I was too much a child during the era of HUAC to understand what I was watching; but I understood the outrage and disdain my mother would throw at the little balck and white screen on which balding Joe McCarthy was prancing around. She called him six kinds of insufferable bastard.

I think the point about labels is an important one. For example there were at least two major meanings to the word Communist in the period between the 30's and the 50's -- actually there were a dozen. But one distinction that has to be made is the difference betweent he philosophical notion of communism (the philosophy of communal interst) and the political activities of the international communist party. there were an awful lot of intellectuals, liberals and artists drawn to the "subject" of communism philosophically, and some of them called themselves socialists and some of them called themselves anarchists, and some called themselves Bolshevik sympathizers, and it was a grand old bunch of malarkey about how societies should be organized for best benefit. The other side of the line was the effort to organize political action groups, labor strikes, and various other overt and covert actions. That gradually became "the enemy" of the American government as its dynamics gravitated to the support of Moscow and the USSR. Obviously these groupings intersect, and there were lots of shades of gray in between as well. But it was always clear to me that the philosophical liberals of the Thirties were a long, long way from Kruschev's shoe-pounding pronunciamento, "We will bury you!".

I guess all those witnesses should have asked for defintions of the word "communist". Maybe they did.

Regards,

A.