on the political left.
7. The Hollywood Ten were:
 Alvah Bessie
 Herbert Biberman
 Lester Cole
 Edward Dmytryk
 Ring Lardner, Jr.
 John Howard Lawson
 Albert Maltz
 Samuel Ornitz
 Adrian Scott
 Dalton Trumbo
The Hollywood Ten paid a high price for their actions at the HUAC hearings. In November
1947, they were cited for contempt of Congress. Facing trial on that charge in April 1948,
each man was found guilty and sentenced to spend a year in prison and pay a $1,000 fine
8. They got added to the blackmail list along with them and their careers went down the drain
as well as their social status. If I were to be put in that situation, I am not sure how I would
react. If I knew it would end badly, I’d close the match on myself instead of lighting it and
burning everyone else along the way.
9. Dashiell Hammer, Waldo Salt, Lillian Hellman, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, etc…
Their reputation has been thrown to the dirt because fake news leaked that they were
communists and no one who hire them.
10. His ‘helpers’ were men promoted by Motion Picture Industry, and their role was to play
observers of a studio picket strike.
11. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67-22,
making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He continued to
speak against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 on May 2, 1957
12. HUAC was renamed to ‘The committee on internal security’
13. These bearing will help us understand the background of the text well