House Committee On Un-American Activities Research Articles

Copland and Communism: Mystery and Mayhem

In the midst of the second Red Scare, Aaron Copland, an American composer, came under fire for his communist tendencies. Between the 1930s and 1950s, he joined the left-leaning populist Popular Front, composed a protest song, wrote Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, traveled to South America, spoke at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, and donated to communist leaning organizations such as the American-Soviet Musical Society. Due to Copland’s personal communist leanings, Eisenhower’s Inaugural Concert Committee censored a performance of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait in 1953. HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities) brought Copland to the committee and questioned him on his communist connections. Copland clearly denied any and all communist activities or affiliations. This raised the questions: what impact did the contemporary political climate have on Copland’s music? What actual ties did he have to communism? Does it matter? To answer these questions, I examined the primary sources in the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress, during the fall of 2019. In addition to selected secondary sources, I focused on the relevant letters, hearing records, and other materials contained in Box 427: the box on HUAC. In addition to the Performing Arts Reading Room Aaron Copland Collection, I utilized the Folklife Collection and their resources on Aaron Copland. I will conclude there is significant external evidence Copland associated with communists, but since Copland himself continuously denied the identity, it is difficult to conclude whether Copland was or was not in fact a communist. It is much easier to conclude that Copland was, at the very least, politically left-leaning, although his political beliefs held a secondary role to the musical style in his compositions.

The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films by Ron Briley (review)

Reviewed by: The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films by Ron Briley Bernard F. Dick Ron Briley. The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films. Lanham, MD. Roman & Littlefield. 2017. 239 pages. “Ambivalent” is a recurring adjective in this absorbing and provocative study of the director’s last twelve films, each given its own chapter except for the last two which are grouped together: Viva Zapata! (1952), Man on a Tightrope (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Wild River (1960), Splendor in the Grass (1961), America America (1963), The Arrangement (1969), The Visitors (1971), and The Last Tycoon (1976). It would be a mistake to bypass the Introduction, paginated in Roman numerals. It is really a chapter unto itself summarizing Kazan’s work and politics. If Kazan emerged as a conflicted man in his autobiography, A Life (1988), he now appears as an ambivalent one, personally and professionally, as Briley has clearly demonstrated by interweaving his life with his films. He was ambivalent about loving his wife, Molly Day Thatcher, and conducting affairs with other women, including Marilyn Monroe. In The Arrangement, a successful advertising executive (Kirk Douglas), a stand in for Kazan, has achieved it all: wife, mistress, and a fabulous career, yet is hemmed in by the conventions that society has imposed upon him. Kazan himself felt similar constraints: the Communist Party in the 1930s, studio interference in his films, the Catholic Church and the Legion of Decency that denounced Baby Doll and contributed to its failure at the box office, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) before which he purged himself and encouraged others to do the same. He respected his immigrant father, who failed to experience the happiness and satisfaction promised by the American Dream, but at the same time feared him, as does the son in The Arrangement (Kirk Douglas), whose father (Richard Boone) was a rug merchant like Kazan’s. Strained relations between father and son are at the heart of East of Eden, in which a son (James Dean) attempts to buy the love of his father (Raymond Massey); in Splendor in the Grass, a father (Pat Hingle) plans the kind of life for his son (Warren Beatty) that he would have wanted for himself (a Yale degree, social respectability, a brilliant marriage), even though his son has no interest in living out his father’s dream. Kazan considered himself a progressive yet feared progressivism could devolve into populism and lead to fascism. In A Face in the Crowd, the rise of a folksy media celebrity (Andy Griffith) is a reflection of the cult of personality that empowers totalitarian regimes. He believed in progress yet questioned the disruptions it can cause, as seen in Wild River, in which an elderly woman (Jo Van Fleet) refuses to leave her home so that a dam can be constructed to prevent flooding, but is finally forced to accept the inevitable. There was one thing, however, about which he was never ambivalent: his decision to cooperate with HUAC in its investigation of Communism in the movie industry. On April 11, 1952, the New York Times published a paid ad by Kazan in which he admitted that he had joined the Communist Party in 1934 and left two years later when he realized that the Party “violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed,” “attempted to control thought,” and “violated the truth.” The previous day he had appeared before HUAC as an informant. On the Waterfront was Kazan’s apologia for informing, although there is an enormous difference between Terry Malloy’s testimony before a legitimate committee investigating waterfront crime and a committee of questionable legitimacy inquiring into one’s political affiliations. Briley brings out the ambivalence in the film, pointing out that Malloy, initially cocky and inarticulate, ends up as a Christ figure wobbling along the dock as if it were a via dolorosa. The sinner has turned saint. But even more disturbing is the ending, which, as Briley observes, Malloy and the workers enter the warehouse as...

