The Un-Americans

     by Paul Wolf, 6 May 2003



     Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 17:34:18 -0400
     From: Paul Wolf <paulwolf@icdc.com>
     Subject: The Un-Americans


       1. McCarthy Hearings Online

       2. Secret Joe McCarthy Hearings Opened After 50 Years (5/6/03)

       3. Excerpt from The Un-Americans by Frank Donner (1961)



           McCarthy flourished during Cold War anxieties, with
           some parallels to today's fear of terrorism. Levin said
           the hearings were a reminder of "tactics (that) can be
           used to quiet dissenters" and the need to resist "those
           who try to still voices of disagreement."



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     McCarthy Hearings (1953-54) online at:
     http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/senate12cp107.html



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     Secret Joe McCarthy Hearings Opened After 50 Years
     By Joanne Kenen, Reuters, Reuters, 6 May 2003


     WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's
     scorched earth investigation into supposed communist infiltration
     of America's most sensitive institutions, secret transcripts
     released on Monday add another layer of tarnish to his place in
     history.

     The 5,000 pages from his closed-door hearings show no smoking
     guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of conspiracy theories
     on which he built his political career.

     "McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions," said Don
     Ritchie, the Senate's associate historian who began poring over
     the transcripts in 1976. He said the files won't provide fodder
     for any revisionists arguing McCarthy was right.

     No one McCarthy summoned went to jail -- even the few who were
     convicted of contempt won on appeal. But his probes ruined lives
     and careers with unproven hints of communist taint.

     The documents were released in a joint venture authorized by Sens.
     Carl Levin of Michigan and Susan Collins of Maine, then
     respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate
     Permanent Committee on Investigations, McCarthy's platform.

     McCarthy flourished during Cold War anxieties, with some parallels
     to today's fear of terrorism. Levin said the hearings were a
     reminder of "tactics (that) can be used to quiet dissenters" and
     the need to resist "those who try to still voices of
     disagreement."

     Perusing the 1953-54 transcripts, released online and in the
     Senate hearing room where McCarthy held forth, shows that McCarthy
     in private was like McCarthy in public.

     His interrogation of an obscure engineer named Benjamin Zuckerman,
     who had worked briefly with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was a good
     example of his brow-beating style.

     Zuckerman testified that on his rare encounters -- four in eight
     years -- with a former college acquaintance later implicated in
     the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, the two young men had
     talked about women, audio equipment, and the best way to cook
     eggs. McCarthy snarled that he was "either the damnedest liar" or
     "a case for a mental institution."

     "Did you ever tell anybody that you believed in communism,"
     McCarthy's lead lawyer Roy Cohn once asked a security guard named
     Francesco Palmiero, who had testified that he had walked past some
     communist meetings near his housing project.

     Composer Aaron Copland, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, and poet-
     playwright Langston Hughes are among the handful of celebrity
     witnesses who appear in these transcripts.

     Hammett refused to answer many questions. Hughes sought to explain
     how racism shaped his political views. Copland, when McCarthy
     harshly pressed for his views of U.S.-Finnish relations, calmly
     replied, "I spend my days writing symphonies, concerts, ballads
     and I am not a political thinker."

     But mostly McCarthy picked on the obscure and the expendable, file
     clerks, engineers, mid-level bureaucrats.

     He questioned one former army engineer as to why he hadn't known
     his mother was a communist when he was a boy. He threateningly
     spoke of looming perjury charges when witnesses said they didn't
     discern any future spies in their college classes 15 years
     earlier. He badgered a World War II veteran on whether he enlisted
     on the orders of the Communist Party.

     "I know you are not as dumb as you are trying to make out," he
     told a secretary named Doris Powell who had once worked for what
     she later discovered was a leftist publication, menacingly urging
     her to get some legal advice or face the consequences.

     A Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy served in the Senate for only
     a decade and his headline-grabbing investigations lasted a mere
     two years. His final years, from his censure in 1954 until his
     death in 1957, he served in relative oblivion.

     But McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself.
     Anti-communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on labor
     or early civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and
     intensified in the late 1940s with the Cold War.

     Ironically, it was McCarthy and his excesses that not only gave a
     name to the anti-communist drive, it was also his excesses that
     brought about its end. "Once he was censured, the whole
     anti-communist issue dried up," Ritchie said.

     Ritchie recalled that before McCarthy aide Cohn died, he dismissed
     allegations he had destroyed lives. "Name them." he demanded.
     "Here they are, these are the names," said Ritchie.



     The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was the House of
     Representatives' equivalent of McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee. If
     Frank Donner's article isn't enough backgound for you, then see
     Ellen Schrecker's The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with
     Documents at:
     http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-age.html

     - Paul


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     Excerpts from The Un-Americans, by Frank Donner, 1961


     REVOLT OF THE NON REVOLUTIONARIES

     For more than a decade we have been steadily losing our freedoms.
     The obsession with anti-Communism and security, transformed into a
     national psychosis during the McCarthy era, resulted in systematic
     attacks on free speech, press, assembly and opinion. The policing
     of dissent by agencies of government became a routine feature of
     our lives. Witness the sedition prosecutions under the Smith Act,
     the intimidations of the FBI, the rash of loyalty oaths, the
     security-screening apparatus which blankets American industry, the
     emergence of the informer as hero, the wave of deportation and
     denaturalization proceedings against the foreign-born, the
     restrictions on the right to travel, the manifold attacks on
     organizations and on the freedom of association, and the
     congressional witch hunts.

     True, the excesses of the McCarthy era have abated somewhat: the
     Army, the State Department, and our libraries abroad are no longer
     fair game for witch hunts. But our entire society is still
     infected with the contagion of caution, fear and silence. At the
     root of the conformity which has engulfed us is a pervasive
     self-censorship, a loss of the sense that freedom is every
     American's birthright. Our people have come to live in terror of
     being publicly identified with the minority. The questioners, the
     "agin'ers," the come-outers and the dissenters simply feel
     themselves to be too menaced by their environment to question, to
     be against, to come out and to dissent. As the domestic frontiers
     of our freedom contract, the Government drenches the world with
     renewed boasts Of our free democratic life -- an irony which has
     amused even our friends and well-wishers abroad.

     The mounting opposition to HUAC stems in part from the conviction
     that it has contributed enormously to our present plight. Because
     of its repressive "fall-out," its impact on our basic freedoms has
     been incomparably more destructive than that of any other
     government activity. To be sure, dissent has been stifled by
     restrictive legislation, but it has been wounded far more deeply
     by fear of public exposure and reprisal, the Committee's most
     potent weapon. Like salt flavoring the sea, the threat of HUAC's
     activities pervades the entire process of individual and group
     expression on the vital issues of our time ... Civil liberty has
     been poisoned by fear of the Committee-fear of its subpoenas, fear
     of being "named" by its informers, fear of joining or remaining a
     member of a "cited" organization, fear of signing petitions, fear
     of supporting causes or movements which might be condemned by
     HUAC. In the view of many, we cannot find our way back to freedom
     unless HUAC is abolished.

     The Committee's highly personalized use of its powers has also
     stirred a torrent of protest. HUAC is supposed to obtain facts in
     order to help Congress discharge its legislative responsibilities,
     Instead, it is charged, HUAC uses the investigative power to
     attack the witness---"to disgrace private persons," as President
     Kennedy put it.

     A hearing is essentially a trial of the witness suspected by the
     Committee of subversion -- but without any of the traditional
     safeguards of a trial. Its purpose is to alienate the
     witness-defendant from the protections of his society and to bring
     about his ruin. This use of the investigative power is called
     "exposure," and has been a self-proclaimed Committee objective
     from the very beginning.

     HUAC's hearings have emerged as a modern counterpart of the
     ancient pillory, a form of public humiliation and punishment. The,
     pillory was an invitation to the community to work its will on the
     helpless victim; so is a HUAC hearing. The use by HUAC of its
     hearings to expose and punish was condemned by the United States
     Supreme Court in 1957 as a perversion of the power to investigate.
     "We have no doubt," the Court ruled in the Watkins case, "that
     there is no congressional power to expose for the sake of
     exposure." Yet the Committee continues to point the finger of
     suspicion, accuse, try and punish.

     Here are some facts about the anatomy of these hearings: In the
     first place, it is not a Federal crime to be a member of the
     Communist Party. In fact, the Internal Security Act of 1950
     provides:

          Neither the holding of office nor membership in any
          Communist organization by any person shall constitute
          per se a violation of . . . this section or of any other
          criminal statute.

     But the Smith Act makes it a crime, among other things, to
     advocate knowingly the desirability of overthrow of the Government
     by force or violence; to organize or help to organize any society
     or group which teaches, advocates or encourages such overthrow of
     the Government; or to become a member of such a group with
     knowledge of its purposes. Evidence that a person is or has been a
     member of the Communist Party or that he attended Party meetings
     or associated with Party members would be links in a chain of
     proof that might lead to the discovery of evidence needed for a
     Smith Act prosecution.

     Let us assume for a moment that you are, or have been, a
     Communist. This is a belief to which you have a constitutionally
     protected right. Furthermore, you have never indulged in any
     criminal act in connection with this belief.

     Should you plead the First Amendment (which protects your right to
     have a belief), you will be in contempt of Congress and liable to
     a jail sentence and fine, for the courts have ruled that the free
     speech and assembly protections of the First Amendment are not a
     valid reason forrefusing to answer HUAC's questions. An answer
     might be a clue or a link in a chain of proof of a Smith Act
     violation. Should you plead the Fifth Amendment (which protects
     your right not to incriminate yourself), then, because you refuse
     to deny that you are a Communist, in the context of a HUAC hearing
     you are guilty by inference (it does not matter that guilt by
     inference has been specifically condemned by the Supreme Court --
     remember we are now in a HUAC hearing). Despite the fact that a
     plea of the Fifth is supposed to protect the innocent witness who
     fears unfounded prosecution, HUAC uses it to defame and disgrace
     the witness. Suppose you are ready to gamble with the risks of
     prosecution and to answer the $64 question right out, "Yes, I am a
     Communist (or have been)?" And the answer is very simple -- if you
     answer HUAC's $64 question, in effect you waive the right to plead
     the Fifth to any questions that follow: thus you are forced to
     inform on former friends or associates, or go to jail on contempt
     charges.

     But you may be completely innocent of any connection with the
     Communist party whatever. You still have the right to plead the
     Fifth in order not to "open the door" to further enquiry. If you
     swear under oath that you are not, and never have been, a
     Communist, you may waive the right to use the Fifth Amendment to
     avoid answering any questions about other organizations which the
     Committee chooses to ask you. And even if your denial is not a
     waiver, it would make the plea of the privilege about other
     organizations so revealing as to be meaningless. Furthermore, if
     you answer in the negative and HUAC refuses to credit your denial,
     you may be indicted for perjury.

     These are the mechanics of a system which weighs and disposes of
     our lives. These are the rules of a game as weird as the legal
     proceeding, described in Kafka's prophetic novel The Trial, in
     which an arm of the state, moved by dark, concealed and vengeful
     compulsions, plucks out and punishes men for phantom crimes.

     In the course of its never-ending investigations, it has blasted
     the careers of hundreds of professionals-writers, artists,
     teachers and lawyers. It has made "unemployable" numberless
     talented men and women in the mass-communications media and has
     forced the discharge and blacklisting of many workers in industry.
     Hundreds have been branded for life as traitors and reduced to
     pariahs. It has ruined the personal lives and mental health of
     scores of its victims; its subpoena has been a trigger of
     unbearable anxiety and fear. A HUAC appearance, or a subpoena,
     contributed to the suicide or untimely death of at least 15
     persons. It has often been argued that HUAC's toll of freedom,
     livelihood, career, reputation and peace of mind is necessary --
     an unavoidable evil, a small price to pay to safeguard our
     security. The liabilities, it is claimed, are more than offset by
     the assets. But when we open the legislative account ledger and
     make a reckoning we discover that after all the Committee's scare
     headlines, its never- ending bouts with claimed threats to our
     existence and its sensationalized disclosures about the Red
     menace, it can claim credit for only one statute: the Internal
     Security Act of 1950, which was vetoed by President Truman and
     still has not been approved by the United States Supreme Court.
     One need not be a thrall of Moscow to conclude that on the record
     the Committee has not justified its existence.

     HUAC is not merely the undisputed leader in its field; it is
     adjudged by many, both in and out of Congress, "the most powerful
     Committee in Congress." HUAC's life and times can only be
     described in superlatives: it has broken more records than Babe
     Ruth. A 23-year-old marathon investigation into a single subject
     -- Communism and subversion -- is in itself a wonder of the
     legislative world. In the course of its stupendous,
     generation-long, nonstop probe, the Committee has published more
     than 50,000 pages of hearings and reports -- easily outdistancing
     all other congressional committees combined in this respect. It
     has issued over 5,000 subpoenas -- another record -- for it is
     estimated that this exceeds the subpoenas issued by all other
     congressional committees combined for the same period. During the
     term of its functioning as a standing committee, it has cited for
     contempt five times the number of witnesses cited by all other
     congressional committees combined in the same period. It has heard
     thousands of witnesses, some two or three times. In addition to a
     long list of Washington hearings, it has conducted hearings in
     about 25 cities -- in some of them several times.


