by Paul Martin
In the early 1930s, Bodenheim’s shooting star finally fizzled out, leaving him tumbling back to earth, scorched and shaken. The stock market crash of 1929 had eviscerated the carefree bohemian life of Greenwich Village. By the end of 1930, unemployed men crowded New York’s sidewalks, hawking apples for a nickel apiece. Bodenheim’s 1928 novel Georgie May and 1930’s A Virtuous Girl and Naked on Roller Skates—a sensationalist Jazz Age crime and sex tale—all sold well, but the spendthrift author had nothing to show for it. Book publishing suffered along with the rest of the economy. In May 1933, Bodenheim’s longtime publisher, Liveright, Inc., went bust. His 1934 novel Slow Vision, a stark portrait of the human toll of the Great Depression, would be his last. Afterward, he simply fell apart, a personal decline as inexorable as death by quicksand. By the mid-1930s, he was homeless and on relief, a drunken wreck selling his poems on the street to buy liquor.
Bodenheim found a temporary reprieve when he was hired by the Federal Writers’ Project, a program started in July 1935 as part of the Works Progress Administration, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal effort to put Americans back to work. The Federal Writers’ Project hired 6,600 writers, editors, researchers, and academics to produce a variety of publications, the most famous being the American Guide Series, detailed guidebooks to every state. For at least three years, Bodenheim worked on the Bibliographies and Indices Project, a position he lost in 1940 when he was purged along with other writers suspected of having ties to the Communist Party. Support for the labor movement and left-wing causes flourished during the Depression years, and though Bodenheim flirted with radical politics, he was more bleeding-heart liberal than Marxist. Ben Hecht described him as one of the “daft knights with no other program than to battle for the disinherited.”17
Once the United States entered World War II in 1941, the economy began to rebound as arms production revived the nation’s industry. Bodenheim never shared in the growing prosperity. He continued his downward trajectory throughout the forties, now with a new companion. After his first wife divorced him, Bodenheim married Grace Finan, a widow with a meager income. The couple evidently achieved a bit of happiness now and then. Grace helped Bodenheim prepare his last book of poetry, published in 1942. Shortly before she died from cancer in 1950, Bodenheim showed up at Ben Hecht’s New York home, filthy and drunk but still his old sarcastic self. Before he left, Bodenheim turned serious. “Honestly, Ben, I am sick of the whole thing,” he said. “I’d commit suicide tonight except that I am in love with my wife. She is very sick and full of suffering. And she needs me.”18
After Grace’s death, Bodenheim married Ruth Fagan, a mentally unstable woman nearly thirty years his junior. At age fifty-nine, Bodenheim was about to sink to a new low. He now spent as much time in the Bowery as Greenwich Village. Reeling through life in a stupor, he became a bitter caricature of his old self, a ragbag of sullied dreams. When he couldn’t raise enough money by begging (he sometimes hung a sign around his neck claiming he was blind) or selling his booze-addled verses to sympathetic passersby, he allowed Ruth to turn tricks.19 The two fought constantly and lived in squalor. They often slept on park benches, but on a freezing February night in 1954, they went home with a twenty-five-year-old dishwasher named Harold Weinberg, a mildly retarded man with a $5-a-week cold-water room on the edge of the Bowery. Bodenheim fell asleep reading Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. He was awakened by the sounds of Weinberg attempting to have sex with his wife. When Bodenheim challenged Weinberg, the younger man shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. Weinberg then grabbed a knife and stabbed Ruth to death. He fled but was caught and committed to a mental institution.20
Bodenheim’s murder seems like a caprice of fate. The turbulence of his life, however, was foreordained, given his rejection of society’s conventions and constant rebellion against authority. His difficult personality and heavy drinking didn’t help. In truth, he courted trouble, thrived on it. He very consciously made his bed as a cynic early in life and was content to sleep in it all his days. He had no faith in lasting happiness. Believing that things were going to hell anyway, he always gave them a nudge. Booze- or drug-fueled self-destruction has always been the melodramatic refuge of minor artists, but in Bodenheim’s case, the compulsion to squander his abilities through a life of dissipation seems to have sprung from the core of his being. “I have a malady of the soul,” he proclaimed.21 He was one of those unlucky people with the knack for pricking their finger on misery’s needle even when it’s buried in a haystack of happiness.
Historically, Bodenheim was a barometer of his times—indulging in all the hedonistic excesses of the 1920s and suffering the dispiriting effects of poverty during the Great Depression. His writing reflected the opposite natures of those two periods, although not as effectively as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It would be surprising if Bodenheim’s novels ever experience a renaissance. Critics have called them uneven, filled with energy and insight in places, tedious and unpolished in others.22 Even Bodenheim regarded himself chiefly as a poet, and while his verse suffers from the same up and down quality as his novels, his earliest compositions often sparkle with subtle, original images that linger in the mind. Minna and Myself contains a short poem titled “Death.” Reading the following lines, you get the faint chill that only first-rate poetry evokes—the feeling that something new, strange, and wonderful has entered the world.
