# House Un-American Activities Committee The **House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)** — formally the House Committee on Un-American Activities — was the congressional engine of the American [[Red Scare]]. Created on **May 26, 1938** as a special investigating committee under Rep. Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.), made a permanent standing committee on **January 3, 1945**, renamed the **House Committee on Internal Security** in February 1969, and abolished on **January 14, 1975**, when its jurisdiction, files, and staff passed to the [[House Judiciary Committee]]. Over roughly 37 years it investigated Hollywood, the State Department, universities, labor unions, the folk revival, the peace movement, the civil rights and antiwar movements, and — once, in 1965–66 — the Ku Klux Klan. For the KB, HUAC matters as the **institution that preceded and outlasted [[Joseph McCarthy]]**. McCarthy was a senator and never sat on it; he was the namesake of [[McCarthyism]], not its architect. HUAC was already seven years old when it became permanent, it produced the case that made [[Richard Nixon]] a national figure, and it kept operating for two decades after the Senate censured McCarthy in 1954. The vault's framing of the era — the machinery mattered more than the man — runs through this page. ## Lineage: four committees before the permanent one HUAC was the fourth in a line of House and Senate bodies built to investigate "subversion": | Years | Body | Target | |---|---|---| | 1918–1919 | Overman Committee (Senate Judiciary subcommittee) | German and "Bolshevik" elements | | 1930 | Fish Committee (House, Rep. Hamilton Fish III) | Communist activity | | 1934–1937 | [[McCormack-Dickstein Committee]] | Nazi and foreign propaganda — including the [[Business Plot]] | | 1938–1944 | Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the **Dies Committee**) | Communists, New Deal agencies, labor | The inheritance is worth noting: the McCormack-Dickstein Committee's main work was on the *fascist* right. Under Dies, the same mandate — "un-American activities" — was turned almost entirely against the left. The phrase never had a statutory definition; it meant whatever the chair said it meant. ## Becoming permanent (January 3, 1945) HUAC had been relatively quiet during World War II, and it was widely expected to lapse with the new Congress. Instead, on the opening day of the 79th Congress, Rep. **John E. Rankin** (D-Miss.) — an open white supremacist — offered an amendment to the House rules that made it a standing committee, outmaneuvering the House leadership. Rankin later claimed the amendment as his own achievement. The Boston Public Library's HUAC guide records his 1946 remark, when asked whether the committee would investigate the Klan: "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." The standing mandate authorized HUAC to investigate "the extent, character, and objects of un-American activities in the United States" and the "diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American propaganda." That breadth is the point: a standing committee with a subpoena power and an undefined target never runs out of work. ## The method: exposure, not legislation HUAC produced very little legislation. Its product was the **public hearing itself**. A witness summoned before it faced a structured trap: - **Answer** questions about one's own past political associations — and then be pressed to name others, with a contempt citation as the price of refusing. - **Invoke the [[Fifth Amendment]]** — legally protected, but publicly read as a confession (the "Fifth Amendment Communist"), and in practice enough to get a witness fired or blacklisted. - **Invoke the First Amendment** and refuse on principle — the route the Hollywood Ten took in 1947, which led to contempt of Congress convictions and prison. The sanction was delivered not by a court but by employers, studios, universities, and neighbors reading the newspaper. That is the mechanism the vault's [[Chilling Effect]] and [[Political Repression]] pages describe: punishment without a verdict, administered by the private sector on the basis of a congressional accusation. The [[Red Scare]] page's summary holds — HUAC's hearings were "designed less to legislate than to expose and publicly shame." ## Major hearings | Year | Hearing | What it produced | |---|---|---| | 1938–1944 | Dies Committee investigations | Attacks on New Deal agencies (the Federal Theatre Project among them) as communist-infiltrated | | 1947 | Hollywood hearings | The **Hollywood Ten** — writers and directors jailed for contempt; the industry blacklist. [[Ayn Rand]] testified as a "friendly witness" | | 1948 | Hiss–Chambers | On August 3, [[Whittaker Chambers]] named Alger Hiss; HUAC member [[Richard Nixon]] pressed the case → [[Alger Hiss Trial]] | | 1949 | Physicist [[David Bohm]] | Took the Fifth, was charged with contempt, later acquitted — and left the country | | 1952 | Clifford Odets and others | "Naming names" — see [[Waiting for Lefty]] | | 1955 | Pete Seeger | Refused on First Amendment