Notes on the Struggle for “Real Fraternity”: The American Youth Congress, 1934–1941

In July 1950, two federal government informers gave testimony about the American Youth Congress (AYC) at a session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Martha Edminston and her ...

Shattering Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Howard Fast

Shattering Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope:An Interview with Howard Fast Eric Monder (bio) Given the value of hearing directly from Alfred Hitchcock's collaborators, many of whom the director did not always properly credit, I was privileged to interview Howard Fast, the screenwriter for what Hitchcock himself thought would be a particularly consequential picture, but one that was never produced. Of the many "lost" or unfinished Hitchcock projects, Kaleidoscope has grown in importance to scholars and has tantalized Hitchcock fans for years, and it was the main topic of discussion (transcribed below) when I met with this author-screenwriter on August 10, 2000, at his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Some background about both the film and Howard Fast are in order first. Kaleidoscope holds a special fascination for those interested in Alfred Hitchcock for many of the reasons Fast brought up in our talk. During the last two decades, more attention has been paid to the latter part of Hitchcock's career and to his unrealized productions. Other than his final, unproduced film, The Short Night (circa 1980), Kaleidoscope is the most significant "lost," late period Hitchcock.1 Kaleidoscope, the story of a young serial killer, was conceived in the mid-1960s, and considerable pre-production work was done before the film was abandoned—much more than on other unproduced Hitchcock projects. Actual locations were selected and photographed and test footage was shot (in New York City, using unknown actors and models). Why the film didn't proceed any further is a sad but fascinating chronicle, revealing that even filmmakers [End Page 128] with the most clout could not be truly independent within the Hollywood system. As Fast confirmed when we spoke, Hitchcock wanted to create something completely different from his prior work, breaking with his own past. Though Hitchcock enjoyed "reinventing" himself throughout his career, this desire might not have been foremost in his mind at the time of some of his most groundbreaking and successful works, such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) in particular. After the commercial and critical failure of Marnie (1964), however, Hitchcock felt at a crossroads and was attracted to what was occurring in the free-form New Wave movements of Europe, particularly the Italian films of Antonioni and Fellini. By creating his own "new" Hitchcock film, he was prepared to breach several Hollywood norms. (Keep in mind that the Production Code, though severely weakened, partly because of Hitchcock, was still in effect, and the Ratings system was a few years away). Hitchcock wanted to again upset generic expectations of the thriller, just as he already had done with Psycho several years earlier. But now, he was ready to disturb or disrupt cinematic norms even further by including a graphic depiction of murder, the explicit use of nudity, and a political critique of the military—something that would have been especially sensitive around the time of America's increasing presence in Vietnam. One other broken norm that would have been more subtle was the way Hitchcock sought to emphasize, more than he had done in the past, a bold visual style over the story itself (very much the Antonioni influence). During our talk, Fast described the narrative of Kaleidoscope, some of the plot elements, and how the project came about, but very little about his own background, which deserves to be at least briefly mentioned in introducing the interview. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was born in New York City and became a noted writer of historical novels, publishing his first at eighteen-years-old, and his breakthrough, Citizen Tom Paine (1943), at age twenty-eight. [End Page 129] His work in the genre continued until he was blacklisted and sent to prison for contempt of Congress in 1950 during the dark days of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations for refusing to name the names of Communist Party members. Fast, like so many fellow writers who were targeted by the government for either their left-wing political views or defiance of HUAC, was forced to write using pseudonyms following his prison release: e.g., Walter Ericson (Fallen Angel, 1952) and E.V. Cunningham (Sylvia, 1960). Under these names, he was...

