GUILT BY SUBPOENA

...As for people already in government service, they too dare not provoke controversy lest the HUAC subpoena await them, and creative administration is stifled by fear...

...The people themselves must understand the danger and call on their legislators to act...

...But they see also with equal clarity the actual, present, repeated mutilation of democratic institutions by this Committee and its imitators...

...It is madness to undermine, ourselves, the very principles of freedom of which the Communists would deprive us...

...Of course not even the powerful House Committee, whose prescribed task is to investigate "un-American propaganda activities," could directly cause a man to take his own life...

...Whenever members of the House Un-American Activities Committee are under attack, they proudly point to the Alger Hiss case as the prime example of successful probing for actual acts of subversion...

...Time and time again Committee members and investigators have denounced the Protestant clergy for alleged ties to Communism, helping to create a climate that could result in the adoption of a California law, happily later invalidated by the Supreme Court, requiring churchmen to sign loyalty oaths before their churches could obtain tax exemptions...

...This points up the nagging problem of words like "un-American...

...There is a line of "clear and present danger" on which even a democratic government and a free society must dig in for their own defense — as Lincoln did during the Civil War...

...Some were addressed by the Committee as "comrade...

...What the founding fathers of the American republic attempted was to combine order and freedom in a democracy, guaranteeing the people's liberties by the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of which is the First Amendment...

...Teachers—aware of the hundreds of their colleagues who have been hauled before the HUAC, or named publicly by the Committee as suspected subversives, and whose contracts were not renewed or who were dismissed from long-time positions— have become timid in stating, even for classroom discussion, ideas that someone later might interpret as subversive...

...The Committee attempted to establish that the struggle against the Mc-Carran-Walter Immigration Act was prompted in large measure by Communists...

...As President Truman's Advisory Committee on Universal Military Training said: "An epithet is not an argument...

...What the Committee has done to government servants is indescribable, mainly because a large part of the damage cannot yet be assessed...

...You can have order—by itself—in a dictatorship, until there is a revolt against its tyranny...

...But, cruel as it may sound, this man's death, and the pain suffered by hundreds of others ensnared by the HUAC, are not the fundamental reasons such probes must be abolished...

...Supreme Court Justice Douglas deplored this development, saying, "There can be no real academic freedom in that environment...

...Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect...

...Also included were teachers of retarded children, and this seems a little far-fetched since it is so difficult to teach retarded children anything, let alone Communism," commented Eleanor Roosevelt...

...Guilt by Subpoena by PATRICK MURPHY MAUN rriHE subpoena served by the House ¦¦¦ Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on biologist William Sherwood in 1957 bore not a single mark to distinguish it from others that had heralded grief for hundreds of people...

...Before he left the Committee to become a judge, counsel Robert Arens helped stage what is known as the "Peregrinations of Mr...

...Representative Martin Dies, Texas Democrat, the first HUAC chairman, often —quite rightly from his point of view — interpreted un-Americanism as "New Deal...

...In the hope of eventual reversal of the close decision of the Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union still argues that the mandate of the Committee is unconstitutional...

...Accusations hurled at the Protestant clergy en masse are not simply the mistakes of over-zealous aides, later fired, but the product of a systematic affliction...

...Although the dictionary could easily be describing the expression of unvarnished truth, there is no doubt that the word conveys the pejorative meaning of a distortion of facts for ulterior ends...

...For the sake of revealing Communist activities — already publicized and counteracted by nearly every American institution, organization, and publication — the Committee's interrogators have not only ruthlessly overridden the delicate human right of freedom of speech and association, but have violated principles of justice and fair play painfully and expensively established by the American Revolution...

...Take the case of the doctor, publicly accused of being a member of a Denver Communist cell at a certain time in the past, who proved he was then studying medicine in the East...

...The outstanding ones among them were Judah L. Magnes, John Haynes Holmes, and Stephen S. Wise...

...no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it...

...In 1938, Congressman Dies launched an investigation of what he considered to be unsavory and dangerous "activities...

...The Vassar psychology teacher, who had lost his original job and four others in quick succession, was released in April, 1960, after serving five months in Federal prison for his mistaken understanding of the First Amendment...

...No one denies that the Committee, along with many other public and private agencies, has, over the years, dramatically called attention to the machinations of the Communist apparatus...

...Attorneys representing witnesses before the Committee were ejected for insisting on making objections for the record...

...an argument...

...The public often has been confused and led to believe, falsely, that many worthy, important, and even vital liberal and progressive movements, organizations, and individuals are genuinely suspect...

