brought Stripling to Washington. In 1932, before Stripling had finished college, U.S. Representative
Martin Dies Jr., a Democrat from the
Texas's 2nd congressional district, brought him to Washington, DC. Stripling had received what he himself called a "patronage job" in the "folding room" of the
Old House Office Building at $120 per month while he attended night school. When the Dies Committee ran out of funding, Stripling helped persuade Dies to continue by offering to serve as secretary without wages. For the next decade, the committee recovered and grew to a staff of 75 and more than one million names, records, and data related to
subversion, among which Stripling named the
Pumpkin Papers of
Whittaker Chambers. The cover of the original print run of Stripling's memoir
The Red Plot Against America cites his title as "Chief Investigator, House Un-American Activities Committee, 1938–1948." However, some sources call him "permanent counsel" {{cite book {{cite book HUAC investigations in which Stripling participated include: testimony of alleged Soviet spy
Gerhart Eisler, the
Hollywood Trials (which derived from Eisler through his brother
Hanns Eisler, a Hollywood composer at the time, and their friend
Bertolt Brecht {{cite news {{cite news On December 7, 1948, Stripling testified before HUAC in the Hiss Case. {{cite book ==Personal and death==