When the FBI Investigated Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was not a politically neutral person. Quite the opposite: the writer repudiated the authoritarianism of his era and the actions of the famous "House Un-American Activities Committee", dedicated to hunting communists. Bradbury was never a communist, but an overactive imagination and the power of his typewriter made the geniuses in Washington nervous. The result? Bradbury became a "person of interest" for the FBI.

The House Un-American Activities Committee was formed by the House of Representatives in 1938, before the beginning of World War II. However, it is necessary to note that it was preceded by three committees, Overman, Fish, and McCormack–Dickstein, between 1918 and 1937. Its operations also reached those with supposed "pro-German thoughts and feelings", but by the end of the war, the priority was to detect communist elements. In March 1947, the Truman Doctrine came into action: Prevent, deteriorate, and/or neutralize Soviet geopolitical expansion.

Almost in parallel, Senator Joseph McCarthy developed his own "red hunt", without a direct relationship with the committee beyond the similarities. At the beginning of the 1950s, the Cold War was heating up rapidly, and the authorities reacted as expected: paranoia, interference in the artistic sphere, censorship, bans, "blacklists" of directors and writers, and full investigations at the slightest suspicion of communist activity. Some artists grew tired of government intervention, and one of them was Ray Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451 and Its Origins

The story tells us that Bradbury published "Fahrenheit 451" in October 1953. Its seed had been planted four years earlier, when Bradbury and a friend had a minor incident with a police officer too enthusiastic about his job. That led to the short story "The Pedestrian", predecessor of "The Fireman", which later became Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury insisted for many years that "451" was a critique of mass media (especially television) that destroys interest in literature, but its association with authoritarianism, the committee's actions, and the McCarthyism of the time is hard to dissolve even today.

One way or another, Bradbury ended up under the FBI's lens. Available information suggests that Martin Berkeley, the committee's number one collaborator in Hollywood, responsible for sharing hundreds of names with the agency, gave Bradbury the thumbs down. Part of the report indicates:

"Some of the writers suspected of having communist backgrounds have been developing in the field of science fiction, and that science fiction could be a lucrative field for the introduction of communist doctrines."

Thanks to a declassification process, today we can explore a good part of the investigation from our computers. Link below.

Source: Flashback

Access the documents: Click here