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(1) Martin Dies, New York Times (10th August, 1938)

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. When any individual or organization is involved in any charge or attack made in the course of the hearings, that individual or organization will be accorded an opportunity to refute such charge or attack.

Mr. Speaker, this resolution (for the continuation of the Dies Committee) presents a very serious issue. It presents the issue of guaranteeing the rights of dissident minorities. Destroy the constitutional rights of minorities, particularly the rights of those minorities that you so vociferously condemn, and you are marching... toward the destruction of democracy. This committee, under the guise of investigating subversive activities, has done its utmost to abolish democratic rights in the United States.

It has failed to distinguish between illegal activities and constitutional activities. It has sought to destroy the right to constitutional activities under the pretext of investigating illegal activities. The rights of minorities to freedom of press, speech, and petition have been endangered as never before by this committee. Oh, I know that when my friend the gentleman from Alabama gets up here he will say, "I subscribe to the doctrine of free speech." Let me say that what the Dies Committee has failed to recognize is the fundamental principle of application. There is a great deal of difference between mere subscription and application. I say that every dissident minority has the right to advocate, it has the right to organize, and it has the right to propagandize. The Dies Committee has failed to recognize the difference between subversive and constitutional.

 

(2) Telegram sent by the Ku Klux Klan to Martin Dies on the formation of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (1937).

Every true American, and that includes every Klansman, is behind you and your committee in its effort to turn the country back to the honest, freedom-loving, God-fearing American to whom it belongs.

 

(3) Vito Marcantonio, speech (23rd January, 1940)

Oh, it is perfectly easy to attack a dissident minority. The press applauds. In fact, "communism" has become very, very convenient for many, many Members of this House, and many people outside of it. If communism is destroyed, I do not know what some of you will do. It has become the most convenient method by which you wrap yourselves in the American flag in order to cover up some of the greasy stains on the legislative toga. You can vote against the unemployed, you can vote against the W.P.A. workers, and you can emasculate the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States; you can try to destroy the National Labor Relations Law, the Magna Carta of American labor; you can vote against the farmer; and you can do all that with a great deal of impunity, because after you have done so you do not have to explain your vote. You do not have to defend yourselves to the country and to the unemployed, to labor or to the farmer. All you have to do is stand up here and say, "I am opposed to communism. Let us destroy communism." What are you going to do when there is no more communism in this country?

 

(4) Dorothy Parker made an attack on Martin Dies and his Un-American Activities Committee in the magazine Directions (April, 1940)

The people want democracy - real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies - that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations - because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.

 

(5) Vito Marcantonio, speech (8th February, 1943)

What is the record of the chairman and of this Dies committee in regard to our enemies from within and from without? A record of failure as to the conditions of Japanese espionage and sabotage in regard to Pearl Harbor; complete failure as to the Nazis; failure and callous indifference to the diabolical conspiracy against the country on the part of the 34 indicted domestic Fascists, their 41 organizations, and 42 publications...

There is a reason why Japanese agents and Nazi agents and domestic Fascists escaped the attention of Mr. Dies. It is an old, old story. It is the history of the tragedies of democracies that have fallen. The diversion of the attack from the real enemy by the creation of the Red scare. The war on the Communists, on labor, liberals, progressives, new dealers, and on the Soviet Union, the war against the war administration, now called by Mr. Dies bureaucracy, was what kept Mr. Dies and his committee "too busy."

War against the Communists who, as an integral part of 130,000,000 Americans, are fighting and working like all other Americans for victory against the enemy; war against the Soviet Union, to which the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Dies] dedicated his energies and his writings and his speeches; this was and is the policy of the Dies committee. But this, too, has been, and is, the war which Adolf Hitler has told the world that he is waging. Only the other day Hitler reiterated to the world, in a statement read by Goebbels, that he was fighting "to protect the European family of nations from the dangers of the East," and he continued to proclaim his "crusade against bolshevism." He used this anti-Bolshevik game to ride into power. Mussolini, too, raised the antiCommunist cry in his "march" on Rome in 1922. The Rome-tokyO-berlin Axis, which our enemies formed to conquer the world, was announced as a "crusade against communism." It called itself the antiComintern. The Lavals and the Petains used it in France. The antiCommunist slogan was and is Hitler's technique of conquest, conceived from the very inception of his plan for world conquest. The democracies that fell for it are no more divided by this slogan, and then conquered by Hitler.Hitler and the other two members of the Axis are today again beating the drums of the antiCommunist theme in an effort to split the United Nations and to divide the people within the United Nations.Thus, while Americans are gloriously fighting at Guadalcanal and North Africa and the Red Army is smashing the enemy at Stalingrad and Rostov, Hitler and Mr. Dies are still crusading against communism.It was a sin of omission to have disregarded the danger of the antiCommunist line in time of peace. Then it was part of Hitler's preparation for a war of conquest. To adopt that same line within our own country now, while Hitler and his antiComintern Axis partners use it as a weapon of war against us, would be suicidal.

 

(6) Emanuel Celler, speech (23rd January, 1945)

The Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities is now a standing investigatory committee with power to initiate legislation. I mean this to be a direct talk. The vaudevillian antics, the brass band tactics, the star chamber proceedings of the Dies Committee have put all of us on notice. Bluntly then, the present committee can make its choice. It can either adopt the Dies course of unfounded character assassinations, lynch-law, prosecutor-jury and executioner all in one - or it can proceed in a manner consonant with the American tradition of the right to be heard, the right of counsel and the right of confrontation of witnesses, placing emphasis on investigation of all foreignisms with honest judicious objectivity. If we are to have again an extravaganza of persecution - a deep-seated mania of embracing some I individually conceived notion of alienism, we face again a betrayal of our basic constitutionally guarded frights. The power to investigate is a great public trust. And we ask the newly constituted committee not for one instant to forget that.

In the final count, it remains with the American people whether it will countenance the continuation of the former practices of the Dies Committee. Illegality will never solve the problem of political lawlessness. As we have seen so clearly demonstrated in Europe, hate breeds hate and the vicious circle revolves with all its attending madness.

Let the overzealous be reminded of Hawthorne's description of those "who go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right."

 

(7) Emanuel Celler, You Never Leave Brooklyn (1945)

From a study made of the Dies Committee and signed by over one hundred distinguished attorneys, I quote the following: "That the Dies Committee, while giving lip service to impartiality and fair play and proclaiming its devotion to Americanism and American institutions, used its hearings, the forum provided by Congress, for the dissemination of irresponsible slanders against honest public servants and private individuals and against public-spirited organizations, on testimony consisting of surmise, conjecture, unfounded opinion, unsupported conclusions and unwarranted deductions, without any attempt at verification or confirmation, which no self-respecting, fact-finding agency anywhere would consider - a proceeding wholly unworthy of the committee of the legislative body of a great and free Republic."

Thus $625,000 dollars of the taxpayer's money has been spent mainly for looking for ghosts under the bed, to chasing only those tidbits that make lurid headline reading, to, indeed, establishing precedents! Congressional investigations that must necessarily destroy that which the committee professed to protect - namely, the democratic processes in the United States.

It has been charged that 600,000 individuals engaged in subversive activities are abroad in this land. If this is actually so, then the Dies Committee has been woefully derelict in its duty. How many convictions have been obtained because of the work of the Dies Committee? How many of those alleged 600,000 are now lodged in jail? I fear me that the Dies Committee has labored like the mountain and has not even brought forth the mouse.

 

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