Word: huac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Martin Dies, 71, progenitor of the old House Un-American Activities Committee and chairman during its first six stormy years; of an apparent heart attack; in Lufkin, Texas. A burly Texan first elected to Congress in 1930, Dies won approval for the creation of HUAC in 1938 to "investigate subversion and un-American propaganda." In tempestuous, headline-making public hearings, Dies attacked all manner of supposed subversives, including Communists, fascists, atheists, advocates of nudism, and New Dealers, whom he characterized as "an army of radical associates and crackpots." Dies' inquisitorial style set a pattern that the committee followed...
...will do no good to look for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none; there were only victims," said Dalton Trumbo. Vaughn's book proves Trumbo's sorry point: the Broadway and Hollywood figures he discusses are pitiable figures, betraying each other, groveling in the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) mud, victimizing themselves to save their earning power. The few heroes, those people who defended their integrity and friends, were the most obvious victims. If they refused to cooperate they were thrown into jail, blacklisted, and destroyed...
...investigators were villains, or course, but more than that victims of their own ignorance, their perverted notions of freedom and patriotism, their lack of understanding. Witness this exchange from 1938, between a suspect and a member of the HUAC...
...precedent by which station owners at license renewal time would have to face a hearing and competitive bidding; and he compared the National Association of Broadcasters to "dead mackerel in the moonlight...it both shines and stinks." Not intimidated by politicians, Fly also resisted pressure from the Dies HUAC, which claimed that two FCC underlings had been associated with Communist front organizations...
...union official whose schooling ended in the eighth grade. One of Berkeley's first student activists in the early 1960s, he protested ROTC, favored the Cuban Revolution and demonstrated against the House Un-American Activities Committee. For his efforts, Tigar was investigated by the California legislature's HUAC equivalent. California conservatives and their congressional allies were so disturbed by his activities that they pressured Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. to withdraw his offer of a clerkship for Tigar, who had graduated at the top of his law-school class. Brennan reluctantly went along...