by Alex Heard
The CRC put up $35,000 in bail for the twelve, and CRC-and party-affiliated attorneys were involved in their defense from then on. Abraham Unger, whose firm, Unger and Friedman, later defended the Daily Worker in the libel case brought by Mrs. Hawkins, represented the original six during their indictment on the 20th. Isserman became part of a defense team that included attorneys Harry Sacher, George W. Crockett Jr., Richard Gladstein, and Louis McCabe. The trial didn’t get fully under way until March 1949, but everybody could see that it was a case with immense stakes, whether one sympathized with the Communists or not.
“The recent indictment…confronts us with a problem whose perplexity is matched only by its gravity,” Columbia University history professor Henry Steele Commager wrote in the Times. “For it involves far more than the fate of the Communist party alone…. It involves the problem of dissent and nonconformity in our politics. It involves the preservation of constitutional rights of free speech, press and petition, and of political organization by minority groups.” Commager didn’t doubt that American Communists desired revolutionary change—“If they deny this charge, they are self-confessed frauds”—but he opposed the case on constitutional grounds. The twelve were being pursued for advocating a set of ideas. They hadn’t been caught in a concrete plot to overthrow the government. But under the Smith Act, their ideas were the plot.
For Communists, CRC members, and civil libertarians, the indictments seemed like a blatant political move by the Truman administration, designed to discredit anybody on the left—including Henry Wallace and his running mate, Idaho senator Glen H. Taylor—who stood in the way of his supposed desire to start a war with the Soviet Union. In a press release, the National Committee of the Communist Party went characteristically overboard, calling the charges an “American version of the Reichstag Fire.”
“Terrified of the growing support for the Wallace-Taylor ticket,” the statement said, “the Democratic high command is seeking to brand the new party as ‘criminal’ because among the opponents of Wall Street’s two old parties and their candidates are the Communists, who also join with all other progressives in supporting the new people’s anti-war party.”
That summer, Republicans were feeling giddy about the Thurmond and Wallace insurgencies, because they seemed to ensure a victory in November by their candidate, Thomas Dewey. It didn’t pan out, so it’s easy to forget how bad it looked for Truman at the time—and for how long. The Chicago Daily Tribune (“DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”) wasn’t the only organization to miss the call. Pollsters blew it too, as did the Washington Post and New York Times. Two days before the election in November, a front-page Times story stated that Dewey would win easily, 345 electoral votes to 105.
On Election Day, there was enough doubt about Dewey—not to mention Thurmond and Wallace—to make voters return to a familiar face. The final count was 303 electoral votes for Truman, 189 for Dewey, 39 for Thurmond, and none for Wallace. Wallace had hoped to do much better; there had been talk of him attracting between 3 and 5 million votes. He got 1.15 million, far short of Truman’s 24-million-plus. And though Wallace was on the ballot in three times as many states as Thurmond, who ran a regional candidacy based on resistance to civil rights legislation, Thurmond beat him in total vote count by more than 18,000.
What explained the weak showing? Communism, as much as anything. Wallace wasn’t a Communist—he saw himself as the defender of what was left of New Deal liberalism—but his campaign attracted enthusiastic backing from Communist Party members like Foster and Dennis, as well as from controversial party supporters like Paul Robeson.
This uneasy relationship had been building for a while. There wasn’t a Communist presidential candidate in 1948, so people on the far left needed somewhere to go. At the 1947 May Day parade in New York, party members, enthralled with a recent Wallace speech critical of the Truman Doctrine, marched along beneath a fifty-foot-tall image of their new mainstream hero, complete with a huge text block of his words.
Wallace knew that Communist support would hurt more than it helped, and while he publicly denounced Red-baiting by the Truman administration, he tried to maintain safe separation. As his biographers John C. Culver and John Hyde point out, he made attempts to “distance himself from U.S. Communist Party members, saying the few he had met ‘sounded kind of pathetic, like poor, lonesome souls.’” Communists also tried to convey that their dalliance with Wallace had limits. Foster declared in one speech that Wallace’s Progressive Party, with its deluded belief that capitalism could somehow be saved, “is in no sense a Communist Party…we Communists have many points of difference with it and we do not hesitate to express them.”
