The phrase “Operation Abolition” was coined in 1957 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), referring to attempts to challenge the committee's mandate to investigate the “un-American.” Established in 1938 as a temporary investigative committee of the US House of Representatives, it had originally been charged with investigating alleged disloyalty and subversive activities by public employees, private citizens and organizations.Footnote ¹ After HUAC's 1945 establishment as a permanent committee and as the Cold War deepened, HUAC decided to imprint its own subjective definition on the idea of un-Americanism by concentrating on communist subversion. The committee's investigations broadened to examine communist infiltration of the motion picture industry, government, labour unions, and higher education. It was only at the end of the Second Red Scare in 1957, however, that civil liberties groups played a significant role in challenging HUAC's power to cast its own subjective view of un-Americanism as an objective political truth.

A small and relatively ad hoc organization, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), was at the forefront of opposition to the HUAC's mandate that spread rapidly across the country. In response to this challenge to its constitutional authority, HUAC attempted to instil a public fear of insidious “un-Americanism” by casting itself as the Constitutional protector of Americanism's core values. Employing guilt by association, HUAC employed increasingly sophisticated propaganda techniques, from the production of the pamphlet Operation Abolition to the film of the same name in May 1960. The country's largest civil liberties group, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was initially reluctant to engage in criticism of HUAC, or to cooperate with the ECLC, preferring to appear above reproach in its alliances. Indeed, in the final analysis, it was institutional opposition, primarily from the Supreme Court and in the efforts of politicians such as Congressman James Roosevelt, which was instrumental in making criticism of HUAC viable, rather than the actions of pressure groups.

The committee was a dominant power base of the Second Red Scare, conducting at least 230 hearings and subpoenaing more than three thousand people to testify between 1945 and 1960.Footnote ² In accordance with the 1940 Smith Act that made it a federal criminal offense to advocate the overthrow or destruction of the government, the committee opposed the right to privacy of political belief.Footnote ³ The first prominent investigation occurred in 1947, when workers in the Hollywood film industry were summoned before HUAC during an investigation into whether communist agents and sympathisers had been planting propaganda into films. The Hollywood Ten case resulted from a number of the witnesses emphasizing the Americanism implicit in their own position by citing their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly as the basis for refusing to answer questions over Communist Party membership. After the Hollywood Ten were cited by HUAC for contempt of Congress, blacklisted and jailed, witnesses appearing before Congressional committees could not invoke the First Amendment in the hope of being protected from having to discuss with the government their political beliefs or activities. Subject to the threat of imprisonment, witnesses faced the unpalatable decision of either naming names or employing the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, which was increasingly regarded by those on the right as a tacit admission of guilt.

Fear of being targeted as a communist subversive also affected those who sought to provide legal defence to suspected communists. Anticommunism predominated in many leading liberal groups such as the Americans for Democratic Action, and the New York-based ACLU. The ACLU's national leadership equivocated on the issue of civil liberties for communists, as it had already internally incorporated anticommunist loyalty statements in 1940, removing from its governing structure anybody who was “a member of any political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country, or who by his public declarations indicates his support of such a principle.”Footnote ⁴ This linked the maintenance of Constitutional rights with political conformity. The ECLC discreetly referenced the issue in its 1951 founding statement that it hoped “to move with dispatch in situations where [existing civil liberties] organizations are unable or unwilling to act.”Footnote ⁵ The group aimed to develop public awareness campaigns in support of constitutionally protected liberties and to “render … aid to victims of the current abridgment of these liberties in politics, education, and the professions.” At stake was a question that was central to contemporary debates over definitions of un-Americanism and Americanism: whether those whose political ideologies advocated the overthrow of the government deserved to be protected by the rights codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The ECLC's recognition of the need to develop an aggressive campaign against HUAC crystallized in response to the perceived illegitimacy of HUAC's 1956 attack on the New York-based Fund for the Republic (FFR).Footnote ⁶ The FFR had been established in New York in December 1952 to study political pressures that were threatening to restrict basic freedoms in the US. It aimed to research not only the nature and location of the “internal communist menace,” but also the possible dangers of the unfair “application of guilt by association” that threatened to undermine due process and equal protection of the laws.Footnote ⁷ During the early 1950s, it published several studies concerning the threat, perceived and otherwise, of communism and anticommunism to American society. Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, published in 1955, polled a cross-section of six thousand Americans to determine their attitudes to nonconformist behaviour, highlighting the dangerous constitutional consequences of efforts to thwart a perceived communist conspiracy.Footnote ⁸ HUAC released a statement that it intended to institute hearings to determine whether the foundation, “with its vast reservoirs of funds and power, [was] a friend or foe in our national death struggle against the Communist conspiracy.”Footnote ⁹ When FFR president Robert Hutchins wrote to HUAC chairman Francis E. Walter in response, asking for time to present witnesses of their selection, he received no formal reply other than subsequent newspaper reports that the hearings had been postponed indefinitely.Footnote ¹⁰ Not getting the opportunity to clear their names, Hutchins privately worried that HUAC would attempt to discredit the fund by conducting further preliminary investigations and linking them to other “guilty parties.”Footnote ¹¹

