A New Look at a Controversial Committee

The author, whose symposium on the House Committee on Un-American Activities will he published next month, looks at the Committee and its critics, and makes, calmly, some penetrating observations

My formal interest in this field grew out of a personal experience with ignorance. It was a college gathering, and in the course of the proceedings someone entered a ritual crack at the House Committee on Un-American Activities with great effect upon the audience. The surprise did not Ke in the audience’s instinctive animosity toward the committee (every college sophomore knows one must disdain any organization so unchic as to pursue a thing called Un-American Activities), but in the quality of the jibe that provoked it. There was no wit or precision in the taunt, no passion, even—I even forget the exact words. It is as though a veteran of the Spanish War got up at a rightwing rally and stirred the audience by shouting, “Remember the Maine!” The experience threw me back to my college days, which began during the euphoria after the war, when if you said anybody else was a Communist, or a pro-Communist, or that any organization was, or ever had been, or ever would be, a Communist front, why you were a witchhunter, and everybody knew what to do to witch-hunters in those days, namely, burn them.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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The author, whose symposium on the House Committee on Un-American Activities will he published next month, looks at the Committee and its critics, and makes, calmly, some penetrating observations

My formal interest in this field grew out of a personal experience with ignorance. It was a college gathering, and in the course of the proceedings someone entered a ritual crack at the House Committee on Un-American Activities with great effect upon the audience. The surprise did not Ke in the audience’s instinctive animosity toward the committee (every college sophomore knows one must disdain any organization so unchic as to pursue a thing called Un-American Activities), but in the quality of the jibe that provoked it. There was no wit or precision in the taunt, no passion, even—I even forget the exact words. It is as though a veteran of the Spanish War got up at a rightwing rally and stirred the audience by shouting, “Remember the Maine!” The experience threw me back to my college days, which began during the euphoria after the war, when if you said anybody else was a Communist, or a pro-Communist, or that any organization was, or ever had been, or ever would be, a Communist front, why you were a witchhunter, and everybody knew what to do to witch-hunters in those days, namely, burn them.