     BIRTH OF A CONGRESSIONAL MONSTER

     The House Committee on Un-American Activities never had -- and was
     never intended to have -- a legitimate legislative function. Its
     birth certificate is a blueprint of the exposure system.

     The resolution of 1938 under which the Committee functioned on a
     temporary basis authorized it to investigate (1) the extent,
     character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the
     United States, (2) the diffusion within the United States of
     subversive and un-American propaganda that is instigated from
     foreign countries or of a domestic origin and attacks the
     principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our
     Constitution.... This resolution thus planted the Committee's
     investigative authority with both feet in the middle of the First
     Amendment. "Propaganda" is a method of communicating ideas. It was
     impossible to investigate "propaganda" without evaluating those
     ideas -- praising some and attacking others. This was censorship
     by investigation.

     When the Committee was created, Chairman Martin Dies acknowledged
     that any attempt to prevent or punish unAmerican activities by
     legislation "might jeopardize fundamental rights far more
     important than the objective we seek. ... But he found what to him
     was an ideal solution. His Committee was, not going to introduce
     legislation banning or even policing un-American activities --
     propaganda or otherwise. That would be unconstitutional. In
     unconsciously ironic deference to our fundamental laws, he
     promised to confine himself to exposure -- independent of a
     legislative end. He would expose and at the same time safeguard
     the rights of the people against legislative trespass. What could
     be fairer?

     HUAC was designated as a "special" investigating Committee with
     limited tenure. It was to submit its final report on January 1,
     1939, a scant seven months after its creation. Chairman Dies told
     the House that he was quite agreeable to this time limitation and
     that he would finish the job in short order.

     By the time January rolled around , however, Dies was pleading
     with the House to extend his mandate for a full year. This the
     House did on the Chairman's claim that there was more
     un-Americanism and more subversion in the land than he had
     realized-and, unsaid, more newspaper headlines than an obscure
     Congressman could get by any other means.

     The antisubversive prober has a natural advantage in the
     investigative sweepstakes: the deep-seated, emotional
     anti-Communism of most Americans. The more farfetched his
     disclosures, the more welcome they are. He deals in issues which
     trench to the heart of the Nation's existence. Their very gravity
     commands that he be given the benefit of the doubt. And he knows
     that if he strikes the right chords of sedition and treason with
     sinister overtones of plotting and secrecy, a receptive press will
     carry his accusations and warnings to every American hearth. Above
     all, he must name names -- he must expose -- for it is always open
     season on Reds and nothing is more productive of headlines than an
     attack on individuals.

     If the antisubversive demagogue knows how to go about it, he can
     launch a spiraling probe which it is impossible to stop. Overnight
     he becomes a man with a mission, a scourge of traitors a defender
     of the Nation, a patriotic awakener. Millions hang on his
     pronouncements; his press conferences are thronged with eager
     reporters demanding new disclosures. He lectures Presidents,
     shares the spotlight with the FBI as a savior of our security, and
     becomes an authority on foreign policy whose warnings it is
     politically dangerous to ignore.

     In 1939, the Committee reported that while Congress lacked the
     power under our Constitution to deny people the right to teach
     what it deemed to be subversive doctrines, "it does have the right
     to focus the spotlight of publicity upon their activities."

     In 1940, the Committee avowed that its real purpose was not
     legislation but rather "to inform the American people of the
     activities" of subversive organizations by "turning the light of
     pitiless publicity" on them.

     The Committee rapidly developed the notion that it had a unique, a
     special, function -- exposure. "This is the only agency of
     government that has the power of exposure," it reported in 1941.
     And in 1943 it announced that "discovery and exposure" were its
     "special function" by mandate from the House. In that year it
     published the names, positions and salaries of 563 Government
     employees, alleged to be members of the American League for Peace
     and Democracy, because "the Committee felt that the Congress and
     the people were entitled to know who they were." This was only one
     of the many lists which the Committee published in the forties in
     the exercise of its self-assumed exposure function.

     The Dies Committee never doubted for a moment that it could use
     the power of investigation to attack individuals, organizations
     and ideas on political grounds without violating the Constitution.
     It seemingly never occurred to the Committee that the First
     Amendment would be meaningless if its prohibitions were binding on
     the Congress as a whole but not on its investigating committees.
     And it actually boasted that it was engaging in a nonlegislative
     activity -- the exposure of individuals. The Committee's
     "temporary" status had become a fiction: its mandate was renewed
     each year until 1943, when its tenure was extended to two years.
     Rooting out un- Americanism became a way of life.

     Chairman Dies had really struck pay dirt, from his point of view,
     three months after the Committee was launched -- in the testimony
     of just two witnesses. The first was John P. Frey, President of
     the Metal Trades Department of the AFL, who for three days in
     August 1938 gave testimony attacking the CIO as a Red-dominated
     organization. Without any corroborating evidence at all, Frey
     cited scores of CIO unions as communistic and listed 283 alleged
     Communists in CIO unions.

     Frey was succeeded on the witness stand by Walter S. Steele,
     Chairman of the American Coalition Committee on National Security,
     a confederation of 114 patriotic organizations. His testimony was
     significant because it marked the emergence of the vigilante
     network that became so important to the functioning of the
     Committee. Steele, who had testified before earlier antisubversive
     committees, charged some six and a half million Americans with
     subversion. He placed the names of 641 allegedly communistic
     organizations on the record and made Red charges against thousands
     of individuals. He even cast suspicion on certain Catholic
     organizations, the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and the
     American Society of International Law. Following what has become a
     persistent HUAC pattern, Steele bad little or nothing. to say
     about Fascist organizations, which, at the time he testified, were
     fairly prominent throughout the country.

     Steele's testimony was too rambling and turgid to capture the
     headlines. But Frey had organized his material with the press in
     mind: his list of names was presented at the beginning of his
     testimony; each individual name was numbered and was followed by
     an identifying description together with data including the home
     city of the victim. The press blazed with headlines: "Communists
     Rule the CIO. CIO Communist-Dominated From Top to Bottom, Frey
     Testifies; He Names 283 Reds." Many of those named were discharged
     and blacklisted in industry. The Committee gave Frey a stunning
     weapon against his arch foe, the CIO, and at the same time found
     an opportunity to perform some antilabor bloodletting on its own
     account.

     Thus the technique of exposure was born: the Committee would
     provide a libel-proof forum for charges of subversion against
     named individuals made without cross-examination and for no
     legislative purpose; the press would publish the lists of names as
     well as the inflammatory trumpery accompanying the names as a news
     story deserving the most prominent coverage because it was
     testimony before a Congressional committee; the community
     (including the employer) would do the rest.

     Kenneth G. Crawford, analyzing Dies's success, pointed out:

          It was probably the very success of the Frey testimony
          as an experiment in publicity that awakened Dies and his
          associates to a full realization of the potentialities
          of the political gold mine that they had struck. From
          Frey on it was catch as catch can with no holds barred.
          No patrioteer was too wacky to be taken seriously.

     While Frey was the prototype of a long line of friendly witnesses,
     J. B. Matthews, a former Methodist missionary, teacher, pacifist,
     socialist and reformed Marxist, was the first of a series of
     Committee ideologists and policy-makers. Matthews not only built
     up the Committee's elaborate file system, but, according to the
     late Howard Rushmore, was the "brain- truster back of the
     Committee's relentless exposures." Matthews gave the Committee its
     basic orientation at a time in 1938 when it was floundering, and
     taught the Committee the neo-Archimedean precept that with enough
     names in a file, one could expose the world. Matthews unburdened
     himself for some ten hours in executive session as a witness
     before the Committee, and shortly thereafter became its research
     director. Matthews was not only a prodigious identifier, but an
     indefatigable bloodhound of concealed "fronts." In his own
     testimony he reeled off over 100 organizations which he claimed we
     linked in various hidden ways to Moscow. It was Matthews who was
     responsible for the charge that Shirley Temple was a Communist
     dupe. Matthews left the Committee in 1944 to become the
     behind-the-scenes high priest of the exposure operation and the
     custodian of what is said to be the most Gargantuan file on
     subversive names and activities ever assembled. In 1948 Matthews
     was chief investigator for an antisubversive investigation of the
     University of Chicago, and in 1953 he served for two weeks as
     executive director of Senator McCarthy's antisubversive probe, but
     was forced to surrender that post as a result of nation-wide
     protests over an article in which he linked at least 7,000
     Protestant clergymen with subversion. His prior testimony remained
     on the record, unquestioned by the Committee. Meanwhile, the
     Committee was discovering other powerful reasons to remain in
     existence. An antisubversive probe had found broader objectives
     than the exposure of individuals or the probers' political self-
     aggrandizement. The ultimate aim was the exploitation of
     anti-Communism as an instrument of political leverage, a means of
     handicapping the achievement of legitimate national goals. The
     Dies Committee unceasingly attacked the New Deal by discrediting
     its programs as communistic and un-American. It undermined the
     implementation of these programs by exposing and calling for the
     dismissal of "subversive" New Dealers.

     With all of its great power, the Committee was to have no
     legislative responsibilities. In theory an agent of Congress, its
     functions were in no way related to the duties of Congress. Its
     real purpose as an investigating committee was to smite the
     political infidel, not to report findings to Congress. The result
     could only be to emancipate the Committee from the supervision of
     the House, which exercises ultimate control over its c ommittees
     through the lawmaking process. It could "investigate" whomever and
     whenever it wanted without concern about its legislative
     productivity. Congressman Dies had explained that this new power
     of exposure was more valuable than legislation because it avoided
     constitutional problems! There was no need to waste time in
     legislative hearings or in drafting reports on dull and technical
     bills; let the other standing committees, with a clearly defined
     jurisdiction, do this grubby work.

     While other standing committees had to get authority from the
     House to conduct investigations with the power of subpoena, the
     Committee had carte blanche. Just what is un-American activity?
     The law defines crimes against the state, and persons committing
     such crimes are admittedly un-American. But is it un-American to
     hold an unpopular opinion, or take an attitude that is also held
     or taken by Communists?

     Thus, the permanent Committee was born, fully equipped with all of
     the basic components of the exposure system: (1) it was
     functionally independent of the body which created it, because (2)
     it lacked legislative responsibilities; (3) its investigative
     power was shaped to inquisitorial ends and conferred upon it by
     (4) a charter to probe speech and ideas so broad and vague as to
     impose no meaningful restraints upon it.


     ANATOMY OF A HATE GROUP

     In the fall of 1960 a fire-bomb was thrown against the front of
     the office of the Citizens' Committee to Protect American Freedom,
     a Los Angeles group formed to oppose HUAC. The bomb shattered the
     door and started a fire. The bombing came shortly after a huge
     swastika was smeared on the door of the Citizens' Committee
     offices. The mailbox was shot off. An attempt was made to set fire
     to the home of Frank Wilkinson, the group's secretary, a leading
     figure in the movement to abolish HUAC (now serving a one-year
     jail term for contempt of the Committee). Wilkinson's wife
     received anonymous telephone calls threatening his life.
     Wilkinson's life insurance was canceled. Log Angeles students who
     joined him in a TV program in opposition to HUAC barely escaped a
     beating by thugs after they left the studio. In the spring of 1961
     the New York office of a HUAC abolition group was broken into and
     vandalized.

     On January 2, 1961, a group of members of the American Nazi Party
     descended on Washington to picket the White House in support of
     HUAC. On the same day a screaming, threatening mob of
     Fascist-oriented refugees besieged a meeting in Washington's All
     Souls Unitarian Church held in support of a HUAC- abolition
     campaign. The atmosphere was electric with imminent violence,
     bloodshed was averted by prompt action of the police, who formed a
     protective cordon around the meeting. When an outbreak seemed
     inevitable, the police requested that the meeting be terminated as
     quickly as possible and supplied a motorcycle escort to protect
     the participants on their way out of the city. The picket signs of
     these fanatics were stored in Chairman Walter's office.

     Two weeks later an inflamed champion of the Committee burst into
     the office of University of California Professor Thomas F.
     Parkinson, poet, Guggenheim fellow, author and teacher. The
     intruder carried a Bible in one hand and a double-barreled shotgun
     in the other. He raised the gun and fired. The shots ripped into
     the back of a graduate student, Stephen Mann Thomas, and brought
     instant death. Professor Parkinson suffered a shattered jaw which
     required skin grafting and plastic surgery,

     The killer, John Harrison Farmer, was apprehended the next day. In
     his briefcase was this note: "Death to all Communists. Death to
     all fellow travellers. Death to every friend of Communism. Death
     in the name of God to all the evil hosts of Communism and its
     followers." Farmer had also marked for death Assistant Professor
     Richard T. Drinnon. Farmer did not know these men. Both of them
     had opposed HUAC and were members of SLATE, a campus anti-HUAC
     organization. He had read about their activity and was
     particularly exercised by an article attacking Parkinson for his
     criticism of the Committee.

