4. Hollywood stars formed the Committee for the First Amendment in response to the HUAC
In 1947 film directors John Huston and William Wyler joined with actress Myrna Loy and Philip Dunne, a screenwriter, to create the Committee for the First Amendment. Among its many members were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye, and Katherine Hepburn. Others included Ira Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Lena Horne. The Committee declared its opposition to the investigations into the political beliefs of members of the Hollywood community as well as the tactics employed by the HUAC. In the fall of 1947, the HUAC released a list of 43 Hollywood luminaries it wished to interrogate. Nineteen persons on the list announced they would not testify.
In response, the HUAC issued subpoenas for 11 of the reluctant 19, with the threat of incarceration for contempt of Congress hanging over them. The hearings were to begin on October 27, 1947. A contingent from the Committee for the First Amendment, led by Bogart and Bacall, flew to Washington to protest the hearings. Increased scrutiny of the group revealed that several of its members were former members of the Communist Party. Though the Communist Party was a legal political entity in the United States, its motives and thus its members were generally regarded with suspicion. The Committee for the First Amendment’s credibility was shattered. Its protest in Washington did little, other than to cast suspicions upon those who had never been communists, including Bogart, Bacall, and John Garfield.