House Un-American Activities Committee

Based on Wikipedia: House Un-American Activities Committee

One of the strangest twists in the history of investigating "un-American" activities is that a founding member of the committee doing the investigating was himself a paid Soviet spy. Samuel Dickstein, a Democratic congressman from New York who helped create what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee, was secretly on the Soviet payroll, receiving twelve hundred fifty dollars a month from the NKVD—the Soviet secret police that preceded the KGB. The Soviets wanted congressional secrets about anti-communists and fascists. Dickstein delivered, handing over war budget documents and classified conference records. The irony is almost too perfect: an architect of America's anti-subversive apparatus was, at the same time, subverting America for a foreign power.

But this is just one thread in a tangled story that spans decades, ruins careers, and still shapes how Americans think about loyalty, paranoia, and the boundaries of acceptable political belief.

The Roots of Fear

To understand the House Un-American Activities Committee, you need to understand the fear that created it. That fear didn't begin with the Cold War. It started much earlier.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution shocked the world. A vast empire fell to revolutionaries who promised to spread their ideology everywhere. Suddenly, communism wasn't just a theory debated in European coffeehouses. It was a government with an army, and it openly declared its intention to overthrow capitalism globally. For American leaders, this wasn't abstract politics. It was an existential threat.

The first real congressional investigation into this threat came from an unlikely source: a subcommittee originally created to investigate pro-German sentiment in the American liquor industry during World War One. The Overman Committee, named after its chairman, Senator Lee Slater Overman of North Carolina, operated from September 1918 to June 1919. When the war ended in November 1918 and the German threat faded, the committee pivoted to a new enemy: Bolshevism. Its hearings in early 1919 helped construct an image of radical leftism as a uniquely dangerous threat to the American way of life.

This was the first Red Scare, and it established a pattern that would repeat for decades.

The Committee Takes Shape

In 1930, a New York Republican congressman named Hamilton Fish III introduced a resolution to investigate communist activities in the United States. Fish was fervent in his anti-communism, and his committee—commonly called the Fish Committee—cast a wide net. It investigated the American Civil Liberties Union, known today as the ACLU, which was then a young organization defending unpopular speech. It investigated William Z. Foster, who was running for president as the Communist Party candidate. The committee recommended giving the Justice Department more power to investigate communists and strengthening immigration laws to keep them out.

Then came the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which operated from 1934 to 1937. This is where our Soviet-paid congressman enters the picture. Samuel Dickstein co-chaired the committee with John William McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat who would later become Speaker of the House. Their mandate was to investigate how foreign propaganda entered the United States and which organizations spread it.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee did something unusual for an anti-communist body: it investigated fascists. In 1934, it subpoenaed most of the leaders of the American fascist movement. That November, it investigated allegations of something called the Business Plot—a supposed scheme by wealthy businessmen to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt and install a fascist government. Newspapers at the time dismissed it as a hoax. Historians have since concluded that while an actual coup was probably never imminent, some kind of "wild scheme" was genuinely contemplated and discussed among certain business figures.

Meanwhile, Dickstein was funneling information to Moscow. The Soviets, however, grew dissatisfied with their investment. When Dickstein failed to get appointed to the committee's successor body, where he could have been more useful to them, the NKVD cut off his payments in February 1940. He died in 1954 without ever being exposed. His Soviet ties only came to light in the 1990s, when archives opened after the Soviet collapse.

The Dies Committee and the Permanent Inquisition

On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was formally established as a special investigating committee. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr., a Texas Democrat, and so became known as the Dies Committee. Its stated goal was to investigate disloyalty and subversion connected to both communism and fascism.

In practice, it focused almost entirely on communists.

The committee's early work had moments of absurdity that would be comic if the consequences weren't so serious. In 1938, it subpoenaed Hallie Flanagan, who ran the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program that employed actors, directors, and writers during the Depression. Flanagan was called to testify for only part of one day, while an administrative clerk was grilled for two full days. During the hearing, committee member Joe Starnes of Alabama asked Flanagan whether Christopher Marlowe—the Elizabethan playwright who died in 1593—was a member of the Communist Party. He also referred to "Mr. Euripides," the ancient Greek tragedian who lived around 480 BCE, suggesting his plays promoted class warfare.

These weren't clever rhetorical traps. The congressmen appeared genuinely confused about who these historical figures were.

