Harry, Tom, and Father Rice:
Accusation and Betrayal
in America’s Cold War
by John Hoerr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
282 pp $29.95
Accusation and Betrayal
in America’s Cold War
by John Hoerr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
282 pp $29.95
On his first day as a congressional representative, January 3, 1949, Pittsburgh’s Harry Davenport made history by offering a resolution to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Previous HUAC opponents had tried merely to cut off the committee’s funding. Davenport sought to shame it out of existence for its “silly tactics” that had “smeared, maligned, slandered” so many good people while paying no attention at all to the real un-American activities of “anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-foreign-born groups that infest . . . our country.”
Davenport blamed HUAC for “broken homes, broken lives, and shattered reputations.” By 1950 he was one of the broken and shattered—not because he opposed HUAC, b...
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