understanding the working people. He acknowledged that his prosperity and Hollywood connections were suspect in the fight for workers' rights. Due to the criticism, he officially joined the Communist Party in 1934 and began to educate himself about the proletarian cause. He soon traveled throughout the poverty-stricken South to study violent labor conflicts in Alabama and Georgia, where workers were trying to unionize. While in the South, Lawson submitted articles to the Daily Worker; he was arrested numerous times. These experiences inspired his next play, Marching Song. It was produced by the radical Theatre Union, opening in New York on February 17, 1937, and running for sixty-one performances. Lawson wrote the screenplay for several films during the 1930s that were political, including Blockade (1938), which starred Henry Fonda. This film on the Spanish Civil War earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story. Lawson also wrote Counter-Attack (1945), a tribute to the Soviet-USA alliance during the late stages of the Second World War. He also wrote the critically acclaimed Algiers (1938), and the Humphrey Bogart vehicles Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic in 1943. In 1941, Lawson ordered Budd Schulberg to make changes to his novel What Makes Sammy Run? to better fit the Communist message; Schulberg refused and quit the American Communist Party in protest. Lawson organized and led a critical attack in 1946 on Albert Maltz after he published an article, "What Shall We Ask of Writers", in The New Masses, challenging the didacticism of the American Communist Party's censorship of writers. Surprised by the ferocity of attack from his fellow writers, including Lawson, Howard Fast, Alvah Bessie, Ring Lardner, Jr., Samuel Sillen, and others, Maltz publicly recanted. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) After World War II, American fears of communist power increased after the Soviet Union established communist governments in eastern Europe. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began an investigation into communist and socialist influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. Lawson appeared before the HUAC on October 29, 1947. Like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and Ring Lardner Jr., he refused to answer almost all questions and would not give names of other people he knew in communist circles. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right