THE UN-AMERICAN COMMITTEE
the house un-american committee THE House Committee on Un-American Activities has demonstrated in recent months that its own conduct has few parallels for ruthless, un-American repudiation of the...
...When Chairman Walter first revealed to the press that such an inquiry was to be held, the officers and directors of the Fund offered their fullest cooperation, volunteering to make available all materials and documents, including the names and identifications of every person who has ever worked on a Fund project...
...It seems clear enough that the Committee's sole purpose was to use its official position to discredit the Cogley findings and that it shamefully abused its power in an effort to intimidate an individual and an organization with whose views it disagreed...
...Certainly the country would be as secure—and the Constitution more secure—if the House of Representatives declines to extend the life of this Committee...
...Malin made it clear that Congress, of course, has authority to investigate "un-American propaganda" related in terms of "clear and present danger" to illegal acts, including the conspira-tional-action part of the Communist Party's activities, which "can properly be prohibited and punished...
...Knowles...
...Knowles in the face of demands for her dismissal that brought it a $5,000 grant from the Fund for the Republic, the agency established by the Ford Foundation to inquire into the state of civil liberties in the United States...
...But it is utterly incredible to us that your Committee should . . . judge the actions of our Meeting at Plymouth or any of its committees as to whether they have followed the requirements of good order in our Society...
...Congress is crawling with committees investigating every conceivable phase of the security problem...
...Cogley, formerly editor of The Commonweal, the distinguished journal edited by Catholic laymen, learned that he was to be subpoenaed through a telephone call from a Washington news commentator...
...There is far more at stake here than the fortunes and reputation of an organization like the Fund for the Republic...
...The Committee sought to deal with this obvious selection of the wrong target by allowing the introduction of three principal points of evidence regarding the conduct of the Plymouth Meeting and its Library Committee: 1) that these bodies did not follow good order in hiring the librarian...
...This will be much more difficult because of the excursion of [the Committee...
...For as the American Civil Liberties Union has pointed out, the House Committee on Un-American Activities is presently violating both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment to the Constitution...
...Under the chairmanship of Representative Francis Walter, Pennsylvania Democrat, the Committee has become an increasingly destructive force in American life—one that hacks away with impunity at the constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press, inquiry, and religion on the mistaken assumption that it is protecting the Republic from its enemies...
...The principles on which our Society conducts its affairs and all questions whether they have been observed, as well as all other matters of regularity and propriety among us, we reserve to ourselves to judge, and we reject as presumptuous the imputations addressed to us by members of your Committee...
...the house un-american committee THE House Committee on Un-American Activities has demonstrated in recent months that its own conduct has few parallels for ruthless, un-American repudiation of the Bill of Rights...
...2) that controversy had developed in the Meeting about the appointment, and 3) that there was opposition to Mrs...
...Ostensibly, the purpose of the investigation was to show that the Fund for the Republic had used bad judgment in making the grant to the Plymouth Meeting of Friends, but the Committee went at its task the cowardly way...
...Both concern activities sponsored by the Fund for the Republic, but the Committee, typically, refrained from a frontal attack on the Fund, preferring the more devious device of throwing doubt and suspicion over two wholly unrelated projects...
...There are countless federal administrative agencies working the same territory...
...The first of these involves the Quaker religion—the Religious Society of Friends...
...But, he emphasized, "propaganda as such —speaking and writing in and of itself, whatever its source and however offensively 'un-American' to Congress, as well as to you and me—is not a proper matter" for inquiry...
...Their conclusion—that certain right-wing columnists and self-styled experts on subversion arbitrarily exercise extraordinary power over employment in radio and television—infuriated Representative Walter and some of his colleagues on the Committee...
...We regard such inquiries as a serious transgression upon the complete division between church and state, which is one of the important foundations of our democracy...
...Here again, it was none of the Committee's business if Cogley reached conclusions different from those that Walter & Company might have reached had they conducted a similar inquiry...
...Knowles in the community...
