[75 years ago, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), usually referred to instead as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), built on its new status as a standing committee in the US House of Representatives and held its first trials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that controversial committee and its influences and legacies, leading up to a weekend post on pop culture representations!]
If you’re
like I was until researching this series, you didn’t know that HUAC continued
to exist until 1975 (the
last few years under a new name, the House Committee
on Internal Security). So here are three telling moments from its
post-blacklist decade and a half:
1)
San Francisco in 1960: If Dalton Trumbo’s
screenwriting credit for Spartacus
represented one 1960
crack in HUAC’s armor, another would have to be the clusterfuck that took
place in San
Francisco in May of that year. HUAC was holding hearings at City Hall, and
students from local universities protested outside; city police officers fire-hosed
those students and dragged them down the building’s marble steps, injuring
many and creating a full-scale riot in the process. Among the many voices who
called out this excessive and brutal response was William Mandel, a prominent
journalist who had been subpoenaed
to testify before those hearings; his angry denunciations of the
police and HUAC alike became well-known throughout the country and helped
truly turn the tide against the committee in public consciousness (not unlike
the “Have you no sense of
decency?” McCarthy moment).
2)
Operation Abolition and Operation Correction: In
an effort to combat those changing public perspectives, HUAC released an
anti-Communist propaganda
film, Operation Abolition, which attempted
to reframe the May riot and which the committee screened around the country in
1960 and 61. But exemplifying the shifts in HUAC’s authority and power in this
moment was a counter-film,
Operation Correction; made by the
Northern California ACLU and featuring commentary from that organization’s
amazing Executive
Director Ernest Besig, this film overtly highlighted and countered misrepresentations
and falsehoods in Operation Abolition.
There’s no way to know which of these films was more effective or influential
for particular audiences (or all Americans, for that matter)—but I would argue that
the immediate existence of the alternative film reflects in any case HUAC’s far
more contested and challenged presence post-1960.
3)
The Yippies: HUAC continued holding hearings
over the next decade, but the tone and tenor of those hearings had likewise
changed, becoming much more consistently a circus. That shift is illustrated
succinctly by the 1967-68
hearings involving the leftist counter-culture community known as the
Yippies; HUAC subpoenaed leaders such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and
those figures took advantage of the occasion to poke
significant fun at the committee itself: dressing
in costumes, blowing bubble gum bubbles, making mock Nazi salutes, etc. In
a particularly telling moment, Hoffman arrived wearing an outfit made of an
American flag; when he was arrested, he
joked at his trial, “I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my
country.” HUAC would continue (under the new name in a failed attempt to change
the narratives once more) for another handful of years after those moments, but
the writing was most definitely on the wall.
Special
weekend post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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