House Committee on Un-American Activities

House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), committee of the United States House of Representatives that conducted widely publicized investigations of alleged subversive influences on American life during the 1940s and 1950s. Its critics frequently accused it of using reckless and unfair tactics. Created on a temporary basis in 1938 to monitor the activities of foreign agents, it was made a standing committee of the House in 1945. In its early years it was often called the Dies Committee, after its first chairman, Texas Democratic representative Martin Dies, Jr., who aroused controversy by his charges of widespread disloyalty among government employees. Although it showed an interest in pro-Fascist groups during World War II, the HUAC was best known for its anti-Communist investigations, which were sometimes referred to as witch-hunts by opponents of the committee. In 1947, under the chairmanship of Democratic representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, the HUAC held hearings on supposed Communist influence in the film industry, which resulted in the imprisonment of a group of actors and writers known as the Hollywood Ten.

The studios which had employed the ten publicly sacked them and stated their support for the HUAC, embarking on a policy of avoiding any difficult or controversial subject-matter in their films, and blacklisting anyone suspected of communist sympathies. Others had to flee the country to avoid the threat of imprisonment or to continue working, often having been investigated for the mildest expression of liberal opinion. Works produced in this period reflect differing reactions to the situation: Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1953), based on the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, drew parallels with the “witch-hunt” by the committee; Fred Zinnemann's film High Noon (1952) has been viewed as a parable of an individual, abandoned by his friends, but still determined to stand up to intimidation; on the other hand, On the Waterfront (1954; Elia Kazan) has been interpreted as an apologia by the director for his decision to testify before the committee.

In 1948-1949 the future president Richard M. Nixon became known for his role in the committee's investigation of the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss. The anti-communist hysteria in the United States at the time, which the committee reflected as well as helped to create, was fuelled by nuclear weapons proliferation which for the first time made Americans feel vulnerable in their own country, and a cold war which presented them with a rival superpower which, also for the first time, they considered ideologically antagonistic. This atmosphere enabled accusations to be made by innuendo rather than evidence, producing the situation in which the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy was able to make wild charges of mass communist infiltration in the State Department and the Army (in February 1950), despite being unable to substantiate a single specific allegation. Although the Soviet Intelligence services did indeed target parts of the Western media and youth movements, and there is documented evidence of the blackmail of prominent Western figures, it has appeared in retrospect to some historians that the HUAC in this period had become a tool of extreme conservative forces seeking to use a fear of communism to reverse the marginalization they had faced in the liberal, social-welfare ethos of the Roosevelt era. However, the forces of moderation were gradually re-established in the United States in the changing climate of the 1960s, by which time the HUAC had become less active; its name was changed to the Committee on Internal Security in 1969, and it was abolished in 1975.

The continuing strength of feelings aroused by the Committee's work was revealed in 1999, when Elia Kazan was given an honorary Academy Award (Oscar) for his life's work. Although many felt the Oscar was well-deserved for his directorial achievements, attention focused almost exclusively, and often bitterly, on the unrepentant Kazan's decision to testify to the Committee nearly five decades before.