On October 30, 1947, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating allegations that Communists were incorporating propaganda messages into\u00a0Hollywood\u00a0films of the time. Lardner was a member of the \u201cUnfriendly Ten,\u201d a group of ten writers, directors and producers who refused to testify before Congress about their political affiliations. (The week prior, several \u201cfriendly\u201d witnesses including Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, and Louis B. Mayer had testified against the insidious \u201cred menace.\u201d) Lardner, like the other members of the Unfriendly Ten, refused to answer HUAC\u2019s questions on the grounds that the First Amendment protected speech on the screen and that political and union affiliations were quite simply no one\u2019s business. When the irate panel chair J. Parnell Thomas asked Lardner, \u201cIt is a very simple question\u2026 Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Lardner famously answered, \u201cI could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lardner, along with the nine other members of the Unfriendly Ten, was tried, convicted and sent to federal prison in\u00a0Danbury,\u00a0Connecticut\u00a0, in 1950 for contempt of Congress for his refusal to answer HUAC\u2019s questions. Upon his release one year later, Lardner found himself blacklisted. In order to find work as a writer, Lardner had to work under a series of pseudonyms despite his previous success and as a screenwriter. Larder, born in 1915, died in 2000, the last living member of the famous \u201cUnfriendly Ten.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On October 30, 1947, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating allegations that Communists were incorporating propaganda messages into\u00a0Hollywood\u00a0films of the time. Lardner was a member of the \u201cUnfriendly Ten,\u201d a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politicalandcivil","category-most-wanted-actors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/1003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hollywoodmostwanted.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}