X-Nico

17 unusual facts about House Un-American Activities Committee


Ben Barzman

Like many of his colleagues in the movie business, Ben Barzman was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

DC Universe

After the war, under pressure from the paranoid Committee on Un-American Activities, the JSA disbanded.

George Naicker

The House Un-American Activities Committee of the McCarthy period found links in SA where the CPSA was banned in 1950 while the Cold War was being put in place.

Isobel Lennart

In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began an investigation into the motion picture industry.

J. Carlyle Sitterson

Student leaders and faculty members of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led a campus movement in opposition to the law which climaxed with the invitation of speakers Herbert Aptheker (an avowed communist) and Frank Wilkinson (an outspoken critic of the House Un-American Activities Committee).

John Herrmann

The Ware group's activities were investigated in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Herrmann was placed under surveillance and questioned many times in Mexico by the FBI.

John McGrew

However, McGrew's career in the United States was effectively ended when his former background painter, Gene Fleury testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he and his wife had seen several fellow artists, including McGrew when they were attending Communist Party meetings.

Michael Freedland

Witch Hunt in Hollywood: McCarthyism's War On Tinseltown is an account of the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and (the not directly connected) House Un-American Activities Committee.

Muriel Draper

In 1949 she was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and ceased her political activities as a result.

Otto Hagel

Hagel and Mieth photographed the inside of the Heart Mountain Japanese American internment camp for LIFE in 1943, but the photographs were not published by LIFE, In the 1950s, the couple was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Prothonotary Warbler

The Prothonotary Warbler became known in the 1940s as the bird that, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, established a connection between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

Robert Claiborne

Robert became an editor at Scientific American, only to lose his job in 1960 after the FBI visited and pointed out to the senior staff that he had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings as an ex-communist, and had refused to testify.

Selena Royle

However, in 1951, when she refused to testify about her alleged Communist sympathies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, her acting career came to a sudden standstill.

Shi Xinning

Influenced by both social realism and European styles, he specialises in historical paintings that insert Mao Zedong into iconic social and political photos of the 20th century - such as the Yalta Conference, the HUAC hearings, and a state procession of the British Queen Mother.

In Xinnings "Mao and McCarthy", for example, Mao can be seen attending the HUAC hearings, though he is not being questioned but is rather an observer.

Trude Lash

Lash had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and became good friends with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Waldron Smithers

During the Cold War, while MP for Orpington, Smithers regularly pressed for a House of Commons Select Committee on un-British Activities to be created to conduct anti-communist investigations, to mirror the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee.


Garfield Bromley Oxnam

He was accused of being a communist by Donald L. Jackson and went before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities.

Hy Kraft

The jacket reads, "A lifetime's stroll from New York's Lower East Side to Broadway, with side trips to Hollywood, London, and Washington, D.C., and singular associations with Victor Herbert, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and the House Un-American Activities Committee."

Lloyd Gough

Married to the actress Karen Morley, both were brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee and when they invoked the Fifth Amendment they were blacklisted, effectively terminating their careers in Hollywood until the late 1960s.

Paul Y. Anderson

In October he took a foray into radio and denounced the conduct of Martin Dies, Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

William Pomerance

Walt Disney accused Pomerance, along with Herbert Sorrell and David Hilberman, of being a communist in an interview with chief investigator Robert E. Stripling before the House Un-American Activities Committee, although Disney said in the interview that "No one has any way of proving" this.