University of Southern Indiana Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium “Where is Juliet Poyntz”

Additional Information

Juliet Stuart Poyntz’s disappearance is an important addition to understand the internecine battles within the left in the 1930s that would feed the anti-communism of the Cold War period. Dr. Denise Lynn will discuss the importance of her disappearance and its significance in relation to the Cold War Period. Poyntz’s disappearance and suspected murder fueled the fears of a number of communists who would later become key witnesses in the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings and vocal anti-communists, and demonstrated that Josef Stalin had manipulated the great socialist experiment in the USSR, terrorized his own people, and that the American Communist Party was culpable by their silent indifference to Stalin’s brutality.