I shall walk down the road.
I shall turn and feel upon my feet
The kisses of Death, like scented rain.
For Death is a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his voice like jewels
Dropped into a satin bag,
How he has tiptoed after me down the road,
His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.
Then he will graze me with his hands
And I shall be one of the sleeping silver birds
Between the cold waves of his hair as he tiptoes on.23
Bodenheim’s first wife arranged for his burial in her family’s plot in a cemetery near Oradell, New Jersey. In his memoirs, Ben Hecht pointed out that the mad, sad old poet never lost his swagger, no matter the circumstances. “Despite the continuing, unvarying defeats of his life, it is this strut I remember as Bogie’s signature. Ignored, slapped around, reduced to beggary, Bodenheim’s mocking grin remained flying in his private war like a tattered flag. God knows what he was mocking. Possibly, mankind.”24 In the end, it’s clear that the most memorable character Bodenheim ever created was himself.
Samuel Dickstein
The trim, distinguished-looking US congressman from New York strode purposefully to the front of the House Chamber. Standing before the massive marble rostrum in the Well of the House, Democrat Samuel Dickstein looked out over the more than four hundred legislators assembled for the opening day of the second session of the 73rd Congress—January 3, 1934. The forty-eight-year-old representative had European affairs on his mind this day. A Jewish immigrant from near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania, Dickstein was acutely aware of the dangers posed by Adolf Hitler’s recent ascent to power in Germany. Nazism was a threat not only to European Jews and Dickstein’s homeland, but also to the United States. It was a threat Dickstein intended to counter.
In a clear voice, Dickstein outlined the dangers of Nazi agitation in America. He proposed the formation of a special committee to investigate subversive activities. The Dickstein Resolution passed in March 1934, and the new committee was formed, with Massachusetts Democrat John McCormack as its chairman and Congressman Dickstein as vice chairman. (Dickstein turned down the chairmanship over concern that his Jewish background might prejudice the committee’s work.) The group’s formal title was a mouthful: the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. Usually referred to as the McCorma
ck-Dickstein Committee, its mandate was simple—to prevent those advocating other forms of government from subverting the US Constitution.
To all appearances, Samuel Dickstein was an admirable man, a staunch defender of his adopted country. Thanks to his efforts, the House of Representatives kept a close watch on Nazi supporters in the United States in the years just prior to and during World War II. Though Dickstein was chiefly interested in thwarting fascism and anti-Semitism, his work led to the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative body that focused almost exclusively on communist subversion during its nearly four-decade-long existence. In its fervor to root out communists inside and outside the government, HUAC routinely ran roughshod over individual rights. The excesses of HUAC became a blot on Dickstein’s legacy. The other blemish on the congressman’s career was the fact that, from 1937 to 1940, he was a Soviet spy, although not a very good one.1
Born in 1885, Dickstein arrived in this country at the age of two. His family settled on the Lower East Side of New York, where his rabbi father became cantor at the Orthodox Norfolk Street Synagogue. Dickstein was educated at public and private schools before going on to earn degrees at City College and New York Law School. After practicing law in the city for a short time, he began a career in public service that would last more than forty years. Dickstein was adept at politics, rising methodically through the ranks in municipal, state, and federal government. In 1911, he was appointed special deputy attorney general of the State of New York. In 1917, he won election to the New York City board of aldermen. In 1919, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, and in 1922, he won a seat in the US Congress, representing the New York City district where he grew up. He was reelected to Congress eleven times.
Being an immigrant himself—and representing a community with a large number of foreign-born residents—Dickstein was naturally interested in immigration and citizenship laws. He was appointed to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, serving as chairman from 1931 through 1945. Among his accomplishments was the establishment of a nationality code, detailing the legalities of naturalized citizenship. His work on the committee introduced him to some unsettling trends. The rise of Nazism in Germany had been paralleled by an increase in anti-Semitism in the United States. Anti-Semitic literature was flooding the country. Waves of foreigners were entering the United States, both legally and illegally, and German groups such as the Friends of New Germany and the Silver Shirts of America attracted substantial support, some of them running youth camps to indoctrinate children with pro-Hitler views.2
It was this knowledge that prompted Dickstein to propose the formation of a committee to investigate subversive activities on American soil. Dickstein claimed that Hitler had spent $32 million on anti-Jewish propaganda in the United States by the mid-thirties, and that every German merchant ship arriving here carried spies and agitators who infiltrated the country.3 Through much of 1934, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee conducted hearings in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, interviewing hundreds of witnesses. Dickstein’s brainchild was responsible for two new laws, one requiring the registration of agents engaged in propaganda for a foreign power and another allowing congressional committees to subpoena witnesses for hearings outside the District of Columbia. Other than that, about all that came out of the investigation was a lot of talk. Dickstein himself did a fair share of the chin-wagging. He questioned witnesses with the theatrics of a ham actor. He tossed out sensational claims about the dangers the country faced, provoking scary headlines.4 His methods may have been extreme, but his motives were sincere. Dickstein knew that millions of European Jews were in great peril. His anger and anguish were real.
