In fact, the hostile blacklisting of Gibson and other Christians now occurring is far uglier than anything that happened during the supposed “Dark Ages” of the McCarthy blacklisting era, because now it is done out of religious intolerance.
To compare not getting nominated for an Oscar with an era in which people were imprisoned, denied the right to earn a livliehood and lied about under oath is just ridiculous.
bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A637841
Blacklisting was a technique used in the film industry. If a person was suspected to have communist connections, they would be blacklisted until they came to trial. This meant they would have their passports and their rights to work in film removed, and their blacklisted status would be published.
The Committee particularly focussed on high profile people, especially those in the media. Many were adversely affected in some way by the era, although there were exceptions; Walt Disney, a fierce anti-communist, was a supporter of McCarthyism. The playwright Arthur Miller (the one who married Marilyn Monroe) was accused, refused to confess, and was lucky to escape with a steep fine.
The first stages of the investigation into the film industry were the interviews of 41 people who worked within it, 19 of which were noted as having a left-wing bias. Of these people, one,
Bertolt Brecht, left for Germany, eight gave evidence and named their accomplices, and ten refused.
The so-called ‘Hollywood Ten’ cited the Fifth Amendment as evidence of their right to remain silent.
However, the HUAC had the view that the only way of proving you were now a ‘proper’ American was to tell the Committee who else was involved. The courts upheld the arguments of the HUAC, and the Hollywood Ten each spent a year in prison. They remained blacklisted long after, and although one eventually cracked and answered the questions required, giving names, the other nine remained faithful.
writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html
The punishments were primarily economic. People lost their jobs. The official manifestations of McCarthyism–the public hearings, FBI investigations, and criminal prosecutions–would not have been as effective had they not been reinforced by the private sector. The political purges were a two-stage process that relied on the imposition of economic sanctions to bolster the political messages conveyed by public officials. The collaboration of private employers with HUAC and the rest of the anti-Communist network was necessary both to legitimate the network’s activities and to punish the men and women identified as politically undesirable. Without the participation of the private sector, McCarthyism would not have affected the rank-and-file members of the Communist movement or so effectively stifled political dissent.
It is hard to come up with accurate statistics for the number of politically motivated dismissals during the McCarthy period, for both the employers and the people they fired tried to conceal what was happening–the former to protect themselves against charges of violating civil liberties, the latter to obtain future jobs. Yale Law School professor Ralph Brown, who conducted the most systematic survey of the economic damage of the McCarthy era, estimated that roughly ten thousand people lost their jobs. Such a figure may be low, as even Brown admits, for it does not include rejected applicants, people who resigned under duress, and the men and women who were ostensibly dismissed for other reasons. Still, it does suggest the scope of the economic sanctions.
The two-stage nature of McCarthyism, in which political undesirables were first identified by one agency and then fired by another, increased its effectiveness. By diffusing the responsibility, the separation of the two operations made it easier for the people who administered the economic sanctions to rationalize what they were doing and deny that they were involved in the business of McCarthyism. This was especially the case with the essentially moderate and liberal men (few women here) who ran the nation’s major corporations, newspapers, universities, and other institutions that fired people for their politics.
