House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) or House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), from 1969 onward known as the House Committee on Internal Security, was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. The HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations. When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.
There were are also several similar committees before 1938, such as the McCormack–Dickstein Committee, with the Jewish Samuel Dickstein as vice-chairman, which among other activities investigated the "Business Plot" and the Friends of the New Germany. Dickstein was actually himself a paid agent of the Soviet NKVD.
The organization investigated suspected Communists and Communist agents, which is disliked by leftists, sometimes comparing it to or seeing it as one part of "McCarthyism", although Joseph McCarthy himself, a Senator, had no direct involvement with the House committee.