Kati Marton, True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. 289 pp. $27.00

Kati Marton, <i>True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy</i>. New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 2016. 289 pp. $27.00

Institutional Argumentation and Institutional Rules: Effects of Interactive Asymmetry on Argumentation in Institutional Contexts

Recent approaches to studying argumentation in institutions have pointed out the role of institutional rules in constraining argumentation that takes place in institutional contexts. However, few studies explain how these rules concretely affect actual argumentation. In particular, little work has been done as to the consequences of interactional asymmetry which often exists between participants in institutional contexts. While previous studies have suggested that this asymmetry exists as an aberration in the deliberative process, this paper argues that asymmetry is built into day-to-day institutional practices as a means of achieving institutional agendas. This article draws upon findings from workplace and discourse studies to explicate particular dimensions of asymmetry that commonly occur within institutional settings, and establishes a methodological framework to account for how this asymmetry can be operationalized for arguments that favor institutional interests regardless of the underlying strength of the arguments being made. Drawing on a controversial case of institutional argumentation during a hearing of the US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the mid-1950s, this article demonstrates how in using these advantages, HUAC is able to overcome legitimate witness counterarguments to its claims and achieve its institutional goals for the hearing. Though the testimony is admittedly 60-years old, HUAC is a useful case study: the asymmetry in the exchange is clear and we have a historical record to verify the factual accuracy of the claims being made. Additionally, we can see how the subsequent legal reforms that reduced conditions of asymmetry for witnesses were responsible for HUAC’s eventual demise as an institutional force. Though this paper analyzes one particular interaction, these findings are applicable to analysis of argumentation in many institutional settings.

Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller Joshua E. Polster Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. By Jeffrey D. Mason. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008; pp. 328. $49.50 cloth. Jeffrey Mason’s Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller disrupts the traditional perspectives on Miller as a social dramatist and, instead, portrays him as a political playwright. After establishing this approach, Mason then assesses the profundity and efficaciousness of Miller’s political theatre and activism. He explores a broad spectrum of material to propel the discussion of Miller’s political theatre, which includes his famous and lesser-known plays, nondramatic works, and his activities as a political advocate. In the preface and introduction, Mason defines the book’s project and distinguishes it from the many studies on Miller’s dramas. According to Mason, for over five decades critics and scholars have presented Miller as a social dramatist. In a social drama, Mason explains, we simply understand that “the individual relates to society but not how he does so. If social drama is about society, then political drama is about its dynamic: its struggles, its dialectic, and its evolution” (2). Mason, primarily supported by Michel Foucault’s studies on power dynamics, argues that Miller’s work goes beyond the social drama to explore structures of power within relationships and communities. Moreover, Mason’s book aims to reveal how Miller’s political sensibilities were strongly shaped by real-world struggles in the United States and abroad, such as the clash between communism and capitalism during the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II, the Jewish Diaspora and the Holocaust, the cold war and the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the Vietnam War, the contested presidential election of 2000, and the continuous struggle for freedom of expression around the globe. Seven chapters are devoted to the project, the strongest being the first, which positions Miller as politically engaged inside as well as outside the theatre—by choice and coercion. The chapter navigates through different periods of Miller’s life, specifically, when he was an “unfriendly witness” before HUAC, when he was pledged to McCarthy as a Connecticut delegate at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when he protested the Vietnam War, when he acted as the President of International P.E.N., and when he contested the use of his play The Crucible by the avant-garde Wooster Group. The section on HUAC explores Miller’s testimony in sufficient depth to allow a more comprehensive understanding of Miller’s stance and political thought in regard to repression and censorship. For instance, Miller is mostly remembered for one act of defiance toward HUAC: he would not “name names,” refusing to cooperate, betray others, and “submit to the power of oppressive authority” (36). Mason, however, inspects the playwright’s entire testimony and concludes that he was, in many respects, “acquiescent” toward the committee. Apparently, he had found a “judicious middle ground” (36, 38). Miller was not as fully cooperative as Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, [End Page 132] and Lee J. Cobb, but he was also not as firmly resistant as Lillian Hellman, Pete Seeger, Zero Mostel, and Paul Robeson. In subsequent chapters, Mason’s political discussion focuses more closely on Miller’s dramaturgy, especially in All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Discussing All My Sons, Mason looks at the scope and depth of Miller’s political vision, how he “doesn’t expand the range of the family as much as brings all of humanity down to the family scale” (79), how he considers the individual’s responsibility to society but not society’s responsibility to the individual, and how he provides a potential geopolitical framework, but ultimately reduces it to one family living on a block in a small Ohio town. In the chapter on Salesman, Mason’s scholarship becomes creative as he examines the political dynamics of the play through the lens of one of its rarely studied characters—the Loman family house: “The house is the venue for confrontation and recognition, whether evaded or attempted. It is the lace...

