A third such observation is that these cases were, by and large, deeply rooted. Such as Adler, Coe, Keeney, and Neumann had been on official payrolls for a considerable span of years previous to McCarthy’s charges and still were in 1950. How they got there, and what had—or hadn’t—been done about them would be essential aspects of the story.
CHAPTER 4
“Stale, Warmed Over Charges”
BEFORE Joe McCarthy, there was Martin Dies. In the latter 1930s and early ’40s, Dies would play a role in Congress eerily similar to that filled by McCarthy a decade later. A conservative Democrat from East Texas, son of a former congressman and protégé of Vice President John Nance Garner (a fellow Texan), Dies was the first and longest-serving chairman of what would become the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Formed as a special unit in 1938, and later made a standing committee, the panel would be a storm center of dispute from the beginning, conducting numerous controversial probes into issues of alleged subversion.
Dies was not the first into this minefield, though he would become by an appreciable margin the most famous, at least before the advent of McCarthy. Earlier such investigations had been made by the Overman committee at the era of World War I, Hamilton Fish in 1930, and the Dickstein-McCormack committee in 1934 and ’35. But it was Dies who became identified in the public mind with antisubversive, mainly anti-Red, investigations. During his seven years at the helm, the group would be known far and wide simply as the Dies Committee. He pioneered the notion of full-time, ongoing congressional interest in loyalty/security matters.
Virtually everything that would later be said about Joe McCarthy was said first of Martin Dies: that he was conducting “witch hunts,” smearing innocent victims, using the Communist issue to advance his own malign agenda, spreading hysteria about a nonexistent menace. As would happen with McCarthy also, it was said that suspects pursued by Dies had been cleared in one fashion or another, that lists of cases he had were phony, that he was undermining the authority of executive agencies and the White House. Spokesmen for left-liberal groups, executive officials, and angry voices in the press assailed him on a nonstop basis. It was the same routine from start to finish.
The similarities between the Dies experience and the later activities of McCarthy stemmed from certain obvious sources. It was the same underlying issue, the same effort to raise an alarm about it, and the same ferocious opposition. In which respect, there was another likeness also—a sharp divide between the people who applauded such investigations and those who bitterly opposed them. Dies was popular with a reflexively anti-Communist public and thus had strong support in Congress, responsive to the voters. But he was disliked intensely by elites, or what were said to be such, in the academy, bureaucracy, and press corps. The same division of opinion, amounting to a cultural chasm, would be apparent in responses to McCarthy.
There were, of course, significant differences between the two Red hunters, which made the path pursued by Dies less rocky at the outset. He was a member of the majority party, chairman of a committee, and backed by conservative southern Democrats who were at that time a powerful element in Congress (this creating frequent tensions between Capitol Hill and the New Deal White House). McCarthy when he began was a junior member of the minority party in the Senate, wouldn’t become a committee chairman until three years later, and for most of his relatively brief career was basically a freelance. Yet the similarities between the two security hawks far outweighed such nominal distinctions.
Most to the present point, there were extensive parallels between Dies and McCarthy, not only in terms of general features and broad objectives, but as to many specific topics. Considering that their respective heydays in Congress were roughly ten years apart, it’s noteworthy that so many of the groups and individuals who drew their attention turned out to be the selfsame people. This was most often true of various federal employees who became the subjects of investigation, though it extended to others outside of government also.
In turn, it was their common focus on the Reds-in-government issue that made Dies and McCarthy most controversial. It was one thing to be against Communism as a general proposition, or to berate and oppose the open Communist Party (though even this wasn’t quite PC back in the 1930s). It was another to zero in on supposedly non-Communist officeholders as secret minions of the party, complicit in the schemes of Moscow. These were the charges that stirred the most vociferous opposition and harsh invective against the accusers. And they were of course the charges that would have been the most outrageous if they had been unfounded.
It so happened, however, that when Dies and his committee came along there had been a recent and fairly extensive penetration of the government by Communists and Soviet agents. This was at the time a novel problem that hadn’t previously drawn much notice, and for which there were few security defenses to speak of. To see the changing nature of the issue, we need only scan the report on domestic Communism compiled in 1930 by the Fish committee. For its time a comprehensive wrap-up, this found the CPUSA to be a militant revolutionary group, mostly headed by alien leaders and drawing on a membership base heavily weighted to recent émigrés, many of whom could not speak English. That a Communist Party so led and constituted could penetrate the civilian ranks of the federal government—or make serious efforts to do so—occurred to practically no one.1
In the next few years, however, the conditions recorded by the Fish committee, both in the Communist party and in the nation, would be altered in drastic fashion. By the middle 1930s, the party would undergo a complete makeover in public image and at least a partial makeover in composition. In the age of the “popular front,” the comrades shelved much of their violent, revolutionary rhetoric; the cause would now be depicted by party boss Earl Browder and his agents as old-fashioned Americanism updated for the modern era. In pursuit of this notion, the party adopted a stance of cooperating with other leftward and conventionally liberal forces for reform and social justice, peace, and other noble objects.