...It is much more difficult for us to believe that [the Committee] would approve the imputation conveyed by the proceedings that an effort to express Christian belief by giving Mrs...
...It is significant, too, that the Committee packed the hearings with hostile witnesses, that it arrogantly refused to hear the testimony of a witness who had flown to Philadelphia from Mexico to tell her story...
...Knowles employment should be abandoned because of outside protest...
...In a recent statement, Patrick Murphy Malin, executive director of the ACLU, emphasized that the Committee's mandate is itself "unconstitutional or unwise, or both...
...it did not summon the big brass of the Fund, whose ranks include some of the nation's most articulate business men and educators...
...Although it was known at the time that she had been under attack for her past political associations, the Meeting was satisfied as to her qualifications and her integrity...
...It is a matter of sorrow to us," they wrote the Committee, "that division in a religious group should be the subject of investigation by civil authority...
...But here again, the shocking part of the story comes with the statement by the Committee chairman regarding the purpose of the inquiry...
...Knowles' conduct as librarian...
...In 1954, the Plymouth Monthly Meeting, in Philadelphia, approved the appointment of Mrs...
...Several weeks before, the Walter Committee, with great fanfare of headlines, summoned John Cogley, a highly respected journalist presently employed by the Fund for the Republic...
...But in the Quaker and Cogley cases, he added, "large parts of the questioning . . . overstepped even the Committee's own established boundaries...
...Is the conscience of the church to be subject to the organized pressure of groups of people who differ from it...
...Two recent episodes exemplify the alien approach of the Committee to its task of investigating "un-American Activities...
...It is significant that the Committee took no testimony to show that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the governing body of Quakers in the area, approved the retention of Mrs...
...He was told the hearings would be held in executive session...
...we called you for the purpose of ascertaining what your sources were in order to determine whether or not your conclusions were the conclusions that we would have reached had we embarked on this sort of project...
...It is no business of the Walter Committee whom the Religious Society of Friends hires, what procedures it uses, or how it copes with controversy in its own ranks...
...What an astonishing admission this is...
...It would seem from its newest escapades—the invasion of freedom of religion and freedom of the press—that it is justifying the taunt of its critics that it ought in fact to be renamed the House Un-American Committee...
...Congress cannot constitutionally legislate about propaganda, in and of itself...
...Instead, it pointed its wrath at the Quakers, whose Plymouth Meeting had merely been the beneficiary of the Fund's action...
...We do not doubt that in due time, with love and forbearance, Plymouth Meeting Friends will compose their difference...
...therefore it cannot constitutionally investigate propaganda, in and of itself...
...Opposition to the appointment, first led by someone outside the Society of Friends and later broadened to include some members of the Plymouth Meeting, at no time involved the slightest criticism of Mrs...
...Cogley did not learn of the change until he read it in the morning paper shortly before arriving at the hearing...
...It was the decision of the Plymouth Meeting to retain Mrs...
...Mary Knowles as librarian...
...Nine prominent Philadelphia Quakers, whose patriotic credentials are at least as good as Representative Walter's, protested the Committee's conduct in language that seems to us a model of charitable restraint in the lace of severe provocation...
...Over the years the House Committee on Un-American Activities has conducted some proper inquiries, but it has dealt with more red herring than Reds...
...At the last moment the plans were changed to make it a public hearing...
...It was only after the Fund made it clear a large number of its distinguished directors wanted an opportunity to testify and the Fund sought the right to cross-examine witnesses, that the Walter Committee abruptly announced the "indefinite postponement" of its investigation of the Fund for the Republic...
...As a result, he was obliged to testify without counsel...
...Cogley and a staff of ten writers and researchers had been engaged for eight months inquiring into the extent of blacklisting in the entertainment industry...
...But what strikes us as far more outrageous is the interference of a Congressional committee in the internal affairs of a religious society...
...These two episodes constitute all the developments there have been in the widely ballyhooed "investigation" of the Fund for the Republic by the Walter Committee...
...When Cogley asked why he had been subpoenaed to testify, Walter replied...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