As part of wider, systemic attempts to muzzle alternative ideological views, HUAC also targeted the ECLC, for their work as legal defenders of the “un-American” during the Second Red Scare. The group's first campaign centred on the right to travel, developing a test-case challenge to the confiscation of suspected subversives' passports. Passport provision came under the aegis of the State Department, but the ECLC's campaign led to HUAC's “passport hearings” to address the use of American passports as travel documents in furtherance of the objectives of what it chose to term the communist conspiracy. On 12 June 1956, ECLC executive director Clark Foreman and the group's general counsel Leonard Boudin were called before HUAC alongside their passport-case clients, who included the artist Rockwell Kent and singer Paul Robeson. In a heated debate with the chairman, Robeson argued that HUAC members belonged “with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the non-patriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”Footnote ¹² By positing an interpretation of Americanism and un-Americanism very different to that shared by HUAC's committeemen, he explicitly linked HUAC's activity with unconstitutionality. Faced with such a direct threat, HUAC recommended that the House of Representatives cite Robeson and Foreman for contempt.

In response to HUAC's explicit attempts both to protect the veracity of its own ideological stance and to undermine civil liberties researchers and defenders through guilt by association, the ECLC Executive Committee developed plans to abolish the House Committee. Foreman recognized that the campaign necessitated an alliance with better-funded groups.Footnote ¹³ In August 1956, ACLU director Patrick Murphy Malin had assured the ECLC that the union believed HUAC to be unconstitutional. Little enthusiasm existed within the ACLU national committee for the campaign during the waning of the Second Red Scare, however, due to the risks of such a high-profile repudiation of HUAC's much-vaunted interpretation of what constituted anticommunism.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, despite the close links between individual members of the groups, such as H. H. Wilson, a key member of the ACLU's Academic Freedom Committee and ECLC's National Board, the ACLU remained suspicious of the ECLC's motives. It engaged a secret evaluation produced by the American Jewish Committee, which highlighted the ECLC's predominant focus on the defence of communists or communist front organizations. In particular, the document repudiated its informal links with the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive bar association that had defended communists at famous political trials such as the Dennis trial of 1948. The group also took issue with the ECLC's failure to take a public position on the issue of worldwide communism, notably the denial of rights and liberties in the Soviet sphere, as well as on the activities of American communists.Footnote ¹⁵

In contrast to the ACLU's caution over the dangers of guilt by association, the ECLC formed an informal coalition with the Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedoms (CCPAF). The Southern California-based CCPAF had been formed in 1952 to oppose HUAC, based on the belief that the committee violated the First Amendment rights of citizens who were called before it to testify about their political beliefs and associations. CCPAF secretary Frank Wilkinson had been assistant director of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles until 1952, when he was fired for refusing to take a loyalty oath after citing the First Amendment when called before HUAC.Footnote ¹⁶ Wilkinson had been blacklisted and placed under Federal Bureau of Investigation surveillance since that time.Footnote ¹⁷ CCPAF chairman Reverend A. A. Heist had previously been leader of the radical and quasi-autonomous Southern California CLU. His desire for independence from national ACLU policy decrees resulted in disagreements over the national office's desire to control affiliates' actions in the political realm. This internal debate over un-Americanism was concurrent with the national debate, and Heist resigned in 1953 in response to the ACLU national office's opposition to a pamphlet opposing HUAC as “un-American.”Footnote ¹⁸ In response, in March 1953 Heist was called before HUAC local hearings where the committee repudiated the leaflet, citing it as a tragedy that “a man of the cloth would deliberately lie.”Footnote ¹⁹