...Buried deep in twenty-three years of accumulated befuddlement lies the root of a confusion that has cast its shadow all over America: Congress' mandate to the Committee...

...In December, 1956, after reviewing a tape recording of a HUAC hearing which sought to expose Communist backing of the drive against the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, the Board of Governors of the California State Bar found the proceedings ". . . of such a character as to pose a threat to the right to appear by counsel and to the proper independence of the bar...

...Slander, libel, misleading advertisements—a host of distortions are prohibited today...

...his union, the Molders, did not intervene...

...The dispute among the Justices reaches to the essence of the controversy about the HUAC...

...or the two students from New York and New Jersey identified as Communists by Pennsylvania's Democratic Representative Francis E. Walter, who forced Walter to retract his accusation, although, of course, the retraction came after all the harm had been done...

...Just as the heart attack of another witness under interrogation, Joseph Klein, a launderer — whose counsel was evicted for laughing when California's Democratic Congressman Clyde Doyle said he asked questions in order to help legislate intelligently—cannot be entirely the fault of the HUAC...

...But a paper-thin majority of the Supreme Court of the United States does not view the transgressions of the Committee in the same light...

...The Committee's opponents see the danger of burning the entire house down in a reckless attempt to get at its termites...

...The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California commented in 1956: "We don't need public hearings to discover that a handful of Communists have seized upon our harsh and discriminatory immigration laws as a means of making political hay...

...Holmes did what he could to set the record straight...

...A Seattle man, identified as a Communist by a HUAC witness but never subpoenaed, was hounded by a woman who called his employer every day for several weeks until he was fired...

...At one point, in 1949, the Committee reached to the very edge of book-burning, when it solicited lists of textbooks and reading lists from dozens of universities...

...Yet Sherwood took poison rather than submit to what he believed would be a humiliating public interrogation...

...The jails would overflow with politicians, salesmen, reporters, and husbands if every man who altered the interpretation of facts to his own advantage could be brought to account by law...

...Ordinarily, the excesses of individuals connected with an enterprise might not be a fit subject of reproach to the enterprise itself...

...But the House Un-American Activities Committee is not dealing with Lincoln's real wartime military danger...

...In each of ten hearings about the country, Fishman, a deputy collector of customs, accompanied by a locked mailbag, was asked by the Committee counsel to open the bag "for the first time" and withdraw the first material to come to hand...

...It is not these personal tragedies that have caused scores of national organizations and millions of Americans to be outraged by the Committee and its imitators...

...Each time Mr...

...Such action would be a signal the world over that McCarthyism, at long last, is dead and buried...

...They result from the very spirit of the Committee...

...In approving the contempt conviction of Lloyd Barenblatt, the Court assessed the danger of the Communist menace and concluded that it was so threatening that it outweighed Barenblatt's rights under the First Amendment...

...Lately the HUAC — subpoenaing commercial television news films — aided in the creation of a film about the students who demonstrated against the Committee in San Francisco last May...

...When, much earlier, the suspicious eye of the Committee's annual report was cast upon the flood of foreign mail between Buffalo and Communist Poland, the statisticians at the Census Bureau hastened to inform the Committee that 300,000 people of Polish descent lived in Buffalo...

...In the case of the House Un-American Activities Committee, however—beginning from a misleading and dangerous mandate through its transgressions of fundamental legal principle and simple morality—the excesses in great degree are symptoms of an organic disease...

...Thus, in dramatic and expenses-paid fashion did the Committee demonstrate that the mail was chock-full of "foreign propaganda...

...acts of espionage, sabotage, violence, or treachery against the American government and people...

...I am convinced that a new President, a new Administration, and a new Congress could do no better in seeking to restore the image of a freedom-loving America than to launch the 1960's by abolishing this fearsome Committee...

...But the price paid for these alarms has been staggering...

...The warp and woof of ideological disputation...

...Stanley Livingston, president of the American Federation of Scientists, have noted the loss in top research personnel, of scientists who did not enter government service because of the fear they might be publicly embarrassed, or their careers ruined, because they had once spoken and cooperated with what the Committee now defines as the wrong men and the wrong groups...

...In Buffalo, even though an auto worker was freed by the courts on the contempt charges originated by the Committee, his fellow employes walked out on their jobs in an effort to get him fired — although his United Auto Workers Union local supported him...

...Opponents of the Committee, no less concerned than the Committee itself about cold war conflicts, see quite clearly the Communist menace to democratic institutions...

...when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it...

...A good deal of the intellectual stagnation of the postwar period, from which students are only now beginning to recover, may be traced to the Committee and emulating school boards who have hacked away at the American tradition of academic freedom...

