As indicated by news dispatches from foreign countries during the past week, the eyes of the world are focused today upon the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In every capital city these hearings will be reported. From what happens during the proceedings, the peoples of the earth will learn by precept and example precisely what America means when her strong voice calls out to the community of nations for freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, the civil rights of men standing accused before government agencies, the vitality and strength of private enterprise, the inviolable right of every American to think as he wishes, to organize and assemble as he pleases, to vote in secret as he chooses.

The quality of our devotion to these principles will be weighed most thoughtfully by all who have been urged to emulate the American way of life. Whether we wish it or not, the Committee and its witnesses appear here before the world as a living test of American democracy in action. By reason of this we have all been committed to a very heavy responsibility.

I shall therefore pass quickly over the hearsay and slander of witnesses classified as friendly to this Committee, as well as over other evidence already established as perjury. I call your attention only briefly to political coincidence that nearly all friendly witnesses summoned by the Committee have violently opposed the ideals of Wendell Wilkie and Franklin Roosevelt, while without exception the unfriendly witnesses have supported such ideals. I shall make no comment at all on the petty professional jealousies, the private feuds, the intra-studio conflicts which here have been elevated to the dignity of the record. And only with reluctance and shame do I find it necessary to recall how fulsomely this Committee has complimented witnesses -who have proposed that all who disagree with them be deprived of citizenship and handed over to the mercy of mobs.

There are three principal points which i wish to stress in my statement to this Committee:

First: In the course of these hearings your Committee has launched a direct attack upon the constitutional rights of property and of management and of that system which we call private enterprise. You have attempted to compel juggernaut to hire and fire at your own dictation, without any regard for rights and agreements already established between management and labor within the motion picture industry. But even beyond this, you have attempted to dictate to industry what kind of product it shall make and what kind it shall not make.

Let every business man in America clearly understand that if this Committee can usurp the rights of management in one industry, it has established the precedent by which it can usurp the rights of management in all industries. Modern history reveals many instances abroad where workers in private industry have resolutely defended the rights of management against the encroachments of a corporate state. I am certain they will make such a defense in this country against the attempt with which this Committee is presently engaged.

Second: The Committee in its hearings has consistently attacked the constitutional guarantees of a free press, which encompass the guarantee of a free screen. The American film, as a medium of communication, as a purveyor of ideas, is completely beyond the investigatory powers of this Committee. No committee of the Congress can dictate to the motion picture industry what ideas it shall and shall not incorporate into films, nor can it dictate to the American people what ideas they may and may not see upon the screens of their neighborhood theaters.

But you have not exclusively attacked the principle of a free screen. In the past, you have sought to intimidate workers in the radio industry. And during these hearings you have thanked witnesses who have testified against the theater, the publishing business, and the press itself. This constant attempt to interfere with the rights of every medium of free expression provides the consistent brown thread which binds together all testimony thus far presented by friendly witnesses. It clearly reveals your intention to establish a slave screen, subservient to the cultural standards of J. Parnell Thomas and the humanitarian precepts of John E. Rankin,

Third: The Committee throughout its hearing has approved even the grossest attacks upon the right of the artist to express his ideas freely and honestly in his work. Similarly, you have sought testimony attacking his right to function in craft organizations and trade unions for thc advancement of his interests. You are now attacking his right to think, and seeking by public inquisition to ferret out his innermost ideas and his most private and personal convictions. No institution on earth possesses this power over American citizens. You violate the most elementary principles of constitutional guarantees when you require anyone to parade for your approval his opinions upon race, religion, politics, or any other matter.

We must furthermore remember always that the defense of constitutional rights is not simply a convenience to be invoked in time of need, but a clear and continuous obligation imposed equally upon all of us at all times. We are, as citizens, literally commanded by its implications to defend the Constitution against even the slightest encroachment upon the protective barrier it interposes between the private citizen on one hand and the inquisitors of government on the other.

Already the gentlemen of this Committee and others of like disposition have produced in this capital city a political atmosphere which is acrid with fear and repression; a community in which anti-Semitism finds safe refuge behind secret tests of loyalty; a city in which no union leader can trust his telephone; a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize one another in public places: a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and in the open air. You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire. For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there a the smell of smoke in this very room.

Mr. Stripling, the rights of American labor to inviolably secret membership have been won in this country by a great cost of blood and a great cost in terms of hunger. These rights have become an American tradition. Over the Voice of America we have broadcast to the entire world the freedom of our labor... You asked me a question which would permit you to haul every union member in the United States up here to identify himself as a union member, to subject him to future intimidation and coercion. This, I believe is an unconstitutional question.

