House Committee on Un-American Activities

Identification Specially appointed congressional investigating committee

Also Known As House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities

Date Established in 1938; dissolved in 1975

This committee was assigned the responsibility of investigating possible cases of subversion, whether by individuals or by organizations, that might endanger the security of the United States. The main targets of its hearings were suspected communists.

During the mid-1930’s, opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation prepared the way for a move to appoint a committee to investigate subvention of the security of the United States. A key figure behind this move was Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, Jr., who was elected to the House of Representatives in l930. During the height of the Depression, Dies blamed part of the country’s economic woes on the high numbers of immigrants to the United States, many of them poor, who he said often brought with them nondemocratic ideologies.

Given the rising wave of communism in Russia and the success of the Nazis in Germany, Dies argued the need for a special congressional committee to investigate presumed perpetrators of anti-American plots and spreaders of anti-American propaganda. He introduced a bill for a short-term (seven months, extendable by congressional vote) House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly labeled HUAC). When the legislation passed on June 7, 1938, Dies became HUAC’s chair, a post he would hold for almost eight years. He seemed determined to use the committee to undermine New Deal legislation for its “leftist-leaning” content. He included as targets union leader Harry Bridges and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which he and his supporters viewed as sympathetic to communist influences. In 1938, Dies received the Washington Post’s Americanism award for his patriotic service.

The clouds of World War II, and especially the 1939 Molotov-von Ribbentrop Treaty, enabled supporters of HUAC to applaud Dies’s inclusion of Adolf Hitler alongside Joseph Stalin as a champion of “double dealing” that menaced the future of the world. By the time the United States entered the war in 1941, the Nazi-Stalinist pact had collapsed, making the Soviet Union an appropriate military ally. Nevertheless, during the war HUAC continued to stress the dangers of communism as equal to, if not more significant than, those of fascism and Nazism.

After 1945, when HUAC became a permanent (standing) congressional committee, fear quickly mounted concerning the spread of communism not only abroad but also within the United States. A series of apparent advances made by communist regimes both by the Soviet Union, which spread its “protection” over Eastern Europe, and by China exacerbated fears in the West generally, and in the United States in particular. Alarming events abroad included a year-long Soviet blockade of Berlin beginning in 1948 and the testing of Russia’s first atom bomb in August, 1949. In Asia, there was the takeover of the Chinese government by communists (followed by the onset of the Korean War about a year later).

HUAC Investigations of Entertainment

Such grave international situations notwithstanding, HUAC had begun to emphasize mainly domestic security issues. Some seven years after Dies had raised the issue of communist “inspiration” in the Hollywood film industry, the committee called a number of actors, producers, and directors to testify concerning allegations of possible communist influences in their work. When some—who became known as the “Hollywood Ten”—invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about communist associations, a blacklist was initiated that eventually would include more than three hundred names. The list included not only actors (perhaps the most famous being Charles Chaplin, who chose to leave the United States to continue his career abroad), but also screenwriters and playwrights, the German immigrantBertolt Brecht among them, as well as directors and a handful of radio commentators. In the latter sphere, HUAC was encouraged to some degree by a campaign of denunciation by the well-known columnist and gossip figure Walter Winchell.

The strongly anticommunist testimony of Russian-born writer Ayn Rand as early as 1947 is often cited as representative of “cooperative” informants who came before the committee. Rand’s testimony was particularly critical of representations of Soviet life in the work of the Hollywood producer Louis B. Mayer (cofounder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), particularly the film Song of Russia, done in 1944. She felt that the film falsely depicted a generally contented population in a country of “slavery and horror.”

Anticommunist sentiments and fears spread beyond the blacklisted individuals who were unable to find employment. Film studio and filmmakers avoided actions that could put them under HUAC’s scrutiny, and many studios actually chose by the end of the 1940’s and the early 1950’s to produce clearly anticommunist films to prove their patriotic commitment. Films such as Guilty of Treason (1950), directed by Felix Feist, and Big Jim McLain (1952), starring John Wayne and John Arness as HUAC investigators, soon came to represent a patriotic backlash to “suspicious” productions under investigation by HUAC. Not only Hollywood personalities but also musicians, writers, and academic figures faced denunciation in front of HUAC from the mid-1940’s and into the height of what came to be known as the “Red Scare,” associated with the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was not a member of HUAC, which was a committee of the House of Representatives. Those under investigation included composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, writer Langston Hughes, playwright Lillian Hellman, author Dashiell Hammett, and chemist and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling.

The Alger Hiss Case

Although considerable attention would develop around HUAC’s questioning of well-known figures in the artistic and literary worlds, one early case in particular—involving accusations of communist involvement by the former State Department official Alger Hiss—created political shock waves that would attract historians’ attention long after the first HUAC hearings on this case were held in 1948. Hiss’s principal accuser before the committee was writer and editorWhittaker Chambers, a disillusioned former communist who had provided vital wartime information to the U.S. government concerning Soviet double agents. On August 17, 1948, Chambers charged that Hiss had collaborated with the communist underground, of which Chambers himself had been a part. This set off a series of claims and counterclaims that led to Hiss’s condemnation for perjury in 1950. Chambers’s own autobiographical account, published as Witness in 1952, went beyond the particulars of the Hiss case to focus on communist infiltration of a variety of key U.S. public and private institutions. By 1950, HUAC seemed eager to uncover evidence that the Hiss case was not an isolated one. Although nothing as spectacular as Whittaker Chambers’s confrontation with Hiss would attract public attention, the committee would hear a large number of witnesses whose testimony harmed the careers of government employees in a number of departments at all levels.

HUAC’s decline came gradually, despite condemnation of its methods by major figures including former president Harry S. Truman. As long as the Cold War posed a menace to American security, the committee’s eagerness to investigate leftist extremists found support among politicians and at least a portion of the general public. Hearings during the Vietnam War era had an aura different from those of the 1940’s and 1950’s, with the hearings sometimes marked by denunciation of the committee by those called before it. HUAC was abolished in 1975, with its functions tranferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

Impact

Controversy concerning HUAC’s activities occurred throughout its operation and decades beyond. Criticism from many fronts varied, ranging from regrets over its reflection of exaggerated fears of communist influence inside the United States to open condemnation of what some considered to be the committee’s encroachments on the basic freedoms of thought and expression guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

Bibliography

Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. New York: Random House, 1952. An autobiographical account by a former communist who testified against former State Department official Alger Hiss before HUAC.

Goodman, Walter. The Commitee. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. A popular and complete history of HUAC’s activities through most of the years of its operation.

Heale, M. J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare in State and Nation, 1935-1965. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. An ambitious and well-researched study of McCarthyism.

Jacoby, Susan. Alger Hiss and the Battle for History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. A scholarly study of the Alger Hiss case and HUAC.

Klingaman, William. Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era. New York: Facts On File, 1996. A complete compilation not only of issues and personalities connected with McCarthy’s “one man campaign” itself but also of the entire atmosphere that prevailed in the heyday of HUAC’s activities.

Swan, Patrick A., ed. Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003. Among the best recent historical surveys of the Hiss testimony before HUAC and its wider ramifications.