House Panel Brought on Era of Red Witchhunts 50 Years Ago

Long before Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on communists in the State Department, long before Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as spies and long before Winston Churchill warned that an Iron Curtain had split East from West, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was rooting out communism in America.

In the process, it also smeared the reputations of many innocent people, turned friend on friend and attempted to twist the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination into an admission of communist affiliation.

The committee will take its place in American history as “a moment of shame and hallucination,” says historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Persecution of Jews Feared

Born 50 years ago last May, HUAC, as the headline-writers called it, was the brainchild of a Jewish congressman from New York who feared that Adolf Hitler’s persecution of German Jews would, in groups like the American Bund, make its way to the New World.

Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-N.Y.) proposed that the group be formed to hunt Nazis, not communists. But from the beginning, congressmen who sat on the committee sought out fellow travelers, “Comsymps” and “card-carrying Communists.” Ironically, the anti-Semitism that Dickstein so feared permeated even the halls of Congress; the man who envisioned the committee was never seated on it.

The committee, originally subject to annual approval, became a fixture in January, 1945, and lived on for another 30 years. It went after labor unions, Hollywood personalities and opponents of the Vietnam War. In its most celebrated case, it brought down Alger Hiss, an on-the-rise New Dealer who had once been a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and raised the fortunes of a young Republican congressman from California, Richard M. Nixon.

In 1975, Congress abolished HUAC. The panel’s name had been changed--to the House Internal Security Committee--but its time had passed.

In the beginning, though, the nation’s mood was different. There were fascists and communists in the country, which was slowly trying to pick itself up from the Depression.

Dies Made Promise

At HUAC’s first hearing in August, 1938, Chairman Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, made a promise that committee critics never forgot.

“We shall be fair and impartial at all times and treat every witness with fairness and courtesy,” Dies promised. “This committee will not permit any character assassination or any smearing of innocent people. . . . It is easy to smear someone’s name or reputation by unsupported charges or an unjustified attack, but it is difficult to repair the damage that has been done.”

Yet, no sooner did the committee begin its work than it began to do exactly what Dies promised it wouldn’t.

“In the days that followed, observers began to wonder whether the lady of breeding who had made such a dignified entrance into town was in fact setting up a bawdy house,” Walter Goodman wrote in his history of HUAC, “The Committee.”

HUAC immediately launched an attack on the Federal Theater and Writers Project, a New Deal program that seemed frivolous, even to some supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when so many Americans were unemployed and hungry.

The committee also had the facts on its side; there were communists in the Federal Theater. In June, 1939, Congress abolished the project.

Took Back Seat to War

The committee turned its attention over the next few years to labor unions and Hollywood, but for the most part, took a back seat to World War II once America had entered the conflict.

It picked up with renewed vigor, though, after the war as fear of communism became more widespread in the United States.

The Soviet Union, no longer a U.S. ally, quickly expanded its influence. Country after country in Eastern Europe fell under the domination of Soviet-backed Communist parties.

Churchill warned in 1946, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent allowing ‘police government’ to rule Eastern Europe.” The image became a metaphor for the time, and Americans, caught by surprise by this new Cold War, began to see the world in terms of “them versus us,” “communist versus American.”

And what could be more “un-American” than a former Communist in the United States, who served as a symbolic link with Soviet aggression abroad?

None stood out more than Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

Symbolized Divisions

Their drama, played out in the HUAC hearing room and on Chambers’ farm in rural Westminster, Md., came to symbolize the divisions within the country.

Hiss, then and even now in his new book “Recollections of a Life,” maintained that he was innocent and victimized by enemies of the New Deal. Chambers presented himself as the last hope of the West.

Their story began in July, 1948, when Chambers, a rumply senior editor at Time magazine, testified to HUAC that Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s.

Some of the other alleged Communists named by Chambers had admitted their past affiliation, but not the tall and lean Hiss, who had worked at the State Department and then as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss immediately denied Chambers’ charges and asked the committee for a chance to deny them under oath.

Hiss made such an impressive appearance that Nixon was the only committee member to question his denial. Nixon questioned Hiss secretly in New York and paid several visits to Chambers’ farm.

Nixon Pressed Hiss

And at a nine-hour hearing on Aug. 25, 1948, the most dramatic and crowded event in the committee’s history, Nixon and others pressed Hiss hard for details of his past. Hiss was careful, prefacing more than 200 answers with “to the best of my recollection.”