grounds; cited for contempt — see [[Protest Songs in America]] | | 1956 | Arthur Miller | Refused to name names; convicted of contempt (later overturned) — see [[The Crucible]] | | 1960 | San Francisco City Hall (May 12–14) | Students protesting the hearings were fire-hosed down the rotunda steps on May 13 ("Black Friday"); HUAC answered with the film *Operation Abolition*, casting the protest as communist-led | | 1962 | **[[Women Strike for Peace HUAC Hearings]]** (Dec 11–13) | The hearing that turned the committee into a punchline — see below | | 1964 | Executive session (Dec 7) | [[Dagmar Wilson]], Donna Allen, and Russell Nixon refused to testify in closed session; convicted of contempt in 1965; reversed by the D.C. Circuit in *Wilson v. United States* (August 2, 1966) | | 1965–1966 | Ku Klux Klan investigation | Under chair Edwin Willis — exposed Klan finances and membership; see [[Third Ku Klux Klan]] | | late 1960s | Antiwar hearings | Yippie witnesses turned the proceedings into street theater — see [[Anti-War Movement]] | ## Chairmen | Chair | Years | Note | |---|---|---| | Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.) | 1938–1944 | Special committee; namesake of the "Dies Committee" | | Edward J. Hart (D-N.J.) | 1945–1946 | First chair of the standing committee | | J. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.) | 1947–1948 | Hollywood hearings; later himself imprisoned for payroll fraud | | John S. Wood (D-Ga.) | 1949–1953 | | | Harold H. Velde (R-Ill.) | 1953–1955 | | | Francis E. Walter (D-Pa.) | 1955–1963 | Chair during the 1960 San Francisco and 1962 WSP hearings | | Edwin E. Willis (D-La.) | 1963–1969 | Klan investigation | | Richard H. Ichord (D-Mo.) | 1969–1975 | Chair as the House Committee on Internal Security | ## Decline: the committee that could not survive being laughed at HUAC's method depended on the witness's fear. The 1960s supplied witnesses who were not afraid — and audiences who were not either. 1. **San Francisco, 1960** — the first time the audience, not the witness, became the story. HUAC's own film about it was widely mocked. 2. **[[Women Strike for Peace]], December 1962** — the decisive blow. The committee subpoenaed fourteen women; many more volunteered to testify; the hearing room filled with mothers, babies, and bouquets. [[Dagmar Wilson]]'s answer to whether she would bar communists — "unless everybody in the whole world joins us in this fight, then God help us" — reversed the entire premise of guilt by association. Herblock's *[[Washington Post]]* cartoon of December 13 had one committee member ask another: "I came in late. Which was it that was un-American — women or peace?" The historian Eric Bentley later wrote: "In the 1960s a new generation came to life. As far as HUAC is concerned, it began with Women Strike for Peace." 3. **The late-1960s antiwar hearings** — witnesses arrived in costume. By then the hearing was no longer a trap; it was a stage. The 1969 renaming was a rebrand, not a reform. Abolition came at the opening of the 94th Congress in January 1975 — the post-Watergate Congress, in the same month the Senate voted to create the [[Church Committee]] to investigate [[COINTELPRO]] and the intelligence agencies. The two events bracket the era: the House ended the committee that had exposed "subversives" just as the Senate began exposing what the government had done to them. ## Through-lines for the KB - **The machinery outlives the demagogue.** McCarthy fell in 1954; HUAC ran until 1975. The vault's [[McCarthyism]] and [[Joseph McCarthy]] pages make this argument; HUAC is the evidence. - **Exposure as punishment.** A congressional hearing needs no conviction to end a career. The sanction is outsourced to employers and the press — the template for every later "name and shame" investigation. - **The undefined mandate.** "Un-American" was never defined, which is why a committee born investigating Nazis spent its life investigating the left — and could turn to the Klan when the political weather changed. Compare [[Domestic Terrorism Framing]] and [[Fellow Traveler]]. - **Ridicule beats fear.** HUAC survived principled refusal (the Hollywood Ten went to prison) but not laughter. The [[Women Strike for Peace HUAC Hearings]] are the clearest case in the vault of a repressive institution defeated by a target that refused to perform fear — a tactic catalogued in [[198 Methods of Nonviolent Action]] and the [[Nonviolent Resistance Tradition]]. - **Records.** HUAC's files are held by the National Archives' Center for Legislative Archives, transferred with the committee's jurisdiction in 1975. ## Related - [[McCarthyism]] · [[Red Scare]] · [[Anti-Communism]] · [[Political Repression]] · [[Chilling Effect]] - [[McCormack-Dickstein Committee]] — predecessor - [[Alger Hiss Trial]] · [[Whittaker Chambers]] · [[Richard Nixon]] - [[Women Strike for Peace]] · [[Women Strike for Peace HUAC Hearings]] · [[Dagmar Wilson]] - [[Church Committee]] · [[COINTELPRO]] · [[FBI]] · [[J. Edgar Hoover]] - [[Cold War]] · [[United States House of Representatives]] · [[House Judiciary Committee]]