     When a Congressman votes against an appropriation measure for
     internal improvement, he may get disapproving mail. But a vote in
     the House against HUAC results in a shower of abuse, obscenity and
     hate. Many of these letters are unprintable. Here are a few mild
     samples of congressional mail after the 1961 vote on HUAC's
     appropriation:

     Please, get yourself a one way ticket to Red Nazi Russia.

     Drop dead. This would be the height of responsibility to this
     wonderful Christian America.

     You are sharing the objectives of the insidious and diabolical
     Communist Conspiracy. Such flirtations with treason are gaining
     for you and the despicable notoriety of being at the very least an
     unbalanced, soft headed, bleeding heart. We, who now reverently
     treasure the memory of our Nathan Hales, have a venomous contempt
     for you Benedict Arnold types.

     This is the harvest of hate, and it dramatizes the role of the
     Committee in the underworld of the professional hate groups.

     Hate groups are established fixtures in American public life.
     Their pathology has been frequently described by social scientists
     as an expression of prejudice rooted in hate and defeat. They
     emerge in response to a need for a scapegoat, an outlet for the
     aggression spawned by frustration. Their world is one of black and
     white, of sweeping, unalterable generalizations. To the bigot --
     organized or unorganized -- the country is on the brink of
     disaster. He sees and invents evidences of imminent doom
     everywhere. He is obsessed by the conviction that there is one
     evil which explains all the ills of his society and of the world.
     Salvation can come only by destroying, by liquidating or punishing
     his "pet hate" -- be it Catholic, Negro, Jew or foreign-born.

     The world of the hate group is structured on myth, stereotype and
     falsehood. It protects itself from the inroads of reason with an
     enormous arsenal of polemic and rhetorical weapons. The spokesman
     of the hate group masterfully echoes all the paranoiac fears of
     his followers and makes every challenge a confirmation of the
     power of the enemy. He slanders, lies, exaggerates, evades and
     forges to keep alive the particular terror on which his particular
     group feeds. The successful merchant of hate develops a special
     fear-breeding vocabulary which oozes contempt and aggression. He
     is a master of propaganda -- the more lurid the better.

     The bigot is drawn to the hate group out of an unrestrainable need
     for action. He is not sustained by mere belief or conviction. He
     has a hunger for direct action, for violence, born of a passionate
     resentment and anger. Means, not ends, are all-iinportant to him.
     All our hate groups are unified by a hazy nostalgia for a pure
     America, peopled by 100% native-born, white Christian Americans
     and cleansed of the evils which, to them, defile it. But they have
     no affirmative program beyond the goal of destroying the objects
     of their hate. They are exclusively anti-Negro, anti-Catholic,
     anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign-born.

     In addition to their special obsessions, the hate groups share an
     enthusiasm for the political and social canons of the extreme
     right. Thus they believe that America is not a democracy but a
     republic, that the income tax should be abolished, foreign aid
     ended, States' rights restored and the powers of the Supreme Court
     restricted. Inevitably, hate groups have an affinity for one
     another, based on a consciousness of kind, common emotional needs
     and interlocking prejudices. The White Citizens Councils are
     anti-Negro but they are also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The
     American Council of Christian Churches is anti-liberal Protestant,
     but it is also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The Circuit Riders
     are anti-liberal Protestant but also antiSemitic, anti-Negro and
     anti-labor.

     Each hate group is thus naturally allied to all the others. All of
     them have a common dedication which unites them in a special way;
     they are fanatical crusaders for HUAC.

     For the 23 years of its existence HUAC has had close and
     continuous ties with the hate underworld and the more
     "respectable" pressure groups which work with it. The Dies
     Committee's first investigator was Edward F. Sullivan, a publicity
     specialist for native Fascist groups and a former professional
     labor spy. Two years before his appointment he was the principal
     speaker at an Asheville, North Carolina, convention of native
     Fascists. (Sullivan's speech was described in the local press as
     "what Hitler would have said had he been speaking.") He also was a
     prominent speaker at Nazi Bund and Coughlinite gatherings. Another
     Committee collaborator was Harry Jung, Chicago propagandist of
     anti-Semitism. J. B. Matthews, the scholar of the patrioteer hate
     underworld, and Walter S. Steele, one of its principal spokesmen,
     were pillars of the Dies Committee. One of Dies's strongest
     admirers and collaborators was Joseph P. Kamp, a professional hate
     merchant who was editor and publisher of a Fascist magazine, The
     Awakener. Kamp's Constitutional Educational League had a working
     relationship with the Committee. Kamp had access to the
     Committee's files, in return for which he supplied the Committee
     with thousands of names. The Educational League gave Dies an
     "Americanism" award; it was subsequently mentioned in a Federal
     conspiracy indictment.

     Dies enjoyed a similar relationship with Father Charles E.
     Coughlin, Fascist priest, leader of the Christian Front. Through
     his radio program and his publication, Social Justice, Father
     Coughlin disseminated quantities of Nazi propaganda. He too
     provided Dies with lists of names and propaganda material. In 1939
     he issued these instructions to his followers:

          In your appreciation of the work accomplished by Dies
          employ some of your leisure moments to write him a
          letter of encouragement. In fact, a million letters
          brought to his desk would be an answer to those who are
          bent on destroying him and the legislative body he
          represents.

     Paid Nazi agents were enthusiastic about HUAC and its work. A
     banquet for Dies was given by Fascist propagandist Merwin K. Hart
     in December 1939 (Mr. Hart, incidentally, was a contributor to
     Chairman Walter's most recent congressional campaign. His National
     Economic Council was charged a few years ago by the Buchanan
     Committee with "ill-concealed anti-Semitism.") Among those who did
     honor to Dies were Bundist James Wheeler Hill, and German-American
     Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn. When asked what he thought of the
     Committee, Kuhn replied, "I am in favor of it being appointed
     again and I want them to get more money." Convicted Nazi agent
     George Sylvester Viereck said, "I have the highest respect for the
     Committee and sympathize with its program." The Federal
     Communications Commission reported that "Representative Dies
     received as many favorable references in Axis propaganda in this
     country as any living American public figure." This was during the
     war.

     Dies shared speaking platforms with Fascist James True, inventor
     of a special blackjack called the "kike-killer," and Reverend
     Edward Lodge Curran, Father Coughlin's lieutenant. Under Dies, the
     Committee fed material and articles by its members to Reverend
     Gerald B. Winrod's Defender and Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith's
     Cross and the Flag, both anti- Semitic hate sheets. Smith and
     Winrod showered Dies with praise -- as did the entire hate
     underworld.

     For example, William Dudley Pelley, the head of the pro-Nazi
     Silver Shirts, said, "I formed the Silver Legion in 1933 . . . to
     propagandize exactly the same principles." The Ku Klux Klan's
     Imperial Wizard, James Colescott, asserted, "[The Committee's]
     program so closely parallels the program of the Klan that there's
     no distinguishable difference between them." In 1942, Imperial
     Wizard Colescott arranged a private interview with Dies which
     resulted in his urging Klansmen everywhere "to support the work of
     the Dies Committee." In the Klan's publication, The Fiery Cross,
     for January 1942, he praised the Committee's "great service to our
     country."

     It is hardly surprising that Representative Samuel Dickstein told
     the House in 1941: "110 Fascist organizations in the United States
     have had, and have now, the key to the back door of the
     Un-American Activities Committee."

     Dies was under constant attack by liberal forces for his failure
     to investigate Fascist organizations. But Dies used his powers to
     shield these groups and made token investigations only to preserve
     the appearance of impartiality.

     These critics failed to appreciate the underlying realities of the
     Dies Committee's relationship to the hate underworld. They had
     become partners in a joint enterprise. The hate groups gave HUAC
     names, propaganda and political support. HUAC used the power of
     the government to strike at the hatists' targets. Then this
     material, fed into the Committee's files and burnished with the
     prestige of officialdom, was used by the underworld in its press.
     As David Wesley has summed it up:

          What these long years did, was to create a solid
          establishment: an acre of files, a thoroughly
          indoctrinated staff, a firm tradition, a network of
          contacts and sources of information, a conditioned
          pattern of behavior, a methodology, all intricately
          interwoven into the whole fabric of the underworld of
          the peddlers of hate, with its interlocking directorship
          and its broad, cross-pollinating system of propaganda
          organs.

     After HUAC was reconstituted in 1945, it continued its
     collaboration with the hate groups. The Committee was dominated by
     Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, one of the most virulent
     anti- Semites ever to sit in Congress. Rankin had been honored by
     the Nazis and did not hesitate to attack Jews and Negroes as
     inferior peoples whenever he found an opportunity. On November 18,
     1943, he announced that I.F. Stone, a Washington liberal
     journalist who had attacked him for his anti-Semitism, was really
     named Isidore Feinstein. When a group of women called on him to
     protest his bill denying the right of franchise to all American
     soldiers, Mr. Rankin said of these ladies: "If I am any judge,
     they are Communists, pure and simple, probably more simple than
     pure. They looked like foreigners to me. I never saw such a
     wilderness of noses in my life." Speaking on the floor of the
     House on February 21, 1944, he referred to Walter Winchell as "the
     communistic little kike."

     In the first major debate on the new HUAC in the House, members of
     Congress complained that HUAC was doing business at the same old
     stand. Representative Hook of Michigan described the Committee as
     a "sounding board for the un- American Fascist groups," and he
     informed the House that "Gerald L. K. Smith [the notorious
     anti-Semite] is not only the Committee's adviser on un-
     Americanism, he is also the confidante of the Committee's plans."
     Representative Savage of Washington complained: "It seems to me
     all Gerald L. K. Smith has to do is yell 'sic 'em' and the
     Committee's counsel takes after whatever party Mr. Smith is peeved
     at." Representative O'Toole of New York said: "The Committee has
     permitted itself to become a forum for the dissemination of racial
     and religious theories that are not part of our democracy."

     The Wood-Rankin Committee's hate-group connections sparked a
     number of investigations in the forties. One of the first was the
     attempt to purge the radio of a group of liberal commentators who
     were critical of the hate groups. In October 1945 the Committee
     obtained 78 scripts of radio commentators. In December the
     Committee introduced a bill which would "by proper and frequent
     announcements clearly separate and distinguish programs consisting
     of news items from those programs based upon, or consisting of,
     personal opinion or propaganda." On February 2, 1946, Rankin said,
     "I want to tell you now, some of this stuff that is going over the
     air should be stopped. Of all the dirt and filth I ever heard,
     those filthy attacks on me and the Committee on Un- American
     Activities by Walter Winchell are the worst."

     The Committee then turned its investigative talents to proving
     that the United States is not a democracy -- the favorite thesis
     of the lunatic fringe. Early in 1946 liberal organizations which
     had concerned themselves with "democracy" were reminded in letters
     from Committee Counsel Adamson that "this country was not
     organized as a democracy." Adamson wrote as follows to columnist
     Drew Pearson: "Several people have called to my attention the
     closing line of your Sunday night broadcast, 'Make democracy
     work.' I should like very much to have your definition of the word
     'democracy' as you are using it over the radio. If you will be
     good enough to supply this information, I will give the matter
     further consideration to determine whether it should be called to
     the attention of the members of the committee for such action as
     they deem proper."

     The Hollywood probe of 1947 also had strong hatist links. The
     files on Hollywood had been developed by Fascist publicist Edward
     F. Sullivan, and the pressure for the investigation had come from
     an assortment of native Fascists. Gerald L. K. Smith finally
     turned the trick. In 1948 he wrote in The Cross and the Flag, "We
     do take credit, we Christian Nationalists, for the recent
     investigation into Hollywood."

     In 1949 HUAC made a sally into the field of education. It asked
     more than 100 schools and colleges to submit textbooks for a check
     on subversive content. This probe, too, was inspired by a
     lunatic-fringe outfit, the National Council for American
     Education, which was ran by the notorious anti-Semite Allen A.
     Zoll. It boasted on its Board of Governors the Coughlinite priest
     Edward Lodge Curran and a Committee member, Representative (late
     Senator) Karl Mundt.

