Martin Dies and the HUAC
The Politics of Fear
One of the basic premises of a capitalistic economy is its cyclical nature that experiences peaks and valleys. The valley that presented itself in 1929 baffled policy-makers and economists as its severity plunged this country into an unprecedented economic crises. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal introduced paternalistic policies that many conservatives feared would open the door to a radical transformation of American society. This essay examines the role of Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in preserving American democracy and capitalism.
The origins of the HUAC were found in the 1920s when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began his relentless search for subversives throughout the country. With the help of a young J. Edgar Hoover, they placed thousands of Americans under the scrutinizing eyes of the Federal government. Consequently, many thousands were jailed, others had their civil rights violated, and still others had their lives ruined by the mere accusation of being a communist.
The onset of the Depression in 1929 was the only thing that slowed the Palmer and Hoover crusades. Within months, attention turned from subversives to soup kitchens and bread lines. As Franklin Roosevelt rode into the presidency in 1933, Americans were willing to give him a chance to “fix” the country. With the introduction of the New Deal, Roosevelt initially enjoyed mass support, but within a few years cracks appeared in the New Deal armor.
These cracks took the form of the Supreme Court rejection of several New Deal programs. A defensive FDR introduced the Judiciary Reorganization Bill in 1937 that would “liberalize” the Supreme Court by appointing younger justices who would ultimately be New Dealers. Conservatives eventually defeated FDR’s planned changes to the Supreme Court, but the political fallout led to renewed attention to the threats of communism. The result was the formation of the controversial HUAC, with Democrat Martin Dies as its Chairman.
As a member of Congress (1930 – 1945), Dies supported strict immigration controls and was fearful of subversives in the federal government. Furthermore, it was his work with the Committee of Immigration and Naturalization that brought him to the attention of those conservatives wanting to keep the Red Scare alive in the 1930s and beyond.
Within a few months of his appointment as chairman of the HUAC (on June 6, 1938), Dies turned the committee into a political extension of conservatism and used every means at his disposal to discredit the New Deal, labor organizations, and FDR’s perceived far-Left liberalism. He stated the sole objective of the HUAC was the investigation of subversive activities in the U.S.
The first New Deal target of the HUAC was the Federal Theater Project (FTP). Dies argued that it advocated the spread of communist ideology through the social themes of its plays. The FTP was already an easy target for New Deal critics because of the public perception that arts were an unnecessary expense, and questioned government expenditures for the production of plays. Playing on public fears of communism, the HUAC aroused suspicion of the FTP by claiming its writers and actors were members of the American Communist Party. In 1939, amid pressures that other New Deal programs would face similar scrutiny, FDR withdrew his support for the FTP.
For Dies and the HUAC, the FTP was only the beginning. The politics of fear soon turned neighbor against neighbor in the 1950s as no one wanted to be labeled as unpatriotic. While there were most surely subversives operating in the United States, many were simply American citizens falsely accused.
References:
Brinkly, Alan. 1993. The Unfinshed Nation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Gellermann, William. 1972. Martin Dies. New York: Da Capo Press.
Moss, George Donelson. 1995. The Rise of Modern America: A History of the American People, 1880-1945. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
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