House Un-American Activities Committee

HUAC hearing

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) or House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)^[1] (1938–1975) was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security". When the House abolished the committee in 1975,^[2] its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's anti-Communist investigations are often confused with those of Senator Joseph McCarthy.^[3] McCarthy, as a U.S. Senator, had no direct involvement with this House committee.^[4] McCarthy was the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. Senate, not the House.

Precursors

Overman Committee (1918)

The Overman Committee was a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary chaired by Democratic Senator from North Carolina Lee Slater Overman that operated from September 1918 to June 1919. The subcommittee investigated German as well as Bolshevik elements in the United States.^[5]

The Committee was originally concerned with investigating pro-German sentiments in the American liquor industry. After World War I ended in November 1918 and the German threat lessened, the Committee began investigating communist Bolshevism. Bolshevism had appeared as a threat during the First Red Scare after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Committee's hearing into Bolshevik propaganda, conducted February 11 to March 10 of 1919, had a decisive role in constructing an image of a radical threat to the United States during the First Red Scare.^[6]

Fish Committee (1930)

Congressman Hamilton Fish III, who was a fervent anti-communist, introduced on May 5, 1930, House Resolution 180, which proposed to establish a committee to investigate communist activities in the United States. The resulting committee, commonly known as the Fish Committee, undertook extensive investigations of people and organizations suspected of being involved with or supporting communist activities in the United States. Among the committee's targets were the American Civil Liberties Union and communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster.^[7] The committee recommended granting the United States Department of Justice more authority to investigate communists, and strengthening of immigration and deportation laws to keep communists out of the United States.^[8]

Special Committee on Un-American Activities (1934–1937)

From 1934 to 1937, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities, chaired by John W. McCormack (D-MA) and Samuel Dickstein (D-NY) (a Soviet agent), held public and private hearings and collected testimony filling 4,300 pages. Its mandate was to get "information on how foreign subversive propaganda entered the U.S. and the organizations that were spreading it." The committee was widely known as the McCormack-Dickstein committee.

The committee investigated and supported allegations of a fascist plot to seize the White House, known as the Business Plot. It was replaced with a similar committee that focused on pursuing communists. Its records are held by the National Archives and Records Administration as records related to HUAC.

Special investigation committee (1938–1944)

On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties.^[9][10] It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee.

In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin (D-MS) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution."^[11] Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project. In 1965–1966, however, the Committee did conduct an investigation into Klan activities under chairman Edwin Willis (D-LA).^[12]

The Committee also carried out a brief investigation into the wartime internment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The investigation primarily concerned security at the camps, youth gangs allegedly operating in the camps, food supply questions, and releases of internees. With the exception of Rep. Herman Eberharter (D-PA), the members of the committee seemed to support internment.

In 1938, Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, was subpoenaed to appear before the committee to answer the charge the project was overrun with communists. Flanagan was called to testify for only a part of one day, while a clerk from the project was called in for two entire days. It was during this investigation that one of the committee members, Joe Starnes (D-AL), famously asked Flanagan whether the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was a member of the Communist Party, and mused "Mr. Euripides" preached class warfare.^[13]

In 1939, the committee investigated leaders of the American Youth Congress, a Comintern affiliate organization.

Ironically, congressman Samuel Dickstein, vice-chairman of the respective committees, was himself named in Soviet NKVD documents as a Soviet agent.^[14]

Standing committee (1945–1975)

The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey became the committee's first chairman.^[15] Under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the 79th Congress, the committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution."

Under this mandate, the committee focused its investigations on real and suspected communists in positions of actual or supposed influence in the United States society. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering communist subversion.^[16]

Hollywood blacklist

MR. JACKSON: Mr. Chairman, may I say that I can think of no greater way to parade one's political beliefs than to appear under the auspices of Mainstream, a Communist publication…

MR. MOSTEL: I appreciate your opinion very much but I do want to say that—I don't know, you know—I still stand on pay grounds, and maybe it is unwise and unpolitical of me to say this. If I appeared there, what if I did an imitation of a butterfly at rest? There is no crime in making anybody laugh … I don't care if you laugh at me.

MR. JACKSON: If your interpretation of a butterfly at rest brought any money into the coffers of the Communist Party, you contributed directly to the propaganda effort of the Communist Party.

MR. MOSTEL: Suppose I had the urge to do the butterfly at rest somewhere.

MR. DOYLE: Yes, but please, when you have the urge, don't have such an urge to put the butterfly at rest by putting money in the Communist Party coffers as a result of that urge to put the butterfly at rest.