The ECLC and CCPAF initial strategy was the development of a publicity campaign to shift public attitudes on what constituted un-Americanism away from HUAC's monopolized grip, and thus onto the Constitutional dangers arising from HUAC's campaign. They copublished Rights magazine and developed newspaper adverts and pamphlets to promote fund-raising and awareness of civil liberties issues related to HUAC hearings during 1954 and 1955.Footnote ²⁰ Foreman's August 1956 offer of the ECLC Executive Committee's support for the CCPAF's program suggests a different balance of power to that posited by HUAC, which viewed the CCPAF merely as the ECLC's California affiliate.Footnote ²¹ In October 1956 Foreman embarked on a fifteen-city tour to warn about the “evils” of HUAC, but the group nevertheless remained localized in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Denouncing HUAC's activities as an “inquisition” merely in the guise of investigating subversives and subversive organizations, the campaign also represented an opportunity to promote the group more widely in the liberal community as a civil liberties defender.

The campaign to abolish HUAC remained rooted in this cross-country alliance of small radical organizations. The ECLC and CCPAF's first major meeting on the issue of abolition, held on 7 March 1957 in Philadelphia, attracted HUAC's attention. HUAC chief investigator Louis J. Russell attended the meeting. His report linked the desire for abolition with dangerous political subversion, highlighting Clark Foreman's long history of opposition to HUAC since 1945 as head of the progressive Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The ECLC was described as a “front” for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). The CRC, formed in 1946 by a merger of the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, had no links in personnel with the ECLC, suggesting that HUAC investigators viewed the development of radical opposition to the group as a subversive matrix.Footnote ²² The national ACLU continued to distrust the ideological motives of the anti-HUAC coalition, believing that a focus on procedural issues would be a more effective limit on HUAC's power. In particular, they pushed for HUAC to be made a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, which would have limited its investigative powers. In March 1957, director of the ACLU Washington, DC office Irving Ferman contacted FBI assistant director Louis Nichols. In reaction to a visit from Frank Wilkinson concerning his desire to mobilize a national campaign against HUAC, Ferman informed the CCPAF representative that the ACLU would not spearhead any such drive.Footnote ²³ At the ACLU's informal April 1957 conference, the delegates agreed with the national office's conclusion that a campaign for complete elimination of HUAC, as advocated by the ECLC, would be a “waste of time and effort.”

Shortly thereafter, resistance to HUAC was facilitated by the key Supreme Court decision of 17 June 1957, Watkins v. US, whereby a majority 6–1 verdict overturned the contempt-of-Congress conviction against a HUAC witness who refused to name names. John T. Watkins, a union official, had willingly volunteered answers describing his own communist past and that of current members of the Communist Party, but refused to testify against those who had long ago ceased to be members. The Court's reasoning was based on the Fifth Amendment “due-process” clause, concerning the committee's refusal to allow Watkins fair opportunity to determine whether he could lawfully refuse to answer questions. Chief Justice Warren's majority opinion, however, confirmed that un-Americanism is fluid and subjective, in clear opposition to HUAC's attempts to posit its narrow, fixed and subjective view as an objective truth. He asked, “who can define the meaning of ‘un-American’? What is that single, solitary principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution?”Footnote ²⁴ The practical significance of the decision was that Congress did not have unlimited power to investigate the private lives of American citizens. The decision viewed the committee system of inquiry practised by HUAC as providing inadequate safeguards for the protection of the constitutional right of free speech. It was handed down the same day as Yates v. US, a Smith Act case which ruled that the First Amendment protected radical and reactionary speech unless it posed a “clear and present danger.”Footnote ²⁵ The Supreme Court's questioning of the scope and legitimacy of HUAC's investigations widened the acceptable public sphere for discussion of these issues, prompting public debate over the boundaries of government power and the issue of a right to privacy.Footnote ²⁶