     With the emergence of McCarthyism, HUAC was no longer limited to
     old- fashioned hatist and crackpot sects for investigative
     suggestions and support. Hate became everybody's business. The
     function of the private organization in HUAC's operation continued
     to be important. It's principal role was to act as HUAC's agent
     and collaborator in the hearings held to expose HUAC's targets.
     The old-line professional hate groups together with patriotic
     societies, reactionary fraternal orders, individual bigots and
     patrioteers (the Network), undertook the punishment of HUAC's
     victims, a perfect outlet for the aggressive action the hate group
     craves. The primary weapons used against HUAC's victims are
     denunciation and discharge pressures. The hatist adds to these his
     own special weapons: the anonymous telephone call, the "crank"
     letter, boycott, vandalism and physical violence. During the
     fifties, too, HUAC's dossiers and files -- the house that hate
     groups built -- multiplied fantastically. The two-way flow of
     names into the Committee and of "official" smears back to their
     hatist source -- became a vast standardized operation. In
     addition, these files were being stocked with names and propaganda
     from new sources: the FBI files and ex-Communists. Every hate
     group was able to become a little do-it-yourself HUAC. These
     groups, too, emerged as the major consumers and distributors of
     HUAC propaganda, which they disseminated in millions of copies. It
     costs them nothing and gives the cachet of official support to
     their own programs. HUAC, on its part, is a national clearinghouse
     for the merchandise of hate.

     The Committee is not merely functionally linked to hate groups.
     Its own operations reflect the hate-group syndrome. It is itself a
     hate group. HUAC's extremism, its exaggerations, deceptions, and
     distortions, its willful oversimplification of the complex, its
     division of the world into black and white, its response to all
     forms of criticism with the Red smear, its overheated,
     fear-mongering rhetoric, and its rivers of antidemocratic
     propaganda, are the techniques and practices which have been made
     familiar to us by the operations of the hate groups.

     HUAC hates the "subversive" in much the same way that the
     anti-Semite hates the Jew, the racist hates the Negro, the
     fundamentalist hates the Catholic, the patrioteer hates the alien.
     But unlike its frequently frustrated non governmental
     counterparts, HUAC can do something about its hate. It can give
     direct expression to its hostility by punishing its object. What
     tells us most clearly that HUAC is a hate group is the exposure
     system. Exposure speaks the language of the hate group; it is hate
     in action.

     All hate groups fantastically exaggerate the power of their
     enemies and find everywhere frightening new proofs of their evil
     influence. This formula is basic in HUAC's operations. HUAC has a
     great advantage over other hate groups in its application of this
     formula, for HUAC's enemy is undefined -- a "subversive" is
     whoever HUAC says is a subversive. The web of subversion -- the
     "conspiracy" -- constantly expands to meet HUAC's needs. When HUAC
     itself comes under attack, this technique is exploited to heroic
     proportions. Since Communists oppose HUAC, all criticism of HUAC
     becomes proof that (a) the critic is a Communist or a supporter, a
     dupe, an ally, etc., and (b) the "conspiracy" is more powerful
     than ever for it includes not only the "hardcore" Communists but
     the supporters, dupes, allies, etc. Thus criticism of HUAC
     confirms the desperate need to continue HUAC, for it alone can
     save us from this gigantic conspiratorial octopus. HUAC naturally
     tries to bring its targets as close as possible to the core of
     evil -- actual Party membership. To achieve this it has developed
     a special logic of its own based on crudely strained inferences,
     falsified proofs, and emotionally defined terms. The problem of
     assimilating the non-Communist to the Communist is solved in a way
     which has become HUAC's trademark: The use of guilt by
     parallelism, mutual object and association. (An amusing current
     example is Chairman Walter's charge that a newspaper story
     criticizing HUAC members' extravagance and abuse of expense
     accounts "directly played into Communist hands.") As HUAC applies
     and expands this formula it becomes clear that it regards all of
     its opponents as subversive.

     The John Birch Society Committee has also opened its welcoming
     arms to another HUAC alumnus, ex-Congressman Kit Clardy. He, too,
     should find its objectives and methods congenial. Clardy was a
     perennial rabble- rouser who idolized Senator McCarthy. He was of
     the no-nonsense, "let-me-at-'em" school of Red hunters.

     When a lawyer once complained to Clardy that HUAC had been rough
     on his clients, Clardy replied:

          Pretty rough on those Communists? If we had been really
          rough on them we would have taken them apart. As it was,
          we were treated in a way that I think exhibited on their
          part the utmost contempt for the Congress and their
          government, and they left the stand and lied like
          horsethieves and we called them back and they took the
          fifth amendment again. If I had my way and we had any
          power, they would really have been punished by putting
          them in the dungeon the first time. ... A few years ago
          this committee had, and may have at the moment the right
          to put witnesses down in the dungeon underneath the
          Capitol if they refused to cooperate with the committee.
          Some day perhaps I will test that out.

     As far as the record shows, Clardy never did realize his dream of
     putting witnesses in "the dungeon." But he did conduct hearings in
     May 1954 in his home district, Flint, Michigan, in which he not
     only abused the witnesses but incited violence against them. He
     recalled that during his college days in 1937, his college mates
     had thrown UAWCIO organizers into the Red Cedar River. He said: "I
     was proud of those kids. They should also have tossed into the
     river the then Governor, the late Frank Murphy." Clardy's conduct
     of the hearing contributed to the lynch spirit which swept the
     city. A number of workers were dragged from their jobs in
     automobile plants by lynch gangs and beaten; hostile witnesses
     were evicted from their homes; their families had to go into
     hiding to escape the fury of mob hoodlums; the office of the
     lawyer for the witnesses was smeared with red paint.


     EXPOSURE: THE CONGRESSIONAL PILLORY

     In 1951, Congressman Walter, presiding as a Committee member at
     Honolulu hearings, made no secret of his hope that the "power of
     public opinion" would implement the Committee's exposure of
     witnesses.

     The exposure system is a concealed and, indeed, an
     unconstitutional form of law enforcement; it has no place in a
     tripartite system of government such as ours, which requires that
     each of the three coordinate branches of government --
     legislative, executive and judicial-respect the integrity of the
     others.

     Legislative power is concerned with the enactment of laws setting
     general standards of conduct which apply to everyone.
     Investigations in aid of the legislative power are directed at
     patterns of conduct, at behavior which reflects a general
     condition, illuminating the need for a new law or measuring the
     effectiveness of an existing law. An investigation -- a
     legislative investigation -- cannot be conducted for the purpose
     of passing judgment on and determining the guilt of an individual.
     The prosecution of individuals under duly enacted law is the
     exclusive responsibility of the law-enforcement branch, which is
     part of the executive department. The determination of guilt or
     innocence falls exclusively within the province of the courts,
     which is the judicial department. Or, to put it simply, one body
     makes the law, the second carries out the law, the third judges
     guilt or innocence under that law. Our governmental structure was
     erected on this tripartite underpinning, not for reasons of
     symmetry or convenience, but because no better way could be found
     to reconcile the use of governmental power with the claims of
     individual freedom.

     As John Adams noted in 1775:

          A legislature, an executive, and a judicial power
          comprehend the whole of what is meant and under stood by
          government. It is by balancing each of these powers
          against the other two, that the efforts in human nature
          toward tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and
          any freedom preserved in the Constitution.

     About 150 years later, one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices,
     Brandeis, pointed out:

          The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by
          the convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to
          preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose
          was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the
          inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the
          governmental powers among three departments, to save the
          people from autocracy.

     The doctrine of separate and coordinate powers is a fundamental
     precondition to the functioning of democratic government itself,
     the means of preserving a system of checks and balances. Its
     purpose is not merely to correct abuses of power in a particular
     instance, but to discipline its exercise, to institutionalize
     arrangements which will prevent abuse from arising in the first
     place. Its integrity is the profound concern of all of us.

     There are aspects of our Government which cannot be squared with
     the separation-of-powers principle. For example, there is no
     question that the executive veto power is a legislative function
     and that the senatorial power to confirm appointments is an
     executive one. The development of our administrative agencies has
     imposed a considerable strain on this principle, for those bodies
     exercise both executive and judicial functions. But their
     activities are subject to judicial review to ensure that they do
     not exceed their charters or violate individual rights.

     Whatever modifications the principle of separation of powers has
     suffered since the Constitution was framed, its basic substance
     remains intact.

     Throughout U. S. history, Congressional committees have
     occasionally abused their power: they have investigated for
     nonlegislative ends, to expose individuals for public condemnation
     or to act as a court to try individuals. The hunt for headlines,
     political ambition, the zealousness to benefit or injure a
     particular economic group, or to influence the outcome of a labor
     dispute, the temptation to have a fling as a prosecutor (many
     lawyer-Congressmen suffer from a "Mr. District Attorney" complex)
     -- all of these, singly or in combination, have led Congressional
     committees on occasion to depart from legislative ends.

     What must be emphasized here, however, is that, in contrast to the
     occasional lapses of other committees, the UnAmerican Activities
     Committee systematically and deliberately uses its powers for non-
     legislative ends. Moreover, these nonlegislative ends are achieved
     not in the context of a legitimate inquiry, but through an
     investigative apparatus which is specially tailored to do one
     thing and one thing alone -- injure the witness. Exposure is not
     the byproduct of the Committee's hearings; it is the primary
     product -- the way in which the Committee exercises its
     jurisdiction. It is not that the Committee fails to comply with
     the rules of the game. It plays a different game in a different
     ball park. HUAC has dedicated itself to the special and unique
     function of exposure. Thus the Committee and its members have
     openly and proudly dedicated themselves to the abuse of the power
     vested in them by Congress. In 1947 the Committee explained that
     its function was to "expose activities by un-American individuals
     and organizations which, while sometimes being legal, are
     nonetheless inimical to our American concepts and our American
     future.

     In the same year, J. Parnell Thomas, then Chairman of the
     Committee, proclaimed in a radio address:

          The chief function of the Committee ... has always been
          the exposure of un-American individuals and their
          un-American activities. This is based upon the
          conviction that the American public will not to tolerate
          efforts to subvert or destroy the American system of
          government, once such efforts have been pointed out. The
          Congress' right to investigate and expose undemocratic
          forces is as established and untrammeled as our
          Constitution.

     This fine-sounding phrase merits examination. The citizen might
     reasonably ask: Established by whom? And when? And obligingly, in
     1951, the Committee provided their answers in a publication
     distributed in more than a million copies (100 Things You Should
     Know About Communism): "Exposure in a systematic way began with
     the formation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
     May 26, 1938 ... with instruction from the United States House of
     Representatives to expose people and organizations attempting to
     destroy this country. That is still its job, and to that job it
     sticks." There's that word "expose" again. Yet the Congressional
     instruction to the Committee says nothing about "exposure" -- this
     was merely Martin Dies' interpretation of the function of the
     Committee.

     Whatever may be the ultimate purpose of a bona fide legislative
     investigation -- recommendations for new legislation, the
     appraisal of a law already on the books, a check on the conduct of
     executive personnel -- it centers on some problem, some issue,
     some evil: e.g., "payola," the prizefight racket, the operation of
     the Port of New York Authority, the high price of drugs. The need
     to throw factual light on "the matter under inquiry," is
     all-important. It determines the nature of the evidence to be
     sought, the kind of witnesses, the number, time, and place of
     hearings. When the subject is exhausted, the investigation is
     over.

     But HUAC has created for itself an inexhaustible subject. It can
     always find "subversives" who must be exposed. The "issue" with
     which the Committee is grappling is supposedly Communism. But the
     hearings held are designed to shed light not on the issue, but on
     the witnesses. HUAC's basic purpose is dual: first, publicly to
     identify the political affiliations of the witness and his
     associates and, second, to punish the witness because of those
     affiliations.

     The identification itself is a serious interference with the
     rights of free speech and association. To a far greater extent
     than is generally acknowledged, our political and social freedoms
     are dependent on privacy and anonymity.

     The secrecy of the ballot, the confidential character of
     trade-union membership, the assurance that subscribers will
     receive publications in "plain brown wrappers" -- in these and in
     scores of other ways we recognize that free association, thought
     and speech require privacy and anonymity.

     Indeed, free speech became possible only when the conditions of
     life made anonymity possible. The right remained an abstraction in
     a pre- industrialized society when each man was at the mercy of
     his neighbor's prejudices and was bound to the mores, the religion
     and the politics of his community. As Professor John P. Roche has
     written, "In a very real sense the very impersonalization of urban
     life is a condition of freedom; it is quite possible to live
     differently from one's neighbors without their knowing, much less
     caring, about deviation." The right to dissent on fundamental
     questions, proclaimed by the founders and enshrined in the
     Constitution, is meaningless without anonymity.

     The conformist pressures under which we live have made individual
     speech so perilous that organizations arc indispensable to give
     dissent strength and anonymity. But now it has become dangerous
     even to join organizations. The Committee relentlessly seeks the
     identification through "pitiless publicity" of members of
     organizations in order to undermine our most meaningful freedom --
     freedom of association. Thousands might be willing to join the
     Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) because they are
     convinced that nuclear testing is the road to final incineration.
     But how many are ready to act in the face of the fear that their
     names may be published by the Committee as subversives and
     reprinted in the newspapers of their community?

     The Committee's major achievement has been the transformation of
     the hearing into a public identification device which destroys the
     privacy essential to freedom. Because it strikes at the
     preconditions of freedom, the ever-present threat of being dropped
     into the Committee's goldfish bowl has been more stifling than all
     the repressive legislation on the books.