HUAC hearing testimony, October 14, 1955

In 1947, the committee held nine days of hearings into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. After conviction on contempt of Congress charges for refusal to answer some questions posed by committee members, the "Hollywood Ten" were blacklisted by the industry. Eventually, more than 300 artists—including directors, radio commentators, actors and particularly screenwriters—were boycotted by the studios. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, left the U.S. to find work. Others wrote under pseudonyms or the names of colleagues. Only about ten percent succeeded in rebuilding careers within the entertainment industry.^{[citation needed]}

In 1947, studio executives told the committee that wartime films—such as Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and Song of Russia—could be considered pro-Soviet propaganda, but claimed that the films were valuable in the context of the Allied war effort, and that they were made (in the case of Mission to Moscow) at the request of White House officials. In response to the House investigations, most studios produced a number of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda films such as John Wayne's Big Jim McLain, Guilty of Treason (about the ordeal and trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty), The Red Menace, The Red Danube, I Married a Communist, Red Planet Mars, and I Was a Communist for the FBI, which was nominated for an Academy Award for the best documentary in 1951 and also serialized for radio.^[17] Universal-International Pictures was the only major studio that did not produce such a film.

Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss

In 1948, the committee heard testimony from former spy, and then foreign desk editor of Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, that numerous figures working for the federal government were in fact, communist agents. Some of the people Chambers named had already died or left the country. Some refused to answer committee questions, citing the Fifth Amendment, and one, Alger Hiss, denied all the charges. In his testimony before the commission, Hiss made a number of false statements for which he was later convicted of perjury and imprisoned.^[18]

Decline

In the wake of Senator McCarthy's downfall, the prestige of HUAC began a gradual decline beginning in the late 1950s. By 1959, the committee was being denounced by former President Harry S. Truman as the "most un-American thing in the country today."^[19]

In May 1960, the committee held hearings in San Francisco City Hall that led to the infamous "riot" on May 13, when city police officers fire-hosed protesting students from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges and dragged them down the marble steps beneath the rotunda, leaving some seriously injured.^[20][21] Soviet affairs expert William Mandel, who had been subpoenaed to testify, angrily denounced the committee and the police in a blistering statement which was aired repeatedly for years thereafter on Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley. An anti-communist propaganda film, Operation Abolition,^[22] was produced by the committee from subpoenaed local news reports, and shown around the country during 1960 and 1961. In response, the Northern California ACLU produced a film called Operation Correction, which discussed falsehoods in the first film. Scenes from the hearings and protest were later featured in the award-winning 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties.

The committee lost considerable prestige as the 1960s progressed, increasingly becoming the target of political satirists and the defiance of a new generation of political activists. HUAC subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used the media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings. Rubin came to one session dressed as a United States Revolutionary War soldier and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance. Rubin then "blew giant gum bubbles while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes."^[23] Hoffman attended a session dressed as Santa Claus. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing the United States flag. Hoffman quipped to the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country," paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were communists for not arresting him also.^[24]

According to The Harvard Crimson:^[25]

In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the 'blacklist.' Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job. But it is not easy to see how in 1969 a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Witnesses like Jerry Rubin have openly boasted of their contempt for American institutions. A subpoena from HUAC would be unlikely to scandalize Abbie Hoffman or his friends.

The House of Representatives abolished the committee in 1975, transferring its functions to the House Judiciary Committee.

Chairmen

During the various phases of its existence, the committee was chaired by:

Special Investigation Committee

• Martin Dies Jr., 1938–1944

House Committee on Un-American Activities: chairmen

• Edward J. Hart (D-NJ), 1945–46
• John Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), 1947–48
• John Stephens Wood (D-GA), 1949–53
• Harold Himmel Velde (R-IL), 1953–55
• Francis Walter (D-PA), 1955–65
• Edwin Edward Willis (D-LA), 1965–69

House Committee on Internal Security

• Richard Howard Ichord Jr., chairman 1969–1975

Among the notable members included:

• Richard Nixon
• Gordon H. Scherer
• Karl Earl Mundt
• Felix Edward Hébert
• John Elliott Rankin
• Richard B. Vail
• Donald L. Jackson
• Jerry Voorhis

The members during the 1947 Hollywood Ten hearings were Reps. Parnell (New Jersey), Nixon (California), Vail (Illinois), John McDowell (Pennsylvania), and John S Wood (Georgia).^[26] Robert E Stripling was the Chief Investigator^[27] and appears on many recordings and transcripts of those hearings.