While the Watkins decision encouraged the ECLC to persist in its abolition campaign, on a practical level it did not result in an upsurge of support, as widespread suspicion over the ideological bent of the court led to these Supreme Court decisions being referred to as “Red Monday.” ECLC chairman Harvey O'Connor highlighted the Court's opinion as implicitly supporting the civil liberties group's firm stance against investigations by Congress in areas of political belief and association, in which it could not legislate.Footnote ²⁷ The Watkins decision prompted the inauguration of the official ECLC campaign at a rally at Carnegie Hall on 20 September 1957, where speakers included one of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, and Frank Wilkinson.Footnote ²⁸ On the other side of this same on-going ideological debate over un-Americanism, Justice Clark's dissenting opinion in Watkins argued that the majority opinion amounted to a “mischievous curbing of the informing function of the Congress.”Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, an American Bar Association special committee condemned the decisions as having “tied the hands of the country … by leaning too far backward in the maintenance of theoretical individual rights,” revealing a tension between constitutional rights and their de facto application.Footnote ³⁰

The ECLC's short-term objectives in the anti-HUAC campaign were to prompt a grassroots letter-writing campaign to Congressmen and newspaper editors in support of the abolition drive, and more broadly to stimulate anti-committee rallies and petitions throughout the country.Footnote ³¹ ECLC chairman Harvey O'Connor penned For Abolition of the Inquisitorial Committees of Congress, arguing that the country's progress was being damaged through the sacrifice of the careers of nonconformist scientists and intellectuals “on the altars of ‘un-Americanism.’” O'Connor urged viewing the use of the term “un-American” as an epithet employed to threaten the activities and thoughts of a small group of left-wing political radicals, rather than as an effective argument or a fixed ideological position. He also popularized former attorney general Francis Biddle's belief that the phrase was “meaningless and sterile, reflecting the timid longing to be correct, an attitude … at its worst, narrow, dark and brutal.”Footnote ³² The ECLC's opposition to HUAC appeared to draw on the intellectual arguments posited by nuanced research conducted by the FFR, and the campaign focussed on the committee continuing to question witnesses' political associations despite the Supreme Court decision.Footnote ³³ On 23 August 1957, the House of Representatives had unanimously cited three additional Americans for contempt of Congress, for exercising their First Amendment rights of silence before HUAC. The Carnegie Hall meeting was followed by meetings in twenty cities across the US and the development of petitions in Chicago and Salt Lake City signed by citizens calling for the abolition of HUAC.Footnote ³⁴

The “Red Monday” decisions also prompted a shift in the ACLU's internal policy, increasing its openness to the abolition of HUAC, away from its previous, more cautious desire for its curbing. In July 1957, Patrick Murphy Malin confirmed to ACLU affiliates that the national office would continue to express opposition to the committee's mandate.Footnote ³⁵ Associate executive director Alan Reitman organized a meeting of national agencies in October to prepare a Congressional campaign, suggesting to affiliates that they send their Congressional delegations a letter proposing abolition.Footnote ³⁶ The ECLC also continued to make overtures to the ACLU, as ECLC supporter Alexander Meiklejohn approached Ernest Besig and the Northern California ACLU regarding the appointment of a full-time worker for abolition. A former ACLU Executive Board member, the well-known philosopher Corliss Lamont spoke on the ECLC's behalf to ACLU executive director Patrick Murphy Malin about the possibility of informal alliances with ACLU state affiliates. Lamont believed that the ECLC's efforts “caused Malin to feel the need of ‘some kind’ of abolition campaign,” as an action plan on the issue was presented at the ACLU December board meeting.Footnote ³⁷