The evidence presented before this Committee concerning Dalton Trumbo clearly indicates that he is an active Communist Party member. Also the fact that he followed the usual Communist line of not responding to questions of the Committee is definite proof that he is a member of the Communist Party. Therefore, by unanimous vote of the members present, the subcommittee recommends to the full committee that Dalton Trumbo be cited for contempt of Congress, and that for his refusal to answer the pertinent question "Are you a member of the Communist Party?" and his refusal to answer other questions, the Committee recommends appropriate action be taken by the full committee without delay.

In 1953, Ian had won an Oscar for Roman Holiday, the last picture he worked on before the blacklist got him. Winning that award was far from an unalloyed pleasure. Ian got involved only by agreeing to front for the already-blacklisted Trumbo. It was he who had come up with the idea of a movie about a reporter and a princess on the loose in Rome. Paramount paid $50,000 for what it assumed to be Ian's (but was really Trumbo's) first draft, and hired him to do a rewrite... The result, much to Ian's (and Trumbo's) surprise, was a wonderful movie, starring Gregory Peck and the unknown Audrey Hepburn.

Whatever else may be said of Communists and the goals they pursued. I think you and I can agree that those who joined the Party were animated by a sincere desire to change the world and make it better, even at the cost of affiliating with an organization that had, from its beginnings, been subject to constant federal harassment, popular hatred, and sometimes physical violence. The impulses which caused them to affiliate with the Communist Party were good impulses, and the men and women who acted on them were good people.

Kazan is one of those for whom I feel contempt, because he carried down people much less capable of defending themselves than he. And he could have at a minimum continued in the theatre, perhaps with somewhat diminished activity, but his reputation would have withstood this blow. But he brought down people in the theatrical and film world who had much more to lose than he and much less ability to function than he. And that is not nice. I just say that that's not a nice thing. That's the way I feel about him.

The blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.

When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - right, left, or centre - emerged from that long nightmare without sin.

There is currently in vogue a thesis pronounced by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

Adrian Scott was the producer of the notable film Crossfire in 1947 and Edward Dmytryk was its director. Crossfire won wide critical acclaim, many awards and commercial success. Both of these men refused to co-operate with the HCUA. Both were held in contempt of the HUAC and went to jail.

When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set of principles. He suddenly saw the heavenly light, testified as a friend of the HUAC, praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it. Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down the years since. Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until 1970. He was blacklisted for 21 years. To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally victims is beyond my comprehension.

I confess that among those who turned informer there are two or three whose deaths I once actually fantasized, and whom I still view with nothing short of horror. As for the others, I do not associate with them and cannot bring myself to trust them.

In a country which, after a reasonable period of punishment, returns murders and rapists to society on the humane theory that it is still possible for them to become decent and even valuable citizens. I have no intention of fanning the embers of justifiable hatred which burned so brightly twenty-five years ago.

Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born.

Let us use his same arithmetic for World War I; 9,000,000 dead young men equal 1,350,000,000 pounds of bone and flesh, 27,900,000 pounds of brain matter, 11,250,000 gallons of blood, 414,000,000 years of life that will never be lived, and 22,500,000 children who will never be born. The dry if imposing figure "9,000,000 dead" seems a little less statistical when we view it from this perspective.

It was a milestone in Hollywood history - actors, writers, producers blacklisted for their political beliefs. Sixty years ago, men and women, some of them with flourishing careers, were made to answer the question: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?"

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), anticipating the "investigations" of Senator Joseph McCarthy shortly afterwards, chose Hollywood for the start of its onslaught against communism. At least, that is what they said they were doing. But any investigation into the investigations, to coin a phrase, reveals it was something else. For "communist", read "Jew".

The hearings that took place in Los Angeles and in Washington between 1947 and the mid-'50s were as much (some would say more) antisemitic as anti-Communist. Hollywood was chosen for the attack because of the great publicity value the movie capital offered. It was also a great opportunity to get at the Jews of Hollywood. One after the other, the people called to give evidence to HUAC (in effect, put on trial by the committee) were Jews - not exclusively so, but enough to make the case.

