by Paul Martin
Despite legitimate successes in exposing spies, the HUAC hearings were often nothing more than witch-hunts, grand inquisitions conducted without regard for the rights of those under investigation.13 The search for truth blurred into persecution as the committee members pursued anyone with the slightest connection to communism at any time in their life—which was considered automatic proof of disloyalty. Witnesses were subpoenaed and badgered into testifying against themselves and “naming names” of others. Those who refused to appear before Congress or declined to answer questions could be held in contempt and imprisoned, and they risked losing their jobs and being publicly branded as traitors. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI intimidated citizens who opposed the congressional investigations by tapping their phones, opening their mail, keeping them under surveillance, and even burglarizing their offices.14 At its height, the anticommunist frenzy spawned the showboating demagoguery of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, a publicity hound who made unsubstantiated claims about the number of communists in the federal government. McCarthy’s reign was blessedly short. His police-state tactics of character assassination and guilt by association led to his censure by the Senate in 1954.
HUAC’s investigations divided the country, with conservatives cheering them on and liberals arguing that they were a stain on our democratic heritage. In 1954, the committee published a fifty-page defense of its activities called This Is YOUR House Committee on Un-American Activities. While acknowledging that some of the criticism of HUAC came from “perfectly loyal American citizens,” the authors thundered that much of the criticism came from “Communists and other enemies of the committee,” along with “uninformed or misinformed individuals.”15 The pamphlet is a bizarre document, filled with self-justification and self-congratulations over the committee’s goals and accomplishments.
Regardless of such PR offensives, by the late 1950s the public began to sour on Congress’s endless red-baiting interrogations. In 1959, Harry Truman—who’d endorsed loyalty oaths for federal employees while he was president—called HUAC the “most un-American thing in the country today.”16 In the 1960s, the antics of renegades Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman held the congressional investigations up to ridicule. Rubin once showed up dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier, and Hoffman appeared in a Santa Claus suit. Intellectuals blasted HUAC—writer James Baldwin called it “one of the most sinister facts of the national life.”17 Like a papier-mâché bogeyman left out in the rain, the committee slowly disintegrated, its prestige and clout diminishing year by year. In 1975, HUAC was abolished.
To be sure, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee’s pursuit of Nazi agitators and the search for communist spies by HUAC (dubbed “Dickstein’s Monster” by writer Walter Goodman) were both legitimate exercises.18 Exposing the criminal activity of subversive elements is critical to the country’s survival, although it’s a task best left to law enforcement. The trick in any case is to distinguish between subversion and the expression of differing but perfectly legal political views. The abuses of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy proved that “un-American” can mean whatever the gentleman pounding the gavel decides upon. Like “patriotism” and “disloyalty,” the concept is very much in the eye of the beholder. Dickstein contemporary and opponent Maury Maverick, a Texas congressman, certainly felt that way. As he succinctly put it in 1938, “Un-American is simply something that somebody else does not agree to.”19
Samuel Dickstein set out to do right in his career as a public servant, and in many ways he did. He demonstrated a genuine concern for the disadvantaged through his work. Without pay, he defended thousands of New York tenants who’d been hit with rent increases after World War I. He sponsored state legislation to improve housing conditions. He was one of the first and among the most persistent voices to warn the nation about the evils of Nazism and the threat of a second world war. He tried to persuade the federal government to allow unused refugee quotas to be given to Jews fleeing Hitler. And while he was unremittingly greedy during his brief turn as a spy, he apparently never gouged his constituents. When he died at the age of sixty-nine, his estate came to a paltry $2,500.20
After Dickstein’s death, three hundred judges and attorneys attended a memorial service in his honor at the New York State Supreme Court building. Dickstein’s New York Times obituary said that he’d “achieved a distinguished record as a legislator.”21 Expressing a far different opinion, a frustrated Soviet agent once called the congressman-spy “a complete racketeer and a blackmailer.”22 From all indications, there was probably a certain amount of truth in both assessments.