Because the ACLU's position appeared to be shifting in favour of the ECLC's broader campaign to abolish HUAC, the House Committee moved swiftly to link abolitionists and subversive un-Americanism, a necessary riposte to this attack on its ideological position. In November 1957, HUAC produced a report entitled Operation Abolition: The Campaign against HUAC, the FBI, the Government Security Program by the ECLC and Its Affiliates, which developed two serious accusations against the ECLC. First, the committee portrayed the ECLC's abolition campaign as being part of a broader attempt to destabilize the government's Cold War security program, notably the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Clark Foreman believed that Operation Abolition was an intentionally “militaristic name,” which would induce fears of political instability.Footnote ³⁸ Second, the report argued that communists were directing the ECLC's abolition campaign.Footnote ³⁹ Privately, making it clear where he stood in the polarized ideological debate, J. Edgar Hoover commented to Francis E. Walter that the campaign revealed the ease with which communists were able to enlist the support of “misguided individuals to assist them in obscuring their subversive workings … the real meaning of civil liberties is not understood by these communist apologists.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The report effectively muted public support for the ECLC and led to media criticism. The Telegraph-Herald reported on the revival of “certain ‘liberal’ agencies that used to spring to the defense of every Red who got into trouble with the law.”Footnote ⁴¹ In response to the effectiveness of the report in shaping public reaction to the ECLC's work, HUAC investigator William Wheeler urged that it would be “advantageous” to produce a similar document on the CCPAF. The two groups enjoyed close links, as Frank Wilkinson had been working in New York and residing with ECLC vice chairman Corliss Lamont as a liaison with the ECLC on its HUAC abolition tour.Footnote ⁴² The CCPAF was actually an autonomous organization that had produced a pamphlet written by Dorothy Marshall entitled Operation Un-American.Footnote ⁴³ The claims were also repeated in HUAC's 1957 and 1958 Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications. Despite their exercise of the right to petition, asking that their name be removed from the guide, the 1958 edition accused the ECLC of having the “avowed purpose … to abolish HUAC and discredit the FBI” due to its “repeated assistance, by means of funds and legal aid, [of] Communists involved in Smith Act violations and similar legal proceedings.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In addition to attempting to influence public opinion against the ECLC's campaign and towards its own position, in 1958 HUAC subpoenaed Frank Wilkinson and another ECLC supporter, Carl Braden, to appear at their hearings in Atlanta, Georgia. In Braden's interrogation, he was asked about his connections with the ECLC and whether he had developed any strategies for working with the group. Wilkinson was deemed to be the ECLC's “guiding light” and asked whether the ECLC's mandate focussed on destroying HUAC and discrediting the FBI director.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wilkinson and Braden's refusal to answer came on the grounds of the First Amendment, rather than the Fifth, with the consequence that they were challenging HUAC's constitutional mandate to ask questions of conscience, rather than concentrating on preventing self-incrimination. Both Braden and Wilkinson were held in contempt of Congress, and Wilkinson and Braden employed counsel provided by the ACLU and ECLC respectively.Footnote ⁴⁶ HUAC also attempted to subpoena ECLC chairman Harvey O'Connor at a meeting to fund-raise for Braden and Wilkinson's legal defence. When O'Connor recalled that a deputy marshal was waiting for him with a piece of paper, he “knew what it was and turned on my heel. The subpoena fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The ECLC took his indictment as a test case.Footnote ⁴⁸

The ECLC remained marginalized by HUAC's attacks, but it continued to press for HUAC's abolition.Footnote ⁴⁹ Its task was rendered more difficult by an internal procedural battle between those in New York and those in California over the most effective method of publicizing HUAC's activities. Cracks developed in the relationship between the East Coast and West Coast advocates of the abolition of HUAC, as Frank Wilkinson's criticism led to spirited defence of the role of the ECLC by Clark Foreman, who argued that despite the group's limited resources, they continued to act as a “priming agent” that would affect other organizations and “persuade some of the public that some action was still possible.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The ACLU became more involved in the fight against HUAC, as the January 1958 Annual Report of the ACLU declared that HUAC “ought never to have come into existence, and ought to be abolished,” for those with the concern that “national security shall be preserved, without violating civil liberties.”Footnote ⁵¹ In December 1958, Counterattack, a prominent newsletter run by former FBI agents, accused the ACLU both in its Southern California affiliate and in the national office headed by Patrick Murphy Malin of making a “special effort to smash” HUAC.Footnote ⁵²