See also

• McCarran Internal Security Act
• Defending Dissent Foundation
• Wilkinson v. United States
• Film gris
• Cold War
• Redbaiting
• Loyalty oath
• Martin and Mitchell Defection
• J. Edgar Hoover
• Bertolt Brecht
• Elia Kazan
• John Garfield
• Paul Robeson
• Zero Mostel
• Alger Hiss
• Whittaker Chambers
• Elizabeth Bentley
• Harold Harby, Los Angeles City Council member, 1939–42, 1943–57, supported the committee

References

Notes

1. ^ Although "HCUA" is for "House Un-American Activities Committee") is the abbreviation most often used. See, for example:
   Kirschner, Don S. (1995). Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin. University of Missouri Press. pp. 7. ISBN 0826209890. "The correct acronym for this committee is thus HCUA, but the committee is commonly known as HUAC..." 
   Some authors believe that "HUAC" was originally coined as a pejorative term, meant to suggest that the committee itself engaged in "un-American activities", but the abbreviation is used by most current authors without any pejorative sense.(: See:
   Smith, Blake (2003). Naming Names. Hill and Wang. pp. vii. ISBN 0809001837. 
   When the unabbreviated name is used, it is usually given as "House Committee on Un-American Activities".
2. ^ Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. New York, New York: Basic Books. p. 265. ISBN 0465041957. 
3. ^ For example, see Brown, Sarah (2002-02-05). "Pleading the Fifth". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1801948.stm. "McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee" 
4. ^ Patrick Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. 2003, page 15-6.
5. ^ Schmidt, p. 136
6. ^ p. 144
7. ^ Memoirs, pp. 41–42
8. ^ To Added Law for Curb on Reds The New York Times, November 18, 1930 p. 21
9. ^ Finkelman, Paul (2006-10-10). Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties. CRC Press. p. 780. ISBN 9780415943420. http://books.google.com/books?id=YoI14vYA8r0C&pg=PA780. Retrieved 25 May 2011. 
10. ^ "House Un-American Activities Committee". Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. National Parks Service. Archived from the original on 2010-05-29. http://web.archive.org/web/20100529011543/http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/huac.htm. Retrieved 25 May 2011. 
11. ^ Newton, p. 102
12. ^ Newton, p. 162.
13. ^ Nightingale, Benedict (September 18, 1988). "Mr. Euripides Goes To Washington". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DA153DF93BA2575AC0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2. Retrieved May 4, 2010. 
14. ^ Weinstein, Allen; Vassiliev, Alexander (2000-03-14). The Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era. New York: Modern Library. pp. 140–150. ISBN 0-375-75536-5. 
15. ^ Walter Goodman, The Committee, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968
16. ^ Doug Linder, The Alger Hiss Trials – 1949–50, 2003.
17. ^ Dan Georgakas, "Hollywood Blacklist", in: Encyclopedia Of The American Left, 1992.
18. ^ [|Chambers, Whittaker] (1952). Witness. Random House. ISBN 0-89526-571-0. 
19. ^ Stephen J. Whitfield. The Culture of the Cold War. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996
20. ^ "The Sixties: House Un-American Activities Committee" at PBS.org
21. ^ Carl Nolte (May 13, 2010). "'Black Friday,' birth of U.S. protest movement". San Francisco Chronicle. http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-05-13/news/20896032_1_san-francisco-s-city-hall-protesters-staircase. 
22. ^ "Operation Abolition", Time magazine, 1961.
23. ^ Youth International Party, 1992.
24. ^ Jerry Rubin, A Yippie Manifesto.
25. ^ The Harvard Crimson: Thomas Geogheghan, "By Any Other Name. Brass Tacks", February 24, 1969, accessed Marcg 6, 2011
26. ^ Dr. Steven Schoenherr. "HUAC Hearings 1947". University of San Diego History Department. http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/20th/1940s/huac.html. Retrieved 2009-01-30. 
27. ^ "Ghost at Work". Time. 1949-01-24. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799701,00.html. 

Bibliography

• Schmidt, Regin (2000). Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943. Museum Tusculanum Press. ISBN 8772895810, 9788772895819. http://books.google.com/?id=Fo1jblFR3BcC&pg=PP1. 
• Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. Random House. ISBN 0-89526-571-0. 
• Newton, Michael (2010). The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: a history. McFarland. ISBN 9780786446537. http://books.google.com/books?id=YSLCS7hg-DEC. 

Further reading

• Gladchuk, John Joseph (2006). Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935-1950. Routledge. ISBN 0415955688. 
• Bentley, Eric; Rich, Frank (2002). Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968. Nation Books. ISBN 1560253681. 
• O'Reilly, Kenneth (1983). Hoover and the Unamericans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace. Temple University Press. ISBN 0877223017. 
• Goodman, Walter (1968). The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0374126887. 
• Donner, Frank J. (1967). The Un-Americans. Ballantine Books. 
• Buckley, William F. (1962). The Committee and Its Critics; a Calm Review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Putnam Books. 

External links

• House.gov HUAC - permanent standing House Committee on Un-American Activities
• House.gov HUAC - 1948 Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers hearing before HUAC
• The National Laboratories and the Atomic Energy Commission in the Early Cold War
• Political Counterintelligence Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB)
• "Operation Abolition", 17 Mar 1961 Time Magazine
• Bogart, Humphrey. "I'm no communist" Photoplay Magazine, March