     The effectiveness of the Committee's use of the identification
     device has shaped the basic strategy of modem repression.
     Compulsory disclosure has emerged in our time as the most widely
     used and most effective form of restraint on our basic freedoms.
     Senator Dodd insists that Dr. Linus Pauling turn over to him the
     names of American scientists who assisted him in circulating
     petitions in opposition to nuclear testing. New Hampshire Attorney
     General Wyman sends Dr. Willard Uphaus to jail for refusing to
     divulge the names of guests at the World Fellowship Camp. A
     Florida legislative committee jails the Reverend Theodore R.
     Gibson for his contempt of the committee in refusing to produce
     membership lists of the NAACP. [Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee,
     Virginia, Georgia and Louisiana have all tried to destroy the
     effectiveness of the NAACP by requiring the disclosure of its
     membership lists.]

     Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view,
     particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group
     association.... It is hardly a novel perception that compelled
     disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may
     constitute an effective restraint on freedom of association....
     [The] vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy
     in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to
     preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group
     espouses dissident beliefs.

     The theories which justify identification and compelled disclosure
     lured many liberals in the forties. "Stand up and be counted"
     became the battle cry when the cold war touched off a drive for a
     means of policing dissent which might not collide with
     constitutional guarantees. Disclosure was widely touted as a
     needed counterpart to the labeling requirements of the Pure Food
     and Drug Act. The provisions of the Securities and Exchange Act
     for public registration of stock issues gave rise to proposals for
     an "SEC of ideas." These theories have been murdered by the
     realities. The supporters of these theories exaggerated the need
     to protect the "consumer" of ideas from deception and ignored the
     key relationship of privacy to freedom. In addition, they failed
     to recognize that disclosure of dissenting opinions would
     inevitably lead to reprisal and punishment by hostile forces in
     the community.

     Nor did they foresee that the requirement that a person disclose
     his own present or past political affiliations can easily lead to
     a requirement that he identify others -- and become an informer.

     The invasion of the privacy of the witness and the restraint upon
     his freedom of association are just the downpayment on the full
     damage which the Committee does to him. The hearing is intended to
     destroy him as a person, to violate his dignity by forcing him to
     confess his political "sins," and to deprive him of his
     livelihood. This is the Committee's punishment for his offense of
     being, not even a proven, but a suspected "subversive" -- not by
     any means only a Communist, or an ex-Communist, but anyone whom
     HUAC expediently chooses to consider "subversive," whether it be
     because of affiliation with the NAACP, or the National Council of
     Churches, or SANE, or any other organization which falls under its
     disapproval. The witness has violated no law; he has merely
     declined to answer the "Sixty-four dollar question," ("Are you now
     or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?") on the
     basis of a constitutional amendment -- usually the Fifth Amendment
     -- privilege against self-incrimination. This plea, as the Supreme
     Court has repeatedly ruled, cannot give rise to an inference of
     guilt. Moreover, even if the witness had been a Communist Party
     member, such membership is itself an exercise of constitutionally
     protected rights of free speech and association. The exposure
     process seeks to brand its victim as subversive for the rest of
     his life on the public record, a visible continuing target for
     hostility and reprisal. The goal is to make the unfriendly witness
     permanently unemployable by attaching to him an indelible stigma
     -- democracy's counterpart of the yellow armbands which Hitler
     forced on the Jews.

     The exposure punishment is actually closer to us than Hitler's
     Germany. We are dealing here with a latter-day version of the
     pillory and stocks, the devices used in the 17th and 18th
     centuries to hold offenders on exhibition in a public place, in an
     uncomfortable and degrading posture. These archaic instruments
     physically punished and humiliated the offender, and at the same
     time exhibited him as a warning to others. Most importantly, the
     pillory held a man helpless in its grasp as fair game for the
     community; it was intended that he be spat upon, cursed, taunted
     and stoned. The pillory was used -- especially in the 17th century
     -- to punish dissenters.

     It is no mean achievement to engineer the punishment of an
     American for nothing more than resorting to rights protected by
     his Constitution. To ensure the destruction of the witness, the
     hearing is carefully staged to reach and inflame, through the
     press, radio and television, a wide audience beyond the hearing
     room: the community at large, employers, bar associations, local
     police authorities, boards of education. The exposure hearing Is a
     highly efficient weapon. Professor Daniel Pollitt, studying the
     results of two years of hearings, showed that of 64 unfriendly
     witnesses appearing before the Committee on whom information was
     available, 50 lost their jobs.

     The knife of exposure sometimes cuts too deeply and wounds even
     the cooperative witness. Justice Black, in the Barenblatt case,
     pointed out that: "Even those the committee does not wish to
     injure are often hurt by its tactics, so all-pervasive is the
     effect of its investigations."

     When the individual's privacy is invaded on the witness stand, the
     shield of urbanization and large-scale industry is transformed
     into a sword. A powerful press rubs the community's and the
     employer's noses in the disclosure. The likelihood is strong that
     the victim is a stranger to his neighbors, without protection
     against their suspicions. The giant size of our employing units,
     their interrelatedness and close ties to the defense
     establishment, make it easy for the Committee to hound the
     unfriendly witness out of employment in an industry. In a highly
     integrated society, the victim has no place to hide, no economic
     or geographic haven of tolerance. By the early fifties, many
     powerful employers (General Electric, Westinghouse, R.C.A.,
     Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, to name only a very few), and indeed,
     whole industries, proclaimed a new ground for automatic discharge
     or suspension -- being an uncooperative witness, or a variant
     thereof.

     In the professions, the Committee struck a gusher.
     Long-established tenure protections were uprooted overnight as
     boards of education made noncooperation with congressional
     committees a ground for termination. Many American universities,
     the United Nations, newspapers, symphony orchestras, private
     schools, social agencies and research organizations adopted the
     same policy.

     It is charged that there are still 200 writers and performers who
     are blacklisted in Hollywood as a result of the operation of the
     exposure system. With the exception of a few New York Times
     reporters, almost all other journalists who were exposed by the
     Committee or its Senate counterpart were fired.

     There are even a number of states which during the fifties denied
     unemployment benefits to those discharged for being uncooperative
     witnesses (Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). In some
     states an unfriendly witness cannot obtain a license to sell
     liquor, tend bar or perform as a wrestler. The District of
     Columbia will not permit an unfriendly witness to tune pianos. And
     the Network once forced the cancellation of a chess tournament in
     Baltimore because a leading contender was an unfriendly witness.

     The victims of the old-time pillory sank or swam on the tide of
     community judgment; thus the pillory of popular dissenters such as
     Daniel Defoe and John Lilburne was made the occasion for public
     triumphs in their honor; but Titus Oates, the notorious informer,
     emerged half-dead from the pillory. The Committee cannot afford to
     leave the fate of its victims to chance.

     For all of the fear-mongering stagecraft of the bearing, there
     remains the possibility that the exposure will not "take." The
     Committee needs some representatives in the community who will
     make sure that all goes well in its absence. To this end, it has
     perfected a system of collaboration with the Network of rightist
     organizations which I have already referred to. Among the most
     prominent of these are: the American Legion, the Veterans of
     Foreign Wars, AWARE, Inc., the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade,
     the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the American Council
     of Christian Churches. In addition, the Network includes scores of
     individuals and ad hoc organizations which spring up in connection
     with particular hearings.

     The Committee's organization Network serves a variety of
     functions. Its members get access to the Committee's files and
     dossiers for the low-down on local suspects. Network members are
     instrumental in bringing the Committee to their communities. They
     are the beaters and the advance men for the hearing and drum up
     favorable publicity. At the hearing, special seats are reserved
     for them.

     But the Network members are more than supporters and well-wishers.
     They act as the Committee's agents and do for it what it cannot do
     for itself. The Committee cannot officially require public or
     private employers to discharge the unfriendly witness -- although
     it frequently comes pretty close to doing so anyway. For such open
     pressures would fatally discredit its claim that the hearing is
     merely a legislative investigation. The Network enables the
     Committee to ensure the injury of the witness and at the same time
     to avoid legal responsibility for it. To make it easier to force
     the witness out of employment, the Committee publishes his name
     over and over again, first in a special index to its public
     hearings, then in its annual report, and again in a huge
     cumulative index.

     Members of the Network visit the local newspapers to develop
     pressure on employers. They personally write, call and visit
     private and public employers. They organize the forced removal of
     unfriendly witnesses from shops -- "run outs," as they are called.
     They circulate copies of the hearings, write letters to the
     newspapers demanding the discharge of the unfriendly witnesses,
     pack board of education meetings called to discuss the fate of the
     teachers who were unfriendly witnesses, and organize telephone
     campaigns to force sponsors to fire performers and writers. The
     dynamics of this partnership between a public agency and private
     power groups was put forth with striking candor by Representative
     Walter before he became Chairman of HUAC:

          Rep. Francis Walter (D. Pa.) who will take charge in the
          new Congress of House activities against Communists and
          their sympathizers, has a new plan for driving Reds out
          of important industries. He said today he plans to hold
          large public hearings in industrial communities where
          subversives are known to be operating, and to give known
          or suspected commies a chance in a full glare of
          publicity to deny or affirm their connection with a
          revolutionary conspiracy -- or to take shelter behind
          constitutional amendments.

     "By this means," he said, "active Communists will be exposed
     before their neighbors and fellow workers, and I have every
     confidence that the loyal Americans who work with them will do the
     rest of the job."


     HOW EXPOSURE WORKS

     Exposure is not simply a process of identifying a witness as a
     subversive at a public hearing. It might be difficult to engineer
     the punishment of the witness merely for exercising his
     constitutional rights, Careful preparation is needed so that the
     identification is made in an atmosphere of pervasive hostility;
     fear must rule people's thoughts and drive out reason so that
     Network groups can call the turn the Committee wants called.

     The Committee strives to inflame the community to destroy the
     subversive and, in the process, to discredit and attack all kinds
     of liberal causes and activities. The exposure system produces a
     planned political overkill.

     The community movement which HUAC shapes to destroy the exposed
     witness spreads like a brush fire. A Committee hearing, if
     properly planned, can influence the decision in a local tax issue,
     kill a housing referendum, defeat slates in trade unions, PTA's
     and cooperative elections, blast the hopes of a candidate for
     Congress or a local council, reduce participation in a community
     forum, force a change in the school superintendent, remove books
     from library shelves, and plunge the community into a miasma of
     suspicion, hate and fear.

     The news of the hearing slowly seeps into the community. A HUAC
     investigator visits a potential witness at home and asks him to
     cooperate. He is warned that a refusal might lead to loss of job,
     or (in the case of a naturalized citizen) to denaturalization. If
     the potential witness remains hostile, he is visited at his job.
     The employer is requested to make the employee see the light.

     When the roster of witnesses is complete, an alert goes out to
     security officers of corporations, boards of education, local
     politicos and other interested individuals. The Committee
     frequently works with a local journalistic tout who gives its
     investigators tips on suspects. In exchange, he is permitted to
     break the story, "Red Probe Due in February"; "Committee
     Investigators Gather Evidence"; "Commie Probe to Call 40, Express
     Learn!" The story quotes a "reliable Committee source" that HUAC
     has uncovered a serious threat to the community's security.

     By now gossip and rumor fill the air with the names of the
     victims. Some of them are called in by their employers for "quiet
     talks." The special hum that fear makes -- of loss of job, of
     injury to family and career -- becomes louder. There are anxious
     telephone calls -- has a stranger appeared with a piece of paper,
     a subpoena? HUAC's supporters are mobilizing. The community is
     still passive, but curious -- waiting for the next development.

     While stoutly insisting that it is a firm policy not to release
     the names of those subpoenaed, HUAC ("a source close to the
     Committee") frequently leaks the names to the press. The
     announcement of the subpoena in advance of the bearing makes it
     easy to develop discharge pressures. The local vigilantes ride
     harder. Resolutions are passed; trials are held; balls are closed;
     shrill-voiced patriots call employers, school boards, and
     professional societies to put them on the spot about subpoenaed
     employees and members.

     At last the subpoenas are actually served -- usually about a month
     before the hearing. Now the Committee issues a press release. It
     frequently promises sensational disclosures of some particularly
     grave peril which will be aired at the hearing ("Probers Fear Port
     Menaced"; "Defense Area Declared Infiltrated"; "Sabotage Threat to
     Be Probed by House Committee"). As the hearing day approaches, the
     press goes into action with "background" stories ("Red-Led Unions
     Here Overdue for Probe"; "Teachers Cell Ten Years Old"). When the
     tempo lags, "dope" stories (inside advance information) appear
     about the unfriendly witnesses ("Area Salesman to Be Called by
     Probe"; "Six Defense Workers Subpoenaed").

