
HUAC hearing
The
House Committee on Un-American Activities
(
HUAC or HCUA,Although "HCUA" is more technically
correct, "HUAC" (for "House Un-American Activities Committee") is
the abbreviation most often used.See
this search versus
this one, or in a book search,
this vs.
this. See also, for example:
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:
When the unabbreviated name is used, it is usually given as "House
Committee on Un-American Activities".
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. McCarthy was the chairman of the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
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.
The
Committee was originally tasked 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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 related records to HUAC.
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 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
United States's 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 and the
Federal Writers'
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, and mused that "
Mr.
Euripides" preached
class
warfare.
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.
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. 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.
Hollywood blacklist
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.
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.
Universal-International
Pictures was the only major studio that did not produce such a
film.
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."
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. 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, 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 an
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."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.
According to
The Harvard
Crimson:
Notable members
During the various phases of its existence, the committee was
chaired by:
Other notable members included:
The members during the 1947 Hollywood Ten hearings were Parnell
(NJ), Nixon (CA), Vail (IL), John McDowell (PA), and John S Wood
(GA). Robert E Stripling was the Chief Investigator and appears on
many recordings and transcripts of those hearings.
See also
References
Notes
- For example, see
- Patrick Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television,
McCarthyism, and American Culture. 2003, page 15-6.
- Schmidt, p. 136
- p. 144
- Memoirs, p. 41-42
- To Seek Added Law for Curb on Reds The New York Times,
November 18, 1930 p. 21
- Mr. Euripides Goes To Washington - New York
Times
- Walter Goodman, The Committee, New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1968
- Doug Linder, The Alger Hiss Trials - 1949-50,
2003.
- Dan Georgakas, " Hollywood Blacklist", in: Encyclopedia Of The
American Left, 1992.
- Stephen J. Whitfield. The Culture of the Cold War. The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996
- "The Sixties: House Un-American Activities
Committee" at PBS.org
- " Operation Abolition", TIME Magazine, 1961.
- Youth International Party, 1992.
- Jerry Rubin, A Yippie Manifesto.
Bibliography
Further reading
External links