Caption: This editorial cartoon from 1953 showed how public opinion began to turn against HUAC when Velde targeted churches.
Some sixty years ago, Peoria’s Congressman led coast-to-coast hearings on unAmerican activities, including some targeting Hollywood. Before U.S. Rep. Harold Velde was done “investigating” alleged Communist infiltration, he not only accused actors of being traitors, but teachers and even church leaders.
Representing the 18th Congressional District after Everett Dirksen and before Robert Michel, Velde’s actions decades ago might be seen as a reminder during the “war on terror” and government spying how fear can become paranoia, then persecution.
Born in rural Tazewell County in 1910, Harold Himmel Velde attended Bradley University and finished college at Northwestern. After teaching and coaching in Hillsdale, Ill., he returned to school and obtained a law degree from the University of Illinois, then practiced law in Pekin. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, but asked and received a discharge so he could become an FBI agent specializing in counter-espionage.
After World War II, he left the FBI and returned to his law firm, then at the age of 36 became a Tazewell County judge until 1949, when he took office in Congress. Halfway through his eight-year career there he became chairman of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) when Republican Congressman J. Parnell Thomas was sentenced to prison for taking kickbacks and two others who outranked Velde – Richard Nixon and Francis Case – left the House to take Senate seats.
HUAC was first established in 1937 under the chairmanship of ultra-conservative Democratic Congressman Martin Dies. Originally set up to probe both left- and right-wing groups, the committee refused to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, which Dies, from Texas, supported.
The committee was quiet during World War II, but in the late ’40s and early ’50s was the epicenter of what’s now known as the “Red Scare,” along with its Senate counterpart headed by the notorious Joe McCarthy. In 1953-54 alone, when Velde chaired HUAC, more than 650 witnesses were questioned. HUAC in 1969 was renamed the Internal Security Committee, then abolished in 1975, but in its heyday caused various American institutions to quake at the threat of being smeared.
“Men like Dies, Thomas, Velde, Nixon and McCarthy had in common political opportunism and the demagogic capacity to exploit nativism and know-nothing passions,” wrote Victor Navasky in his book “Naming Names.”
Now recalled for its well-publicized targeting of Hollywood, HUAC actually cast a wide net over many walks of life. For example, Velde alleged subversive activities at Northwestern, Roosevelt College and the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, and prior to HUAC hearings at Harvard, Velde said, “Education is a field that has been largely untouched by investigation committees.”
The questioning itself was more a formality to accuse rather than a fact-finding exercise.
Following is a revealing passage from Frank Donner’s book “The UnAmericans”:
Tom O’Connor, a liberal newspaperman at the New York Daily Compass, was interrogated in 1952 about a charge that he had been a Communist in 1938. Congressman Velde asked him:
“Are you a member of the Communist Party now?”
“No, sir,” O’Connor replied.
“Were you a year ago?” “No, sir.”
“Were you five years ago?” “No, sir.”
“Were you ten years ago?” “No, sir.”
Velde had no further questions, but made the following comment:
“I personally can draw only one inference, that you are not only a past member of the Communist Party, but that you continue to be a member of the Communist Party and that you are an extreme danger to the country as the managing editor of a large New York newspaper.”
In Youngstown, Ohio, in 1956, Mr. Velde asks a witness [about the uprising in Hungary]: “Whose side are you on in the revolt, the Soviet Union’s or the rebels?” The witness replies, “I am on the rebels’ side.”
But Velde is not satisfied with the witness’ answers to other questions, so he concludes, “From the witness’ appearance and demeanor before this committee, I am satisfied that he bears watching by the duly constituted authorities. I do not think he is on the side of the rebels. I think he is on the side of Moscow, the Soviets.”
And it wasn’t just foreign affairs. Velde in 1949 said that President Harry S Truman tried to “cover up and protect” Soviet plans “to establish, by force and violence if necessary, a Communistic or socialistic United States.
“The executive branch of the government has been bombarded with plots to establish a new type of government in America,” said Velde, who subpoenaed Truman in 1953 after he was out of office, but the Democrat ignored the summons.
Besides high-profile targets, the committees targeted other popular artists and a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, leaders of the Boy Scouts and CIA, Atomic Energy Commission scientists and teachers. But Velde and HUAC seemed to go too far when the committee went after clergy.
Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam was sympathetic to Communists, said HUAC, which grilled him for ten hours.
Leaders from different faiths strenuously objected. The National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America, and the Presbyterian Church USA protested.
John Mackay, moderator of the Presbyterian Church USA’s 1953 General Assembly, told the delegates, “A passionate, unreflective opposition to the Communist demon is coming to be regarded as the one and only true expression of Americanism and even of Christianity.”
Father Robert C. Hartnett, editor of the Catholic magazine America, said the hearings “debauched public discussion in this country.”
Dr. Louis Harap, editor of Jewish Life, charged that Velde’s HUAC was creating conditions like those “under which six million Jews were murdered” in Europe.
Curiously, McCarthy avoided targeting the church, telling the Associated Press that Velde “has my complete, wholehearted assurance that there is not even the remotest possibility of our overlapping.”
