On today’s date in 1947, the German composer Hans Eisler, who had been living in the United States since 1938, was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

This was some years before Joseph McCarthy headed such investigations, but one member of the committee was a first-term Californian congressman by the name of Richard M. Nixon. Nixon and other committee members were eager to expose Communist agents, who they believed were undermining American values by infiltrating and influencing the film industry.

Hans Eisler, who had been working in Hollywood since 1942, was a prime suspect. After all, his brother Gerhard was an ardent Communist, and Hanns himself a close artistic collaborator of the Marxist poet, Bertolt Brecht. As one newspaper reported, Hans Eisler was “the commissar of the West Coast Party activities on the movie front.”

While Hans Eilser did have leftist sympathies, there was absolutely no evidence of his being a Soviet agent, and as a film music composer, Eisler had no ideological influence on the scripts or even the topics of the films on which he worked. Celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland all rallied to his defense, but to no avail. The mood of the country in the early days of the Red Scare was such that Eisler was banned from working his Hollywood, and eventually forced out of the country.

Like his old friend Bertold Brecht, Eisler eventually settled in Communist East Germany, where he died in 1962.