But the committee did serious damage too. It compiled a report arguing for the internment of Japanese Americans, known as the Yellow Report. This document claimed that Japanese cultural traits—loyalty to the Emperor, the number of Japanese fishermen in America, Buddhist religious practice—constituted evidence of espionage. All of it. Just being Japanese and practicing Buddhism was treated as suspicious. With one exception, Representative Herman Eberharter of Pennsylvania, committee members supported internment. Their recommendations aligned with the goals of the War Relocation Authority, which would eventually force over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans into camps.

In 1946, the committee considered investigating the Ku Klux Klan. It decided not to. John Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat on the committee who was an avowed white supremacist, offered this justification: "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." The committee wouldn't investigate the Klan until 1965, nearly two decades later.

Hollywood on Trial

The committee's most famous chapter began in 1947, when it turned its attention to Hollywood.

For nine days, the committee held hearings investigating alleged communist propaganda and influence in the motion picture industry. The hearings produced the Hollywood Ten—screenwriters and directors who refused to answer the committee's questions, invoking their constitutional rights. When asked the now-infamous question "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?", they declined to respond. All ten were cited for contempt of Congress, convicted, and sent to prison.

But prison was just the beginning of their punishment. After their convictions, the major studios announced they would not employ known communists. This was the beginning of the blacklist.

Eventually, more than three hundred artists were blacklisted. Directors, actors, screenwriters, radio commentators—anyone who had been named or who refused to cooperate faced exile from the industry. Some left the country. Charlie Chaplin went to Switzerland. Others, like Dalton Trumbo, continued working under pseudonyms or using the names of friends willing to front for them. Only about ten percent of those blacklisted ever rebuilt careers in entertainment.

The studios, meanwhile, scrambled to prove their patriotism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, they produced a wave of anti-communist films with titles like The Red Menace, The Red Danube, and I Was a Communist for the FBI—the last of which received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain, playing an HUAC investigator as a heroic figure. Universal-International was the only major studio that refused to produce such propaganda.

Curiously, when the committee investigated earlier films, studio executives admitted that wartime productions like Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia could be seen as pro-Soviet. But they argued these films served the Allied war effort when America and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany. Mission to Moscow, they claimed, was made at the request of the White House itself.

The Case That Proved the Point

If the Hollywood investigations were the committee's most dramatic moments, the Alger Hiss case was its most consequential.

In 1948, the committee investigated charges of espionage against Alger Hiss, a former State Department official who had been present at the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Whittaker Chambers, a former communist who had become a fervent anti-communist, accused Hiss of being a Soviet spy. Hiss denied everything.

The case became a national obsession. It was, as the Substack article linked to this topic puts it, "drama of the highest order."

Hiss couldn't be prosecuted for espionage because the statute of limitations had expired. But he was prosecuted for perjury—for lying about his relationship with Chambers and his communist activities. He was convicted and served prison time. To this day, historians debate whether Hiss was actually guilty. Soviet archives opened after the Cold War suggest he was, but questions remain.

What's undeniable is the case's political impact. It convinced many Americans that congressional committees could effectively uncover communist subversion. It launched the career of a young California congressman named Richard Nixon, who played a key role in pursuing Hiss. And it gave ammunition to those who believed the federal government was riddled with Soviet agents.

The Labor Movement Under Siege

Hollywood grabbed headlines, but the committee's investigations of labor unions affected far more ordinary Americans.

The committee frequently attached the communist label to unions and union leaders, giving it grounds for investigation and harassment. Harry Bridges, an Australian immigrant who led the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, was a particular target. Martin Dies led a campaign to have Bridges deported based on testimony claiming Communist Party membership. Bridges publicly denied being a party member, though he did align himself with certain communist causes and organizations. The committee tried repeatedly to have him thrown out of the country.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had helped found the ACLU, faced a different kind of pressure. She joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was elected to its Central Committee the following year. This made her an irresistible target for the committee, which could attack both her and the ACLU simultaneously. When Martin Dies publicly attacked the organization in 1939, the ACLU responded by cutting ties with anyone connected to the Communist Party. Flynn, one of the organization's founders, was expelled from its board.

The ACLU's willingness to purge one of its own founders shows how far the fear extended. Even an organization dedicated to defending civil liberties felt compelled to distance itself from communism at any cost.

High Noon and the Art of Allegory

Not everyone went along quietly. Some fought back through art.

