William+Mandel

An excerpt from William Mandel's testimony before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) in May of 1960. Mandel lost his fellow position at Stanford University as a result of the widespread belief that he was a leading communist during the McCarthy era. Mandel is best known for standing up to Senator McCarthy in 1953 during a televised senate hearing where Mandel yelled that McCarthy "lack[ed] only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago." The linked video clip is a small portion of Mandel's response to the question, "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" William F. Buckley later described Mandel's answer as "a histrionic speech." Recordings of Mandel's testimony were aired repeatedly on radio stations many years after as it is said to "represent the final hours" of the McCarthy era.

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