House Un-American Activities Committee

HUAC hearings

House Committee on Un-American Activities or HUAC (or, rarely, HCUA) (1938-1975) was an investigating committee of the United States House of Representatives. It is often referred to as the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to the Committee on Internal Security. The House abolished the committee in 1975 and its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's work during the war 1940s is often confused with that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, which came later.

McCormack-Dickstein (1934)

This House committee, McCormack-Dickstein, was named after its chairman and vice chairman, John W. McCormack and Samuel Dickstein. It was called the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. In 1934, it 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 NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration) as related records to HUAC.

Dies Committee (1938-1944)

The House Committee on Un-American Activities grew from a special investigating committee established in May 1938, chaired by Martin Dies and co-chaired by Samuel Dickstein, himself named in the Venona project as a Soviet agent. In pre-war years and during World War II it was known as the Dies Committee. Its work was supposed to be aimed mostly at German American involvement in Nazi and KKK activity. As to investigations into the activities of the "Klan," the Committee actually did little. When HUAC'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 alledgedly operating in the camps, food supply questions, and releases of internees. With the exception of Rep. 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 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.

Subversion

HUAC became a standing (permanent) committee in 1946. 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."

The committee came into its own when it acted on suspicions that some people with Communist sympathies and affiliations worked within the United States government. Some Americans in the 1930s had often been attracted to Marxism, particularly to Spain's Popular Front government. Many US intellectuals worked to support the Republican government in Spain against the fascist uprising led by Franco. This work brought them into contact with the US Communist party, and in opposition to US government policy, which was not supportive of the elected government in Spain. Several of these people had reached positions of influence during World War II and the late 1940s.

In 1947 HUAC investigated wartime shipment of uranium to the Soviet Union. The Committee reported that in 1943, with high-level protection inside the government, the United States government issued export licenses for the delivery of millions of pounds of atomic bomb-making materials. Restrictive orders of the Manhattan Project were bypassed by an American firm called the Canadian Radium and Uranium Corporation. Security concerns at the National Laboratories also came under review.

There were also fears agents were still actively working to subvert American foreign policy and needed to be removed from positions of influence. In particular, the committee, with the leadership of representatives such as Richard Nixon, brought about the trial and conviction of State Department employee Alger Hiss.

The committee investigated so-called "Communist front" organizations to determine if they were effectively under the control of the Communist Party or of party members. People like W. E. B. DuBois and I. F. Stone were identified as having been so affiliated.

Hollywood Blacklist

Later the committee held nine days of hearings into alleged Communist propaganda 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 screenwriters—were boycotted by the studios. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, left the country to find work. Others wrote under pseudonyms or the names of colleagues.

In 1947 studio executives told the Committee that wartime films like Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia could be considered pro-Soviet propaganda, but they suggested that the films were valuable in the context of the Allied war effort. In the 1950s the studios produced a number of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda films like John Wayne's Big Jim McLain, The Red Menace, The Red Danube, I Married a Communist, I Was a Communist for the FBI and Red Planet Mars. Most were box-office failures, but placated Hollywood's critics and protected the industry against a threatened boycott campaign.

Committee chairs and notable members

Martin Dies Jr., chair 1938 – 1944
John Parnell Thomas, chair 1947 – 1948
John Stephens Wood, chair 1949 – 1953
Harold Himmel Velde, chair 1953 – 1955
Francis Walter, chair 1955 – 1963
Edwin Edward Willis, chair 1963 – 1969
Richard Howard Ichord Jr., chair 1969 – 1975
Richard Nixon
Gordon H. Scherer
Karl Earl Mundt
Felix Edward Hébert
John Elliott Rankin
Samuel Dickstein

External links

The National Laboratories and the Atomic Energy Commission in the Early Cold War
Political Counterintelligence Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB)

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