Operation Abolition

On May 12-14, 1960, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings at City Hall in San Francisco.

Hundreds of students from nearby universities, and other concerned citizens, both supporters of the Committee (many of whom had been sent tickets to the hearings) and opponents, who claimed that the Committee was a notorious abuser of civil liberties, converged on City Hall.

Students attempting to enter the hearing room were forcibly removed from the building by police. Film of the events made by local TV stations was commandeered by the Committee, which then commissioned the production of a film, OPERATION ABOLITION, to tell the story from the Committee's point of view.

There was a strong reaction against the Committee and the film on many campuses across the country. In fact, the copy of the film now available on YouTube is deposited there by the American Civil Liberties Union - ACLU.



These hearings, and the reaction that followed, when added to the new activism on Civil Rights generated by the sit-ins spreading through the South and the rest of the country, gave enormous energy to what was to become the student movement.

These events took place ten years before the events of May 1970, which saw  the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, Jackson State, and Augusta, Georgia.

Stills from Operation Abolition. These frames show students and others being dragged down the City Hall steps, which had been flooded by fire hoses. 

The film prompted a backlash among students who saw the film and were offended by its simple minded appeal and by the apparent brutality of the police.

A Regime of Sycophancy

Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

from the publisher:

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC's) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Alain Badiou to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls "comic cosmopolitanism," an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the "uncooperative" witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to "name names." Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.

Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.