This week Reel Mudd brings you a dou­ble fea­ture with Oper­a­tion Abo­li­tion and Oper­a­tion Cor­rec­tion! Per­haps the term dou­ble fea­ture is inac­cu­rate — each film con­tains the same footage but tells a dif­fer­ent story. Oper­a­tion Abo­li­tion describes how Com­mu­nist infil­tra­tors led riots while the House Un-American Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee con­vened in San Fran­cisco. Oper­a­tion Cor­rec­tion, how­ever, talks of mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion by a gov­ern­ment agency des­per­ate to remain rel­e­vant while its rai­son d’être faced pub­lic scrutiny.

Oper­a­tion Abo­li­tion, a 1960 doc­u­men­tary pro­duced by the House Com­mit­tee on Un-American Activ­i­ties (a.k.a House Un-American Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee or HUAC), focused on an inci­dent on May 13, 1960 when the Com­mit­tee con­vened in San Francisco’s City Hall. While the com­mit­tee met, stu­dents protested in the hall­ways and out­side the build­ing, lead­ing to clashes with the police and the arrest of 64 stu­dents. Oper­a­tion Abo­li­tion shows footage of the inci­dent taken from sub­poe­naed San Fran­cisco TV sta­tion news­reels, using that footage to allege that the stu­dents were Com­mu­nists and/or insti­gated by Com­mu­nist agents. The film’s nar­ra­tors, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Fran­cis E. Wal­ter, Chair­man of HUAC, and Ful­ton Lewis III, son of a promi­nent anti-communist radio com­men­ta­tor, sug­gest that the pro­test­ers were mem­bers of and/or “duped” by groups whose ulti­mate goal was to destroy the com­mit­tee, weaken the FBI, and reduce the enforce­ment pow­ers of the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Despite being a news­reel pro­duced by a gov­ern­ment agency, Oper­a­tion Abo­li­tion was sur­pris­ingly pop­u­lar. Accord­ing to Time Mag­a­zine, an esti­mated 15 mil­lion peo­ple saw this film.