House Un-American Activities Committee
U.S. House investigatory committee, 1938–1975
Also known as: HUAC, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dies Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee — known popularly as HUAC and originally as the Dies Committee after its first chairman Martin Dies of Texas — was a standing committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that operated in various forms from 1938 to 1975. Quigley discusses HUAC in Tragedy and Hope (chiefly chs. 18 and 19) as the principal documentary anchor of the post-1945 American anti-Communist investigations, working in tandem with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (McCarran) and Senator Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Origins: From the Fish Committee to the Dies Committee
HUAC's institutional ancestry runs through the Fish Committee (1930) and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (1934–1937), both of which investigated subversive activities of Communist, Nazi, and Fascist groups in the United States. The Dies Committee was constituted as a Special Committee in 1938 under Texan Democrat Martin Dies and reauthorized session by session until it was made permanent (with the name House Un-American Activities Committee) by the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. Its statutory mandate to investigate "subversive and un-American propaganda" was sufficiently elastic to cover anything from genuine espionage cases to the political beliefs of Hollywood screenwriters.
The Quigley Framing: HUAC in the Post-War Anti-Communist Wave
Quigley's framing in Tragedy and Hope is that the Committee operated at two distinct registers, often simultaneously. At one register it conducted serious documentary investigations of genuine espionage networks — the August 1948 hearings at which Whittaker Chambers named Alger Hiss are Quigley's chief example (T&H 925–928). At the other register it conducted political theatre against figures whose actual relationship to the Communist Party of the USA was distant or hypothetical: the Hollywood Ten hearings of October 1947, the IPR-adjacent hearings of the early 1950s, the long series of inquiries into education, the State Department, the entertainment industry, and the labour unions. Quigley's overall verdict is that the documentary record HUAC produced was substantial and serious; that the political theatre damaged the country's institutional culture; and that the two were inseparable in the Committee's actual operation.
Hiss, Chambers, and the Establishment Crisis
The Hiss-Chambers case (T&H 925, 927, 931, 937, 955) is, in Quigley's account, the institutional pivot of the era. Whittaker Chambers's August 1948 testimony before HUAC named Alger Hiss — a former State Department official who had been Secretary-General of the United Nations founding conference at San Francisco and a senior member of the post-war Establishment — as a member of an underground Communist cell. The August 1948 confrontation in suite 1400 of the Commodore Hotel, the November 1948 production of the "Pumpkin Papers," the 1949 perjury trial of Hiss (mistrial), and the 1950 retrial (conviction) were the documentary basis on which the credibility of the Eastern Establishment was attacked. Quigley reads the case as devastating to the Establishment not because Hiss was central to it (he was not) but because the response of senior Establishment figures — most notably Secretary of State Acheson's January 1950 "I shall not turn my back on Alger Hiss" — created the political ground on which McCarthy's subsequent attacks could be mounted.
Hollywood, the Labor Movement, and the Politics of Anti-Communism
Quigley discusses the broader pattern of HUAC's work: the 1947 Hollywood Ten hearings and the resulting blacklist; the 1949–1950 hearings into Communist influence in the trade-union movement (the CIO's 1949–1950 expulsion of eleven Communist-led affiliates was in part a response to anticipated HUAC and IRS pressure); the long campaign against secondary-school and university teachers. The Committee's procedural pattern — naming names under subpoena, the contempt citation for refusal to testify, the parallel referral to the Department of Justice and the FBI — created a quasi-judicial apparatus operating outside the constitutional protections of a criminal trial. Quigley's discussion of these episodes treats them less as the work of a few zealots than as a structural feature of the American institutional landscape from 1947 to 1957.
Decline and Dissolution
HUAC's institutional decline began with the censure of Senator McCarthy in December 1954 and accelerated through the late 1950s as the courts (especially the 1957 Watkins v. United States decision) narrowed the permissible scope of congressional investigations into political belief. The Committee was renamed the Committee on Internal Security in 1969 and abolished altogether in 1975 — its functions transferred to the House Judiciary Committee. Quigley's principal writing predates the abolition but anticipates the institutional verdict: that HUAC had functioned as a structural pathology of the Cold War American republic and that its eventual dissolution was the necessary consequence of the longer-term restoration of the constitutional limits its operations had eroded.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 925 Quigley
Hiss, A., 925, 927, 931, 937, 955.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 927 Quigley
Chambers, W., 923, 927.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 929 Quigley
[HUAC and the McCarthy-era investigations].
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 933 Quigley
Lattimore, O., 925, 933, 936.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 945 Quigley
On February 20th, in an incoherent speech of more than six hours in the Senate, [McCarthy] announced that he had penetrated 'Truman's iron curtain of secrecy.'
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 947 Quigley
He continued his charges in 1953-1954 with his own party in control of both houses of Congress and Eisenhower in the White House.