House Un-American Activities Committee
- Date:
- 1938 - 1975
- Related People:
- Whittaker Chambers
- Arthur Miller
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, established in 1938 under Martin Dies as chairman, that conducted investigations through the 1940s and ’50s into alleged communist activities. Those investigated during the Red Scare of 1947–54 included many artists and entertainers, including the Hollywood Ten, Elia Kazan, Pete Seeger, Bertolt Brecht, and Arthur Miller. Richard Nixon was an active member in the late 1940s, and the committee’s most celebrated case was perhaps that of Alger Hiss.
In April 1948 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) sent to the floor for a vote a bill coauthored by Nixon and Rep. Karl Mundt that sought to proscribe many activities of the Communist Party though not to outlaw it altogether; the bill was passed by the House but failed in the Senate. Claiming that the need for legislation “to control Communist activities” was unquestionable, the bill asserted in part:
Ten years of investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities and by its predecessors have established: (1) that the Communist movement in the United States is foreign-controlled; (2) that its ultimate objective with respect to the United States is to overthrow our free American institutions in favor of a Communist totalitarian dictatorship to be controlled from abroad; (3) that its activities are carried on by secret and conspiratorial methods; and (4) that its activities, both because of the alarming march of Communist forces abroad and because of the scope and nature of Communist activities here in the United States, constitute an immediate and powerful threat to the security of the United States and to the American way of life.
HUAC’s actions resulted in several contempt-of-Congress convictions and the blacklisting of many who refused to answer its questions. Highly controversial for its tactics, HUAC was criticized for violating First Amendment rights. Its influence waned by the 1960s; in 1969 it was renamed the Internal Security Committee, and in 1975 it was dissolved.