On the floor of the House of Representatives itself, Congressman John Rankin made a speech which consisted of virtually nothing more than a list of Jewish names. The wife of the actor Melvin Douglas, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas - whom a certain HUAC member named Richard Milhous Nixon had insulted by saying she was "pink, down to her underwear" - asked which films the committee really believed were helping the Communist Party. Rankin answered by reading some of the names that had appeared on a petition to congress: "One is Danny Kaye," he began. "We found his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Then there was Eddie Cantor. His real name was Edward (sic) Iskowitz. Edward G Robinson, his name is Emmanuel Goldenberg." The final cut was when he added, almost as an afterthought, the name of the congresswoman's husband: "There's another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg."

The musician Larry Adler, a refugee from Hollywood after being warned he was about to be put on the blacklist, told me shortly before his death: "What was worse were the letters Rankin wrote. One I saw began, ‘Dear Kike'."

The petition Rankin mentioned was in support of the so-called Hollywood Ten, most of whom were writers, jailed after being denied the opportunity of making a statement in their defence. They were unable to claim either the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech, or the Fifth, which said they could not be asked to incriminate themselves. Six of the 10 - John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz and Samuel Ornitz - were Jews.

Their appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected. The original chairman of HUAC, Martin Dies, had invoked the 1918 Sedition Act, which declared that anyone who was foreign-born (even if subsequently naturalised) could be declared a "non-citizen" - because "there are too many Jews in Hollywood".

The most important Jews in Hollywood were, of course, the studio bosses - people like the Warner Brothers, Louis B Mayer of MGM, and Harry Cohn of Columbia. They were among those responsible for the Waldorf Declaration - a statement issued after a gathering at the New York hotel which declared that they would never employ a communist. The only one who would not sign was Samuel Goldwyn (born Shmuel Gelbfisch), who said that nobody was going to tell him how to run his operation.

The signatories were cowards. They were scared that if they did not come out in support of HUAC , they themselves would be condemned as communists, resulting in the collapse of their businesses. Once on the blacklist, actors could not get parts, writers could not submit scripts, directors could not get work.

Writers, however, did learn how to use "fronts" (Woody Allen made a film using blacklisted actors and writers - nearly all of them Jewish - called The Front, about a writer getting a restaurant cashier to submit scripts in his name). Actors had many more difficulties. No one could prove that Edward G Robinson was a communist, but he had a reputation for being left-wing. So this superstar was put on a "grey list". Warners would not give him more than a few subsidiary roles in "B" pictures and ordered an article to be published under his name, called "The Reds Made A Sucker of Me".

He was luckier than many. The tough guy actor John Garfield (originally Jules Garfinkle) died from a heart attack at the age of 39 on the eve of being called before HUAC. The blacklisted star of the hit radio and TV series The Goldbergs, Philip Loeb, booked himself into an hotel, ordered champagne from room service and then jumped from the skyscraper building window. It was a scene recalled in The Front by Zero Mostel, another blacklist victim. One scene in the film was taken from Mostel's own story. Walter Bernstein, the blacklistee who wrote the film, told me about the actor, whose busy life had previously included cabaret appearances at Jewish resort hotels in the Catskill mountains. Mostel was out of work."I took him up to the Concord, where he had been used to getting $2,000 a night," said Bernstein. "Now he was only to get $500. His rate was then cut even more. There were 2,000 people there. They loved it. He cursed them in Yiddish and the more he cursed them the more they liked it."

Several Jewish actors and directors came to live in London - like Carl Foreman who had the indignity of seeing his script for the film Bridge on the River Kwai win an Oscar but awarded to the French writer Pierre Boulle instead. Larry Adler's score for the movie Genevieve was nominated for an Academy Award - in the name of the musical director Muir Mathieson. "I was pleased to see that it didn't win," he told me.

A leading Broadway actor, J Edward Bromberg came to Britain, too, after being blacklisted - and died of a heart attack. The Jewish actress Lee Grant was blacklisted for speaking at a memorial service for Bromberg. She was told she could get off the list if she named her husband as a communist. She refused - and did not work for 12 years. Bromberg "died of a broken heart", the Israeli-born actor Theodore Bikel told me. "He was a victim of those antisemites, those fascists."

The blacklist lasted for those 12 years, but ended because of Jews, too. Kirk Douglas (Issur Danielovich) with Spartacus, and Otto Preminger, who was directing Exodus, insisted that the writer of both films, the Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo, should use his real name, not a nom de plume. "I have been working for Hollywood for 60 years, made 85 pictures," said Douglas. "The thing I am most proud of is breaking the blacklist."