The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Alabama, 1964-1971

The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Alabama, 1964–1971 ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1964, THE FBI LAUNCHED a highly secretive and extralegal domestic covert action program called COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, which sought to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” Ku Klux Klan groups in the United States.1 During 1965, as the FBI facilitated a crucial criminal prosecution of Alabama Klansmen and an effective House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) exposé, the bureau’s COINTELPRO operations exposed and discredited leaders of the Alabama-based United Klans of America (UKA). Beginning in 1966, an accelerated campaign of disruption involving “notional” (fake) communications, “snitch-jacketing” operations that framed effective Klan organizers as spies, and the use of informants further aggravated internal factionalism in Klan organizations. The result of these operations was increased frustration, resignation, and J O H N D R A B B L E John Drabble is an Assistant Professor in the American Culture and Literature Program at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Republic of Turkey. In summers, he teaches in the International Area Studies Teaching Program at the University of California Berkeley. He would like to thank the editorial staff of the Alabama Review, as well as his father Dr. John E. Drabble, who read early drafts of this manuscript. 1 Director to Atlanta et al., Sept. 2, 1964 (section 1), in COINTELPRO: The Counterintelligence Program of the FBI, 30 reels (Wilmington, Del., 1978). Unless otherwise indicated, all FBI documents cited in this article are from this microfilm collection, the most complete record of COINTELPRO operations available. The White Hate records comprise reels eighteen through twenty. Unless otherwise indicated, communications between FBI executives are contained in section one, and communications between FBI headquarters and field offices are contained (in rough chronological order), in the respective field office files. Given a lack of historiography on Klan activity in Alabama after 1965, and redactions in COINTELPRO documents, the author used newspaper articles and Michael Newton and Judy Ann Newton, eds., The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1991), to provide narrative context and to identify COINTELPRO targets. The term COINTELPRO is an amalgam of “counterintelligence program.” T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 4 fear among rank and file members, leading to extensive membership losses during the next five years. Other COINTELPRO operations disrupted relations between the UKA national leadership and officers in other states, facilitating an overall reduction in Klan activity and membership, both in Alabama and throughout the South. This story is not well known, because scholarship on COINTELPRO has been restricted to policy studies of institutional workings and of operations against civil rights, black nationalist, and New Left groups. Non-academic accounts are largely anecdotal.2 Much of the scholarship on the civil rights movement focuses on the first half of the 1960s; consequently, the bureau’s reluctance to suppress Klan violence before 1965 has received more attention than its efforts to undermine the Klan with COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE during the late 1960s.3 In particular, FBI performance regarding the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo frames accounts of relationships between the FBI, southern law enforcement authorities, and the Alabama Klan.4 The problematic activities of FBI informant and Klan member Gary Thomas Rowe—who coordinated vigilante attacks on the Freedom Riders in 1961, was implicated by Alabama authorities in the Sixteenth Street church bombing, and who witnessed Liuzzo’s murder—obscures the role COINTELPRO and the FBI played in weakening Klan influence and membership.5 Polemical accounts that use Rowe to frame 2 John Drabble, “The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Mississippi, 1964–1971,” Journal of Mississippi History 66 (Winter 2004): 353–56. 3 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63. 4 Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York, 1987), 324–25; Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America...

Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (review)

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. The New Press, 2OO2. 46O pages; $29.95. Sympathetic to the Left Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, building upon the ideas introduced in their biography of leftist screenwriter and film director Abraham Polonsky, assert that many classical Hollywood studio films produced between the early 1930s and late 1940s, before implementation of the blacklist, constitute a body of work reflecting the progressive values of radical screenwriters often associated with the Communist Party. The authors, focusing upon such genres as the Western, gangster, horror, family, combat, and woman's films, argue that Hollywood screenwriters on the left were able to successfully incorporate into studio-era films storylines celebrating the triumph of common working people over the upper class and exploitive capitalist values. In developing this thesis, Buhle and Wagner, who are obviously sympathetic to the left, appear to support the accusations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and anti-communist cultural critics who maintain that Hollywood communists posed a subversive threat through their influence over film content. Indeed, Buhle and Wagner reserve their harshest criticism for Hollywood liberals rather than right-wing politicians and cultural figures. Radical Hollywood refutes the claim of studio executives and liberals that leftist screenwriters failed to control the means of production within the studio system and, thus, were unable to inoculate their political messages into the films upon which they worked. Buhle and Wagner, seeking to empower the screenwriters, such as Howard Lawson, Michael Wilson, and John Bright, upon whom Radical Hollywood focuses its narrative, insist that Hollywood's progressive writers were able to insert their politics into cinema. The authors, however, do acknowledge that studio executives often grafted Hollywood endings onto films, somewhat negating the issues of race, gender, and class raised by the writers. Also, Buhle and Wagner insist that the Hollywood left was not comprised of hack artists who blindly followed the Communist Party line articulated by officials on the East Coast. In publications such as the Hollywood Quarterly, leftists in the film industry, along with academics, sought to articulate a film aesthetic which would incorporate more complex political ideas into popular film. …

Cultural memory and the cultural legacy of individualism and community in two classic films about labor unions

On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth are read as epideictics for the experiences of directors Elia Kazan and Herbert Biberman testifying before the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC). These films are self-conscious studies of the directors' principles in which union struggles serve as the vehicle for narrative analogies that express differing philosophies about a key tension in the American identity–that between individualism and community. Because these films represent the creation of meanings at two different synchronic sites within the culture, they offer opportunities to inspect how their messages are historically and culturally determined and how they are like, or unlike, the cultural memory of our own time. This rhetorical approach to reading cultural memory investigates the diachrony of contexts, requiring the rhetorical critic to act not only as an archaeologist of the moment of production, but also as a historian of the circulation of texts, and as a contemporary social moralist. Such a multi-layered approach is necessary for understanding the different cultural options and cultural force of On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth.

An Early Harvard Memorandum on Anti-Depression Policies: An Introductory Note

The memorandum that this note introduces was completed by three young members of the Harvard economics department sometime in January 1932. Two of them, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White, were soon to play key roles on the American, indeed the worldwide, policy scene. Both of them would go to Washington in 1934 as founding members of Jacob Viner's 'Freshman Brains Trust.' In due course, first at the Federal Reserve Board and later at the Treasury and the White House, Currie would become a highly visible and leading advocate of expansionary fiscal policy, while White, at the Treasury, was to be a coarchitect, with Keynes, of the Bretton Woods system. Both would fall victim to anti-Communist witch-hunts in the late 1940s, in White's case perhaps at the cost of his life, since he died of a heart attack in 1948 three days after a strenuous hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The third author, Paul Theodore Ellsworth, later a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, is perhaps best [End Page 515] remembered nowadays as the author of a leading textbook on international economics (Ellsworth 1937), although it is worth noting that he was also a very early (December 1936) but hitherto unrecognized discoverer of what came to be called the IS-LM model as a means of elucidating issues raised by Keynes's (1936) General Theory.

