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).

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) searched for communists and other suspected subversives for nearly forty years. Founded in 1938 as the House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and chaired by a conservative Texas Democrat, Martin Dies, HUAC became a standing committee of the House in 1945. In 1969 it announced a new focus, domestic terrorism, and received a new name, the House Internal Security Committee. Six years later, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the full House abolished the committee.

Prior to HUAC's founding, congressional investigations of subversion were episodic. The most notable occurred in 1919, 1930, and 1934, and the sponsor of the committee's founding resolution, Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat, had been involved in several of those efforts. Where Dickstein was primarily concerned with native fascism and all other forms of anti-Semitism, however, the committee came to focus on ostensible left-wing subversion. Its basic charge was that communists and their sympathizers had infiltrated nearly all of the New Deal's alphabet agencies.

During the Cold War years, HUAC made its mark on two fronts. First, beginning in 1947, the committee held hearings on President Harry S. Truman's Federal Employee Loyalty Program. The most important of these investigations involved Edward Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards, and Alger Hiss, a former State Department official. When Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican, asked to see Condon's loyalty file, President Truman declined—citing both privacy and constitutional grounds, namely the separation of powers. That refusal not only allowed HUAC to charge the administration with covering up a sham of a loyalty program; it also broadened the debate. Could a sitting president refuse a congressional request for information? This debate over "executive privilege" would continue—and eventually involved a freshman congressman sitting on the committee, Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon was also the HUAC member who most determinedly pursued Alger Hiss. When Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950 for having denied under oath the passing of documents to a self-confessed Soviet agent, the committee's basic point about the adequacy of a loyalty program run by a Democratic president appeared, at least to its partisans, a proven fact.

The second front on which HUAC made its mark was investigating communist infiltration of the film industry. The initial hearings were orchestrated with the help of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The FBI identified both "unfriendly" witnesses who were not expected to answer the committee's questions during the televised hearings, and "friendly" witnesses who could be counted on to cooperate fully. Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, who actually had an FBI informant code designation, was among those in the latter category. Ultimately, these hearings resulted in a First Amendment challenge to the committee's authority by the so-called Hollywood Ten. The Supreme Court rejected that challenge.

Thereafter, HUAC played a substantial role in establishing and policing the Hollywood blacklists. Any actor, writer, director, or other film industry employee named as a communist would find himself or herself without work, and the only way off the blacklist was to appear as a friendly witness before the committee and "name names"—that is, inform on friends and acquaintances. A witness who received a committee subpoena could remain silent only by citing the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. Citing free speech or any other constitutional protection would result, as the Hollywood Ten discovered, in both the blacklist and a federal prison sentence for contempt of Congress.

In the 1960s, the committee kept at communist in-filtration while adding hearings on such new subjects as the Ku Klux Klan and Students for a Democratic Society. However, with the decline of McCarthyism and the gradual eroding of the Hollywood blacklist, HUAC's heyday had passed. There would be no more klieg lights and screaming newspaper headlines. The committee spent its last years toiling in relative obscurity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goodman, Walter. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

O'Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

KennethO'Reilly

See alsoAnticommunism ; Blacklisting ; Cold War ; Hiss Case ; andvol. 9:The Testimony of Walter E. Disney before the House Committee on Un-American Activities 24 October 1947 .

House Committee on Un‐American Activities. The House Committee on Un‐American Activities (HUAC) was created in 1938 by legislators concerned about fascist groups in America and by conservative opponents of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. First chaired by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, the committee created a sensation by charging that communists dominated numerous federal agencies, including the Works Progress Administration. The raucous committee hearings drew attention to the prominent role of left‐wing radicals in the political life of the 1930s and abetted the Republican party's resurgence in the 1938 midterm elections.

HUAC enjoyed its most dramatic hours in 1947 and 1948: the Hollywood hearings that resulted in the jailing of ten screenwriters and directors for contempt and led to a show‐business blacklist that would linger for years; and the confrontation between the excommunist Whittaker Chambers and the former State Department official Alger Hiss that would send Hiss to jail for perjury and propel Representative Richard M. Nixon, a committee member, to national attention.

Much criticized for its bruising treatment of witnesses, its use of hearings as a weapon of repression, and its lack of legislative accomplishments, the committee did contribute to the 1950 Internal Security Act that called for the registration of Communist party members. Subsequent investigations—into atomic scientists, colleges, churches, and labor unions—did not stir much excitement as the loyalty‐security issue began to ebb in the 1950s. Despite a foray against anti‐Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s and the enduring support of Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, HUAC was abolished in 1975.
See also Anticommunism; Communism; Communist Party—USA; Fifties, The; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Walter Goodman , The Committee, 1968.

Walter Goodman

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee (1938–75) of the U.S. House of Representatives, created to investigate disloyalty and subversive organizations. Its first chairman, Martin Dies , set the pattern for its anti-Communist investigations. The committee's methods included pressure on witnesses to name former associates, vague and sweeping accusations against individuals, and the assumption of an individual's guilt because of association with a suspect organization. Witnesses who refused to answer were cited for contempt of Congress. A highly publicized 1947 investigation of the entertainment industry led to prison sentences for contempt for a group of recalcitrant witnesses who became known as the Hollywood Ten. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers made sensational accusations of Soviet espionage against former State Dept. official Alger Hiss ; those hearings kept the committee in the headlines and provided the first national exposure for committee member Richard Nixon . Critics of the committee contended that it disregarded the civil liberties of its witnesses and that it consistently failed to fulfill its primary purpose of recommending new legislation. After 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy borrowed many of the committee's tactics for his own Senate investigations. The committee (renamed the House Internal Security Committee in 1969) was abolished in 1975.

Bibliography: See study by W. Goodman (1968).

Un-American Activities Committee, House (HUAC) Committee of the US House of Representatives, established (1938) to investigate political subversion. Created to combat Nazi propaganda, it began by investigating extremist political organizations. After World War 2, encouraged by Senator Joseph McCarthy, it attacked alleged communists in Hollywood and in the federal government. It was abolished in 1975.

Un-American Activities Committee, House a committee of the US House of Representatives (HUAC) established in 1938 to investigate subversives. It became notorious for its zealous investigations of alleged communists, particularly in the late 1940s, although it was originally intended to pursue Fascists also.