     By the time the hearing opens, the normally passive anti-Communist
     members of the community have been gulled into believing they are
     genuinely threatened, while the community Network is riding high
     on a tide of vociferous hostility. The press waits to cash in on
     the scare headlines it has, been running, expectant citizens await
     with alarm the disclosure of information that menaces their
     community; unfriendly witnesses, anticipating the rack for weeks,
     reach a crescendo of anxiety. The cry of "Communist!" has been
     made to echo the panic of an insidious disease once proclaimed by
     another cry, "Unclean!" The climate of fear is prepared, the stage
     set.

     In the typical case, the person who is served with a subpoena
     knows he has been singled out for public exposure. Sometimes he is
     summoned to a private, executive session. He hopes that the
     private session will shield him from further harassment. But if he
     refuses to answer in executive session, he is called for a public
     appearance.

     Here is the statement of a witness who appeared at an open
     hearing, in November 1959, purportedly dealing with subversion
     among Puerto Ricans in the continental United States and their
     homeland:

       1. A representative of this committee first approached me in
          December of 1957 and I was interviewed by him in my office.
          On November 3, 1958, almost a year later, two representatives
          of the committee, Mr. Williams and Mr. Gerhard, visited me at
          my home in New York City. At this time these representatives
          noted that my graduate studies as a candidate for Doctor of
          Philosophy were nearing completion. They suggested that I had
          a promising career ahead as a scientist and that it would be
          a pity to ruin my career before it was even started. They
          stated that if I did not provide them with the information
          they requested, I would be served with a subpoena by the
          committee. They stated that if I refused to testify and
          invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment the consequent
          publicity would result in reprisal by persons outside the
          committee who disapproved of witnesses invoking the Fifth
          Amendment. They reminded me that other careers had been
          rained by such exposure. They stated they had delayed service
          of the subpoena in the hopes of eliciting cooperation. At the
          end of the interview, when they decided they bad been wasting
          their time, they announced that a subpoena would be
          forthcoming and commented, "Let the chips fall where they
          way."

       2. I appeared before the committee in executive session on
          August 6, 1959. At that time I declined to answer questions
          concerning my past or present political associations and
          personal affairs. I was continued under subpoena until today.
          I can only conclude that my summons to this open hearing is
          an attempt to make good the threats to carry out this
          punitive action. It would seem that the broken careers that
          have been left behind by the committee are not an unfortunate
          by-product of information-gathering for legislative purposes,
          but rather a primary purpose of the hearings.

     Torn between his fears and his principles, the unfriendly witness
     is plunged into an agonizing crisis. He knows that the Committee
     demands his physical presence in the hearing room for no reason
     other than to make him a target of its hostility, to have him
     photographed, exhibited and branded.

     Life in a emocracy has not taught him how to cope with these
     attacks. He knows that the vandalism, ostracism, insults, crank
     calls, and hate letters that he and his family have already
     suffered are but the opening stages of a continuing ordeal to
     which he is to be relentlessly subjected. He knows that he may
     lose his job -- if he hasn't already lost it -- and that his
     family faces a kind of community outlawry. Most of all, he is
     tormented by the awareness that he is being punished without valid
     cause, and deprived, by manipulated prejudice, of his fundamental
     rights as an American and of the moral and ethical protections
     which a civilized society extends to every man. He is sickened by
     the realization that an agency of Government has pandered to the
     bigotry of the community and now proposes to make his personal
     life a prey of that bigotry.

     He must choose a lawyer (and pay him a fee). If he is still
     employed, he must explain to his employer that he will be away
     from work -- and why. If the hearing is out of town, he may lose
     several days' work (and incur extra legal fees and expenses). Will
     the witness' wife share his feelings? (A blacklisted witness,
     Alvah Bessie, has written, "Personally, I know of at least fifteen
     broken marriages broken because husband or wife became an informer
     or refused to....") Shall he tell his coworkers about the
     subpoena? Will they understand? Or should he pray that the story
     of his appearance will be buried on the back pages? His youngsters
     have been taunted, shoved off the sidewalks and spat upon. What
     about the children's school? Should the teacher or principal be
     spoken to? Should he consult the minister?

     As he approaches the hearing, the fear, the sense of shock,
     intensifies. A subpoenaed person, interviewed in the course of The
     Fund for the Republic's investigation of blacklisting, describes
     it this way:

     Even though you know what takes place in that committee, you are
     so accustomed to respecting government in all its forms, that your
     fear is enormous. Intellectually, you understand what's happening,
     but you can't control the fear. An insidious form of selfguilt
     sets in. You accept the views of the committee in spite of
     yourself. It's quite bewildering. Afterwards, you find yourself
     guarded and evasive whatever you do, wherever you go.

     While the Committee likes to see the unfriendly witness exposed
     and destroyed by publicity even before the hearing, it is careful
     to shield the identity of the friendly witness, especially if his
     name and role have never before been disclosed. These witnesses
     are frequently issued subpoenas as though they were unfriendly.
     The Committee will not identify them before the hearing because,
     it says, they might be assassinated or their families injured by
     the bloodthirsty Reds. Besides, this heightens the discomfiture of
     surprise, the drama of confrontation, and minimizes the
     possibility of cold feet, second thoughts, or the development of
     discrediting material (always a danger with an informer) which
     might dampen community enthusiasm.

     Moreover, it is important for the friendly witness to share the
     confidence of the unfriendly witnesses until the hearing so that
     he can testify about the hostility with which the unfriendly
     witnesses responded to the Committee, the steps they planned to
     resist it, and the advice that they received from their lawyers --
     something that might be difficult if the friendly witness were not
     subpoenaed and impossible if his "friendly" status were disclosed.
     In the 1959 Pittsburgh hearings, the Committee, with great relish,
     elicited testimony from a friendly informer about the reaction of
     the unfriendly witnesses to the hearing, and how, armed with his
     own subpoena, he penetrated their meetings with counsel and,
     masquerading as an unfriendly witness, shared in the legal advice
     that they received -- a tactic which outraged even the Pittsburgh
     press.

     Ile public hearings throb with hostility. When the hearing is held
     on the road, the Committee arranges in advance to pack the room
     with its Network supporters. The 1954 Seattle hearing was so
     jammed with members of the American Legion Auxiliary and
     Pro-America that many of the witnesses and their lawyers had
     difficulty getting into the bearing room. The friendly witnesses
     are separated from the unfriendly ones and are usually seated in
     an enclosure reserved for the Committee itself, members of the
     United States Attorney's office, the FBI, employers and members of
     the local antisubversive squad. When the hearing is held in
     Washington, similar efforts are made to ensure a hostile audience.
     At the 1953 Wasbington bearing of Reverend Jack E. McMichael, the
     best seats in the hearing room were reserved for members of the
     Circuit Riders, a reactionary religious group which shares the
     Committee's views. Each seat was lined in advance with copies of
     its literature.

     When the hearing begins, the Chairman of the subcommittee
     conducting the bearings makes a statement in which he freshens up
     the fears of the audience and inspires them to finish off the
     unfriendly witnesses. The Reds are more menacing than ever; their
     machinations are more diabolical; do not be deceived by the number
     of individuals who have left the Communist Party; these are
     sinister tactics to screen a revolutionary plot, etc.

     After this ritualistic denunciation, there follows a special local
     appeal. Chairman Velde's opening gambit in the 1954
     Seattle-Portland hearing Is a classic example of the genre:

          There is probably no section In the United States that
          possesses a more strategic importance than this area. We
          members of Congress recognize this fact, and,
          unfortunately, so have enemies of this country.

     In the Committee's world it is always high noon -- there are no
     unstrategic areas, every industry is the most vital to our defense
     and every example of subversion the most devilish it has ever
     encountered.

     Sometimes the need to make a good first headline for the afternoon
     press will drive the Committee into particu larly silly charges.
     In July 1959, the Committee opened hearings on "Communist Training
     Operations" with an announcement by Chairman Walter that one of
     the witnesses had "received orders from the Kremlin, which have
     now been transmitted to the comrades in the United States. ... to
     intensify the training of key revolutionaries in sabotage,
     subversion and penetration." There was not a word of evidence
     adduced in the hearing to support this charge, but it was good for
     a headline: REDS STEP UP SABOTAGE WALTER SAYS.

     When the informer takes the stand, even Arens can do very little
     to recreate the mingled sense of fear, awe and excitement which
     his revelations produced in an earlier day. But Arens does his
     best to invest the performance with melodrama and menace. After
     the preliminaries are disposed of, the Committee gets to the heart
     of the matter-the listing of names. The Committee already has the
     names, but it wants them on the public record. For example
     (Communications, 1957):

     Mr. Arens: Now during the course of your membership in the
     Communist Party did you know a number of people as Communists who
     were engaged in the communications field?

     Mrs. Greenberg: I did.

     Mr. Arens: Do you have before you now a list of names of persons
     that you have given to the staff here, persons known by you to a
     certainty to have been members of the Communist Party?

     Mrs. Greenberg: I have.

     Mr. Arens: As to each of these persons, have you. observed him or
     her i n a closed Communist Party meeting?

     Mrs. Greenberg: I have.

     Mr. Arens: Would you kindly tell us the names of each of these
     persons, and give us just a word of description concerning each
     one of them?

     The witness then proceeded to list the names previously given to
     the Committee. If the witness forgets a name, he is prompted (New
     England, 1958):

     Mr. Arens. May I make the record clear here? The names which I
     have, from time to time, been prompting your memory with and
     suggestions are, in each and every instance, names which you have
     heretofore given us?

     Mr. Penha: That is absolutely correct.

     Mr. Arens: In private sessions, is that correct? Now may I suggest
     the name of the witness then characterizes the political position
     and importance of each person named. In most instances, the
     victims turn out to be of the leadership elite. There are few
     unimportant Communists in the informer's world. Hearings, rarely
     fail to turn up a headline: WITNESS NAMES NO. 1 RED IN AREA PROBE.

     When the informer leaves the stand, he is held in reserve for
     confrontations and for spot appearances.

     It must be remembered that the subpoena and the Committee
     appearance is only one path to the Committee's goal of exposing
     and ruining its victims.

     As the friendly witness recites the list of names, each one
     described and the spelling verified, when necessary, to pinpoint
     the victim, newspaper reporters relay their stories of the
     disclosures. At once the machinery that worked on subpoenaed
     witnesses now goes to work on people who have merely been named.
     The named victim's phone rings; the press is calling for a
     statement. Discharge and trouble strike; the entire community
     becomes an exposure mill. The next edition carries as front- page
     news the list of those named-with photographs when they are
     available. Stores and homes are picketed, calls to boards of
     education are made, boycotts are threatened, blacklists are
     imposed, emergency meetings are called. The named victims can be
     exposed and ruined on a wholesale scale without a subpoena or an
     appearance -- simply on the testimony of an informer.

     The following recital by a named, and subsequently subpoenaed,
     doctor tells it own tale.

     On September 21, while you were questioning a doctor, you asked
     him whether there was a certain type of meeting in my home, and
     you mentioned my name twice, and you spelled out my name to make
     sure that everybody got it, and the following day at 10 o'clock in
     the morning the superintendent of the hospital asked me to resign
     because of the associated publicity. This, mind you, after seven
     and one-half years of excellent service, admitted by the
     superintendent of the hospital.

     The meeting referred to was a "meeting of the medical division of
     the Arts, Sciences and Professions." Finally, the dreaded moment
     arrives. The subpoenaed unfriendly witness, named by the friendly
     witness who has just left the stand, is called to testify. The
     Committee moves in to complete the exposure; members of the FBI
     staff and local Red squad look him over as he moves toward the
     witness stand to fix his face in their minds. He is overborne and
     bewildered by the naked hostility of the governmental forces
     confronting him.

     The picture which the Committee presents is as harsh as it is
     false. The Government of the United States, in the persons of
     members of the Committee, panoplied by its staff, United States
     marshals and friendly witnesses, has trapped an enemy of the
     Nation, lurking and plotting in his community and place of
     employment, and is bringing him to book. The Committee members sit
     high on the judges' seats of the local courthouse (where field
     hearings are usually conducted), or on the dais of the august
     caucus room in the old House Office Building in Washington. The
     witness proceeds to a table below with a gagged counsel at his
     side, to be judged and punished at the same time. And this highly
     direct use of power is as arbitrary as it is harsh, for it is
     unredeemed by any of the procedural decencies of the
     Anglo-American legal system.

     The witness makes his way to the stand, amidst the popping of
     flash bulbs, the grinding of television, the clicking of stiff
     cameras, and the bustle at the press table. His lawyer complains
     of the unnecessary bedlam and requests that the cameras be halted
     and the televising cease. The Committee solemnly explains that it
     has no jurisdiction -- and this frequently in a Federal courthouse
     -- over the photographers or television cameramen until after the
     witness is sworn. This reason for evading Speaker Rayburn's ban on
     the televising of all committee hearings is akin to a claim that
     the Committee would be powerless before a witness is sworn to
     prevent a spectator from smoking or brawling at the place where it
     is conducting a hearing.