Halting McCarthyism: The Stamler Case in History

The now-forgotten Stamler case is a reminder of the days that followed the McCarthy era, and after its damage had been done, when the U.S. Federal Courts became a useful arena for the left. No one rang a bell to say that an era was over and the U.S. courts were open for the Bill of Rights. Instead, persistent and able lawyers, battling side by side with a renewed social (civil rights) movement, discovered that after the long night they could get things done in U.S. courts. The Stamler case achieved no less than a softening up of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) for its congressional demise in 1974. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities

Book Reviews Review Essay Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities Thomas W. Benson Whittaker Chambers. By Sam Tanenhaus. New York: Random House, 1997; pp. 638. $35.00. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. By Edward Dmytryk. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996; pp. 210. $34.95 cloth; $14.95 paper. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. By Walter Bernstein. New York: Knopf, 1996; pp. 292. $24.00. Anything Your Little Heart Desires. By Patricia Bosworth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp 416. $27.50. Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. By Sally Belfrage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994; pp. 263. $22.50. fohn Wayne's America. By Garry Wills. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp. 380. $26.00. American politics, according to its own myths, is the definitive enactment of the democratic promises of the public sphere. At the same time, participants in American politics, from left, right, and center, necessarüy conduct their own political activities in what are at best only approximations of genuinely accessible public settings and in language that appeals as much to personal identity, virtue, religious or ideological conviction, and tribal hostilities as to civic ideals. Where can we look to find the public? One answer suggested by a diverse collection of recent accounts is that public and private are necessarüy fuzzy, partial, approximate, and simultaneous. According to our actual practices, it appears that Thomas W. Benson is Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of Rhetoric atPenn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 117-141 ISSN 1094-8392 118 Rhetoric & Public Affairs we often enact, affirm, or critique our public life from the perspective of the private, or the reverse, or find one in the other, or mistake one for the other, or ruin one for the sake of the other. I propose to read as a rhetorical critic some recent accounts of the intersection of a great public event with a series of private lives. These accounts offer themselves both as political enactments—that is, as rhetorical appeals—and as, at least implicitly, political theories—that is, theories of the relations of public and private experience as revealed in biography and autobiography. These stories recall the time we now call the McCarthy era, though McCarthy himself was an opportunistic intruder on territory first exploited by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and its most junior member, Richard Milhous Nixon.1 Fifty years after the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched its October 1947 investigations of communism in Hollywood, and fifty years after Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, before the same committee, in August of 1948, of having been part of Chambers's Soviet spy ring in the 1930s, the echoes of those painful days continue to resound. Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of Chambers (19011961 ), whose autobiography, Witness, was for years a bible of postwar American conservatism.2 Alger Hiss (1904-1996) had been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a star among young New Deal bureaucrats. Hiss transferred to the State Department in 1936; in 1945 he served as secretary-general of the conference that created the United Nations. In 1946 he became the president of the Carnegie Endowment. In 1948 the seemingly patrician Hiss was accused by Chambers, then a senior editor at Time, of having participated in a Soviet espionage ring in Washington in the 1930s. In a confrontation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Hiss, who had at first denied knowing Chambers, said that he had known Chambers slightly, but under the pseudonym George Crosley. As a result of his testimony before HUAC and a grand jury, Hiss was eventually tried for two counts of perjury. A first trial resulted in a hung jury; the second jury convicted Hiss for having "lied twice to the grand jury, first in saying he had not seen Chambers after July 1, 1937, second in saying he had not transmitted the spy papers to Chambers" (431). Hiss denied until his death that he had been guüty. For decades, many liberals believed...

The Politics of Cafe Society

Cafe Society is above all founded upon publicity. Its members often seem to live for the exhibitionist mention of their doings and relations by social chroniclers and gossip columnists. . . . In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth. Not the gentleman's club, but the night club, not Newport in the afternoon but Manhattan at night; not the old family but the celebrity. -C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956 By any reckoning, Cafe Society, a New York City cabaret that opened in 1938, deserves a prominent place among twentieth-century American shrines to the politics of culture. A patron descending into the small basement on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village might be met by a doorman wearing worn-out gloves and might be served by flip waiters clad in tails. To the left of the foyer, a simian-looking Adolf Hitler hung suspended from the ceiling along with papier-mache send-ups of wellknown Manhattan society icons. The club admitted customers and showcased talent regardless of race, tweaked high society, eliminated chorus lines and cigarette girls, treated its employees well, served good food, and offered pointed political satire. But the rise and fall of Cafe Society conjures up a subtext involving another kind of politics: of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance and break-ins, of plots to assassinate Hitler and sell the atomic bomb to the Soviets, of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings, blacklisting, and jailing for contempt of Congress. Historians working at the margins of cultural studies have been much concerned lately with delineating the boundaries of these two kinds of politics -cultural and traditional, or orthodox in their own lives as well as in those of the subjects they study.' Are teaching and scholarship a substitute for, a distraction from, or a com