The residue of Dickstein’s congressional career still influences the nation’s political discourse. Every time a politician slings the un-American label at an adversary, the ghost of Samuel Dickstein is hovering nearby. Although Dickstein eventually realized he’d loosed a dangerous toxin in American society, by then it was too late. What was born of a legitimate concern over foreign subversives quickly mutated into a blunt-edged weapon used to attack domestic political enemies. If Dickstein’s life teaches us anything, it’s that the proper response to blustering superpatriots is always a healthy dose of skepticism.
Emerich Juettner
The mid-autumn weather had artfully daubed Central Park in luminous oranges and muted browns. These final days of October 1947 were crisp and bright, the nights pleasantly cool. It was the time of year that made you think of hot cider and pumpkin pie or of giggling young witches and goblins rustling through fallen leaves. Over on nearby West 96th Street, seventy-two-year-old Emerich Juettner paused to admire a pot of bright yellow mums making their final stand before the first hard freeze. A bald, blue-eyed elf—he topped five feet by just a couple of inches and weighed no more than 120 pounds—Juettner wore a frayed army jacket over a sweater and vest, an old man’s grab-bag armament against the morning chill. A handyman’s ever-present screwdriver protruded from his back pocket.
With his grandfatherly demeanor and ready, toothless grin, Juettner had become a fixture in this part of Manhattan. The old fellow pushed a wooden cart filled with an assortment of castoffs he’d scrounged from empty lots and along the Hudson waterfront—a broken baby carriage, a battered lamp, a birdcage that had seen better days. What other people threw away, Juettner collected. With a bit of luck, he could repair and sell these oddments. It was how he’d helped to support himself for several years. Truth be told, though, he was just as likely to give his treasures away. And he was always willing to lend his neighbors a hand with his Mr. Fix-It skills, like the time he’d revived a faulty electric train set on Christmas Eve for a frantic mom.
A scruffy terrier mutt padded along next to the old man’s feet, a faithful friend of many seasons that, strangely, Juettner had never bothered to name. Juettner looked down at his dog. “You hungry, boy?” he asked in his reedy voice, which still carried traces of his native Austria. The terrier sat on its haunches and stared up at its master, its head cocked as if it could actually understand what Juettner was saying. The old man bent down and scratched the dog’s ears. “Let’s see if we can find you a treat.”1
Juettner parked his pushcart in front of a butcher shop and tied his dog to one of the wheels. Stepping inside, the old man approached the glass display case. He tugged at his scraggly white mustache as he eyed the selections—plump roasts, thick-cut steaks, and an assortment of poultry, sausages, and chops. “Got any scraps to sell?” he asked, tilting his head toward the door. “For my dog.” The butcher wiped his hands on his apron and glanced at the chopping block behind him. “I can give you those trimmings for 15 cents.” The old man nodded and reached into his coat pocket, retrieving a crumpled dollar bill, which he placed on the counter. The butcher wrapped the meat scraps and handed them to Juettner, along with 85 cents in change.2
Juettner walked out of the butcher shop and dropped the package into his cart. He winked at his dog as he rolled on down the sidewalk, knowing that he’d just pulled off another successful caper, one that he’d executed more than
five thousand times in the past. You see, sweet old Emerich Juettner (he also used the name Edward Mueller) was a counterfeiter—moreover, a record-setting counterfeiter. The kindly neighborhood junkman had run his scam—swapping phony paper money for real change—for over nine years now, which was longer than any other currency forger in the nation’s history had operated before being caught.3
That wasn’t the only thing that set Juettner apart. While most counterfeiters went for the big score—churning out a glut of ten-, twenty-, or hundred-dollar bills—Juettner was the only modern-day forger who produced nothing but $1 bills. And he did it at a snail’s pace, printing just enough bogus bucks to supplement his meager junkman income and keep himself and his pooch housed and fed.4 Indeed, Emerich Juettner was a singular man, possibly the world’s first and only frugal money faker.