Still, it didn’t help that Wallace supporters often made extreme statements. In an April 1948 speech at Columbia, the novelist Howard Fast—later the author of Spartacus, and both a Wallace man and a Communist Party member—denounced Truman and his crew as “obscene, hideous people who can sign a death warrant that will murder 50,000,000 people without a thought.” Foster, testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in May, said that in any war between the United States and the Soviet Union, he could not fight against the U.S.S.R.
The result in some quarters was a rugged referendum on whether Wallace—who had been an extremely capable public servant in his prime—was an idiot, a paid agent of Stalin, or both. In his 1948 book, Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth, literary critic Dwight Macdonald wrote that Wallace’s apologies for Stalinism came about because “a large power-mass like the Soviet Union exercises a tremendous gravitational pull on an erratic comet like Henry Wallace. In the past year, this pull has become so powerful—or the resistance has been so weakened—that Wallace’s Comet appears to have become a satellite of the larger body.”
Wallace never got involved in the McGee case—he left public life before it took off—but many of his followers did, providing Progressive Party support for McGee in 1950 and 1951 that was just as important as his Communist Party backing. Bella Abzug’s partner during the 1951 appeals process was John M. Coe, a former state senator and highly experienced lawyer based in Pensacola, Florida, who had volunteered to help coordinate Wallace’s Florida campaign. Sidney Ordower, a Chicagoan who came to Mississippi in 1950 as part of a delegation seeking a gubernatorial pardon for McGee, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Wallace man in Illinois.
These people weren’t Communists, but they weren’t Truman Democrats either. They were hard-left liberals whose views on issues like civil rights put them far ahead of the curve in 1948. Doomed though Wallace was as a candidate, he inspired them and thousands of others, not least by his quixotic decision to take his campaign into the hostile territory of the South in the summer of 1948.
Wallace had no business campaigning in the South—he won only 225 votes in Mississippi and 154 in South Carolina—but he wanted to make a statement. So, in late August and early September, he scheduled a seven-state tour of Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, with all his appearances scheduled to take place before desegregated audiences, in defiance of local custom and law.
There was trouble at many of his stops. Prior to a Wallace rally in Durham, North Carolina, a scuffle broke out in the crowd and one Wallace supporter was stabbed (though not fatally) on his arms and back. During a four-town speaking tour the next day, Wallace was pelted with eggs, tomatoes, peach pits, and cries of “Hey, Communist” and “Hey, nigger lover.” In Hickory, North Carolina, the New York Times reported, “The barrage was so heavy that for the first time Mr. Wallace quit his talk abruptly and paraphrased a passage from Scripture for his tormentors.
“‘As Jesus Christ told his disciples,’ he said, ‘when you enter a town that will not hear you willingly, then shake the dust of that town from your feet and go elsewhere….’”
By the time Wallace got to Mississippi, violence seemed likely, but it didn’t happen, despite provocative editorials in local newspapers. The Jackson Daily News warned
that Wallace’s only purpose was to “spread the doctrine of Communism and promote racial antagonism and strife. Therefore, by all the principles and traditions the South holds dear, Henry Wallace is a public enemy.”
Neither Governor Wright nor Wallace seemed eager for trouble. Wallace stopped in Jackson only long enough to file a slate of electors and criticize Wright in a radio speech, saying he substituted “prejudice for reason” on racial matters. Wright provided him with a highway-patrol escort to his most important appearance during this leg of the trip: the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg, about as Deep South as it got. Vicksburg had been the target of the greatest siege campaign of the Civil War, which ended when General Ulysses S. Grant conquered it on July 4, 1863. Until 1945, the town ignored the Fourth of July.
