Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968

By Eric Bentley

Book Overview

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this book from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly readable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. This book serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record. "The basic document with which all future studies of the [House Un-American Activities] Committee will have to begin." -Dalton Trumbo "...what he has done is give us HUAC as spectacle, and the perspective is shattering."-Victor Navasky, The New York Times

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670701653
• ISBN13: 9780670701650
• Release Date: November 1971
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 991 Pages
• Weight: 3.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Hard core history

A fascinating book--we're talking transcripts of the sessions before the HUAC. You'll discover who sang for the committee (and how loudly; some of the famous people who caved before the committee will suprise you), and those who ran it in riotous circles. The best reads: Zero Mostel, Pete Seeger, and Tom Hayden. Original history, without the filters. (The index, however, is terrible.) A must have.

liberals are inexplicable

This book is intended to show how bad those mean old anti communists were and how noble and heroic the communists were. Except. By showing us the communists themselves, by letting us read their actual words, it is impossible come away with out feeling intense revulsion. These people were unpleasant liars at best, Evil at worst. They condemn themselves. Why anyone thought that printing transcripts of their testimony would help the liberal cause is beyond me. Communism can only be defended if things like facts and morality are not allowed to cloud the issue. The book is a valuable resource for the anticommunist cause. Not what the liberals intended. But their myopia is all encompasing. Inexplicable.