House Un-American Activities Committee

HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

House Un-American Activities Committee

The House of Representatives began its work investigating subversive activity by U.S. citizens in 1930 as the Fish Committee and in 1934 as the McCormack Committee. In 1938 the committee was revived as the Dies Committee (after the name of its chairman, Martin Dies, Jr., D-Texas) to investigate the activities of communist and fascist organizations on the home front. Despite the strong anticommunism of Chairman Dies, before and during World War II the committee concentrated on fascist organizations.

The Permanent Committee

In January 1945 the special committee was transformed into a permanent standing committee of the House. In Public Law 601, the seventy-ninth Congress authorized HUAC to investigate the following:

(1) the extent, character and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States, (2) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and unAmerican propaganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic origin and attacks the principal form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution, and (3) all other questions in relation thereto that would aid Congress in any remedial legislation.

Such a vague and wide-ranging authorization opened the door to mischief by ambitious congressmen.

Communists in Hollywood

It has been estimated that from the middle 1930s to the middle 1950s as many as three hundred Hollywood actors, writers, directors, and designers joined the Communist Party. The former secretary of the Southern California Communist Party estimated that membership in the party reached a wartime high of four thousand. When the Soviet Union was allied with the United States during World War II, ultrapatriotic organizations, such as the Hollywood Writers' Mobilization and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, attracted people from the leftist extreme of the political spectrum. In addition, the emerging leftist theatrical unions in Hollywood, and their calls for higher wages for screenwriters and actors, had a large part in recruiting Hollywood movie people into the Communist Party.

Backlash

In 1947 the United States adopted a policy of containment toward the Soviet Union, proposing to stop further Soviet territorial expansion. The change in policy soured U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations and raised wariness about Communists in the United States. In March 1947 Rep. John Rankin, a member of HUAC, called for a cleansing of the film industry. Some HUAC members, such as chairman J. Parnell Thomas, were concerned with possible "Communist propaganda" being injected into Hollywood movies.

Witch-Hunt

At hearings before HUAC on 28-30 October 1947, actors, directors, and writers were "investigated" to determine their political leanings in an effort to purge Hollywood of Communists. The list of witnesses included forty-one names, nineteen of whom were classified as unfriendly. The list of witnesses was filled with stars and industry bigwigs: Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Rod Taylor, and Ronald Reagan, among others. The one question the committee eventually asked each witness was "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"

The Hollywood Ten

Ten individuals, including Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, and Albert Maltz, refused to answer the question during the hearings. In November 1947 they were cited for contempt of Congress for invoking either their Fifth Amendment right to be free from self-incrimination or their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly. They were indicted by a grand jury in December and were found guilty of contempt in April 1948. The convictions were upheld on appeal, and the Supreme Court, following the deaths of two liberal justices (Frank Murphy and Wiley Blount Rutledge were replaced by Tom Clark and Sherman Minton, who both supported the government in Cold War cases), declined to hear the appeal in April 1950. The Hollywood Ten went to federal prison, where they were incarcerated with committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas, who had been convicted of padding the payrolls of his congressional staff.

Hiss-Chambers Case

After the war the permanent committee turned its attention almost entirely to the perceived Communist threat. On 31 July 1948 HUAC began to hear evidence from two former Communists, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, the latter a writer for Henry Luce's Time magazine. During his testimony Chambers accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Communist agent. When Hiss heard of Chambers's testimony he demanded to be heard in rebuttal. He appeared on 25 August 1948. This testimony, Chambers's subsequent appearance in front of a New York grand jury, Hiss's libel suit against Chambers, and Hiss's two trials for perjury took the case out of the realm of HUAC and into the regular court system. The conviction of Hiss for perjury in 1950 justified for many the techniques of HUAC.

The Shape of Things to Come

The work of HUAC in the 1940s, while not as wide-ranging as that under the Senate Permanent Investigations Committee under the chairmanship of Joseph McCarthy, was the beginning of the great search for Communists in American life that dominated the early part of the 1950s. These congressional investigations concentrated attention on the great questions about individual rights and national security that remained for the courts to answer.

Sources:

Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgekas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland, 1990);

David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978);

Bernard F. Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989);

Kermit L. Hall, The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);

Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York: Atheneum, 1973).