calliope3
Odets did not testify at "The McCarthy hearings" -there were no such "hearings" as you seem to think existed...the result of years of media/educational misinformation. The people who told you there were "McCarthy hearings" involving the likes of Odets were either lying or had no sound knowledge of the topic.
Who were the many innocent people McCarthy smeared?
Almost all of McCarthy's targets were government employees or advisers like Owen Lattimore, John Service etc. His main contention (which has a lot to it) was that people in US government employ had a significant role in the fall of China to the communist industrial scale mass murderer Mao in 1949.
Hollywood communists like John Howard Lawson (Lawson was the liaison man in Hollywood for the party hq in New York) and co were Stalin's creatures, working for the Sovietizing of the USA and the rest of the world. That would have meant the Gulag, mass murder and total destruction of freedom in a totalitarian terror state. That's the hell you would have had if those ideological fools like Lawson had been able to carry out their plans. The CPUSA was not a bunch of startled innocent "liberals in a hurry." The CP was not a regular "political party"-it was the agency, on USA soil, of a hostile totalitarian foreign power, funded by that power with its US activities entirely dictated by Moscow. The party underground were engaged in illegal activities to further its aims-espionage etc. A government investigation into the activities of such an organization, in numerous areas, was justifiable, though that isn't to say such
investigations were inevitably carried out in the best way. Remember, any "blacklisting" was done by employers, not by government committees or individual congressmen and senators. The "Hollywood 10" were jailed for their behavior before the committee, for contempt of congress, not because they were communists. The same thing happened to gangster Frank Costello a few years later for refusing to answer questions and walking out on the Kefauver crime committee-but nobody makes a martyr out of him, like they do with the "Hollywood 10."
However, Senator McCarthy and his committee of 1953-4 had no part in investigating Hollywood's Stalin groupies; that was done by a House of Representatives committee, popularly known as HUAC in 1947 and 1951/2. Odets appeared before HUAC in 1952. He was long out of the party, but provided "names" to the committee, names they supposedly already knew.
JJ is supposedly based on the leading columnist and reporter Walter Winchell (1897-1972), a former Roosevelt Democrat, but a firm and noisy McCarthy supporter in the 50s. JJ as a personality isn't at all like Winchell, though Walter, like JJ, could be very ruthless in destroying, or trying to destroy, those who got on the wrong side of him.
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