Opposition to HUAC became more publicly acceptable, a change which resulted primarily from the actions of individual political leaders, rather than the abolition campaign. Most prominently, James Roosevelt, the oldest son of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a US Representative for California, introduced House Resolution No. 53 in 1959. His resolution echoed the ACLU's plan for HUAC in providing for a shift in jurisdiction to the Committee on the Judiciary.Footnote ⁵³ He also spoke out against the House vote to give $327,000 for the committee. HUAC chairman Francis E. Walter denounced Roosevelt's attempt to transfer jurisdiction of the committee to the House Judiciary Committee as a central facet of an attempt to destroy the investigative function of HUAC. Representative Gordon H. Scherer similarly noted that “members of Congress and the news media have been bombarded with anti-Committee and anti-FBI propaganda, instigated by the Communist apparatus and joined in by some well meaning and not so well meaning people.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Roosevelt informed a news conference that he was not trying to stop House probes of subversion, but instead was going to strengthen the investigator function by “responding to a Supreme Court comment on the vagueness of the House resolution which set up the Un-American Activities group.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Attempts to denounce the ECLC and its allies far outstripped the publicity afforded to the abolition campaign. Clark Foreman believed that with each successive meeting, HUAC representative Scherer became “more hysterical in his abuse” of the ECLC; giving them “credit for everything that all other organizations are doing to abolish the committee, in his fury he pays us too good a compliment.”Footnote ⁵⁶ By the turn of the decade, there was a massive expansion in the number of single-issue groups willing to challenge the group's mandate, particularly based in higher education, including the Johns Hopkins University Committee for Basic Freedoms, the Columbia–Barnard Democratic Club and Cornell University. In April 1959, the committee was being denounced by former President Harry S. Truman as the “most un-American thing in the country today,” highlighting what he, too, believed to be the damage done to the Constitution and Bill of Rights by the investigating committees.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Southern California ACLU developed a petition campaign to eliminate HUAC, attempting to get 100,000 signatures in Southern California, directed at local Congressmen, aiming for them to offer a resolution to eliminate the committee. Concurrently, Congressman James Roosevelt offered cooperation during his positing of a resolution on the floor of the House to eliminate HUAC as a standing committee.Footnote ⁵⁸

However, the constitutional opening to challenge HUAC appeared to end with the handing down of the Supreme Court Barenblatt decision in 1959. In a 5–4 decision, the Court signalled a retreat from the Watkins decision, which had limited the ability of congressional committees to inquire into citizens' political beliefs and associations. The case upheld the conviction for contempt of Congress of Lloyd Barenblatt, who had refused to testify before HUAC about his beliefs and communist membership.Footnote ⁵⁹ Boudin lamented the “radically different” view taken by the Court from the strictures it placed on HUAC's conduct in the Watkins decision.Footnote ⁶⁰Counterattack described the decision as a “striking defeat” for the ACLU and ECLC.Footnote ⁶¹ Justice Black dissented, challenging what he viewed as the belief that despite the First Amendment, “Congress can abridge speech and association if this court decides that the governmental interest in abridging speech is greater than an individual's interest in exercising that freedom.”Footnote ⁶² In July 1959, the ACLU announced two new legal briefs challenging the constitutionality of the committee, charging that the committee had infringed freedom of speech and association while searching for communists.

Nevertheless, public opposition to HUAC was boosted by James Roosevelt's continuing campaign, as he continued to move to abolish the committee. Frank Wilkinson announced that two influential Representatives, Adam Clayton Powell and William Fitz Ryan, both of New York City, would vote with him. Echoing Harvey O'Connor's criticism of HUAC, Roosevelt continued to press for stronger limits on the group's power, as he lamented the lack of intellectual debate over HUAC's existence, and that investigating an area labelled “un-American activities” is “itself so vague and subjective that it inevitably devolves into name-calling at the lowest level.”Footnote ⁶³ An economic strand was added, too, to bolster the ideological arguments: rooting out the un-American necessitated disproportionate expenses, $654,000 over a two-year period, more than four times the funds allocated to less controversial committees, such as the Committee on Armed Services which received $150,000. The same month, the ACLU's biennial conference produced a resolution urging the “maximum effort” to abolish HUAC.Footnote ⁶⁴

Although HUAC enjoyed constitutional judicial endorsement of its activity, public opposition to the group increased. In May 1960, when HUAC sent a three-member committee to San Francisco, a violent confrontation occurred between police and protestors. It signalled a renewed campaign against HUAC not only by civil liberties organizations, but also by the New Left. A one-thousand-strong anti-HUAC rally, predominantly comprising students, formed on 12 May 1960.Footnote ⁶⁵ A picket line was established and a campaign developed by local students in the Bay Area, holding signs declaring, “Fascism is not our national policy yet” and “Protect the Bill of Rights.” The police arrested protestors in the Town Hall and carried them to waiting police vehicles, while high-pressure water hoses were turned on those outside. The committee hoped to quell any other protests in other cities, by portraying the organic development of the predominantly student protest as having been manipulated by Communist Party fronts. The first report on the issue was produced by the FBI, positing that the campaign had been developed by the Communist Party providing funding to the CCPAF, particularly Frank Wilkinson, who was accused both of organizing the riot and of being the “brains and energy” behind the campaign to abolish HUAC.Footnote ⁶⁶ Lawrence Speiser, the Washington director of the ACLU, met with Francis E. Walter and Frank Tavenner to discuss HUAC, followed up by a private communication from Executive Director Patrick Murphy Malin, who promised that “we have not cooperated and will not cooperate in any way with any of the organizations discussed,” concluding that although “in the public mind this distinction is frequently blurred, I assure you that the ACLU does its best to see that the difference is understood.”Footnote ⁶⁷