     Moreover, the cameramen know very well that the Committee really
     does not intend that they cease photographing or televising the
     witness during his testimony. They usually continue while the
     witness or counsel protests in vain. For example, in the 1958 New
     England hearings the Chairman ruled at the request of a witness
     that "no pictures will be taken during the course of the
     testimony...." The photographers persisted after she took the
     stand. She protested, "The photographers are getting me very
     nervous, Mr. Chairman." Her counsel added, "I thought the pictures
     were not to be taken, according to your own ruling." For this
     simple reminder, counsel was rebuked for "taking this opportunity
     to make speeches."

     When the cameras continued, the witness pleaded, "Please I am very
     nervous when the pictures are taken. Please, I ask that no
     pictures be taken." The Committee, still declining to enforce its
     own ban on photographers, told the witness, "If you would answer
     the question you would not be so nervous." There followed an
     attempt to terrorize the witness into answering with the help of
     the grinding cameras. Another request to halt the televising ("I
     want to call your attention that you are still permitting the
     cameras to go after you already said they would not"), was ignored
     as the Committee pressed harder and threatened contempt. The
     witness again protested, "Mr. Chairman, the photographers are
     still taking pictures here" and they continued to do so until the
     witness left the stand.

     While objections to photographers are frequently futile, a failure
     to object sometimes brings the taunt that the witness is avid for
     publicity. In a recent hearing in Chicago, a 70-year-old witness
     who had been hospitalized with a heart attack asked the Committee
     to consider his age and health in its interrogation. When his
     counsel said that there was no objection to the photographers,
     Congressman Scherer sneered, "You don't think that would hurt his
     heart condition?"

     As in a slaughterhouse, nothing in an exposure hearing is wasted.
     The very first questions asked (residence, occupation, place of
     work) are all designed to contribute to the witness' ruin. The
     Committee knows where the witness works, but how can the Committee
     be sure that a witness will lose his job if the nature and place
     of his employment are not put on the record? Similarly, the public
     identification of the witness' home address, which the Committee
     also knows, is indispensable if his neighbors are to be reached.
     Matters such as these could hardly be left to chance.

     The Committee invariably threatens contempt against witnesses who
     refuse to answer such questions. Even when the witness pleads with
     the Committee that previous disclosures have resulted in
     molestation, it does not relent.

     The witness' office address is an equally vital piece of
     information (Los Angeles, 1952):

     Mr. Moulder: Where is your office located from which you engage in
     the practice of law?

     Witness: In the City of Los Angeles.

     Mr. Moulder: In what building and office number?

     Witness: Does that have any pertinency?

     Mr. Moulder: To properly identify you as to who you are. We are
     trying to designate as to just exactly who you are.

     Witness: I believe it is in the telegram as correctly stated here,
     Mr. Moulder. That is the telegram which I received summoning me to
     this postponed hearing.

     Mr. Moulder: Then do you refuse to answer that question?

     Witness: Well, my address, as I say, is correctly stated in the
     telegram. I believe you have a copy.

     The witness answered the question.

     In the 1959 Los Angeles hearings, the Committee tried to force a
     witness to state whether he was a doctor or a dentist and to give
     his street address. He gave his address as "Los Angeles County."
     But this did not satisfy the Committee. First Committee Counsel
     Tavenner tried to justify extracting his address from him on the
     ground that it was necessary "to locate him geographically so as
     to be able to know what his opportunities are for knowledge of
     Communist activities" in the particular area under investigation.
     Congressman Jackson suddenly sprouted a concern that the Committee
     might be confused. There was, he claimed, another individual with
     the same name; the residence was important to eliminate the
     possibility "of confusion with another doctor with the same name."

     The doctor's lawyer unsuccessfully tried to offer this information
     off the record. The Committee wanted it on the record. To satisfy
     both. Tavenner and Jackson, the witness specified the area of the
     county where he lived.

     Throwing pretense to the winds, the Committee demanded, "Where,
     what address, that is a very general area." The witness then gave
     his street number. Surely there could not be two doctors with the
     same name, living in the same area, and at the same street number.
     But the Committee closed in on him: "What city?" "Well," continued
     Mr. Tavenner "it has been a long time finding that out. Where do
     you maintain your office?" The witness' lawyer, again to spare his
     client harassment, offered to supply this data off the record.
     When the Committee refused, the witness pleaded the Fifth
     Amendment.

     In the Newark hearing held in September 1958, a witness resisted
     giving his residence and occupation because he had appeared in
     executive session where he had already given the Committee answers
     to these questions. He lost his job.

     A witness (Youngstown, 1956) is asked to state her occupation. She
     answers, "If I state my occupation, I will be fired. I prefer to
     withold that."

     Mr. Arens: You are required to state your occupation.... I
     respectfully request that the witness be ordered and directed to
     answer the question.

     Witness: I am a social worker.

     Mr. Arens: And you work where?

     Witness: I expect if I made public where I work, that I will be
     fired. I hope that I do not have to make public that information.

     Mr. Arens: Maybe it would be in the public interest if we would
     divulge where you work....

     Mr. Willis and Mr. Velde assure the witness that she will not lose
     her job, if she answers the questions.

     Mr. Arens: What do you do at the place where you are employed?

     Witness: I am a social worker.

     Mr. Arens: And what do you do where you are employed?

     Witness: I do the usual duties of a social worker.

     Mr. Arens: And among whom do you work?

     The witness again begs the Committee not to force her out of her
     job. Let's start on another question, Mr. Arens suggests, and then
     we will return to your job. "Are you a Communist?" When the
     witness declines to answer on constitutional grounds, Arens again
     insists, "Now tell the Committee where you work."

     Again the witness appeals to the Committee not to take away her
     job. Arens offers her another bargain: If the Committee doesn't
     require an answer to the employment question, will she talk about
     other organizations. She is asked about those and again about the
     Communist Party. The witness declines to answer on constitutional
     grounds.

     Mr. Arens: Now we are back where we started from. Tell us where
     you work.

     Witness: Your Honor, I am a social worker for a private social
     agency.

     Mr. Arens: And what is the name of that private social agency?

     Witness: As I said, if I give the name, I will certainly be fired.

     Mr. Arens: Did you have a discussion with your employers
     respecting your membership in the Communist Party when you
     accepted this position with this private social agency?

     This last question is the standard question used to cue the
     employer to fire a witness and at the same time to supply a reason
     for the discharge. Arens was beginning to weary of the
     cat-and-mouse game he was playing with the witness, for in his
     next question he indicated that he knew all along where she was
     employed, and worked in the "brainwashing" theme.

     Do you think your losing your job might be because the parents of
     the children that you influence in Communism, try to influence in
     Communism, protest a little bit if they knew they had a Communist
     on the grounds? Do you think that is what might be in the back of
     your mind?

     After taunting the witness a little more and permitting her to
     thrash about as the net was being drawn tighter, Arens asked, "Are
     you presently employed at the Jenny E. Clarkson Home for Girls at
     Valhalla, N.Y.?" But it was not enough for Arens to torment the
     witness; first, by seeking to use economic pressure to force her
     to surrender her constitutional rights; second, pretending that
     the Committee did not know where she worked and needed to know for
     a legitimate reason; third, by suggesting without any factual
     warrant at all that she deserved to lose her job because she had
     abused her relationship to her charges; and fourth, by naming her
     employer after the witness had made it clear that such a
     disclosure would result in discharge. When she repeated that the
     disclosure of her employment was "unfair" and "unfortunate" and
     would injure her, Arens baited her in a new way: "You didn't lose
     your employment with the Western Pennsylvania Committee for
     Protection of Foreign Born because somebody said something bad
     about you, did you? ... You didn't lose your job as executive
     secretary of the Civil Rights Congress in Pennsylvania because
     someone said something bad about you, did you? ... Did the
     Communist Party ever deprive you of a job?"

     After another try at the "brainwashing" theme ("how old are these
     girls? ... how many are there in the home?"). Arens tried a new
     gambit and asked the witness to identify her name on a Daily
     Worker wrapper: "We are going to give you an opportunity now to
     make your employer proud of you, and these little girls proud,
     that you are here serving your country, telling us all about the
     conspiratorial apparatus that would destroy this country. Just
     tell us if you are she. Perhaps you receive the Daily Worker to
     use it in uncovering other Communists or something. We receive it
     in our work all the time."

     The Committee's tactics succeeded --the witness lost her job.

     What conceivable relationship does this inquisitorial savagery
     bear to the process of gathering facts to help Congress discharge
     its legislative responsibilities? The hate, the drive of almost
     pathological intensity to wound and hurt which breaks through the
     records of this (and so many other) hearings, echoes with chilling
     fidelity the grillings of Jews by the Nazis -- before worse came.
     To bring the matter closer to home: where could one find a more
     vivid counterpart to the 17th century arraignment and trial of a
     witch?

     It should be more than clear by now that the hearing is not a
     legislative investigation at all, but an inquisition. The initial
     question about the witness' residence and occupation are not mere
     formalities to identify him in a preliminary way, but dodges in a
     game of exposure.

     These tactics are used solely because the witness is unfriendly.
     The witness can escape this grilling simply by becoming friendly.
     For example, if the witness does not want to give his address or
     his occupation, he can indicate his readiness to cooperate. ("You
     do not want to give your street address? There is no necessity for
     giving your street address.") In one instance, after being asked
     if he were a member of the Communist Party, and before answering,
     a witness requested the removal of the camera. Chairman Velde
     replied:

     Well, now, may I ask the witness this: If I do order -- or if the
     committee does order -- the cameras turned off and the lights
     turned off, would the witness then answer the questions put to him
     by the counsel?

     Witness: Well, I would feel more at case.

     Mr. Velde: Well, would you answer the question as to your
     membership in the Communist Party if the lights were turned off
     and the television and newsreel cameras ordered to desist? Would
     you then be willing to cooperate with the committee in that
     regard?

     The heart of the hearing-the $64 question, "Are you now or have
     you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" and its variations
     -- have no investigative meaning or purpose. The Committee's claim
     that this question is not a destination, but a journey to the
     facts, a "preliminary question," is a deception. The absurdity of
     the claim that the $64 question is asked as a matter of
     unavoidable necessity to establish the witness' qualification to
     report the facts which alone interest HUAC is best demonstrated by
     the savagely accusatory character of the "questioning" of the
     witness about his politics.

     It is not Arens' style just to ask the witness the $64 question
     and let it go at that. He, has perfected a ripe antisubversive
     baroque, so freighted with prejudicial rhetoric that a failure to
     respond will yield a maximum of exposure value. Arens asks a
     witness if "he is now or has ever been a member of a Godless
     conspiracy based on perversion and deceit," if he is a member of
     the "army of the Kremlin steeled to overthrow our institutions and
     operating behind a facade of humanitarianism," if he is part of a
     Kremlin-controlled world Communist operation aimed at the nerve
     centers of our Nation." Here is a full-blown example (Ohio, 1956):

     Are you a member of an organization that is dedicated to the
     destruction of religion, dedicated to the destruction of the
     entire Judo [sic] -Christian concept upon which his Nation is
     founded?

     Picking up steam, he continues, "Are you a member of any
     organization which is an atheistic organization, dedicated to the
     destruction of religion, the sterility of the individual, of all
     concepts of God....?"

     The witness, who of course has been sworn, is called upon not
     merely to answer the question, but to answer it, "Now that you are
     under oath." When Arens asked a leading West Coast minister a
     question so prefaced, his lawyer in vain protested. "Is there any
     suggestion the witness is not under oath? ... There is no point in
     asking this man, this witness, if he is under oath while he is
     under oath. This is unnecessarily offensive to the witness."

     When the witness challenges the pertinence of a question, it is a
     cue for a renewed exposure attack, Listen to Arens explain to a
     witness why he is being interrogated: "We understand, and we have
     received testimony from 'live witnesses identifying you ... as
     part and parcel of that movement, as a dedicated zealot of the
     Communist conspiracy in the United States who masquerades behind
     the Constitution of the United States, and would desecrate the
     flag of this great Nation.... And I propose, if you will tell us
     whether or not, while you are under oath, you are in the
     conspiracy of the Communist Party, to interrogate you at length
     with reference to plans and proposals and designs of this
     conspiracy which were taken from premises under your custody and
     control."

     When the witness takes refuge in the plea of the privilege against
     self-incrimination, or of the First Amendment, Arens has another
     go at him (New England, 1958): "Maybe you do not know what you are
     declining here, I just ask you if you think that is a pretty
     serious charge to level against a man. He is in the underground
     apparatus of a foreign- controlled conspiracy to overthrow the
     Nation, under whose flag he obtained protection. Don't you think
     that is a kind of serious charge to make against a man? Would you
     like to express yourself on that, or am I probing into your
     thoughts?"

     A witness who declined on constitutional grounds to discuss his
     participation in a group known as "Coalition for Freedom and
     Democracy" was asked, "You certainly wouldn't be ashamed of being
     in a coalition for freedom and democracy would you -- unless it
     was a false freedom and false democracy under the auspices of a
     conspirational apparatus?"

