Committee on Un-American Activities

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The Committee for Un-American Activities , in the Original House Committee on Un-American Activities , abbreviated HCUA or HUAC for the abbreviation House Un-American Activities Committee , often also translated as Committee for Un-American Activities , was a body at the House of Representatives of the United States of America .

It was originally intended to investigate the threat of infiltration into American society by supporters of German National Socialism , later especially during the "Second Red Fear" communists or their possible sympathizers , and then to submit suitable draft laws to counter the threat.

McCormack-Dickstein Committee 1934

The Chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee in the US Congress , Samuel Dickstein , who had conducted personal investigations into Nazi actions and fascist groups in the US, presented his results to the 73rd Congress on January 3, 1934. With the so-called “Dickstein Resolution” (HR # 198) of March 1934, a “Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities” was set up under John W. McCormack . As a Jew, Dickstein declined to personally chair the committee. The correct mandate was "To obtain information on how foreign subversive propaganda got into the US and who was spreading it."

The commission spent 1934 holding public and private hearings in six cities, interviewing hundreds of witnesses, and producing 4,300 pages of material. Dickstein advocated the eradication of all traces of Nazism in the United States and interviewed many personally. His tendency towards drama and sensation, combined with occasionally exaggerated accusations, secured him headlines. He was particularly interested in the American-German Confederation . The committee uncovered the so-called business plot for the overthrow of Roosevelt . The Foreign Agents Registration Act passed in 1938 resulted from the results of the investigation .

Dies Committee 1938

In 1937, Dickstein called on a new committee in Congress, which then took up its work the following year under the chairmanship of Martin Dies Jr. ( Dies Committee ) and was later named "Committee for Un-American Activities" (HUAC). The committee had a total of seven members. Except for Martin these were:

In addition to German-Americans suspected of Nazism , it now dealt with the Ku Klux Klan , but stopped this investigation “due to lack of data” (chief advisor Ernest Adamson) and went to the Communist Party of the USA , which was assumed to be the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Theater Project had infiltrated.

For security reasons, the camps of the 120,000 US Japanese interned during the war and the American Youth Congress, an organization affiliated with the Comintern , were also dealt with .

Standing Committee after 1945

Because of the increasing criticism of the work of the Dies Committee, its dissolution seemed a done deal at the end of World War II .

"Everyone assumed that the special, temporary Dies committee and the 78th Congress would expire together."

"Everyone expected that the temporary dies special committee would come to an end together with the 78th Congress."

- Time January 15, 1945: "By the Flank"

But on January 3, 1945, the 79th Congress had just met for its opening session, John E. Rankin (Democratic Party / Mississippi) succeeded by a surprise coup not only in preventing the dissolution of the Dies Committee, but even preventing it to convert into a standing committee.

Just a few minutes after he had announced his bill, through which the until then only temporary dies committee was to be converted into a standing committee, he had it put to the vote ( shotgun vote ). 137 Republican MPs and 70 Democratic MPs approved his bill, 150 Democrats, 34 Republicans and 2 nonpartisans voted against. Rankin's bill was passed with 207 votes to 186. It was decided that six MPs from the Democratic Party and three from the Republican Party should form the now standing committee.

Bearing in mind the committee's previous activities, Time already had an inkling of what the future would bring:

"In irresponsible hands it could, as it often had under Martin Dies, become a threat to civil liberties, by using the authority and prestige of Congress for unscrupulous or bigoted ends."

"In irresponsible hands, as [so] often under [chaired by] Martin Dies , the committee could become a threat to civil liberties by using the authority and prestige of Congress for unscrupulous and bigoted purposes."

- Time January 15, 1945: By the Flank

At first the investigations were of little use. However, the committee and the media portrayed it as a great success when it became known that some officials with Communist sympathies or connections were working for the American government. The background to this was that in the 1930s many intellectuals and some officials in the New Deal government sympathized with radical Marxism , some had even reached senior positions in the 1940s. Under the leadership of Martin Dies and Richard Nixon , the committee arranged for the conviction of Alger Hiss . However, many, including anti-communists , were not particularly happy with the label “un-American activities”. On October 14, 1954, President Eisenhower issued a decree according to which failure to testify before the committee would lead to discharge from civil service.

In 1947, the German emigrants Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were also summoned. Brecht then left the USA. At the end of the 1940s, the committee pounced on supposedly communist propaganda from Hollywood . This resulted in an extensive blacklist of leftist and communist filmmakers, including the famous Hollywood Ten . Because of their refusal to answer questions about party membership to the committee as a witness, they were convicted of disregard and detained. This discredited them and barely had the opportunity to work as a writer or director in their profession. Pro-Soviet Hollywood films were hard to find; one of the rare examples is Mission to Moscow , which was actually released in theaters in 1943 with the assistance of Franklin D. Roosevelt .

For many observers, the work of the HUAC committee finally assumed the character of a “witch hunt” with the hearings in Hollywood. Although he was never a member of the HUAC himself, the name of the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy was named McCarthy era in the following period . The ambitious senator's allegations against “pro-communist” government employees, initially massively supported by Edgar Hoover and the FBI , seemed plausible against the background of Stalin's successes in Europe and Mao in China and the success of Russian spies, which were gradually uncovered through self-reports by former communist spies Nuclear espionage. McCarthy was ousted in 1955; 1960 began the rehabilitation of banned filmmakers, starting with the well-known screenwriter Dalton Trumbo .

In the 1960s, the HUAC committee investigated against the New Left and Stalinist student parties such as the Progressive Labor Party. But time had changed. Affected people like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had far less to lose than civil servants, employees or scriptwriters. They turned the show survey into a kind of Dadaist happening and became stars of the counterculture who ridiculed their old established opponents.

Nevertheless, the committee was responsible for hundreds of layoffs, a myriad of public defamations and a large number of factual professional bans in the cultural field . The still disturbed relationship between large parts of American cultural workers and the Republican Party of the USA is also attributed to the times of this committee. The excesses of his activities prompted President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) to criticize the following principles:

"I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!"

"I have said repeatedly that I think the House Un-American Activities Committee was the most un-American affair in America!"

In 1969, the HUAC was renamed the Committee on Internal Security . It was disbanded in 1975.

Chairperson

Surname Political party State Term of office Congresses Remarks
Martin Dies Democrats Texas 1938-1944 k. A.
Edward J. Hart Democrats New Jersey 1945 79. resigned in July 1945
John Stephens Wood Democrats Georgia 1945-1947 79. 1. Term of office
J. Parnell Thomas republican New Jersey 1947-1949 80.
John Stephens Wood Democrats Georgia 1949-1953 81–82. 2. Term of office
Harold Himmel Velde republican Illinois 1953-1955 83.
Francis E. Walter Democrats Pennsylvania 1955-1963 84-88.
Edwin E. Willis Democrats Louisiana 1963-1969 88-90
Richard Howard Ichord Democrats Missouri 1969-1975 91-93.

Significant members

Movie

Films in which the HUAC is a central element of the plot include:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Todd Bennett: Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II ( Memento of April 30, 2002 in the Internet Archive ). The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. September 2, 2001.
  2. ^ Third Radner Lecture, Columbia University, New York City (April 29, 1959), published in Truman Speaks: Lectures And Discussions Held At Columbia University On April 27, 28, And 29, 1959 (1960), p. 111.