...It is no wonder that zealous Congressmen who seek to carry out that mandate involve the HUAC in matters which other people—with different understanding of these vague words—believe the First Amendment expressly has forbidden Congress to tamper with...

...The Constitutional guarantees of free speech and association do not entitle the conscious or unconscious agents of the Soviet Union to commit PATRICK MURPHY MAUN is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...I would love to spend the next few years in laboratories and I would hate to spend them in jail...

...The forty-one-year-old research scientist, who, according to his wife, had sown his youth with voluble concerns about Fascism that the Committee labeled "ultra-radical," put the blame directly at the Committee's hearing-room door...

...So brazen has the Committee been in its exposure drive that it has attempted to blunt the effectiveness of individuals and organizations who seek an end to restrictive legislation...

...Remembering that the Court in 1954 reversed its 1898 segregation decision, and in 1956 modified its 1951 decision upholding the Smith Act, the ACLU believes the true security of the nation lies in these words of Justice Hugo Black's dissenting opinion: "The real interest in Barenblatt's silence is the interest of the people as a whole in being able to join organizations, to advocate causes and make political 'mistakes' without later being subjected to governmental penalties for having dared to think for themselves...

...But many such transgressors can be...

...Gitlow's statement, in reference to matters that occurred thirty years before his testimony, provided no opportunity for personal rebuttal of this outrageous canard by Rabbis Magnes and Wise, who were dead...

...We must heed Justice Learned Hand's admonition that we not "rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts . . . Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women...

...Un-American means simply that it has not been done in America...

...Under the "or else" spur of Committee exposure, not only have periodicals, movies, and television systematically excluded Committee - labeled suspects by means of a blacklist, but, even more pernicious, the pressure has caused a self-imposed pre-censor-ship by the mass media...

...Professor Andrew Deinum was fired by the University of Southern California for refusing to implicate people he knew in the past...

...The ACLU believes that propaganda, in and of itself—even Communist propaganda—falls within the protection of the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of speech and press...

...I have tried to be a scholar all my life...

...Such accusations caused a political atmosphere in America that Walter Lippmann keenly described: "There is a kind of smog in what should be the clean and open air of this free land, a smog that makes men nervous, makes them afraid to speak their minds, makes them not sure to dare to keep their minds open...

...Yesterday and today, Committee members, in their search for Communist influence, still confound economic with political philosophy, and sometimes badger men and women with "socialistic" interests in medical care, or public housing, or public education...

...His farewell note to his wife and four children said: "My life and my livelihood are now threatened by the House Committee...

...From this fallacious, misleading, and provocative mandate springs a corollary disregard for fair legal procedures...

...Fishman unlocked the bag, withdrew a package, and, like a Twentieth-Century Archimedes, greeted his discovery with an exclamatory: "Foreign propaganda...

...It would have taken from me my ability and authority as a teacher...

...Such confusion automatically brings Committee scrutiny into the intellectual and moral worlds most concerned with social reform, fermentation of thought, unrestricted inquiry into knowledge, creative mental processes...

...But, too frequently, any reform is labeled un-American...

...Webster's dictionary defines propaganda as: "Dissemination of ideas, information, gossip, or the like, for the purpose of helping or injuring . . ." Propaganda is an attempt to persuade...

...In 1953 the House Committee released to the press without comment a statement by Benjamin Gitlow of its staff that "ministers who carried out the instructions of the Communist Party, or collaborated with it, were limited in number...

...Distorted to make it appear that the students rioted only at the instigation of known and recognizable Communist agitators (when in fact the county sheriff remarked about the peaceableness of the crowd), the film all-too-effectively tries to show that the movement to abolish the HUAC is directed by Communists—notwithstanding the lengthy list of clearly non-Communist persons and groups who have called for an end to the Committee...

...If Americans want it, it becomes American...

...Scientific leaders such as Dr...

...The "good" done by the Committee's exposure to creative thought had been stated already by film producer Robert Rossen, in his unintentionally and painfully revealing "confession" before the Committee: "I did a lot of thinking...

...Although the Committee can be depended upon to make mistakes and spur the rising cry to abolish it, a movement given vocal leadership by Representative Roosevelt in his stirring recounting to Congress on April 25, 1960, of the Committee's wrongs, Americans cannot depend on the courts and political leaders alone to carry on the struggle...

...And all it ever accomplished in its 1959 abortive investigation of California school teachers was that, of 111,500, four stopped teaching...