Simultaneously, and no doubt aided by this tactic, there would be an influx into party ranks of native-born Americans, many fresh off the college campus, some from Anglo families dating back for generations. The new arrivals gave the party a different kind of cadre, and cachet, that would be useful to it in numerous projects. Foremost among these was the entry of party members into posts of influence in many walks of life, including academic and media jobs and government work for those inclined in that direction.
Aiding the infiltration process were the pell-mell methods of the First New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, who came to power in 1933 in the early stages of the Great Depression. As is well known, Roosevelt and his advisers tried multiple panaceas to deal with unemployment, bank runs, a collapsed stock market, farm problems, and other economic troubles. Subsidies, regulations, and new programs abounded. This hurly-burly meant a lot of federal hiring. It also drew into its vortex all manner of self-styled planners and reformers anxious to get in on the action. And nobody at this time was bothering to vet the new recruits for anti-Red credentials.
As a result of these conditions, a sizable corps of Communists and fellow travelers would wind up on the federal payroll, together with a host of others susceptible to recruitment. The full scope of the penetration is hard to gauge, but there doesn’t seem to be much doubt it was extensive. Much of what we know about it is based on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet courier who worked closely with Communist and fellow-traveling federal workers beginning in the early 1930s.
As described by Chambers, a particular concentration point for CP members was the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a New Deal offshoot of the Department of Agriculture. Here the main Communist leader was one Harold Ware, who contrary to the usual pattern had been in the department for a while before this, and was an enthusiast for Soviet-style collective farming. The group he headed, according to Chambers, included such eventually well-known figures as Alger Hiss, Henry Colli
ns, Nathan Witt, John Abt, Lee Pressman, and Charles Kramer, among a considerable host of others.
Subsequently, Witt and Kramer would move to the National Labor Relations Board, which became a redoubt of Communist economic/political power later in the decade. Hiss, Collins, and Abt would meanwhile get jobs with congressional committees, and Hiss—the most upwardly mobile of the group—would move to the Department of Justice and then to the State Department. Though State wasn’t then the penetration target it would become a few years later, there were already comrades ensconced there in the 1930s. Noel Field, Richard Post, and Julian Wadleigh were among those in the department named by Chambers as members of the apparatus.
A further enclave of CP members and fellow travelers—probably the largest group of all—was in the Treasury Department. Here were employed the influential Harry Dexter White, the Soviet agent Solomon Adler, V. Frank Coe, and several others named by Chambers, all also named by Elizabeth Bentley and in the pages of Venona. Added to these were still other party contacts holding federal office: Irving Kaplan of the National Research Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Victor Perlo at the National Recovery Administration (NRA), Hiss’s brother Donald in the Department of Labor, and White House assistant Lauchlin Currie. Small wonder Soviet espionage boss J. Peters would brag to Chambers: “Even in Germany, under the Weimar Republic, the party did not have what we have here.”*13 2
In explaining how such infiltration happened, Chambers would cite his own experience when, in 1937, he wanted to get a federal job and establish an official identity for the record after leading a mostly underground existence. He said he was referred to Irving Kaplan at the National Research Project and in a matter of days would be on the federal payroll. The research project, per Chambers, was a kind of “trapdoor” through which comrades could enter governmental ranks, then move on to other outposts. (And when one got in, he could hire others.)
As to the purpose of such infiltration, Chambers made a couple of further points that in subsequent security debates would be too much neglected. First, that the Communists with whom he worked were, either directly or indirectly, agents of Moscow, albeit with varying levels of commitment, and that the whole operation was managed by Russian or other foreign commissars to whom Chambers as middleman reported. And second, that the object of the infiltration wasn’t merely to filch secret papers, though this did occur, but to place people in positions of trust where they could affect the course of policy in favor of the Soviet Union.
Such was the picture of Red penetration circa 1938, as later sketched by Chambers, when the Dies committee was founded. At the outset, like the Fish investigation before it, the committee would survey the scope of Communist activities in American society at large. Only by degrees, as part of a gradual learning process, would it engage the matter of Communists on the federal payroll. In early sessions, the panel looked at Red agitation in the ranks of labor, education, arts and letters, and civic groups of one sort and another. In addition—though this, too, is much neglected—it went after the German-American Bund and other pro-Nazi outfits of the era that were trying to stir up trouble. Otherwise, its foremost project was scrutiny of the innumerable Communist fronts that flourished in the “Red decade.”
