HUAC's Strange Life: Dickstein's Soviet Pay, Euripides and a Santa Suit

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The House Un-American Activities Committee grew out of earlier inquiries that shifted targets with each decade. The 1918 Overman Committee began by probing pro-German sentiment among American brewers and pivoted to Bolshevik propaganda after the Russian Revolution. The 1930 Fish Committee went after communists and the ACLU, and the 1934 McCormick-Dickstein Committee examined fascist propaganda and the alleged Business Plot. Its co-chair, Representative Samuel Dickstein, was secretly paid $1,250 a month by the Soviet NKVD, which cut him off in February 1940 for delivering too little. In 1938 the Dies Committee under Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr. made the anti-subversive inquiry formal, and Representative Joe Starnes asked Federal Theatre Project head Hallie Flanagan whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist and whether Euripides preached class warfare.

Made a standing committee in 1945, HUAC declined in 1946 to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, with John Rankin calling it an old American institution, and in 1947 opened nine days of Hollywood hearings that produced the Hollywood Ten and a blacklist of more than 300 artists. The 1948 Alger Hiss case, built on Whittaker Chambers's testimony, gave the committee its biggest boost. By the 1960s its power was fading: police hosed student protesters down the steps of San Francisco City Hall in 1960, and Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman answered subpoenas with costumes and mockery. Renamed the Internal Security Committee in 1969, it was abolished in January 1975.

• The committee's Yellow Report cited Buddhism and the number of Japanese fishermen on the coast as signs of espionage in the incarceration camps.
• Only about 10 percent of blacklisted artists ever rebuilt careers in entertainment, and some, like Dalton Trumbo, wrote under fake names.
• High Noon, written by blacklisted Carl Foreman, was widely read as an allegory for HUAC.
• HUAC's film Operation Abolition drew a rebuttal from the ACLU called Operation Correction.
• Rubin appeared once as a Revolutionary War soldier and once as Santa Claus, and Hoffman was arrested for wearing an American flag shirt.