Cole

In the month of October, 1947, the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives conducted a public hearing, at Washington, for the purpose of inquiring into alleged Communist infiltration into the motion picture industry. Among dozens of witnesses called, beginning October 20, and concluding October 30, were the appellee, Lester Cole, and a number of the executives of the appellant, Loew’s, Incorporated, a Delaware Corporation, engaged, under the trade name of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in the production and distribution of motion pictures. Cole had been employed by Loew’s as a writer of screen plays since 1945. He was cúr rently employed under a written contract to which, we shall presently refer.

At the hearing Cole, and some nine other screen writers, who came to be known in the current newspaper accounts of the hearing (which had extremely wide notice in the press and on the radio) as the ten “unfriendly” witnesses, were accompanied by counsel who challenged the validity of the investigation and the power of the Committee to conduct the inquiry or to issue the subpoenas served, by a so-called motion to “quash the subpoenas”. When Cole was called to the stand…