P J O'Connell rightly recommends OPERATION ABOLITION, the
HUAC version of the San Francisco hearings of 1960, as a window
on the anti-communist hysteria of the time; the rebuttal film he
recalls is, I think, OPERATION CORRECTION, which was produced by
the Northern California branch of the ACLU.
 
I recall using OPERATION ABOLITION during the early 1960s as an
organizing and consciousness-raising device; along with some other
radical (?) graduate students at Cornell who were interested in
peace, civil rights, and civil liberties, I took the film to nearby
colleges, where we would show it and then refute it.  The self-satisfied
anti-communist crudity of the film, showing Berkeley students being
fire-hosed and dragged down the marble steps of the interior of
San Francisco's city hall, with heads bouncing on the steps, made
our work easy.
 
Tom Benson
Penn State