The photo league

Abstract For the Photo League, a group of documentary photographers working in New York City from 1936 to 1951, 1947 was a particularly ominous year. In documenting the ghettoes and poverty-stricken neighbourhoods that the organization knew well, the group formulated a policy of openly declaring its discontent at a capitalist system that it saw as failing the working class, and through photographs made by the members the organization intended to effect social change. However, on 4 December the Photo League, along with seventy-nine other organizations and eleven schools, was listed by the Attorney General, Tom C. Clark, as ‘either totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive’.1 The Attorney General's list was based on information furnished by the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and was compiled by concentrating on the actions of each suspected organization's leaders. If the leader's actions consistendy followed a ‘subversive party line’, then the whole organization was considered to be suspect. Such assumptions were based on the FBI's philosophy that any person, no matter how innocent, who associated with other persons with ties to the Communist Party of America (CPA) automatically became contaminated with the disease of communism, which then spread throughout an organization. The publication of the list quickly led to panic and outrage, especially when persons and groups realized that avenues to disprove guilt by association were unavailable.2

Politics in the Pumpkin Patch

IT WAS A TYPICALLY SULTRY Tuesday morning that third day of August, 1948. Summoned on short notice by the unpredictable House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a contingent of Washington reporters with note-pads and pens in hand filed into a large imposing hearing room usually reserved for the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and waited for the unscheduled public session to begin.' HUAC was up to something, of that the reporters were sure. As was often the case, the committee had begun its morning session in Executive Session, meeting behind closed doors in their cramped Old House Office Building hearing room. Standing in the hallway, waiting for the day's witness to reappear so they could snap another photo, reporters barely had enough time to smoke a cigarette when staff informed them that the committee had abruptly adjourned, having elected to reconvene in open session. Six congressmen, all critics of Harry Truman's democratic administration, along with the press corps, crossed New Jersey Avenue, entered the ornate committee room, and waited for the chairman to pound his gavel.2

FBI Files on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)

FBI Files on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). 9 reels with printed guide. 35 mm microfilm. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1986. $405.) Get access Steven Rosswurm Steven Rosswurm Lake Forest College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 4, March 1988, Pages 1405–1406, https://doi.org/10.2307/1894521 Published: 01 March 1988

Interpretation of the “City Hall Riots” as a Function of General Dogmatism

On May 13, 1960, rhe House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) continued its hearings (begun several days earlier) on the wing activities in the San Francisco Bay area. A disturbance took place outside of the chambers of the San Francisco City Hall, in which the hearings were being held. Students and other individuals picketing the hearings inside of the ciry hall clashed with police. This disturbance had nation-wide publicity at the time of its occurrence and has remained a subject of controversy. The demonstrators held that they did not initiate the clash, and further, that they were well within their legal rights to picket the proceedings. J. Edgar Hoover, in a statement (the Hoover report) described the picketing as communist inspired and said that the demonstrators were responsible for the clash with the police. The movie, Operation Abolitio~, endorsed by the HCUA, presents the position that communist inspired students were responsible for the disturbance. The record, Sounds of Protest, produced by students, presents a poinc of view in direct opposition to that expressed in Operation Abolition. Quice clearly, two opposing positions can be taken with respect to this disturbance. A study by Simos (1956) demonstrates that there is a relation between the degree of generalized ethnocentrism shown by Ss and their attitudes toward specific controversial issues. The present study is an attempt to determine whether degree of general dogmatism, as measured by Rokeach's ( 1956) D scale (which presumably measures authoritarianism of the left as well as of the right) is related to the position take by Ss regarding the demonstrations against the HCUA.