The Dies disclosures/allegations about Reds in government thus weren’t systematic, but occurred in piecemeal fashion as different aspects of the problem surfaced. In one instructive episode, the committee took testimony concerning the Federal Writers Project in New York, another unit of the WPA, set up to give work to unemployed writers. In this project, according to the testimony, more than 100 out of 300 writers had inscribed a book written by Communist party boss Earl Browder, expressing their good wishes to a retiring comrade, the circumstances indicating that the signers were CP members or close-in fellow travelers. If there were 100 such people in a single project, the government-wide problem was arguably in the thousands.3
In other instances, Dies would get on the trail of individuals who had pro-Communist or extremely radical records, or had published writings that showed an affinity for Red causes. The committee came up with suspects at the NLRB, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and, in the early 1940s, Office of Price Administration and the Office of Facts and Figures (progenitor of the Offices of Strategic Services and War Information). Again, these were piecemeal, ad hoc disclosures, rather than the findings of a dragnet inquest.
Although the Dies committee had certain ex-Communist witnesses before it to discuss the secret doings of the party—such as ex-Red Ralph de Sola, who helped expose the Writers Project—the more sweeping revelations of Chambers and Bentley were still years in the future. When these formidable witnesses surfaced in the 1940s, they testified, as it were, from the inside out. In the earlier going, Dies didn’t have access to their expertise and was working mostly from the outside in.
Accordingly, in trying to gauge the extent of the infiltration problem, Dies and his colleagues would focus on the Communist fronts that flourished in the 1930s, and the membership and sponsor lists of these the committee would assemble. The fronts were the most striking phenomenon of the age, integral to many propaganda successes for the comrades. They would also be, for Dies and his researchers, a potential key to understanding how deeply the Communist Party had penetrated government agencies and programs.
Though portrayed in some historical treatments as an amusing oddity of the age, like marathon dancing or flagpole-sitting, the fronts were no laughing matter. Nor were they of spontaneous nature, or indigenous to the United States. They were serious propaganda operations, devised and guided by Moscow and its agents. A vast number were the handiwork of the German Communist Willi Munzenberg, a famous impresario of deception who spun out groups and publications on demand throughout the 1930s. Relief projects, protest committees, newspapers, manifestoes, art synods, and literary conclaves were all on the Munzenberg agenda.4
The point of this activity, as explained by Munzenberg himself, was to promote the Soviet interest through a host of propaganda outlets. “We must,” he said, “penetrate every conceivable milieu, get hold of artists and professors, make use of cinemas and theatres, and spread abroad the doctrine that Russia is prepared to sacrifice everything for peace.” Or, as his Communist colleague Otto Kuusinen expressed it: “We must create a whole solar system of organizations and smaller committees around the Communist Party…smaller organizations working actually under the influence of our party (not under mechanical leadership).”5
In simplest terms, a front was a Trojan horse—a metaphor often heard in the rhetorical battles of the time. The idea was to have a group that was under the discipline of the Communist Party but that to the casual viewer seemed something different. In most cases, the front was created ab initio, though in others a formerly non-Communist group might be captured and exploited. Two essential aspects of a front were that, while it enlisted as many non-Communists as it could, the control positions were always in reliably Communist hands; and, somewhat easier to spot, the group would invariably parrot and support the propaganda of the Soviet Union.
The proliferation of such groups meshed with other Communist blending tactics of the age. As “progressive” ideas abounded, utopian schemes were preached on street corners, and notions of collectivist planning espoused by many, the comrades seldom had much trouble merging their modified program with the general background noise of the decade. Judged by many public statements, it was hard sometimes to tell who was who. Accordingly, this was the golden era of the fronts, which functioned in virtually every sector of public life—from arts and letters to youth concerns to foreign issues of interest to Moscow such as the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese attack on China.
These are matters of some importance, as they help explain why so many people in the 1930s were drawn to the Red orbit and why a fair number of these would be induced to stay there. In the addled conditions of the time, such notable non-Communist figures as Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR’s Interior Sec
retary, Harold Ickes, could be persuaded to lend their names to pro-Red ventures if these had a plausible cover, since the big-hearted joiners didn’t bother to look beyond this. Likewise, less famous people, influenced by such examples, could be brought into the fold and often stick around to be converted. It was precisely in this manner, Elizabeth Bentley would testify, that she was recruited into the Communist Party and thence into the demimonde of Soviet plotting.
For purposes of our survey, the most significant thing about the fronts was their linkage to the Communists-in-government issue. In the 1930s, there was a fair amount of overlap between comrades on the federal payroll and the outside activities of the fronts. This wasn’t good tradecraft, was indeed the reverse, especially for CP members in government called on by Chambers, and later by Bentley, to perform secret chores for Moscow. However, in this freewheeling era when nobody was paying much attention to such matters, the comrades often moved back and forth between their day jobs in federal offices and night work or weekend projects cooperating with the agitprop of the fronts.
The resulting degree of interlock between Reds in government service and outside agitation would be noted not only by the Dies committee but also, somewhat briefly in the early 1940s, by the Justice Department under Francis Biddle, FDR’s Attorney General. This last occurred when the New Deal became for a time atypically concerned about the problem of Red infiltration and supplied a list of fronts to cabinet agencies for guidance in vetting their employees. This was initially a roster of eleven groups, including information that showed their Communist origin and nature, and was most revealing, especially considering the source.6
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