A Chicago newspaper editorialized, “The American TV audience saw for itself the vicious and unfair manner in which some Congressmen have set themselves up to pass [judgment] upon reputations of their fellow countrymen. Millions of Americans must have asked themselves, ‘What is the purpose of this inquisition and whither is it taking us as a nation?’
“The committee’s practice is to throw victims to the lions of defamation.”
Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared his disapproval of any such probe, too, saying that churches promoted belief in God and could not be Communist.
“Generalized and irresponsible attacks that sweepingly condemn the whole of any group of citizens are alien to America,” Eisenhower said in one of his earliest and clearest statements denouncing the Red Scare.
Other HUAC actions now seem ridiculous.
HUAC considered an attempt to remove future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from representing plaintiffs in a desegregation lawsuit because of Marshall’s alleged membership in Communist-friendly groups.
Velde personally attacked Agnes Meyers, wife of Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer, after she criticized HUAC’s investigating schools. Velde claimed she had praised Communism in a letter to a Russian journal. (The actual letter was written by a Canadian with a different name, but after this was pointed out Velde refused to retract his accusation until libel was mentioned.)
Eisenhower’s administration “never really saw Velde as a menace,” wrote “A Conspiracy So Immense” author David Oshinsky, “just an ‘excruciating embarrassment.’
“Under Velde’s inept leadership,” Oshinky continued, “HUAC became a traveling carnival.”
Many people called to testify defied HUAC. Screenwriter Edwin Huebsch took the stand wearing a button inscribed “Fire Velde!”
Actor Fredric March wrote an open letter about the hearings, saying, “Who do you think they’re really after? Who’s next? Is it your minister who will be told what he can say in his pulpit? Is it your children’s school teacher who will be told what she can say in classrooms? This reaches into every American city and town.”
Frank Sinatra added, “If you make a pitch on a nationwide radio network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie?”
Still, hundreds of people were blacklisted from working, ranging from screenwriters Dalton Trumbo (“Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Spartacus”) and Nat Hiken (“Sgt. Bilko”) to director Abraham Polonsky and actor Lionel Stander. The latter two actually had participated in Communist-affiliated activities years before, legally.
Stander had been active in the 1930s Popular Front, a coalition of progressive groups dedicated to fighting reactionaries at home and fascism abroad. Stander wrote, “We fought on every front because we realized that the forces of reaction and fascism fight democracy on every front. We, too, have been forced, therefore, to organize in order to combat them on every front: politically through such organizations as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee; economically through our guilds and unions; socially and culturally through such organizations as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.”
Probably best remembered for playing Max on TV’s “Hart to Hart,” Stander had appeared in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “A Star Is Born” and other top films before HUAC questioned his loyalty. In his HUAC testimony in 1953, Stander denounced Velde’s use of informers, particularly those with mental problems. But Stander was blacklisted and didn’t resume working in Hollywood for years, later appearing in Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” “The Cassandra Crossing” and other films.
Velde in 1951 referred to director and screenwriter Abraham Polonsky (“Body and Soul,” “Force of Evil”) as “the most dangerous man in America.”
Polonsky never denied being a Communist. However, that was known by the U.S. military, which during World War II had him as a member of America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) as a liaison with the French Resistance underground. Velde’s targeting Polonsky lent credence to the suspicion that HUAC was less interested in “ferreting out” Communists as in criticizing progressives. Blacklisted, Polonsky eventually returned to work, writing “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” “Madigan” and other movies.
Meanwhile, Dirksen – Velde’s predecessor and the future Senate Leader – supported Velde and HUAC, although overwhelming opposition eventually arose in the general public, both houses of Congress, both parties, the media and the White House, where Eisenhower, the former Army general, insisted hearings questioning the military be televised so the committees’ bullying could be exposed.
Ultimately, the tide turned. Moderate Republicans such as New York’s Jacob Javits criticized HUAC’s and McCarthy’s tactics. In 1954, Dirksen moved to close the Senate hearings; by that December, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy for behavior unbecoming a Senator; and by 1957, Velde’s last year in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that witnesses testifying before Congress don’t lose their constitutional rights.
After his four terms in Congress, Velde practiced law in Washington, was in business in Chicago and returned to Washington as a government attorney, retiring in 1975 and dying in Arizona 1985.
Looking back at HUAC and that period of distrust and defamation, The Nation magazine wrote, “The red hunt was misguided because the equation that came to define the McCarthy era (to be a liberal is to be a pinko is to be a red is to be a spy) was misguided. And it was misguided because, in the name of national security and national safety, it inhibited, marginalized, attacked and attempted to decimate dissent.”
CAPTION: Velde, left, questions actor Lionel Stander, right, an uncooperative witness at a 1953 HUAC hearing. Although Joseph Litvak in his 2009 book “The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture” compared the Velde-Stander exchange to Groucho Marx-Margaret Dumont banter in Marx Brothers movies, the consequence wasn’t funny to Stander, who was blacklisted until 1963 and didn’t regularly work in the United States until the ’70s. Photo courtesy Jump Cut magazine