House Un-American Activities Committee

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HUAC hearings
HUAC hearings

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or HCUA,[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, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's anti-communist investigations are often confused with those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, as a senator, had no direct involvement with this House committee.[2]

Contents

[edit] 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 and Samuel Dickstein, held public and private hearings in six cities, questioned hundreds of witnesses 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 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 related records to HUAC.

[edit] Special investigation committee (1938–1944)

In May 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. and Samuel Dickstein, and therefore known as the Dies Committee. Its work was aimed mostly at German American involvement in Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity. As to investigations into the activities of the Klan, the committee actually did little. When the committee's chief counsel Ernest Adamson announced that "The committee has decided that it lacks sufficient data on which to base a probe," committee member John E. Rankin added: "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." 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.

The Dies 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, 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 that 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, famously asked Flanagan whether the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was a member of the Communist Party.

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.[3]

[edit] 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.[4] 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 American society. The first such investigation looked into allegations of communists in the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. 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.[5]

[edit] Hollywood blacklist

Main article: Hollywood blacklist
Segment of Zero Mostel’s testimony before HUAC
Segment of Zero Mostel’s testimony before HUAC

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 were made, in some cases, 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 József Cardinal 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.[6] Universal-International Pictures was the only major studio that did not produce such a film.

[edit] Decline

In the wake of the downfall of Senator McCarthy, 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 ""most un-American thing in the country today."[7]

In May 1960, the committee held hearings in San Francisco that led to the infamous "riot" at City Hall on May 13, 1960, when San Francisco police officers fire-hosed students from Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges down the steps beneath the rotunda. An anti-communist propaganda film, Operation Abolition[8] was produced by the committee from subpoenaed local news station reports and shown around the country during 1960 and 1961.

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 an American 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."[9] Hoffman attended a session dressed as Santa Claus. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing an American 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.[10]

According to The Harvard Crimson:

“ 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.[11] ”

[edit] Notable members

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

Other notable members included:

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Although "HCUA" is more technically correct, "HUAC" (for "House Un-American Activities Committee") is the abbreviation most often used. See the hit counts of this vs. this. When the unabbreviated name is used, it's usually given as "House Committee on Un-American Activities."
  2. ^ Patrick Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. 2003, page 15-6.
  3. ^ 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. 
  4. ^ Walter Goodman, The Committee, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968
  5. ^ Doug Linder, The Alger Hiss Trials - 1949-50, 2003.
  6. ^ Dan Georgakas, "Hollywood Blacklist", in: Encyclopedia Of The American Left, 1992.
  7. ^ Stephen J. Whitfield. The Culture of the Cold War. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996
  8. ^ "Operation Abolition", TIME Magazine, 1961.
  9. ^ Youth International Party, 1992.
  10. ^ Jerry Rubin, A Yippie Manifesto.
  11. ^ Thomas Geogheghan, "By Any Other Name. Brass Tacks", 24 February 1969, The Harvard Crimson.

[edit] Further reading

  • US House of Representatives, 81st Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II (DC, US Gov Printing Office [GPO], 1950).
  • Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Scarecrow Press, 2004). ISBN 978-0810852761
  • Frank J. Donner, The Un-Americans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961).

[edit] External links

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