A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938–1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC is a scrapbook of sorts, chronicling and critiquing the United States House of Representatives’ House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The committee was renamed the House Committee on Internal Security in 1969; a vestige of this committee still remains as the House Judiciary Committee. The committee concerned itself with investigating everything from Communist activity to Nazis in America to the Ku Klux Klan. It had a hand in the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and the Hollywood blacklists. HUAC is often confused with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which, perforce, was a part of the Senate. Both organizations were criticized by former President Harry Truman as being “the most Un-American thing in the country today” in 1959.
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WE ARE LIVING THROUGH the most crucial moment of our history, the moment which will result in a new life for us, or a new death. I am not being in the least metaphorical about this. When I say “a new life,” I mean a new vision of America, a vision which will allow us to face, and begin to change, the facts of American life; and when I say “death,” I mean Carthage. This seems a grim view to take of our situation, but it is scarcely grimmer than the facts. Our honesty and our courage in facing these facts is all that can save us from disaster. And one of these facts is that there has always been a segment of American life, and a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness.
In this connection, the House Un-American Activities Committee is one of the most sinister facts of the national life. It is not merely that we do not need this committee; the truth is, we cannot afford it. It always reminds me of a vast and totally untrustworthy bomb shelter in which groups of frightened people endlessly convince one another of its impregnability, while the real world outside—by which, again, I mean the facts of our private and public lives—calmly and inexorably prepares their destruction. It is perhaps because I am an American Negro that I have always felt white Americans, many if not most of them, are experts in self-delusion—they usually speak as though I were not in the room. “I,” here, does not refer so much to the man called Baldwin as it does to the reality which produced me, a reality with which I live, and from which most Americans spend all their time in flight. People in flight never can grow up, which means they can never, really, become citizens—and we simply must not surrender this great country to those people. We must not allow their fear to control us, and, indeed, we must not allow it to control them. Rather, we should attempt to release them from their panic and their unadmitted sorrow. We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact. We must dare to take another view of majority rule, disengaging it from anything resembling a popularity contest; taking it upon ourselves to become the majority by changing the moral climate. For it is upon this majority that the life of any nation really depends.
Speaking as a man, as a Negro, as a citizen, it has seemed to me for a long time now that the really dreadful agony confronting Americans is this: the time has come for us to grow up. A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: “The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.”
That self-knowledge which matures a nation as well as a man presupposes free men and free minds. This book opens with a drawing by the great American artist Art Young, depicting Jesus Christ as wanted for sedition. It recalled for me another Christ—the “Black Christ” of Countee Cullen:
Men may not bind the summer sea,
Nor set a limit to the stars;
The sun seeps through all iron bars;
The moon is ever manifest.
And more than this (and here’s the crown)
No man, my son, can batter down
The star-flung ramparts of the mind.
(1963)