WHO'S UN-AMERICAN NOW?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000200140023-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 15, 2004
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: July 7, 1968
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 20041M/0 '' NQMP70B00338R000200140023-6
TD'MS BOOK REVIEW
July 7 1968
11
W
w?'s U -A e ?ic m Now?
THE COMMITTEE. 71raordinarr
C76armser of the House Committee on Un.
Po: .,.aV r,tr -.
Ar encan Activity By //alter Goodman.
Foreword by Richard H. Rovere. II-
lustratcd. 564 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux. $10.
, OR a good many years, "The
:! Committee" has been known by
its initials-HUAC. But to those of
a certain age it will always be "The
Dies Committee," after its first chair-
man, the ebullient Martin Dies of
Texas. Now in its 30th year, the
Committee has flourished under Dem-
ocratic and Republican majorities
alike.
Walter Goodman, the author of
two earlier books on advertising
and business ethics, is the Commit-
tee's fifth biographer; its early and
middle years were covered in stu-
dies by Father A. R. Ogden ("The
0 Dies Committee," 1945) and Robert
K. Carr ("The House Committee on
Un-American Activities," 1952), and
six years ago its merits and defects
were vigorously explored in books by
William F. Buckley (pro-"The Com-
mittee and Its Critics") and Frank
Donner (con-""The Un-Americans").
Mr. Goodman's addition to this li-
brary is more comprehensive and, de-
MR. TAYLOR is professor of law at Co
lumbia University and the author of
"Grand Inquest: The Story of Congres-
spite its bulk, more readable than
any of its predecessors.
The Committee's life falls into'
three well-marked periods: the war
and prewar time of Martin Dies, ,the
postwar decade when public concern
with political subversion reached its
peak, and the years since about
1956, during which the Committee
appears to have become a permanent
but less prominent part of the politi-
cal landscape. During the late forties
and early fifties under the chairman-
ship of Congressmen J. Parnell
Thomas of New Jersey, John S.
Wood of Georgia, and Harold H.
Velde of Illinois, the Committee's
hearings involving such figures as
Elizabeth Bentley, Alger Hiss and
Whittaker Chambers, and Bishop G.
Bromley Oxnam, were almost con-
stant front-page news. Since then
H.U.A.C. has generally operated in
the shadow of more exciting doings
by other investigating committees,
by which such names as Charles
Van Doren and Bernard Goldfine
have been inscribed in the footnotes
of American history.
Although his work is not devoid
of analysis and appraisal, the au-
thor's approach is essentially that of
the historical journalist. The story
of the Committee is presented as a
rich and gaudy swatch of American
history. "What a circus!" bellows
Joe Curran, as he takes the witness
chair. Martin Dies confuses labor
leader John Reid with John Reed,
who lies beneath the Kremlin wall.
His colleague Joe Starnes of Ala-
bama staggers Hollie Flanagan of
the W.P.A. Theater Project tly, asking
whether one Christopher Marlowe
was a Communist. Other literary
and historical howlers stud the pages.
These echoes of a time when Shir-
ley Temple was really Shirley Temple
and the Committee's chief-of-staff,
J. B. Matthews, complained that she
had, albeit unwittingly, served Com-
munist interests by sending greetings
to a French Communist journal, are
.undeniably entertaining. So many
half-forgotten names and faces are
brought to mind and life that a
strange nostalgia bemuses the reader:
Oh! that Martin Dies and his zany
crew,
What cra-a-azy things they used to
do!
But of course that is not the whole
story. Touched with burlesque from.
time to time though it be, the Com-
mittee is much more than a show.
It is the fruit of hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars annually appropri-
ated by the House of Representatives
in order to amass voluminous dossiers;
to question thousands of individuals
about their beliefs and affiliations,
usually left-wing and thought to be
extreme; and to publish hearings and,
reports that require 25 pages as list-
ed in a useful appendix to this book.
In the light of 30 years' experience,
surely one may justifiably echo Little
Peterkin's question about the Battle
of Blenheim. What good came of it?
Very little, according to the author.
The Committee "has established a
record not of laws but of Fifth
Amendment pleas and contempt cita-
tions and disrupted lives." To be
sure, it has been good medicine for
the liberals, exposing the intellectual
lopsidedness that makes them alert
to dangers from the right while blind
to those from the left. The Commit-
tee has also helped "to keep us from
smugness" and has served as "a
stimulant to an apathetic constitu-
tion." But its career has had mean-
ing only through its "casualties,"
that is "the people whose reputations
and livelihoods have been blithely
hazarded," and the "proudest exhibit
of the Committee's 30 years is its
spacious files filled with the names,
associations, activities and public
utterances of thousands of Amer-
icans."
 C
0
Approved For a ease - -
Martin Dies, chairman
Mr. Goodman is hardly the first
to render a negative verdict on the
Committee and its works, and while
the mainstream of criticism has come
from liberals, other sources are not
lacking. In 1953 the late Congress-
man Francis Walter, then a member
and later chairman of the Committee,
described the Committee's use of sub-
poenas, during hearings involving the
deceased Harry Dexter White, as "the
most incredible, insulting, un-Ameri-
can thing that I've encountered in
my 21 years in Congress." The fol-
lowing year another member-Ber-
nard Kearney, Republican and re-
tired general-described the staff sit-
uation under Chairman VeIde as "rot-
ten" and "intolerable." When he be-
came Chairman in 1955, Mr. Walter
promptly proposed to abolish
H.U.A.C. and turn its functions over
to the Judiciary Committee.
But the House did not do so. Every
year proposals to abolish the Com-
mittee are defeated by overwhelming
votes, while generous financial sup-
port for its work is enthusiastically
extended. Surely these votes do not
accurately reflect the division of
House opinion about the value of the
Committee's work. But most of the
members believe it unwise to incur
the enmity of the Committee's sup-
porters, and cast their votes as a
sop to Cerberus.
of the first House Un-American Activities Committee, with Representative
In 1959 ex-President Truman, never
one to mince words, called the Com-
mittee the "most un-American thing
in the country today." Mr. Goodman
strongly disagrees: " . . . unless one
is prepared to blank out large and
significant patches of our history,
there is nothing un-American about
the Un-American Activities Com-
mittee."
To a degree the issue is semantic.
Despairing of finding a meaning,of
"un-American" sufficiently precise
for legal purposes, Judge Henry W.
Edgerton observed that: "in a literal
sense whatever occurs in America is
American." But of course that is not
the sense in which the word is used
in the title of the Comniittee,-the
thrust of
Noah Mason, August, 1939.
which is that too many things
in America. are dangerous im-
ports.
What things are those, and
whose identification of them is
to be trusted? Surely the prob-
lem is still with us today and
sharper than ever. Comment-
ing on the assassination of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., one or-
ganizational leader declared
that "the concept of nonvio.
lence died with him; it was a
foreign ideology anyway-as
foreign to this violent country
as speaking Russian."
In responsible and represent-
ative hands, the Committee
might have helped to illuminate
those values that are essential
to American democracy, and
explore the cause and course of
threatening trends. But, as Mr.
Goodman's work abundantly
demonstrates, too many of the
Committee's leaders have been
neither responsible nor repre-
sentative, and have fallen far
short of even minimal stand-
ards of political competence
and integrity. In that sense,
alas, Mr. Truman was right. ?
Approved For Release 2004/02/09 : CIA-RDP70B00338R000200140023-6