Juettner turned to counterfeiting late in life, and then only out of necessity. The Austrian immigrant had arrived in the United States in his early teens. For several years, he earned a living by gilding picture frames. He eventually married, and he and his wife had a son and a daughter. In 1932, after the children were grown, Juettner took a job as the superintendent of an apartment building at Broadway and 99th Street. In his spare time, he tinkered with a series of inventions, none of which ever came to anything.
In 1937, Juettner’s wife passed away. At the age of sixty-two, the little handyman was no longer able to keep up with the duties of a building super. He and his dog moved to a two-room, top-floor apartment on West 96th. Shortly afterward, Juettner began gathering and selling junk. He struggled to make a go of it for several months, but the junk business just didn’t bring in enough money. That’s when he decided to call on a different set of skills to supplement his income.
Back in Austria, Juettner had studied photoengraving, a procedure that involves exposing a photographic image onto a sensitized metal plate, developing the plate, and then etching it in an acid bath so it can be used to print copies of the original image. Late in the summer of 1938, Juettner sat down at his kitchen table and photographed a $1 bill. After transferring the image to a sheet of sensitized copper, he processed the plate and fitted it onto a small manually operated printing press he set up next to his sink. Gingerly, the old man cranked out a few faux greenbacks. They were quite possibly the worst looking counterfeits ever.5
Unlike professional counterfeiters, who use high-quality paper similar to the cotton and linen stock used for real currency, Juettner printed his fakes on inexpensive bond paper. In addition, his photoengraving skills were rudimentary at best. Numbers and letters on the bills were crudely shaped, and George Washington came out looking downright comical: his left eye was a black blob, like a cartoon character’s, and the right eye made the father of our country appear to be Asian. Later, while retouching the image of his phony dollar, Juettner would misspell Washington’s name, making it “Wahsington.”6 This truly was funny money, but Juettner just smiled at his handiwork and set the damp bills aside to dry.
In reality, Juettner’s counterfeits didn’t need to be perfect, for some very simple reasons. For one thing, no one would be looking for fake $1 bills. After all, what self-respecting forger bothered with singles? Then there was Juettner’s clever method of passing off his bogus currency. Usually, he sought out a busy place to make his exchanges, such as the subway at rush hour, where a harried ticket agent wouldn’t have time to inspect a bill. By purchasing a five-cent fare, Juettner got back 95 cents in real money. It was a sweet, if extraordinarily small-time, deal. In keeping with his philosophy of subsistence-level crime, he passed no more than one or two bills a day, and he never victimized the same establishment twice. He wanted to make sure that no one lost too much money because of him.7 Juettner was a strange character all right—a crook with scruples.
By never hitting the same location twice, Juettner inadvertently lessened his chances of being caught. From November 1938 on, the old man spread his kitchen currency all over the Upper West Side, as well as in other parts of Manhattan and in surrounding locales—at bars, newsstands, and small shops of all sorts. It wasn’t long before someone noticed the bogus bills. The first was spotted when a cigar-store owner tried to deposit one of Juettner’s notes at his bank. The teller recognized it as a crude fake and informed the Secret Service.8
Originally part of the Treasury Department but now under the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service has been responsible for nabbing counterfeiters since 1865 (three decades would pass before the service assumed the role of protecting the president). The federal agency gave Juettner’s phony currency a thorough analysis at its Washington, DC, headquarters (there must have been a lot of chuckles and head-scratching involved). The unknown New York money faker was assigned a case number—880—and agents began pursuing the perpetrator. Even though Juettner’s output was miniscule, the feds employed all the government’s resources, interviewing the merchants who’d been victimized and giving out stacks of warning notices.
Most counterfeiters quickly end up behind bars, but Emerich Juettner frustrated the Secret Service like no other forger before him. The feds actually wondered if their elusive quarry was toying with them as they fruitlessly pressed their most prolonged manhunt ever.9 No doubt the agents would have slapped their foreheads in disbelief if they’d known that the brilliant felon they were after was a scrawny junk collector with a furry, tail-wagging sidekick. To top it off, Juettner wasn’t even trying to elude them. His lack of greed simply rendered him invisible.
