(1) 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.

 

(2) 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.

 

(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?

 

 

McCarthyism in America

McCarthyism

 

 

(4) 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 over-zealous be reminded of Hawthorne's description of those "who go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right."

 

(5) Larry Parks agreed to talk about his own involvement in the Communist Party but was at first unwilling to give the names of other former members when he testified in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (October, 1947).

I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people's names. Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer. I have two boys, one thirteen months, one two weeks. Is this the kind of heritage that you would like to hand down to your children.

 

(6) Lee J. Cobb was one of those who was originally blacklisted but eventually agreed to do a deal with the HUAC.

When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HUAC did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again.

 

(7) Budd Schulberg was interviewed by Victor Navasky when he was writing his book, Naming Names (1982)

These people (those he named), if they had it in them, could have written books and plays. There was not a blacklist in publishing. There was not a blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. They were practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since. They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the Party.

 

(8) Abraham Polonsky, explained in an interview with Victor Navasky, what he felt towards the people who named him as a member of the Communist Party.

In most cases the informers picked a route that seemed to them an easy solution to a difficult problem; in other words, they could handle their own friends, whom they testified against, better than they could handle the U.S. government harassing them. Schulberg just has to explain one thing: Why did he become an informer when they forced him to? And why didn't he become an informer before they forced him to? The reason was that before, he thought it wasn't a good thing to do. The Nazis pointed a gun up against his head and said, "Look, give us some names," and he says, "Yeah, I hate those guys anyway."

 

(9) Peter Seeger testified in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee on 15th August, 1955 but was unwilling to name other members of the various left-wing groups that he had belonged to over the years.

I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours, that I am any less of an American than anyone else.

I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, make me less of an American.

 

(10) Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

In the early fifties, the House Un-American Activities Committee was at its heyday, interrogating Americans about their Communist connections, holding them in contempt if they refused to answer, distributing millions of pamphlets to the American public: "One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism" ("Where can Communists be found? Everywhere"). Liberals often criticized the Committee, but in Congress, liberals and conservatives alike voted to fund it year after year. By 1958, only one member of the House of Representatives (James Roosevelt) voted against giving it
money. Although Truman criticized the Committee, his own Attorney General had expressed, in 1950, the same idea that motivated its investigations: "There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere - in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in private business - and each carries in himself the germs of death for society."