Unexpectedly, not a single egg, fist, or peach pit was thrown, partly because Wright had publicly asked Mississippians to treat Wallace with respect. Wallace spoke outside the Vicksburg courthouse to an unsegregated crowd of 200. Before he took the mike, twenty-nine-year-old folk singer Pete Seeger—who accompanied Wallace during his Southern tour—suggested that everybody join together and sing a song.
“A sullen looking youth snapped out, ‘Dixie,’” a Washington Post reporter wrote. “To his astonishment, Seeger went into Dixie. He knew every word of it, and played and sang it with gusto.
“The would-be heckler was furious, and began muttering. Police Chief [L. C.] Hicks moved alongside and told him to sit down and keep quiet. He did.”
In the McGee case, the other crucial development in the summer of 1948 was the emergence of William L. Patterson as the head of the CRC. Patterson was an African-American lawyer and Communist who, by then, had already put in more than twenty years as an organizer, civil rights theoretician, and student of Marxist-Leninist theory and tactics, which he learned during lengthy stays in Russia that took place from 1927 to 1930 and again from 1934 to 1937. While there, he married a Russian woman with whom he had two daughters, but his Russian family couldn’t come with him when he returned to the United States in 1937. Patterson took over the CRC at fifty-seven, after George Marshall’s imprisonment, moving to New York from Chicago in July and bringing a level of energy and drive that altered the CRC’s trajectory. His credo was that action in courtrooms had to be matched by mass political protests, a tactic he’d learned through his involvement with the two most famous left-wing causes of the 1920s and 1930s: the murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the capital rape trials of the Scottsboro Boys. As Patterson explained in his 1971 autobiography, The Man Who Cried Genocide, his experiences working on these and other cases left him with little faith in the American legal system’s ability to provide justice to politically unpopular or racially oppressed defendants. The outcomes were rigged, he wrote, especially in the South, where it was futile for “a Black American to rely solely on U.S. laws—administered and manipulated by racists—as liberating instruments.”
This didn’t mean abandoning the law as a tool. After all, much of what the CRC did involved criminal-defense work. But it did mean that public protest was as important as courtroom tactics. Writing about the CRC’s various causes during the postwar years—it was active in several legal fights on behalf of allegedly railroaded black defendants, as was the NAACP—Patterson said, “It was proved beyond doubt that mass indignation and protest action had to be mobilized in overwhelming degree to make any dent at all in the solid front of blind bigotry. Such demonstrations do not guarantee a people’s justice, but without them the hope is slim indeed.”
Patterson’s path to the helm of the CRC had been long, colorful, and complicated. As he recounted in The Man Who Cried Genocide, he was the son of a former slave, Mary Galt, who was born on a Virginia plantation in 1850, and whose mother was the offspring of the white plantation owner and a slave with whom he sired three children.
Before the Civil War started, the owner sent his “Black family” west to San Francisco, when Mary was ten. She grew up, married a man who later died, and sometime in the late 1880s married James Edward Patterson, a native of the British West Indies who had been a seaman. William Patterson wasn’t certain about his birth date—he believed it was August 27, 1891—nor did he know his father well. James became a Seventh-day Adventist, going away frequently on missionary trips in other countries.
These experiences—along with physical abuse he suffered at his father’s hands—left Patterson bitter against both his father and religion. In a biographical statement written for Communist Party officials in 1939, which the FBI later obtained for the 5,000-page file it kept on Patterson, he wrote, “My early family life was one of poverty. My father was a fanatical [S]eventh Day Adventist. He had been a steward on the Pacific Mail Steamship lines but [quit] and gave everything he had to the church…. The religious atmosphere was tense, training strict.”
Patterson graduated from high school in 1911, when he was twenty years old, enrolled at Berkeley, dropped out, worked for a while, and in 1915 started taking law classes at the University of California, San Francisco. He got his first exposure to Marxism when he walked into a Bay Area bookstore that sold publications like the Masses and the Messenger. The ideas clicked, and for the rest of his life Patterson never lost faith that Communism was the way out for black Americans, a liberating force for a people who, he believed, had been subjected to organized genocide. In a speech written a few months after the end of World War II, he said, “What the Jew is to Germany, the Negro is to Fascist-minded Americans. The Soviet Union is the friend of all oppressed people. We must seek great changes in the system we now have. I speak as a Communist and I [say] that my party will be in the forefront of the battle.”
