75. McCarthyism: Hollywood on Trial (Ep 2)

Journey Through Time

Goalhanger

History

4.3 • 595 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

What happened when the House of Un-American Activities Committee started to prosecute some of the biggest names in Hollywood? Who were the infamous ‘Hollywood Ten’? Why did the trial of Alger Hiss, a State Department official, terrify the American public? How did a young Richard Nixon make his name during these trials? Join David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell as they look at when the HUAC hearings came to Hollywood. Email: journeythroughtime@goalhanger.com X: @ThroughTimePod Blue Sky: @ThroughTimePod Instagram: @JourneyThroughTimePod Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producers: Alfie Rowe, Alfie Norris Producer: Alice Horrell Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Journey Through Time. I'm David Olusioga, and this is the second of our six-part series on McCarthyism and the second Red Scare.
0:16.8	Yeah, so when we left off last time, Truman's loyalty program, as we said, was just about to kick
0:22.4	into gear. But in today's story, we're going to really see what it does. So between 1947, when it
0:28.9	kicks off in the mid-1950s, that loyalty security program ultimately screened over five million
0:34.3	federal workers and applicants. Thousands of people lost their jobs, maybe as many as
0:39.0	10 to 12,000 people by some estimates, were fired or resigned under pressure. But the program uncovered
0:44.4	no spies. It simply punished thousands of people for guilt by association. For being linked to
0:50.1	organizations mainly on the left that were under suspicion. Yeah, for attending a meeting,
0:55.3	years earlier, for signing a petition or for belonging to the wrong group. It was as simple as that.
1:00.7	So there are two examples from early on that really kind of show the human cost and how it worked
1:05.1	in practice. The loyalty program's first big test was a woman named Dorothy Bailey, and she was a
1:09.8	federal security agency employee.
1:11.5	She'd been working for the government for 14 years. And she was fired in 1948 for alleged
1:16.5	Communist Party membership. Now, she had no recollection. She literally had no recollection of ever
1:21.1	having been a member of the Communist Party. And maybe she had like sat in on one or two,
1:25.7	you know, out of interest, you know, 20 years earlier or
1:27.9	something. And she appealed the decision. And her appeal reveals the way it worked because the
1:32.9	evidence that came out under her appeal was that the loyalty board that decided to fire her
1:37.6	had no idea what it was that she had been accused of. They didn't have any specifics against her
1:43.5	at all. They didn't know who had accused her. They didn't have any specifics against her at all. They didn't know who
1:45.2	had accused her. They didn't know whether the accusations were made under oath. They only knew that the
1:49.5	FBI had said their sources were reliable. That was it. So they were strictly relying on an FBI
	...

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