After the short life of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, another group was formed to carry on its work, again at Congressman Dickstein’s urging. (Two similar committees had preceded McCormack-Dickstein: In 1918, the Overman Committee investigated communist influence in America following the Russian Revolution, and in 1930, the Fish Committee investigated suspected communist organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union.) In May 1938, the first incarnation of the House Un-American Activities Committee took up the pursuit of subversives, led by conservative Democrat Martin Dies of Texas.
The Dies Committee investigated Nazi and communist agitators in the United States and also sniffed around the edges of the Ku Klux Klan’s activities. However, the committee devoted a large part of its time to booting suspected communists off the government payroll, specifically writers and actors employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project and Federal Theatre Project, two of the federal government’s Depression-era job creation programs that were favorite targets of critics. (When the Dies Committee grilled Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, Alabama congressman Joe Starnes asked her if Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe belonged to the Communist Party.)5 For the conservatives who dominated the committee, the investigations were a handy way to whack their liberal opponents, buff their patriotism credentials, and get their own names in the newspapers—a trifecta of opportunism no politician could pass up.
Samuel Dickstein wasn’t named to the Dies Committee, although initially he gave it his full support. He kept busy in other ways: shortly before the new investigative committee was established, Dickstein became a Soviet operative.6 There may have been a certain logic to his decision. Dickstein hated Hitler, who was persecuting Jews; Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin also hated Germany’s fascist leader—ergo, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That doesn’t excuse Dickstein’s actions, but it would make his motivation understandable. On the other hand, Dickstein may have just been out to make a profit. Unlike most American spies of the era, he apparently wasn’t motivated by communist ideology.7
The congressman’s foray into espionage began in 1937 when he agreed to fix a Soviet secret agent’s immigration papers for a fee of $3,000. He only realized $1,200 out of the deal, but it was easy money, so Dickstein approached the Soviet ambassador in Washington with an offer to sell information on pro-Nazi Russians operating in the United States. Although the Soviets agreed to the arrangement, Dickstein asked for $2,500 a month for his services, which the Russians thought was too high. They offered him $500. A compromise figure of $1,250 was reached, and the new secret agent set to work.8
Because of Dickstein’s financial demands, the Soviets gave him the code name “Crook.” The first “intelligence documents” he delivered contained information that was already common knowledge. The Russians were not pleased. They wanted inside information on Nazis, White Russians, Ukrainian nationalists, and other enemies of the Soviet state. Dickstein gave them the transcripts of the Dies Committee’s investigations, along with lists of known fascists operating in America. As the Dies panel began to focus more on communists than Nazis, Dickstein attacked the committee publicly, even suggesting that it be disbanded. The Russians still didn’t think they were getting their money’s worth. “‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name,” wrote a high-ranking Soviet spook in America to his superiors in Moscow. “This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money . . . a very cunning swindler.”9
Dickstein continued to feed the Soviets dribs and drabs of information—sometimes culled from newspaper articles and public speeches—but when they asked him to penetrate American intelligence operations and provide them with information gathered on Soviet enemies, the congressman dithered. He finally said that he could obtain information from the FBI, but he’d need more money.10 The Soviets were getting fed up. Early in 1940, they cut Dickstein loose. By then, they’d shelled out more than $12,000, an amount equivalent to nearly $200,000 today.11 It was money poorly spent. Dickstein may even have been working both sides of the street in his low-grade “spying.” A Soviet memo reported that he also sold information to the Poles and the British.12 If Dickstein fed them the same type of material he gave the Soviets—“rubbish,” his handlers
called it—he truly was “a very cunning swindler.”
Dickstein remained in Congress until December 1945, when he resigned and returned home to run for election to the New York State Supreme Court. He was elected and served on the court until his death in April 1954. The public didn’t learn about his work for the Russians until 1999, when authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, the latter a former KGB agent, published their book The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era. Weinstein and Vassiliev discovered Dickstein’s secret life while combing through intelligence files in Moscow in the mid-nineties.
After Dickstein left Congress, the investigation of American subversives took a new turn. In 1945, the temporary Dies Committee gave way to a permanent House Un-American Activities Committee. The Nazis had been defeated, and in the aftermath of World War II, the now standing committee devoted its full attention to fighting communism. Over the next three decades, HUAC conducted ongoing hearings aimed at uncovering communist infiltration of the federal government, organized labor, and the entertainment industry.
In the frightening years of the Cold War, the Red Menace seemed very real, and the public supported the aggressive pursuit of communists. American spies actually were stealing secrets about nuclear weapons and other sensitive matters. A few famous cases grabbed national attention, notably those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage in 1953, and Alger Hiss, who served forty-four months in prison on a perjury conviction related to his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC made its biggest splash when it investigated communist influence in Hollywood. As a result of the hearings, more than three hundred artists were blacklisted by the studios, some because of their ties to the American Communist Party and others simply because they supported liberal causes the enforcers of the blacklist found objectionable.