Patterson finished law school at twenty-seven and explored the idea of moving to Liberia, the West African nation colonized in the nineteenth century by former American slaves. He got as far as England before changing his mind and coming back, this time settling in New York. He found a room in Harlem, where he met his first wife, Minnie Summer, and Eslanda Cardozo Goode, who would later marry Paul Robeson. Through Summer, Patterson met Robeson in 1920, when Robeson was still studying law at Columbia.
By then, Robeson was already on a rapid rise to fame. At Rutgers, where he graduated in 1919, he was a four-sport athlete and a first-team All-American in football. He also sang, acted, debated, and excelled academically—he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, delivered his class’s commencement speech, and wrote a senior thesis called “The Fourteenth Amendment, the Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution,” which, according to his biographer Martin Bauml Duberman, “proceeded to interpret it in a way that prefigured the eventual use of that amendment as a civil-rights weapon.”
Patterson was further along the path to radicalism than Robeson, who spent most of the 1920s and 1930s performing in such Broadway and Hollywood productions as The Emperor Jones, Show Boat, and Othello. Robeson didn’t become openly political until the late 1930s, when he supported the anti-Fascist side during the Spanish Civil War.
For Patterson, the catalyst was the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born workers and anarchists who were sentenced to death in 1921 after being convicted of killing two payroll escorts, Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter, during an armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The debate about their guilt or innocence—which goes on still—was hopelessly tangled up with their politics. They were members of the Galleanists, an Italian-American anarchist group whose followers were suspected in a string of bombings that occurred after the end of World War I. In June 1919, anarchists were accused of setting off bombs in eight U.S. cities, including one at the Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The Palmer device went off prematurely, killing the bomber and sending body parts flying across a residential block of R Street in Northwest Washington. Palmer’s neighbor, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, found human remains on his steps the next morning.
Such episodes spurred a massive
federal crackdown on suspected anarchists and Communists that became known as the Palmer Raids. In November 1919, Justice Department agents, armed with deportation warrants, rounded up hundreds of people in cities all over the country, often basing their arrests on extremely flimsy evidence. In December, nearly 250 people with suspected anarchist, Socialist, or Communist ties were shipped to the Soviet Union on an old troop transport ship called the Buford, which was popularly known as “the Soviet Ark.” By early 1920, the raids had led to the arrest of some 10,000 suspects and the creation of a new General Intelligence Division in the Justice Department. The man in charge of collecting names was J. Edgar Hoover, then just twenty-four.
In the eyes of their supporters, Sacco and Vanzetti faced execution only because they held unpopular views and were foreign born. Many people at the time—not all of them radicals—believed that the trial judge, Webster Thayer, was so clearly biased that a retrial should have been automatic. Among those supporting a second look were establishment fixtures like Harvard Law School professor (and future Supreme Court justice) Felix Frankfurter, who wrote an influential 1927 article about the case in the Atlantic Monthly. Frankfurter dissected a 25,000-word opinion by Thayer—in which Thayer denied Sacco and Vanzetti a retrial based on new evidence—calling it “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.”
Patterson came to the case late, participating in public protests that occurred on the eve of the execution. On August 22, 1927, he was arrested during a march in front of the Massachusetts statehouse, an incident that was described later in Upton Sinclair’s Boston, a “documentary novel” about the case published in 1928.
“There was John Dos Passos, faithful son of Harvard,” Sinclair wrote, “…and William Patterson, a Negro lawyer from New York, running the greatest risk of any of them, with his black face not to be disguised. Just up Beacon Street was the Shaw Monument, with figures in perennial bronze, of unmistakable Negro boys in uniform, led by a young Boston blue-blood on horseback; no doubt Patterson had looked at this, and drawn courage from it.”