House Un-American Activities Committee

            During the height of Cold War fears regarding the subversive activities of communists in the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conducted highly publicized hearings to expose the communist ties of individuals in public employment, education, labor unions, and other influential fields. For those brought before the Committee, the hearings sometimes led to ostracism, the loss of employment, and even criminal prosecution. The activities of HUAC raised serious civil liberties issues because they damaged the lives and careers of individuals based on their political associations and beliefs.

By House resolution in 1938, Congress established the Special Committee on Un-American Activities under the leadership of Texas representative Martin Dies, Jr. (The Committee’s name was later changed to produce a more easily pronounced acronym.) After repeatedly renewing HUAC, the House finally converted it to a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Although HUAC’s creation was motivated largely by concerns over subversive activities in support of the Nazis, the focus shifted to anticommunism in the wake of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War. Based on fear that numerous Americans were working on behalf of international communist forces to overthrow the U.S. government, the Committee’s hearings sought to expose individuals with ties to the Communist party.

            HUAC’s best-known activities took place during a time when anticommunism was a dominant concern in American politics. With the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union gave way to tension and hostility between what had become the world’s only two superpowers. Communists had been feared even before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, but events in the years following World War II raised the stakes dramatically. Stalin’s Soviet Union imposed police states throughout Eastern Europe, including Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and supported communist forces in the Greek Civil War. When the USSR demonstrated its nuclear capacity in 1949, far earlier than U.S. intelligence had anticipated, the revelation heightened concerns over Soviet military designs, and the impression that American spies had betrayed U.S. nuclear secrets. Chinese intervention in the Korean War on the side of the North in 1950 furthered the sense that a far-reaching international communist coalition sought to overrun democratic societies around the world. There was also a belief among many Americans that communists within the United States posed a severe threat to national security. This belief was reinforced by the high-profile conviction of Alger Hiss for perjuring himself before HUAC while answering questions about his alleged espionage, and the convictions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

            In this political context, a number of policies were developed, both at the state and federal levels, to combat the threat of domestic communism, including the requirement of loyalty oaths for positions in public employment and some professions, which required individuals to swear that they had never been members of a communist organization. In addition, the Smith Act of 1940 was employed to prosecute leaders of the Communist party for advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and Congress passed new anticommunist legislation, including the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required communist organizations to register the names of members and contributors with the Subversive Activities Control Board.

Enlisting legislative committees to conduct investigative hearings was another element of the governmental strategy to root out domestic communism, and HUAC was not the only committee active in this regard. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, for example, used his chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations, to make accusations of communist influence in the executive branch and the U.S. Army. Relying on its subpoena power, HUAC compelled suspected communists to appear, and interrogated them about their ties to communist organizations, and about the political activities of their friends and acquaintances. Witnesses before the Committee were faced with several alternatives, each raising moral and legal dilemmas. An admission of membership, past or present, in communist organizations, could lead to ostracism and “blacklisting,” which effectively blocked employment in certain professions. The mechanism the Committee allowed witnesses for demonstrating remorse was to provide the names of others involved in communist activities, which some viewed as an unconscionable act of collaboration. Witnesses who refused to testify on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination avoided legal censure, but, since this was widely perceived as a tacit admission of guilt, subjected themselves to the label of “Fifth Amendment communist,” and many of the same reprisals visited upon those who openly confessed communist activity. On the other hand, witnesses who claimed First Amendment protection, or who refused entirely to cooperate, could be criminally charged with contempt of Congress. Indeed, this was the fate of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who refused on First Amendment grounds to cooperate with HUAC’s investigation of the communist ties of Hollywood actors, writers, and directors.

HUAC’s activities were challenged as violations of civil liberties on a number of grounds. While the Committee’s mandate was to consider legislation addressing the communist menace, its hearings took on aspects of court proceedings, yet without affording all of the rights guaranteed to the accused in criminal trials. The Committee, for example, could make vague accusations, based on past or former political associations, without allowing witnesses the opportunity to offer evidence on their own behalf, or to cross-examine the witnesses against them.

In its earliest reviews of HUAC’s activities and other Cold War era policies targeting individuals for communist associations, the Supreme Court generally upheld the government’s actions. In Dennis v. U.S. (1951), for example, the Court left undisturbed the Smith Act convictions of eleven Communist party leaders, and in Barsky v. Board of Regents (1954), upheld New York’s termination of a college professor who had refused to cooperate with HUAC.  In a series of cases in 1956-57, culminating in four decisions issued on June 17, 1957 (referred to by opponents as “Red Monday”), however, the Court sided with parties challenging anticommunist policies. Thus, for the first time, in Watkins v. United States, the Court questioned the scope of HUAC’s investigative power, overturning the contempt conviction of a recalcitrant HUAC witness. The Court’s interference was heavily criticized, and the justices retreated for some time, upholding the prison sentence of a Smith Act defendant as late as 1961. After 1962, however, the Court indicated in a series of cases that it would no longer tolerate prosecutions based on individuals’ refusal to testify to legislative committees about communist associations. And, in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Court unanimously adopted an understanding of the First Amendment which clearly protected the advocacy of political ideas, sharply distinguishing mere advocacy from the incitement of immanent lawless activity.

Although the House, after changing HUAC’s name to the Committee on Internal Security in 1969, abolished it in 1975, the Committee’s activities remain controversial today, as highlighted by the dispute over Elia Kazan’s lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Academy Awards. Unlike many of his colleagues during HUAC’s heyday, Kazan chose to cooperate with the Committee, providing the names of other Hollywood figures who had been members of the Communist party. Hundreds staged demonstrations of Kazan’s award, protesting the honoring of a man who had turned on his friends rather than stand up for artistic freedom. The activities of HUAC are sometimes cited as an example of the danger posed to civil liberties by overly aggressive governmental reactions to security threats. In the midst of the U.S. response to 9-11, the anticommunist policies of the Cold War era stand as a historical reminder of the challenges involved in seeking to protect national security while also continuing to protect cherished individual freedoms. 

FURTHER READING

            Beck, Carl. Contempt of Congress: A Study of the Prosecutions Initiated by the Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945-47. New Orleans: Phauser Press. 1959.

            Buckley, William F., Jr. The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm Review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Chicago: Henry Regnary Co. 1962.

Carr, Robert K. The House Committee on Un-American Activities 1945-1950. New York: Octagon Books. 1979.

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

                                                                        Stephen A. Simon

                                                                        Ph.D. Student, University of Maryland