     When the witness objects to the loaded character of the
     questioning, he finds himself attacked from a new direction. A
     witness in the Los Angeles 1956 hearings was asked about his
     relationship to an organization known as the Southern California
     Peace Crusade: "Kindly tell us while you are under oath now and in
     the aura of patriotism which you have surrounded yourself in the
     opening statement, whether or not you betrayed your country by
     being executive secretary of this organization designed to subvert
     the security of this great Nation?" The witness protested that
     "there is a condemnation attached to the question." Arens
     tauntingly rephrased it, "For the moment may we change to say were
     you executive secretary of this innocent little organization, this
     patriotic organization, this organization for the uplift of
     humanity, the Southern California Peace Crusade?" Note the
     sarcastic diminutive in the preceding quotation. Arens is very
     fond of this device: "In 1949 did you go to New York City for a
     little session of the American Committee for the Protection of the
     Foreign Born?" (Youngstown, 1956).

     A minister complains that the question, "Are you now, or have you
     ever been, a member of a godless conspiracy controlled by a
     foreign power" is improper because its characterization contains a
     value judgment based on opinion. Arens insists that the protesting
     witness has waived the privilege against self-incrimination and
     should be required to answer because he has "voluntarily" dealt
     with the subject matter of the question.

     Many witnesses fear that to answer any "political" question (even
     about espionage) might be considered a waiver of the privilege for
     all purposes and ultimately lead to an informing demand. Arens
     asks the questions of the witness which he knows could be
     truthfully answered in a completely exculpatory way, but which the
     witness feels obliged to decline to answer in order to preserve
     his constitutional privilege -- a trick perfected by the late
     Senator McCarthy. When it becomes clear that the witness intends
     to plead the privilege broadly out of fear of waiver, Arens throws
     all restraint to the winds and wallows in what amounts to a parody
     of a movie-style courtroom scene. In a loud staccato, he asks
     (perfectly sure that the question will be unanswered): "Now, sir,
     I put it to you as a fact and ask you to affirm or deny the fact
     that you are part of an enterprise to destroy the very
     constitution of the United States under which we all have
     protection, that you are the agent of the Communist Party as an
     arm of the international Communist conspiracy sent into Atlanta
     for the purpose of engaging in conspiratorial activities on behalf
     of the Communist Party. It that is not so, deny it under oath."

     Arens is not always sure how far he can use the question as a
     means of testifying against the witness. Thus, in the 1956 Seattle
     hearings, he first tested out a witness: "I ... ask you while you
     are under oath to affirm or deny the fact that you are an expert
     in the Communist underground conspiratorial apparatus and in
     garroting?" When the witness pleaded the self-incrimination
     privilege to this question, Arens tells him: "I put it to you as a
     fact, sir, that you were trained in the underground school to
     garrote for the International Communist conspiracy. Now deny that,
     you are under oath."

     Not a scrap of evidence was introduced in the record to supply a
     factual foundation for these questions.

     On occasion, early in the hearing, the Committee stages a
     confrontation, which is a device for dramatizing the unfriendly
     witness' identification by the informer. The informer physically
     points to (the argot is "fingers") the victim and states that he
     knew him as a Communist. The feat is usually performed by an
     undercover agent; few ex-Communist friendly witnesses are called
     upon to do it.

     Mr. Arens: While you are under oath, would you kindly look at the
     gentleman who has just testified? Look him in the face and tell
     this committee while you are under oath and while he is under
     oath, did he or did he not tell the truth when he said he knew you
     as a Communist?

     Mr. Scherer: I ask that you direct the witness to look at the
     witness Wereb.

     Mr. Doyle: So that the record will show, I instruct you to face
     the witness, Mr. Wereb, who has, under oath, sworn that he knew
     you as a member of the Communist Party, and ask if you recognize
     him.

     A more conventional form of confrontation runs like this: "The
     previous witness laid his liberty on the line, and said that he
     knew you as a member of the Communist conspiratorial apparatus.
     While you are under oath, stand up like a red-blooded American and
     tell the Committee was he lying or telling the truth."

     The witness, of course, would never be permitted to cross-examine
     his accuser -- that is not the practice of legislative
     investigating committees, explains Mr. Arens. As for the informer
     laying his liberty on the line, it would be the height of fantasy
     to suppose that the Committee would bite the hand that feeds it by
     challenging in any way the veracity of the undercover agent.

     Confrontations are good for headlines; they make the hearings
     coruscate with sinister emanations of hidden guilt. Another device
     which accomplishes a similar purpose is the offer of immunity from
     prosecution. Most lawyers are convinced that the Committee lacks
     the power to give immunity to a witness. But that makes no
     difference -- it creates the impression that he is concealing
     secrets of such vast import to the Nation's security -- espionage,
     sabotage -- that every legal resource must be exploited to
     overcome his silence. Other favorite tactics are votes to
     recommend contempt, denaturalization, deportation, withdrawal of
     defense contracts, Department of Justice investigation into the
     bona fides of a Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavit, etc.

     As the hearing moves along, the Committee never loses sight of the
     main problem -- to steep the witness in an atmosphere of crime,
     treason and sedition. One way of building a record against the
     witness is deliberately to force him to plead the Fifth Amendment
     over and over again by asking a flurry of questions all falling
     within the same area. The Committee knows from the initial
     response that the witness will refuse to answer, but a high score
     is good for headlines (Local Man Pleads Fifth Forty Times) and
     helps sharpen the exposure consequences. Sometimes the Committee
     pointedly comments in the record on the frequency of the plea.
     (Congressman Clardy: "I hope the gentleman isn't a drinking man
     ... thirty-four fifths taken in less than half an hour is quite a
     lot.")

     The questions are frequently used in this multiplication game to
     give the Committee the air of a prosecutor who is on to something
     big but is frustrated by the silence and evasiveness of the
     witness. (Did the witness have a mimeograph machine in his
     basement ten years ago? Was he present at a party at which the
     guests consumed a cake frosted with a hammer and sickle? Did he
     ever live at a given address 15 years earlier?) The impression
     which the Committee wants to leave with its a udience and the
     press is that it has access to damning intelligence data
     implicating the witness in serious crimes.

     A special contribution of Mr. Arens to the "cops and robbers"
     sweepstakes is to request the witness to sign the voucher for his
     witness fee on the record. He explains to the witness (and to the
     press) that he wants the signature to compare with the signature
     on a document in the Committee's possession (a letter, election
     petition, or a certificate of incorporation) which it regards as
     proof of subversion. A witness, fearful that he might lose the
     fee, may sign. Usually he pleads the Fifth Amendment. Arens then
     informs him that when he signs for his fee after the hearing, the
     signatures will be compared -- a marvelous ploy for the gooseflesh
     trade.

     A special form of the numbers game is the practice of ordering the
     unfriendly witness to identify others, HUAC knows that the witness
     will refuse -- many witnesses plead the Fifth Amendment primarily
     to avoid becoming informers. The Committee likes to do this in
     order to smear particular individuals whom it dislikes, such as
     critics of the Committee. It thinks that the refusal of an
     unfriendly witness to identify others on Fifth Amendment grounds
     helps to expose him. The Committee will do this even where it is
     obvious that the individuals asked about have nothing to do with
     the matter under inquiry. It asks a recalcitrant witness to
     testify about persons attending a social gathering at which he was
     present. A witness who ran a summer camp for children was grilled
     in this way by Congressman Doyle:

     Mr. Doyle: Counselors?

     Witness: These are high school kids who help the kids have a good
     time.

     Mr. Doyle: Tell me definitely the name of one counselor that you
     had last summer.... Tell me the name of one person.... You would
     not have any hesitation about giving the names of your counselors
     in executive session, would you? ... Do you have a list of the
     counselors who were at your camp last summer? ... And the
     addresses of the counselors are on that list ... are they not?

     The grand strategy of the Committee is, of course, to discredit
     the Fifth Amendment and to equate its use with guilt. The witness
     is frequently told that this plea is a direct clue to his guilt. A
     favorite ploy is to "test the good faith" of the pleader by asking
     a question which has no relevance to any legitimate inquiry but
     which invites the surmise that the witness is a knave --
     especially when he refuses to answer on the Fifth Amendment
     grounds. ("Are there any organizations [addresses] that you could
     tell about which would not supply information which might be used
     against you in a criminal proceeding?")

     Witnesses, with increasing frequency, try to foil the Committee's
     exposure game by denying present membership, but pleading the
     Fifth Amendment as to the past (the diminished Fifth). The
     Committee tries hard to make it appear that this is a trick, a
     Communist tactic. It asks a series of questions which push back by
     small increments of time the period of denial. Were you a
     Communist before you entered this room? A month ago? Six months
     ago? A year ago? In 1958?

     This creates an unpleasant dilemma. The witness can answer "no" at
     a given point and plead the privilege beyond that point. But this
     answer in effect surrenders the plea by pinpointing the failure to
     deny earlier than a particular date. If he pleads as to each
     question in the time sequence (after having denied generally as to
     the past), the Committee makes it appear that he is a concealed
     Communist of one sort or another: "under discipline," "a member
     not of the formal entity but of the Communist operation," "a part
     of the Communist underground," etc. The logic of the exposure
     process compels the Committee constantly to move to ever more
     direct forms of condemnation, naked of even a fig leaf of
     legislative pretense. This sometimes takes the form of rhetorical
     questions:

     Have you formed any Committee for the Protection of the
     Hungarians?

     Now tell us what you have done to protect the flag of this country
     by your activities in connection with congressional committees?

     You are certainly not ashamed as one who has sworn to defend this
     great Republic to state what you have done to protect the helpless
     foreign- born, would you? Unless they happened to be Communist
     conspirators?

     Have you betrayed the flag that you were sworn to uphold?

     Are you familiar with the very first Psalm, "Blessed is the man
     that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly"? [asked of a
     minister].

     Mr. Velde asks a witness (Youngstown, 1956): "Whose side are you
     on in the revolt, Soviet Union's or the rebels?" The witness
     replies, "I am on the rebels' side."

     But Velde is not satisfied with the witness' answers to other
     questions, so he concludes, "From the witness' appearance and
     demeanor before this Committee, I am satisfied that he bears
     watching by the duly constituted authorities. I do not think he is
     on the side of the rebels. I think he is on the side of Moscow,
     the Soviets."

     The late Tom O'Connor, a liberal newspaper man, was interrogated
     in 1952 about a charge that he had been a Communist in 1938.
     Congressman Velde asked him:

     "Are you a member of the Communist Party now?"

     "No, Sir," O'Connor replied.

     "Were you a year ago?" "No, sir."

     "Were you five years ago?" "No, sir."

     "Were you ten years ago?" "No, sir."

     Velde had no further questions, but made the followIng comment:

     I personally can draw only one inference, that you are not only a
     past member of the Communist Party, but that you continue to be a
     member of the Communist Party and that you are an extreme danger
     to the country as the managing editor of a large New York
     newspaper.

     The Committee uses the record to injure the witness in other ways.
     It recently held hearings in Pittsburgh to which it called a
     number of foreign-born witnesses who cannot be deported because
     the proof of their deportability is defective or because there is
     no country to which they can be deported. It filled the entire
     record with the Immigration and Naturalization Service dossiers on
     each of them. If a witness has been in trouble with the law -- a
     tax case, contempt of court, a labor offense -- HUAC brings it out
     "for purposes of identification."

     As the frenetic Arens slows down, the Committee members take over.
     A few of them take an active role in the assault on the witness.
     The fire-eating Scherer glares at the witness, sneeringly comments
     on his responses, throws out a running fire of disparagement and
     insult. He specializes in perfecting the record for a contempt
     case. He stands guard to make sure the witness does not "dance
     away from," or "weasel out of" a question.

     Congressman Kearney -- a former general and a leader of the
     Veterans of Foreign Wars -- grunts his disapproval of the witness
     and joins in the attack in a rough-hewn style ("I am astounded at
     this character").

     Congressman Doyle -- a lawyer -- likes to take over the
     questioning when the witness is about to be excused, seeking to
     wear him down into making disclosures he has already refused to
     make. He specializes in an evangelical approach: "Why don't you
     get yourself and keep yourself in shape as a young American
     citizen, when you don't have to plead your constitutional
     privileges.... This country has honored you by giving you birth.
     Why the dickens do you get into an atmosphere ... where you have
     to refuse to help your own Congress . . . to work out what is just
     and fair in the field of legislation involving the cold war we are
     in with Soviet Communism. I suggest if you do it, you will feel a
     whole lot better inside."

     As with many a frustrated evangelist, Doyle rains curses on the
     unconverted, virtually inciting a lynching of his hapless victim:
     "I think the great majority of people who are in this room, as
     well as the American public, whenever they think of you, will look
     at you with shame when you have called this sort of thing an
     inquisition.... The trouble is, we do not have enough help to
     expose the real intended purpose of people who write filth such as
     you have written in these papers."




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