HUAC shifted its policy from attempting to minimize any media coverage of opposition to its mandate to attempting to control the flow of information in its entirety. It subpoenaed footage held by several television stations, ultimately producing a forty-five-minute movie, Operation Abolition, narrated by HUAC research director Fulton Lewis III. Introducing the film, Chairman Francis E. Walter warned the people of the US that the Communist Party had “assigned top priority to Operation Abolition,” and had allocated “agents trained in propaganda and agitation” to the project. One major allegation developed from the FBI's report, namely that Frank Wilkinson played a prominent role in organizing the protests and was therefore ultimately responsible for duping the students into rioting. Despite being caustically described by Time magazine as being “abrupt, badly edited … its eye-jolting camera work murky,” Walter estimated that more than 10 million people saw the film within nine months of its release.

Two further setbacks occurred for the anti-HUAC coalition. The first was the House's vote in March 1961 by a margin of 412–6 to sustain the committee, an act which fundamentally undermined Congressman Roosevelt's campaign to cut funding for the group. Second, Frank Wilkinson was sent to prison for contempt of Congress, an event which led Fulton Lewis Jr. to declare that “Operation Abolition was past history.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The split 5–4 decision affirmed Wilkinson's contempt citation, while Justice Black's dissent in the Wilkinson decision lamented that the only real limitation upon the committee's power to “harass its opponents” was “the Committee's own self-restraint, a characteristic which probably has not been predominant in the Committee's work over the past few years.” He highlighted an alternative path to the defence of Americanism, arguing that “true Americanism” could be protected “not by committees that persecute unorthodox minorities, but by strict adherence to basic principles of freedom that are responsible for this Nation's greatness.” Despite Wilkinson's imprisonment, he began to develop the National Committee to Abolish HUAC in August 1960, with ECLC supporters Aubrey Williams, James Imbrie, Alexander Meiklejohn and also Clifford and Virginia Durr.Footnote ⁶⁹ Placed on the Security Index, Wilkinson was reported as having “conferred with national and local leaders of the Communist Party concerning his anti-HUAC activities” in 1960.Footnote ⁷⁰

Shown widely across the country, the film Operation Abolition stirred sharp controversy over its political slant. The California affiliates of the ACLU took a leading role in attempting to educate the public against the official HUAC interpretation. At Long Beach State College, the campus chapter of the Southern California ACLU organized a mock session of HUAC, presenting a replica of the methods used by the committee.Footnote ⁷¹ The ACLU general counsel A. L. Wirin announced that the union was considering filing suit for damages against Walter, Wheeler and Lewis, alleging that the ACLU was slandered in the film.Footnote ⁷² The Northern California ACLU affiliate organized a seminar at the Marina Junior High School for over a thousand students. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the film Operation Abolition was shown to “disbelieving chortles,” while Professor John Merryman's speech concluded that “it is rather symbolic that this many people should gather together to talk about somewhat ignorant, somewhat futile, fat little men.”Footnote ⁷³ Outside, religious students picketed with signs stating “Welcome Fellow travellers,” “ACLU – Does Russia have an RCLU????” and “Enter front door, then go Far Left.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The film formed part of a broader propaganda attempt to equate un-American activities with the Communist Party, and un-Americanism with communism. It was frequently shown alongside Communism on the Map, an anticommunist film that had been privately produced by Harding College in Arkansas, where military and civilian groups were trained in “Americanism.” Communism on the Map blamed President Roosevelt for his recognition of the USSR in “moral leadership” lecture presentations to high schools and colleges across the Northwest. Operation Abolition was employed by the Department of Defense to illustrate the domestic communist threat at Cold War seminars for reserve officers, as well as in training programs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard.Footnote ⁷⁵ By July, the Defense Department had completed a new film to replace both movies, the Challenge of Ideas, in which famous news figures and actors assessed the ideological battle between the US and the Soviet Union, urging the need for vigilance in the protection of American democracy.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Michigan, Governor Swainson barred state police from showing either Operation Abolition or Communism on the Map to civic, school or professional groups, due to the development of “negative hopeless” feelings associated with the films.Footnote ⁷⁷ ACLU executive director Patrick Murphy Malin praised Swainson's actions on the grounds that the state police should not become involved in politically motivated activity.Footnote ⁷⁸ ACLU affiliates, including those in Washington and Delaware, offered speakers to discuss the factual inaccuracies, which chief HUAC investigator on the West Coast William Wheeler openly acknowledged on television on the Goodwin Knight Show. The film, he admitted, contained serious inaccuracies and distortions.Footnote ⁷⁹

