Showing results for "The Communist" in Americas

The Communist Party banned lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off as "degenerates." It persisted in this policy until 1991. During this sixty-year ban, gays and lesbians who did join the Communist Party were deeply closeted within it, as well as in their public lives as both queer and Communist.

In January of 1965, 24-year-old US Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for 40 years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick).

In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Laurence A. Johnson, a supermarket chain owner in Syracuse, New York, wasn't just passionate about fresh produce; he was equally fervent about purging communism from America's airwaves in the early 1950s. Teamed with like-minded anti-communists, Johnson targeted food giants like Borden and Kraft. He threatened to hurt sales of their products if they sponsored TV and radio shows employing anyone blacklisted for alleged communist ties. The Grocer Who Sold McCarthyism explores Johnson's ascent from small-time grocery operator to kingmaker wielding Red Scare hysteria.

Tens of millions of Americans sense there is something very wrong with the president of the United States, but they don’t know what. The Manchurian President answers that question. In writing this exhaustively researched book Aaron Klein, with Brenda J. Elliott, definitively exposes just how dangerous Barack Obama really is as America’s commander-in-chief.

Episode Two: The Committee re-opens its hearings in early 1950 and calls Gordon Kahn as its first witness. Kahn flees the subpoena to Mexico, leaving his two young sons in the care of family and friends. J. Edgar Hoover, calling Kahn "one of the three most dangerous Communists in Hollywood," issues an all-points-bulletin to the FBI, the State Department and the CIA, and puts Kahn on his security index, "a secret list of people to be placed in armed detention camps in the event of a "national security emergency."

This program is part of a series of six half-hour dramas about one of the...

Episode Three: Joined by his family, Gordon Kahn makes plans for an indefinite stay in the quiet, sunny town of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Back home, the "red scare" grows and J. Edgar Hoover launches a secret program to get the Mexican government to ship American "subversives" like Kahn to the United States. To protect his family, Kahn applies for Mexican citizenship and invests his life savings with a Mexican businessman.

This program is part of a series of six half-hour dramas about one of the darkest periods for the First Amendment in American history: the Hollywood blacklist. Gordon Kahn's...

Episode Five: Gordon Kahn arrives with his family in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the winter of 1955. Soon after, a "friend" informs on him to the state Attorney General, a nationally known Red Hunter named Louis Wyman. Wyman launches an investigation that becomes front-page news. FBI surveillance and wiretaps are resumed; the children are beaten up at school and Kahn is threatened with twenty years in prison for refusing to cooperate. Kahn's wife Barbara looks for work as a schoolteacher and learns she has been blacklisted, too. Kahn, earning a small living under the pseudonym of Hugh G....

Episode Four: Gordon Kahn learns that his business partner, an FBI informer, has robbed him of his money. Blacklisted and bankrupt, Kahn suffers a heart attack. While recovering, he writes day and night, stockpiling short stories, articles, and plays to sell under a pseudonym in the States. Forced by political and financial pressures to leave Mexico, he makes plans to return, hopefully unnoticed, to the shelter of his wife's father's house, in New Hampshire.

This program is part of a series of six half-hour dramas about one of the darkest periods for the First Amendment in American history:...

Episode Six: In 1960, a thaw comes to the Cold War. Blacklisted writers in Hollywood and New York begin to work again under their own names. But in New Hampshire the ice is slow to break. Gordon Kahn's younger son becomes embroiled in a political protest at his high school and is denounced as a communist and Kahn loses his resolve to write under his own name. Kahn dies of a heart attack in a freak storm, on the last night of 1962. His name reappears in print the following month. Hoover, notified of Kahn's death, closes the files. As he does, we learn that Kahn and Hoover had met once and that...

Episode One: The House Un-American Activities Committee opens its stormy hearings into Communist influence in Hollywood, in October, 1947. Ten leftist screenwriters denounce the investigation and are sentenced to jail for contempt. Gordon Kahn, a well-known enemy of HUAC, escapes a similar fate when the Committee suspends it hearings before calling him to testify. Blacklisted and under FBI surveillance, Kahn fights publicly for the freedom of "The Hollywood Ten" as fear of criticizing the Committee spreads through Hollywood.