In 1952, the film High Noon appeared in theaters. On its surface, it's a straightforward Western. Marshal Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, is about to retire when he learns that a criminal he put away is returning to town seeking revenge. Kane tries to recruit the townspeople to help him, but one by one, they refuse. In the end, he faces the threat alone.

But the film's screenwriter, Carl Foreman, intended something more pointed. The story of a community that refuses to stand against tyranny, that hides and hopes someone else will take the risk, was widely understood as an allegory about Hollywood's response to the committee. The townspeople who abandoned Kane represented the studios and artists who named names or looked the other way while their colleagues were destroyed.

Shortly after the film's release, Foreman refused to confirm or deny whether he had been a Communist Party member. He was blacklisted. The major studios wouldn't touch him. He moved to England and continued his career there.

High Noon became a classic. It's still studied in film schools and referenced in political discussions. Its power comes partly from the ambiguity of allegory—you can read it as a critique of HUAC or as a more general story about moral courage. But for those who lived through the era, the message was clear.

McCarthy's Shadow

Here's something that surprises many people: Joseph McCarthy had nothing to do with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

McCarthy was a senator, not a representative. He chaired the Senate's Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—entirely different bodies from HUAC. But the term "McCarthyism" became so associated with anti-communist investigations that the two are often confused.

The confusion isn't entirely accidental. Both HUAC and McCarthy used similar tactics: public hearings designed to humiliate witnesses, guilt by association, demands that people inform on friends and colleagues. Both trafficked in fear and destroyed lives and careers based on thin evidence or none at all. The era gets called "the McCarthy era" or "the Red Scare," but HUAC was investigating alleged communists before McCarthy arrived on the scene and continued after his fall.

McCarthy's Senate hearings ran from 1950 to 1954. HUAC was created in 1938 and didn't finally die until 1975—nearly four decades of investigations, hearings, and blacklists.

The Long Twilight

The committee evolved over time. In 1969, it was renamed the House Committee on Internal Security. This was partly cosmetic—the old name had become an embarrassment—but it also reflected changing political realities. The Vietnam War was generating its own protests and movements, and the committee turned its attention to the antiwar left.

But by the 1970s, the political climate had shifted. Watergate revealed that the government itself could be the source of subversion. The FBI's COINTELPRO program, which had targeted civil rights leaders and antiwar activists, was exposed as a pattern of illegal surveillance and harassment. Congressional investigating committees that had once seemed like guardians against foreign influence now looked more like threats to civil liberties.

In 1975, the House abolished the committee entirely. Its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee, where they quietly disappeared into the bureaucratic background.

What It Meant

The House Un-American Activities Committee left complicated legacies.

Its defenders argue that communist espionage was real. Soviet archives opened after 1991 confirmed that spies had penetrated the American government and that the Communist Party USA was closely tied to Moscow. Alger Hiss appears to have been guilty. The Rosenbergs, executed in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, were indeed spies. From this view, the committee was investigating a genuine threat, even if its methods were sometimes crude.

Its critics counter that the committee destroyed innocent lives, chilled free speech, and created a climate of fear that lasted for decades. The blacklist punished people not for anything they'd done but for their beliefs or for the beliefs of their friends. The committee's investigations often had nothing to do with actual espionage and everything to do with political theater. Asking people to name names forced them to become informers or face professional destruction.

Both critiques contain truth. Espionage was real, and some of those investigated were genuine threats. But the committee's methods were often more about spectacle than security, more about punishing dissent than catching spies. The line between legitimate security concerns and political persecution was blurred so thoroughly that it's still hard to untangle.

The committee also revealed something uncomfortable about American democracy: how quickly constitutional protections can erode when people are afraid. The First Amendment protects free speech and association. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination. But when the committee asked people to name friends who might have been communists, and punished them professionally for refusing, those protections became largely theoretical.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson is how fear can make a nation turn on itself. The committee was called "Un-American Activities," but its own activities—demanding loyalty oaths, blacklisting artists, treating political beliefs as crimes—were themselves profoundly at odds with American ideals. The search for the un-American became deeply American, in the worst possible sense.

And somewhere in those early years, while congressmen asked whether Elizabethan playwrights were communists and debated the loyalty of Buddhist fishermen, one of the committee's own founders was quietly cashing checks from Moscow. Samuel Dickstein, patriot and spy, remains the perfect symbol of an era when nothing was quite what it seemed.