House Committee On Un-American Activities

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES. The prototype of the inquisitorial committees that infested the legislative branches of national and state governments during the McCarthy era, the House Committee on Un-American Activities—often referred to as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC—provided a foretaste of the McCarthyite inquisitorial techniques immortalized by the query “Are you now, or have you ever been a Communist?,” and of methods such as Redbaiting, guilt by association, and the political smear as well. After uncertain beginnings as the Fish Committee (1930–1932) and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (1934–1935), the renewed Committee on Un-American Activities hit its full stride under the flamboyant Texan Martin Dies in 1938. When the United States became a participant in World War II, as an ally of the Soviet Union against the Fascist Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan, Dies’ strident anti-communism and divisive attacks on the Roosevelt administration were out of step with the times.

The Cold War emerged before the end of World War II, reversing America’s political direction. Erstwhile enemies became allies, and former allies, the Soviet Union and the emerging countries of the Third World, became the enemy. The chief threat facing the United States was the “worldwide international Communist conspiracy,” the Internal Security Act of 1950 proclaimed as the finding of Congress. This and the Communist Control Act, an amendment to the Internal Security Act enacted in 1954, are the only significant pieces of legislation generated by HUAC in its thirty-year history.

With the changing political climate, HUAC became a permanent standing committee in 1946, mandated to investigate “subversive and un-American propaganda activities.” Unlike other committees of the House, HUAC was not primarily concerned with the legislative purpose mandated by the Constitution but with the ideological mission of chilling dissent and inculcating anticommunism.

Orchestrated by HUAC and its counterpart committees in the Senate and state legislatures—with the covert assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—the surge of anticommunism engulfed the nation. Since guilt was ideological, it mattered little to the inquisitorial committees whether a person was an actual member of the Communist (or other Left) Party, or a “fellow traveler” who participated in a union affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations or other progressive cause. Countless Americans found themselves enmeshed in the dragnets of the subversive-hunters.

HUAC was armed with the power to compel testimony anywhere in the United States under subpoena, and to enforce its rules with citations for contempt of Congress. In the classic confrontational hearings, witnesses summoned before it were of two classes, “friendly” and “unfriendly.”

The “friendlies” were the informers who named names in well-rehearsed testimony. Most often these were paid FBI infiltrators; others were persons supportive of HUAC’s aims and purposes who volunteered their cooperation, as did former Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan (FBI code number T-10). Some were frightened individuals who gave reluctant testimony to escape being fired, blacklisted, or, in some cases, deported with their families. The “unfriendly” witnesses were pilloried in proceedings lacking every element of due process and fairness. To avoid being compelled to be a witness against themselves and others, they most often “took the Fifth Amendment,” which provided the only sure means of avoiding a year in prison for contempt to those who refused to answer the committee’s questions.

Until the mid-sixties, the news media usually played a supportive role, headlining HUAC charges and giving full and uncritical coverage to informer witnesses, while downplaying or ignoring the testimony of “unfriendly” witnesses.

The Los Angeles-Hollywood area was the movie capital of the world. During the Depression and war years, many progressive writers, actors, directors, and technicians won fame and fortune. In 1947 HUAC undertook to cleanse the industry of such “subversive” influences, to redirect the movie industry as a propaganda instrument for the Cold War.

A group of writers and directors (who would come to be known as the “Hollywood Ten”) resisted, with the support of many celebrities, citing their First Amendment rights as grounds to refuse to answer the committee’s questions. When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their claim, and they were sentenced to prison, the “Hollywood blacklist” emerged to punish all who failed to answer the committee’s questions. Resistance crumbled. HUAC went on to scour the nation, exposing “subversive” activities in unions, cultural groups, schools, orchestras, plays, organizations of the foreign born, and civil rights groups in hearing held throughout the nation.

In the late 1950s, the Los Angeles area again became the center of organized resistance to the committee, giving birth to the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. Community opposition was organized wherever HUAC hearings were held, and political pressures were transmitted to the House of Representatives. By 1969, HUAC was forced into a tactical retreat, adopted the sanitized name of “House Committee on Internal Security,” and stopped issuing subpoenas to hostile witnesses. In 1975, as part of a structural reorganization of the House of Representatives, the committee was eliminated, and its files, including index cards on 750,000 “subversive” Americans, were consigned, under seal, to the National Archives.

When the Freedom of Information Act was amended in 1976 to permit a limited public access to FBI records, it revealed the full scope of the illicit partnership between HUAC and the FBI, which began in 1947 in conjunction with the HUAC’s purge of the movie industry. Without this vast storehouse of political intelligence dating back to the early 1930s, HUAC would have been largely impotent. Thereafter, HUAC became an adjunct to the operations of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover needed HUAC as an instrument in his illegal “neutralization” programs, which were intended to destroy individuals and organizations that had been targeted by Hoover but against whom evidence was lacking for lawful prosecution. The notorious Counterintelligence Program brought to public attention in the 1970s by hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Senator Frank Church was only one of many neutralization programs. By placing FBI informer testimony in the public record, HUAC acted as the laundry transforming confidential data into “public source information,” which the FBI could more safely leak to its favored news media contacts. By giving HUAC its lists of individuals to subpoena as its “unfriendly witnesses,” the FBI could effectively damage those it sought to neutralize. Information covertly passed along to the HUAC staff director included informer-derived and wiretap information on the contemplated moves of congressional opponents of HUAC.

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Collection: Pamphlets collected by HUAC, many of which the committee deemed "un-American". (4,000 pamphlets). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress

Navasky, Victor. Naming Names, rev. ed. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.

O’Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

U.S. Congress. Senate. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports of Intelligence Activities and Rights of Americans. Book III. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976.