Americans have fought back against authoritarianism at home before

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by increasing authoritarianism at the heart of the US federal government. He has openly defied court orders, worked beyond the established remit of executive power and is making no secret of his strongman ambitions. History tells us that such an authoritarian presence is not new and offers a blueprint for how it might be overcome.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, a congressional committee called the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) operated with near impunity. Granted extraordinary powers to investigate subversion and subversive propaganda, Huac sidelined political opponents, ruined careers and crushed organisations.

In popular memory, Huac remains inexorably tied to the “red scare” politics of the 1950s when cold war tensions led to intense anti-communist paranoia in the US. But in reality, it operated across five decades and its demise only came with the careful plotting of a concerted and organised campaign.

Huac derived much of its power from the vagueness of its mandate, with no objective definition of un-Americanism ever being universally agreed. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the US supreme court at the time, even openly questioned in 1957 whether un-Americanism could be defined and, thus, whether it ought to be investigated.

But the committee was not cowed by that lack of definition. For decades, Huac sought to be seen as the sole arbiter of the meaning of un-Americanism. That way, the committee could target its own enemies at will under the guise of investigating un-Americanism for the public good.

Curbing Huac’s authoritarianism was a delicate business. It had extraordinary powers, ill-defined parameters and vituperative members. The committee had also been a fixture of American life for so long that its existence seemed inevitable. The answer to overcoming its authoritarianism came in two separate stages.

Fighting against authoritarianism

First was the building of a broad coalition. Huac had many opponents both in politics and culture, the issue was uniting them behind a single cause.

Individuals, groups and protest movements that had been operating separately had to be encouraged to put their specific concerns aside and coalesce instead around an overall concern for democratic values. It was here that civil liberties protesters first forged an alliance with their civil rights counterparts at the turn of the 1960s.

Civil liberties organisations were primarily concerned with the free speech provision of the US constitution’s first amendment. Civil rights groups, on the other hand, were most concerned with the 14th and 15th amendments’ equal rights provisions. Huac’s assault on American principles was a reminder that these were amendments to the same document and it was the constitution as a whole that needed protection.

Momentum was key. A Huac memo from around that time recorded American civil rights leader John Lewis stating that “civil rights and liberties are the same”. Lewis worked across generational and geographical divides to unite sit-in students at segregated public spaces in the southern states with students who stormed Huac hearings in the west.

Gender divides also allowed women’s activists to humiliate the masculine conservatism of Huac committeemen. Poems described the committee shivering in its own manure, vinyl records captured anti-Huac protests and singers satirised its proceedings. The supreme court confronted Huac’s overreach, which activists and public intellectuals translated into popular broadsides.

However, this activism alone was insufficient. The second stage in bringing Huac’s authoritarianism to heel saw the carefully planned intervention of national mainstream politicians. Here, Congressman Jimmy Roosevelt provided bold but also tactically astute leadership. He delivered a speech from the floor of the US Capitol in 1960 that changed the movement from one designed to protest Huac’s authoritarianism to one demanding the committee’s outright abolition.

Roosevelt used the committee’s own actions against it. As he recognised, Huac’s meticulous record keeping also detailed its own failings. It spent public money on propaganda and its members, including staff director Richard Arens, were found to have been in the pay of scientific racists even as they investigated the civil rights movement. They also used designated wartime powers in peacetime.

Roosevelt stepped back, though, and concentrated on questions of principle at the heart of American democracy and the nation’s founding ideals. In his speech, Roosevelt told the House that Huac was “at war with our profoundest principles”. The un-American committee had used its powers in un-American ways.

By appealing to matters of principle, Roosevelt was also able to appeal to principled members of the new congressional intake following elections that year which saw Democrat John F. Kennedy enter the White House.

Liberal House members had long given Huac a wide berth on account of its reputation. But riding a wave of liberalism, and encouraged by Roosevelt’s political leadership, some of that new intake now actively sought appointment to Huac so they could oppose its authoritarianism head on.

For the first time, the committee shifted from trying to frame civil rights activists as un-American to investigating the un-Americanism of the Ku Klux Klan. Its reformed membership also began opposing the scale of the congressional appropriations that had underwritten its investigations.

Its remaining conservative members were drawn into making increasingly desperate claims to maintain their national profile, but succeeded only in drawing the committee towards ridicule and irrelevance. Huac limped towards the end of the decade and was finally dissolved in 1975.

History tells those in Washington today that democratic pressures can be brought to bear on an authoritarian presence, however entrenched it may appear. Building a broad coalition is vital, as is labelling authoritarian behaviour appropriately. Denying any one individual ownership of what constitutes un-Americanism is equally important.

The record also shows that disparate groups can apply pressure most effectively when they are bound to a single issue. Here, as in the campaign against Huac, that issue is the principle of American democracy.

Roosevelt left three lessons for US citizens. First, that the momentum generated by a growing popular coalition can be harnessed in national politics. Second, that bold and principled leadership brings reward. And third, that elections can be the harbinger of significant and substantive change.

George Lewis has received funding from the British Academy for his research into un-Americanism.