Martin Dies was an American lawyer and politician. He was a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives.
Background
Martin Dies was born on November 5, 1900, in Colorado, Texas. He was the son of Olive M. Cline and Martin Dies, a legislator. Shortly after Dies's birth, he and his family moved to east Texas, where, in 1908, the elder Dies was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Dies's parents were divorced during his father's first term in Congress. Dies spent time with both his mother and his father, attending public schools in Beaumont, Texas; Washington, District of Columbia; and Greenville, Texas.
Education
Dies studied at Cluster Springs Academy, in Cluster Springs, Virginia, from 1914 to 1917, and completed his secondary education at Beaumont High School the following year. He briefly attended Wesley College in Greenville, the University of Texas in Austin, and the Hickman School of Speech and Expression in Washington, District of Columbia. He received a Bachelor of Laws degree from National University in Washington in 1920.
Career
After graduation Martin Dies practiced law in Orange, Texas, with his father and Kemper W. Stephenson. In 1930 he was elected as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives from Texas's Second Congressional District, the same district his father had represented. Although he would later be known as one of the most conservative members of the House, he gave little indication of this early in his political career. In his 1930 campaign he sounded almost like a late-nineteenth-century rural radical, condemning "capitalistic tyranny" and the evils of monopoly, and calling for lower tariff rates and inflation of the currency through a wider use of silver.
By the late 1930's, the concepts of foreignness, un-Americanism, and radicalism had merged in Dies's thinking. The same emotional energy that had earlier invigorated his nativism began to propel his developing crusade against Communist subversion in America. This crusade took shape early in 1938 when, at the urging of Vice-President Garner, Dies proposed the establishment of a special committee to investigate un-American activities. Dies's resolution received support not only from conservatives concerned about Communist subversion, but also from liberals who hoped that the committee would investigate the fascist organizations that had begun to appear in America. Dies's resolution passed in May 1938, creating the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. The committee began its investigations immediately, with Dies as its chairman. The committee's most famous investigations, such as the one of former State Department official Alger Hiss, took place after Dies left Congress and the chairmanship of the committee in 1944. Still, from the beginning, the committee gained headlines as it heard witnesses describing Communist influences in labor organizations such as the CIO, government agencies such as the Federal Theatre and Writers' Project, and various other groups and organizations. The committee did conduct some investigations of the German-American Bund and other fascist groups, but most of its hearings focused upon threats from the Left, rather than from the Right. Despite persistent questions about the fairness of the committee's procedures and the accuracy of the testimony it collected and reports it issued, the House of Representatives continued to reauthorize it.
A skilled political orator, Dies had speaking engagements all over the country. His name also appeared as the author of a book published during this period, The Trojan Horse in America: A Report to the Nation (1940). Though actually written by J. B. Matthews, a former Communist sympathizer who was serving on the Dies Committee staff, the book reflected Dies's views upon the threat of Communism and fascism to America.
Martin Dies's anti-Communist career reached its peak from 1938 to 1941, during the early years of the Dies Committee's existence. Starting in 1941, Dies faced a string of personal and political difficulties. In 1941, he made an unsuccessful attempt to win a United States Senate seat, and was shaken when he came in fourth. The United States' wartime alliance with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union complicated his task of conducting anti-Communist investigations, and his committee held no public hearings for a two-year period. In 1944, suffering from ill health, Dies announced that he would not run for another term in the House. Dies and his wife then moved to the east Texas town of Lufkin, where he soon regained his health. He kept himself in the public eye through frequent lectures, usually opting to speak on anti-Communist themes that were regaining popularity because of the Cold War.
When a position for a congressman-at-large from Texas opened up in 1952, Dies returned to the House and remained there until 1959, when redistricting eliminated the position. Unable to regain a seat on his old committee, Dies maintained a relatively low profile during his second stint in Congress. He compiled a conservative voting record, opposing civil rights initiatives, and proposing legislation aimed at crippling domestic Communists. He refused to support foreign aid, even when supporters justified it as necessary to hinder the spread of international Communism. Before he left Congress, he made one more unsuccessful bid for the Senate in a special election held in 1957 to fill the seat vacated by Price Daniel.
After he retired from the House, Dies resided in Lufkin until his death. He continued to give speeches, but also occupied himself with writing an account of his anti-Communist activities, Martin Dies' Story (1963). From 1964 to 1967, he wrote for the conservative periodical American Opinion. Although he covered a variety of topics ranging from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the United States' involvement in Vietnam, most of the thirty articles expressed the anti-Communist themes upon which Dies had built his political career.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, Dies initially supported most New Deal economic reforms. By 1935, however, Dies began to abandon liberalism. He fought the administration on coal-industry regulation and minimum-wage legislation. Like his friend and mentor, Vice-President John Nance Garner of Uvalde, Texas, Dies was disturbed by sit-down strikes in the auto industry in late 1936, and he tried unsuccessfully to initiate a congressional investigation of the situation. His antipathy toward the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), many members of which were involved in the sit-down strikes, also revealed his increasing distance from New Deal liberal positions.
Dies emulated his father's nativist sentiments, and during his first years in Congress, the younger Dies claimed that immigrants were taking jobs away from native-born Americans during the depression. Dies also believed that immigrants were particularly susceptible to the influence of radical philosophies. As Dies moved rightward, this element of his nativism dominated.
Personality
Dies was a big, blond, broad-faced Texan.
Connections
On July 3, 1920, Dies married Myrtle McAdams; they had three sons.