Still, there was nothing to show that Hiss had been involved in any spying. Then, in November, 1948, Chambers delivered to the Justice Department 65 typed pages of copies or summaries of State Department documents and three memos in Hiss’ handwriting. He stashed two strips of developed microfilm and three cylinders of undeveloped microfilm in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm.

A few days later, with a blast of publicity, HUAC investigators found the pumpkin and the microfilm, and on Dec. 15, Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury. He was convicted in 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison.

The Hiss case helped launch Nixon’s career. Not long afterward, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower picked the young Republican to be his vice presidential running mate in the general’s successful campaign for the presidency.

The case also played an unintended role in furthering the fortunes of Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, making it easier for him to exaggerate the dimensions of the internal communist menace.

Sneaking Propaganda

HUAC turned its attention in the early 1950s to Hollywood. Its stated reason was the suspicion that the communists were sneaking propaganda into the movies. Joseph Rauh Jr., who represented the writers Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman in their appearances before the committee, said in a recent interview that he believes the committee’s real motivation was publicity.

“How would you get publicity?” Rauh asked. “You’d get it by getting famous people in front of you. When it was rumored that Arthur Miller was going to marry Marilyn Monroe, he was subpoenaed by the committee. He wasn’t subpoenaed after he wrote one of the best plays of this century, ‘Death of a Salesman.’ ”

President Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, told the committee in 1951, “I abhor their (communists’) philosophy, but I detest their tactics, which are those of a fifth column and are dishonest.” The President’s anti-communist rhetoric continued even last spring as he prepared for his trip to Moscow and the fourth summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Among others testifying during those years were director Elia Kazan, writer and performer Abe Burrows, playwright Clifford Odets and actor Zero Mostel. Many of the Hollywood witnesses exercised their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.

For the committee, taking the Fifth was considered an acknowledgement that one was a communist. If you had nothing to hide, panel members reasoned, why take the Fifth.

Those who did refuse to answer the committee’s questions were in danger of being cited for contempt of Congress.

Kazan Named Others

Kazan opted to tell all he knew. He not only confessed that he had been a member of the Communist Party briefly, in 1934-35, but named others he knew had belonged as well. Odets named names too.

Kazan, promoting his new book, “Elia Kazan: A Life,” said in a recent interview on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, that he debated whether he should identify others who had belonged to the Communist Party.

“I went one way and swung the other and it was a very hard decision to make but I thought . . . the Congress has an absolute right to investigate anything like that, anything like the Communist Party in this country,” he said.

Kazan had directed two of Miller’s plays, “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman.” After he testified, he never directed another work by his longtime friend.

Hellman in 1952 tried another tack.

Rauh recalled that Hellman “said she couldn’t name names and she couldn’t go to jail because she was not the kind of person who could survive in jail.

‘Willing to Talk’

“She said she was perfectly willing to talk about herself. But the problem was that if she did talk about herself, she waived the privilege against self-incrimination.”

Rauh said they worked out an arrangement whereby Hellman would write a letter to the committee explaining that she would waive the Fifth Amendment if the committee would not ask her about other people.

“To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” she wrote.

The committee did not like Hellman’s stance, but never pursued her further.

The Hollywood investigations marked the end of HUAC’s heyday. The events that followed--the 1953 death of Josef Stalin, who had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for 24 years; the Senate’s 1954 censure of McCarthy, and the end of the Korean War in 1955--set in motion the committee’s demise.

Anti-War Groups

HUAC’s last stand, in a sense, came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it held public hearings on anti-war groups and such terrorists as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Richard H. Ichord, then a Democratic congressman from Missouri, was chairman of the committee. He recalled that by the late 1960s, HUAC “didn’t have the support it commanded after World War II. The Russian bear had become a bugbear.”

In 1975, less than six months after Nixon was forced out of the presidency by Watergate, the House reorganized the structure of various committees.

Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) introduced the resolution in the House Democratic Caucus to abolish the committee. “I’m happy to say that my motion passed,” he said. “I never saw such a fast hammer in my life.”

And on Jan. 14, the full House gave its assent. In a final irony, the House voted to transfer jurisdiction to the civil and constitutional rights subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee--the subcommittee the liberal Edwards headed.

‘Kangaroo Court’

“We hold the hearings in the right way--on civil rights and civil liberties,” Edwards said. “HUAC was a kangaroo court. It acted as an investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury of men and women whose political, social and economic views the committee thought were contemptible.”

Ichord said he is disappointed that the Judiciary Committee has not continued to root out communists.