Both the ECLC and the ACLU played a central role in attempting to undermine the official interpretation of the San Francisco protests or riots as a violent threat to Americanism and American democracy. Clark Foreman called the film a “fair gauge of the evil and trickery of that committee,” showing it in areas across the Northeast corridor, including at Princeton University.Footnote ⁸⁰ Leadership of the campaign against the film Operation Abolition came from the Northern California ACLU and its executive director, Ernest Besig, who produced a new voice-over focussing on the misrepresentations and inaccuracies contained in the original film. In Operation Correction, Besig argued,

The Northern California ACLU's revision received wide media attention, due to its highlighting of the more egregious errors and misrepresentation as events occurring on the Thursday and Saturday were conflated as if they had occurred immediately before the riots.Footnote ⁸¹ Defending the film, HUAC had argued that due to a lack of footage, it had to use shots out of sequence, which Ernest Besig called “the most bizarre bit of logic since the Mad Hatter.”Footnote ⁸²

The Wilkinson and Braden decisions of February 1961 checked efforts to abolish HUAC. The Supreme Court confirmed the petitioners' convictions on the reasoning of Barenblatt v. United States. Critics of HUAC were not immune from investigation merely because they were opposed to the existence of HUAC. William O. Douglas lamented that the decision

International attention was attracted by HUAC's actions, as twenty-five prominent British figures, including nine MPs, petitioned President Kennedy to free Braden and Wilkinson.Footnote ⁸⁴ The ACLU came under attack in the House, as Congressman Thomas B. Curtis quoted a St. Louis Globe-Democrat article that “this outfit could teach Adolf Hitler tricks in propaganda and molding public opinion” as he characterized their campaign as character assassination.Footnote ⁸⁵

Nevertheless, both civil liberties groups continued to lobby for a reappraisal of the committee's activities. HUAC investigator Robert Henry Goldsborough spied on a Maryland ACLU affiliate meeting, at which prominent civil liberties lawyer Osmond K. Fraenkel was the speaker. Fraenkel outlined the need for a new policy as the union could no longer depend on the courts to “clip the [HUAC's] wings” but instead must educate the public. This was supported by a display of determination in the official ACLU press release on the issue two days later, as it declared that it did “not believe that the campaign is ended: only one battle has been lost.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The ECLC continued to advocate against the group's mandate, developing an education campaign to highlight the group's links with political extremism. In April 1961, it issued a pamphlet that argued that HUAC should be regarded as a hate group.Footnote ⁸⁷ It pointed to evidence that members of staff at HUAC maintained links with hate groups. Notably, staff director Richard Arens was a paid consultant to Wycliffe Draper, who ran a committee that attempted to prove that African Americans were genetically inferior and to promote the deportation of coloured Americans to Africa.Footnote ⁸⁸

As one of the longest-lasting structures of the Second Red Scare, HUAC developed sophisticated defences against challenges to its mandate and to its ideological stance. The optimism attached to the 1957 Watkins decision was ultimately dashed by the 1959 Barenblatt and prominent 1961 Wilkinson and Braden decisions, which supported the government's right to investigate the private political opinions of its citizens in order to root out what remained a deeply subjective, but equally objectively packaged, view of un-American subversion. The ECLC was prompted by the spread of guilt by association to develop an education campaign that sought to highlight the damage to civil liberties caused by the hunt for “un-Americans.” The Operation Abolition campaign was at the forefront of a change in attitude from the conformity that dominated 1950s America, as HUAC was significantly damaged by the development of these small pockets of resistance. HUAC's primary method of defence, namely the depiction of its opponents as being communist dupes or as communist-inspired, worked effectively against smaller ad hoc groups, including the ECLC, but proved much less effective against larger nongovernmental organizations and national institutions such as the Supreme Court.