Who asked “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

The committee that asked it

The question belongs to the House of Representatives, not the Senate. Its Committee on Un-American Activities, known as HUAC, began in 1938 as a special committee under Representative Martin Dies and became a standing committee in 1945. In October 1947, under its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, it held hearings on communist influence in the movie industry, in a Washington hearing room crowded with newsreel cameras.

The first week belonged to friendly witnesses, among them Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild. The second week brought writers and directors the committee suspected of being Communists.

October 28, 1947

Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter of Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, took the stand. Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator, asked the question that would follow witnesses for a decade:

Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Trumbo would not give a yes or a no. The chairman banged his gavel and had him removed from the stand, and on the way Trumbo got out one sentence: this, he said, was the beginning of an American concentration camp. Later that week the question went to Ring Lardner Jr., who said he could answer it, but that he would hate himself in the morning.

Why the Ten would not answer

Ten witnesses refused, and they became the Hollywood Ten. Their argument was the First Amendment: Congress, they said, had no right to ask a citizen what he believed or which lawful groups he joined. Membership in the Communist Party was legal, and all ten were, or had been, members. They chose that defense over the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination because they wanted to challenge the committee’s right to ask at all.

They lost. The House cited them for contempt, the courts upheld the convictions, and in 1950, when the Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals, they went to prison. Many witnesses who came after them took the Fifth instead, which kept them out of prison but not off the blacklist. One more turn: Chairman Thomas was himself convicted of padding his office payroll, and served his sentence in the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut, where two of the Ten, Lardner and Lester Cole, were also held. What the hearing started in the studios is told in What was the Hollywood blacklist?.

Not McCarthy’s question

Joseph McCarthy was a first-year senator in 1947 and sat on no House committee; the Hollywood hearings were never his. His own televised hearings came in 1953 and 1954, in a Senate subcommittee. The confusion is natural, because the question outlived the hearing that produced it and came to stand for the whole era that took his name, described in What was McCarthyism?. One young HUAC member of 1947 did become famous through the committee: Representative Richard Nixon, during the Alger Hiss case of 1948.

The committee kept asking the question through the 1950s, of actors, teachers and writers, Arthur Miller among them in 1956. It was renamed the Committee on Internal Security in 1969 and abolished in 1975.