# Women Strike for Peace HUAC Hearings (December 11–13, 1962) On **December 11–13, 1962**, a subcommittee of the [[House Un-American Activities Committee]] held three days of hearings in the caucus room of the Old House Office Building on "**Communist Activities in the Peace Movement (Women Strike for Peace and Certain Other Groups)**." The stated purpose was to determine the extent of Communist Party infiltration into "the so-called 'peace movement' in a manner and to a degree affecting the national security." The committee had subpoenaed fourteen women from [[Women Strike for Peace]] (WSP) — thirteen from the New York area plus the movement's founder, [[Dagmar Wilson]], of Washington. It was supposed to be a routine exposure hearing. It became the moment HUAC stopped being feared and started being laughed at. Amy Swerdlow, the historian of WSP (and a member), called it "a rhetorical victory for the women of WSP and a deadly blow to the committee." The hearings opened six weeks after the [[Cuban Missile Crisis]] — the closest the world had come to nuclear war, and the strongest possible argument for what WSP had been demanding. ## Setting | | | |---|---| | **Dates** | December 11–13, 1962 | | **Place** | Caucus room, Old House Office Building, Washington | | **Presiding** | Rep. Clyde Doyle (D-Calif.), subcommittee chair | | **Committee counsel** | Alfred Nittle | | **Full committee chair** | Francis E. Walter (D-Pa.) | | **Witnesses subpoenaed** | 14 WSP women (13 from the New York area, plus Dagmar Wilson) | | **Audience** | Roughly 500 women, many with children | ## WSP's counter-strategy The committee's playbook assumed a frightened target: a group that would distance itself from any members with Communist pasts, or be tainted by refusing to. WSP refused the premise instead. - **They broke the news first.** WSP released word of the subpoenas to the press before HUAC could issue its own announcement, so the first story was theirs. - **They volunteered.** Rather than hide, many WSP women who had not been subpoenaed wrote in asking to testify — the message being that the group had nothing to conceal. - **They filled the room.** Some 500 women packed the caucus room, many with infants and toddlers. According to Mary McGrory's account, babies "noisily sucked their bottles during the whole proceedings." - **They treated every witness as a heroine.** The women rose silently when the first witness was called. They applauded each witness — including those who took the Fifth — until the chair banned clapping; then they took to running up to kiss the witnesses and hand each one a bouquet. By the third day, per Swerdlow, "the crowd was giving standing ovations to the heroines with impunity." ## The testimony **Blanche Posner**, a retired New York schoolteacher who ran WSP's office as a volunteer, was the first witness. She invoked the [[Fifth Amendment]] some forty-four times while lecturing the committee, JSTOR Daily's summary of Swerdlow notes, "as though they were recalcitrant boys" — and explained the movement in a line that made the committee's question look beside the point: mothers "saw not only the Wheaties and milk, but they also saw strontium 90 and iodine 131." **Dagmar Wilson** testified last, on December 13, in red wool; a mother holding an infant handed her a bouquet of purple and white flowers "exactly as if she were the principal speaker at a ladies' luncheon" (McGrory). Unlike many of the New York witnesses, who invoked the Fifth, she answered the committee's questions. Three answers carried the day: - Asked whether WSP would bar communists, she said: "I have absolutely no way of controlling, do not desire to control, who wishes to join in the demonstrations and the efforts that women strikers have made for peace. In fact, I would also like to go even further. I would like to say that unless everybody in the whole world joins us in this fight, then God help us." - Asked whether that openness extended to Nazis or fascists: "if we could only get them on our side." - Asked how a movement without officers had coordinated simultaneous demonstrations in dozens of cities: "This is something I find very difficult to explain to the masculine mind." The first answer is the one that matters. HUAC's whole method rested on **guilt by association** — the presumption that a group containing communists was a communist group, and that a leader who would not purge them was complicit. Wilson did not deny the association; she declared it irrelevant. There was nothing left for the committee to expose. ## The press The coverage turned on the committee. - **Herblock**, *[[Washington Post]]*, December 13: three aging committee members, one asking another, "I came in late. Which was it that was un-American — women or peace?" - *Chicago Daily News*: "It's Ladies Day at Capitol: Hoots, Howls and Charm; Congressmen Meet Match." - Russell Baker: "Peace March Gals Make Red Hunters Look Silly." - *Detroit Free Press*: "Headhunters Decapitated." - *Vancouver Sun*, December 14: "The dreaded House Un-American Activities Committee met its Waterloo this week. It tangled with 500 irate women." Swerdlow's reading of the coverage cuts both ways: the press recast a political inquisition as a battle of the sexes — "female common sense, openness, humor, hope, and naivete versus male rigidity, solemnity, suspicion." That framing destroyed HUAC's credibility, and it also trivialized the women as "gals" and "ladies." WSP accepted the trade on purpose. ## Aftermath - **HUAC came back once.** On December 7, 1964, a HUAC subcommittee called Dagmar Wilson, Donna Allen, and Russell Nixon into a closed executive session about their help securing a visa for a Japanese peace leader. They refused to testify in secret, offered to testify in public, and were convicted of contempt in 1965. The D.C. Circuit reversed 2–1 in *Wilson v. United States* (August 2, 1966): the Speaker, with Congress out of session, had certified the contempt citations automatically rather than exercising the discretion the statute required. - **The committee never recovered its menace.** The critic Eric Bentley, as quoted by Swerdlow: "In the 1960s a new generation came to life. As far as HUAC is concerned, it began with Women Strike for Peace." Later-1960s antiwar witnesses treated the hearings as theater, and the committee was renamed in 1969 and abolished in January 1975. - **The test ban came eight months later.** The Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed on August 5, 1963. See [[Nuclear Testing]] and [[Nuclear Arms Control]]. ## Why it worked — through-lines for the KB 1. **An exposure hearing needs the target's fear to do the work.** HUAC could not jail WSP; its power was the stigma. A target that treated the hearing as a public platform — and was cheered for it — took the stigma away. Compare the San Francisco City Hall protests of 1960, where the audience first became the story. 2. **Refusing the premise beats answering the charge.** WSP never argued about which members had Communist pasts. Wilson declared the question irrelevant to the goal. That is the answer to every "will you denounce…" demand the vault tracks in later eras. 3. **Ridicule is a weapon the powerful cannot easily return.** A committee that shouts at mothers holding babies loses. The tactic sits in the [[Nonviolent Resistance Tradition]] and [[198 Methods of Nonviolent Action]] lineage. 4. **Respectability is a shield with a price.** The same femininity that protected WSP also let the press dismiss it. See [[Women Strike for Peace]] on why the maternal frame is ideologically portable. ## Source note — the date Several secondary accounts, including the WSP history project's timeline and Wikipedia's WSP article, date the hearings to **November** 1962. The hearings ran **December 11–13, 1962**: that is the date given by Swerdlow's study of the hearing record, by the Arms Control Association, and by contemporary photo captions, and Herblock's cartoon ran in the *Post* on December 13. Use December. ## Related - [[House Un-American Activities Committee]] · [[Women Strike for Peace]] · [[Dagmar Wilson]] · [[Bella Abzug]] - [[McCarthyism]] · [[Red Scare]] · [[Anti-Communism]] · [[Political Repression]] · [[Chilling Effect]] - [[Cuban Missile Crisis]] · [[Nuclear Testing]] · [[Cold War]]