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Excerpt from "Testimony from House Un-American Activities Hollywood Hearings, October 1947"
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"Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don't know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind."—Ayn Rand

In October 1947, to root out communist influence or propaganda either real or imagined in U.S. movies, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigating the U.S. film industry in Hollywood, California. J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), director of the Federal Bureau of...