...Symptomatic of the entire authors-versus-subver-sive-hunters conflict was Representative James Roosevelt's question to his colleagues in the House in February, 1959: "What good did it do to the free world to subject this talented man [playwright Arthur Miller] to criminal prosecution because he refused to name [associates of] ten years ago...

...In the South, for instance, state investigating bodies such as Virginia's Committee on Offenses Against the Administration of Justice, viewing "un-Americanism" as they logically would understand the word, have used investigations to harass the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other racial-justice organizations...

...You can have freedom—by itself—in anarchy, until society collapses...

...in 1945, Mississippi's Democratic Congressman John Rankin was responsible for elevating the Dies inquiry to standing-committee status...

...It undermines the very foundation of our democratic system, the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom...

...The mentioning of names would save me a great deal of practical trouble, but it would smash me inside and ruin me as a man...

...But the direct and indirect power of the Committee—wielded through public exposure accompanied by harsh questions that rob witnesses of dignity, followed often by loss of livelihood, social ostracism, sometimes even prison—can create such fear that, in Sherwood's case, it brought him to his desperate act...

...Throughout the world, the image of America as an exuberant crusader for liberty is vanishing...

...The result has been incalculable harm to the orderly liberal development of the democratic process, so necessary to the maintenance of the free traditions of our democracy...

...He told the Committee: "You can be sure that if I had at any time pursued activities inimical to the best interests of my adopted home, I would immediately have gone to the proper authorities...

...When Communist propaganda is linked to imminent illegal acts, then investigation is proper—though the main defense against genuine acts of espionage or sabotage lies in professionally trained counter-intelligence agents, in the FBI, and in the military services...

...And they have a greater faith than the Committee in the innate strength which freedom alone brings to democracy...

...I don't think, after two years of thinking, that any one individual can even indulge himself in the luxury of individual morality...

...This is where the Committee has struck hardest and has done its worst damage...

...If Congress consequently may not abridge these freedoms, Congressional committees—which exist to examine the need for legislation and how existing legislation is administered—certainly are out of bounds in examining matters about which Congress may not legislate...

...While the Committee's ravages arouse disgust with its antics, and sympathy for those pilloried, the continued existence of the Committee poses a threat to American traditions far more ominous than personal tragedy...

...A country that punishes belief and association is not merely a country with a lesser degree of democracy, it is on the way to being no democracy at all...

...Unfortunately, the ACLU said, investigation of these Communists opposing the immigration laws tars all the other people who oppose these laws with a "red" brush—including even President Eisenhower, who wished to ameliorate some of the harsher provisions...

...Arens, by the way, recently questioned President Eisenhower's patriotism because he introduced his grandchildren to Khrushchev...

...So the wrath of the community is unleashed...

...The list of irresponsible accusations (many of which would be legally slanderous, except for Congressional immunity) is endless—and could be easily avoided...

...Since Congress cannot constitutionally come right out and forbid the expression of ideas, however well organized (organization is what the HUAC usually means when it uses the evil-sounding term, "conspiracy"), the Committee does the job by exposure, inviting patriotic public excoriation of persons deemed "un-American...

...Chief Justice Warren's encouraging dictum condemning "exposure for exposure's sake" in the 1956 Watkins decision was followed in 1959 by a five to four ruling that the HUAC mandate was constitutional...

...Raging around the purposes and practices of the House Un-American Activities Committee—progenitor of Senator Joseph McCarthy's and Senator James Eastland's enterprises, plus several state and local facsimiles—is the age-old torrent of controversy between freedom and order...

...Writers and others in various communication fields have been brought before the Committee in profusion...

...Much of the tarnishing of our prestige abroad results from the depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its emulators throughout the nation...

...It is profoundly disturbing to realize that the Committee—an arm of Congress—does with impunity what Congress itself is expressly forbidden to do...

...One Committee member, California's Republican Representative Donald Jackson, last year accused the National Council of Churches, in dead seriousness, of promoting obscene books written by Communist sympathizers...

...It is being replaced by an image of tired men fearful of domestic shadows...

...But political propaganda...

...It is equally disturbing to know that the Committee has spawned dozens of state and municipal counterparts — little HUACs — which carry subversive hunts to the point of dangerous absurdity...

...Even membership in the American Civil Liberties Union is cited by state attorneys-general and little HUACs as clear evidence of "subversion...

...Fishman...

...The present mandate of the House Un-American Activities Committee reads, in part: "The Committee on Un-American Activities, as a whole or by subcommittee, is authorized to make from time to time investigations of (i) the extent, character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States, (ii) 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 our form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution . . ." (Italics added...