Years went by, and there was still no clue as to the mystery moneymaker’s identity. Like a national game of Where’s Waldo?, Juettner’s humble homemade dollar bills cropped up all over the country, passed along by unsuspecting individuals and banks. In time, the under-the-radar counterfeiter began to acquire the aura of a legend. “Old Mr. 880” lawmen started calling him. Merchants who discovered that they’d accepted Juettner bucks came to prize them as souvenirs—a rarity in the annals of counterfeiting.10
Traditionally, counterfeiting has been regarded as one of the gravest of crimes, with correspondingly harsh penalties. Money fakers during the time of the Roman Empire risked having their ears, nose, or even more sensitive body parts lopped off. In Renaissance Europe, currency forgers were subject to being drawn and quartered and burned at the stake. In colonial America, convicted counterfeiters faced the good old-fashioned hangman’s noose.11
The first counterfeiters—who go back to the beginning of recorded history—produced fake coins by plating base metal with a thin coating of gold or silver. With the advent of paper currency—thought to have originated, like everything else, in China—artists and engravers got into the act. The United States issued its first national paper currency during the Civil War, replacing a hodgepodge of different currencies issued by state banks. Naturally, the federal notes quickly became a target for forgers and have been ever since. A fortune in counterfeit bills is in circulation in this country at any given time, although more sophisticated security measures are making it harder to produce quality fakes.12
The practice of counterfeiting isn’t limited to individuals. A greater threat comes from bogus currency produced by governments, which can be used to disrupt an enemy nation’s economy. During the American Revolution, Great Britain inundated the breakaway colonies with phony Continental dollars (which gave rise to the saying “not worth a Continental”). In the Civil War years, the North distributed wagonloads of counterfeit Confederate money, causing hyperinflation in the South. North Korea is now believed to be the source of the most realistic counterfeit American currency, the so-called “superdollars.”13
By 1947, the Secret Service had amassed more than five thousand of Emerich Juettner’s primitive bank notes in its files. However, at the end of that year a series of coincidences soured the elderly counterfeiter’s uninterrupted streak of good luck. In early December, Juettner was awakened in the night by his dog. A fire had broken out in his junk-filled rooms. The old man escaped from the
burning apartment, although his little dog didn’t make it. Rendered temporarily homeless, Juettner went to live with his daughter in Queens until his apartment could be repaired. The old man was distraught over the death of his dog, but he would soon face a graver issue.
While battling the blaze, firemen had tossed some of Juettner’s belongings onto a trash heap next to his apartment building. A heavy snow soon buried the discarded effects. After the snow melted, some neighborhood boys came across a collection of printing plates and dollar bills. Thinking the bills were stage money, the boys divvied them up to use when they played poker. The father of one of the boys noticed the odd-looking notes and became suspicious. He took the bills to the local police station, where they were identified as the handiwork of the city’s long sought, will-o’-the-wisp counterfeiter.14
Secret Service agents immediately interviewed the boys to find out where the illegal money and printing plates had come from. The agents traced the evidence to the apartment in which the recent fire had taken place, and on January 14, 1948, they collared Emerich Juettner when he returned to his rooms.15 Inside the apartment, the agents found Juettner’s printing press, photographic negatives of currency, tubes of ink, and a small amount of bogus money. Notorious Old Mr. 880 was done for at last.
The New York Times trumpeted Juettner’s arrest on page one, under a headline that read “Snow, Fire Turn Up Elusive Suspect in 15-Year Crop of Bogus $1 Bills” (the paper overstated the time span by six years).16 The Secret Service agents were taken aback when the genial counterfeiter freely admitted to his illicit activities. With a childlike lack of guile and his habitual toothless grin, Juettner explained that his little sideline was his way of making ends meet. To their surprise, the agents interrogating the polite, garrulous duffer found themselves taking a shine to him.17 They didn’t even lock the old guy up. Instead, they allowed him to return to his daughter’s house on his own recognizance.