THE UN-AMERICANS

Protecting democracy by killing democracy.

Above you see photos of various people involved with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the government body that sought to ferret out communism in the U.S. beginning in 1938. The images were made today in 1951, and the men pictured are A.L. Wirin, Robert Shayne, William Wheeler, Arnold Krieger, and Morton Krieger. Wirin was a defense lawyer who later became prominent in the ACLU, Wheeler was a lead investigator for HUAC, and the others were witnesses called to testify. Some of the latter group offered varying levels of cooperation, with Morton Krieger giving up at least one name, that of Dr. Murray Abowitz, who interrogators described as “a member of one of the professional cells of the Communist Party in the field of medicine.” Abowitz was later fired from his position at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles.

His destruction was indicative of the fact that the communist witch hunts which had begun in Washington, D.C. had by 1951 spread into every sector of society—the entertainment industry, the professional ranks, labor unions, and black communities such as Watts, Harlem, and Oakland. It was a disgraceful period in U.S. history. Consider—many other countries, particularly those in Europe, lived up to their democratic ideals by allowing communist parties to have a voice in the political discourse. But given free reign to disseminate their solutions, communists didn’t then and haven’t since had great success convincing significant numbers of voters to follow their path. In the U.S., by contrast, top political powers decided that Americans could not be allowed to hear such ideas at all. Thus the anti-democratic red squads were conceived and over the next two decades ruined thousands of careers and lives.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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