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House Un-American Activities Committee
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The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or HCUA,
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.
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Encyclopedia
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or HCUA,
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".
1934–1975) 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, nor did he have anything to do with the infamous "blacklisting" of creative talent.
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.
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, 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 American 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 that led to the infamous "riot" at City Hall on May 13, 1960, when San Francisco 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 '60s.
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."
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.
According to The Harvard Crimson:
Notable members
During the various phases of its existence, the committee was chaired by:
- John W. McCormack, chairman 1934-1937 (Special Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Samuel Dickstein, vice-chairman 1934-1937 (Special Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Martin Dies Jr., 1938–1944 (special investigation committee)
- Edward J. Hart, chairman 1945-1946 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- John Parnell Thomas, chairman 1947–1948 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- John Stephens Wood, chairman 1949–1953 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Harold Himmel Velde, chairman 1953–1955 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Francis Walter, chairman 1955–1965 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Edwin Edward Willis, chairman 1965–1969 (House Committee on Un-American Activities)
- Richard Howard Ichord Jr., chairman 1969–1975 (House Committee on Internal Security)
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
Further reading
External links
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- Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB)
- Time Magazine
- Bogart, Humphrey.
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