The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), commonly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative body within the United States House of Representatives.
Established in 1938, its primary mission was to probe allegations of disloyalty and subversive actions among private citizens, government employees, and organizations suspected of having connections with both fascist and communist groups.
Bertolt Brecht was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to determine whether he was a communist and narrowly escaped becoming one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten”.
In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed various people working in the Hollywood film industry to testify at Congressional hearings as to whether Communist agents and sympathizers had been inserting propaganda in American films.
Walt Disney was the first to testify at the hearings, naming specific people as probable Communists.
Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, testified that a small clique within his union was using “communist-like tactics” attempting to control union policy. Reagan’s allegations against friends and colleagues led to arguments between Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, eventually leading to their divorce.
A group of Hollywood A listers including director John Huston and actors Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland and Danny Kaye, organized the Committee for the First Amendment to protest the government’s targeting of the film industry.
Of the 43 people on the witness list, 19 declared that they would not give evidence. Eleven of these 19 were called before the committee. Of the eleven “unfriendly witnesses” only Bertolt Brecht eventually answered questions, the others citing their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly.
The HUAC Committee formally accused the Hollywood Ten of contempt of Congress, and began criminal proceedings against them in the full House of Representatives.
The Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted after refusing to answer questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. They were:
| Alvah Bessie, screenwriter Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director Lester Cole, screenwriter Edward Dmytryk, director Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter | John Howard Lawson, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter |
The FBI had translated “The Decision/The Measures Taken” in the 1940s, saying it promoted “Communist World Revolution by violent means.”
Brecht appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) on October 30, 1947.
Despite being fluent in English, Brecht made use of a translator to slow down proceedings and some of his answers were that his plays were being mis-interpreted.
The day after his appearance at HUAC, Brecht left the United States forever and flew to Paris before finally settling in East Germany.
A year later Brecht said:
“They weren’t as bad as the Nazis. The Nazis never would have let me smoke. In Washington they let me have a cigar and I used it to create pauses between their questions and my answers.”
A month after the hearings, on November 17, the Screen Actors Guild under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, voted to make its officers swear a pledge asserting they were not a Communist. On November 24 the House of Representatives voted 346 to 17 to approve citations against the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress.
Later that day, following a meeting of the Motion Picture Association of America which included Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, and Albert Warner, they issued “the Waldorf Declaration” stating that
“We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ, and we will not re-employ any of the 10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist”.
The HUAC hearings failed to turn up any evidence that Hollywood was secretly disseminating Communist propaganda but in early 1948, all of the Hollywood Ten were convicted of contempt of congress for not testifying and they began serving one-year prison sentences in 1950.
In March 1961, folk singer Pete Seeger faced a jury trial and was found guilty of contempt of Congress. He received ten concurrent one-year jail sentences. However, in May 1962, an appeals court determined that the indictment had deficiencies, leading to the reversal of his conviction.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was elevated to the status of a permanent, standing committee in 1945 and, starting in 1969, it adopted the name House Committee on Internal Security. In 1975, the House discontinued the committee, and its responsibilities were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.
The committee’s inquiries into anti-communism are frequently linked with McCarthyism, despite the fact that Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. Senator, was not directly associated with the House committee. McCarthy served as the chair of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the U.S. Senate, not in the House.
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Further reading
Man Equals Man and the Elephant Calf: And the Elephant Calf
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht, et al (Paperback – February 2001)
The Good Woman of Setzuan — by Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley
Collected Stories — by Bertolt Brecht, et al; Paperback
Mother Courage and Her Children — by Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley
Brecht Collected Plays Vol 1 — Bertolt Brecht, et al (Paperback – Methuen Publishing Ltd – 30 August, 1994)
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui — Bertolt Brecht, et al (Paperback – Methuen Publishing Ltd – 3 September, 1981)
Brecht Collected Plays Vol 6 — Bertolt Brecht, et al (Paperback – Methuen Publishing Ltd – 30 August, 1994)
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