By the end of the Eisenhower administration, the reactionary grip had loosened. A number of Supreme Court decisions had begun to breathe life back into the Bill of Rights; the civil rights movement was in the process of reviving student activism; and the American public, at last, was starting to tire of the stale vitriol of the reactionary Right.
For once HUAC found itself on the defensive. Richard Criley and Frank Wilkinson, founders of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC, had organized against the Red-hunters for a decade; now their efforts were paying off in increased congressional support.
In May 1960, a critical victory from another quarter occurred when spontaneous demonstrations by a coalition of students and old-time progressives drove HUAC out of San Francisco. By 1965, the momentum was clearly with the opponents of HUAC.
Criley is a descendant on his mother’s side from William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and on his father’s side from Giles Cory, who was pressed to death during the Salem witch trials of 1692. He and Frank Wilkinson were leaders in the fight to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “My FBI file is ten thousand pages. It starts in the thirties and goes up to about ’77. We were effective, so they hated our guts and we became targets.”
I left the Communist Party in 1960. I had been having some real policy differences, particularly around the First Amendment. I was supportive of free speech, but the Communist Party was utterly ambivalent, for reasons that are pretty obvious. They were totally supportive of Stalin. Although, to some degree, most of us were truly ignorant of what Stalin had actually done until Khrushchev made his famous speech. The Party was justifying the dictatorship of the proletariat and building on various theories that you can’t defend fascist free speech, racist free speech.
Look, I argued, the minute you put forward the concept that we only defend free speech that we agree with, since not too many people agree with the Communist Party, you’re putting yourself in a very little box with nobody to defend you. You have to be committed toward defending everybody’s free speech.
I had taken part in a discussion before the Illinois state committee at the time of the Khrushchev statements in 1956. Khrushchev really shook the Communist Party up. Even the way the material got to us was interesting. The Daily Worker didn’t print it, the New York Times did, then after the New York Times did, the Daily Worker had to. So I talked to the people in this committee meeting and said, “It’s time a lot of us did some rethinking for ourselves. I joined the Young Communist League because I was a nonconformist, a rebel against a status quo that was unjust and repressive. But in a strange kind of a way I’ve become a conformist. I assumed that because I wasn’t born with a red diaper I didn’t know as much Marxism as somebody else and contented myself with being an implementer of policy and not really taking responsibility for policy decisions. I’m not going to do this anymore. I made a lot of mistakes, other people’s mistakes, but I accepted them uncritically. Any mistakes I make in the future are going to be my own. I’m not taking anybody else’s positions without critically examining them first.”
It went over like a lead balloon. That was the beginning of the end. I found increasingly sharp relationships. I stayed nominally a member for a number of years, but worked more and more on my own.
When I was no longer a member, the FBI knew it and went after me harder than before. They were devoting more effort to screw me up, because my work was actually more effective. I was doing very good work to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.
HUAC was the right arm of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The main way they would neutralize you would be to get you subpoenaed by either the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee or HUAC. It wasn’t an accident that I was subpoenaed five times—three times with SISS and twice with HUAC.
I made myself obnoxious. I said, “This whole committee is illegal, because the chairman is a man named James Eastland, elected in Mississippi, and in Mississippi the Fourteenth Amendment1 has been a dead letter since Reconstruction, and Eastland has no more right to sit on this committee than I have.”
Senator Hrushka banged the gavel and said, “I’m not going to let you blaspheme my coworkers! Those remarks are expunged from the record.”
“You can’t expunge them, I said them.”
“They are expunged!” [Laughs.] They printed the verbatim testimony from that hearing, and they were in fact expunged from the record.
The FBI went to the extreme of writing a poison-pen letter about me to the board of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. They were aware that I was probably more radical than most of the board members were. This would have been around 1963.
The board included Victor Obenhouse, who was probably the leading Protestant theologian in the Midwest and professor of Christian ethics at the Chicago Theological Seminary; Robert Havighurst, who was the primary professor in the field of education in the United States; and leading ministers of the major Protestant nominations, some prominent Catholics. This letter was supposedly from a guy that had known me when I was a member of the Communist Party. He claimed that he knew that I was still a secret Stalinist and I didn’t believe in civil liberties for anybody but Communists and I was really there to defend Communists, period.
The letter said the board should demand a meeting and fire me. I called up Obenhouse and said, “What do you think we should do—should I call a special board meeting?” And he said, “There’s only one thing to do with an anonymous letter, that’s put it in the wastepaper basket.” This was the reaction of just about everybody on the board, except, strangely enough, one guy who was the representative of the Friends Service Committee.2 I think he was scared it would hurt his fund-raising abilities, guilt by association, so he quietly withdrew.
There was another person on our board who earlier had been visited by the FBI and had dropped out and not explained why. Then they visited a woman board member whose husband was a doctor in a veterans’ hospital. They threatened her husband’s job unless she withdrew from the committee.
The FBI went to my family. This was in the sixties. My brother had two sons, one of whom was a doctor doing some government-funded research on heart problems, the other was a brilliant mathematician who was doing government work. So every year I used to come out to California for Christmas with my wife, and I’d visit my mother in Carmel and then I’d visit my in-laws and then go to Los Angeles to visit my brother.
This particular year I got a tearful phone call from my brother Ted saying, “Don’t come—the FBI has been talking to us, and they’ve said that if we see you they’re going to withdraw the security clearances from my sons, and I have to protect my kids.”
They went to my sister-in-law in San Francisco. Her husband was a Norwegian who made his living selling haberdashery, called slop chests, for seamen. He was Norwegian, so he was covering all the Norwegian boats, quite a few of which came to San Francisco. He needed a Coast Guard clearance.3 They went to Martha and said, “If you see your sister or brother-in-law, we’re going to have to take Arnie’s clearance away.” So we got this tearful letter from Martha saying I love you both, but we won’t be able to earn a living without that certificate.
These were the standard operating procedures of FBI neutralization. I got threatening phone calls. I would get letters, including some that enclosed human shit. All of a sudden I’d get a whole bunch of phony life insurance policies along with a death threat, a note that had rifle sights on it.
The FBI was very concerned with protecting and saving HUAC. At some point they gave up and decided it was hopeless. The committee had gotten itself into too much hot water and there was too much opposition to it. Their intensive operation against us stopped about ’67. But it was clear that Hoover didn’t care whether you were a member of the Communist Party or not, but were you effectively doing things which the FBI disapproved of.
If HUAC came to town, we would help organize a local operation dealing with the media. The last hearing that was ever held outside of Washington was in Chicago in ’65, and we organized the resistance to that. We had a picket line that went up to a thousand people and every day was led by a different person. Reverend Obenhouse led it one day, a very prominent rabbi led it the next, so if the newspapers came around, here was the person in charge. By ’65 we were getting an equal shake in the press. In contrast to earlier years, when, whether you were on the witness stand or anything else, they would just fill their pages with the HUAC stuff, but nothing that we had to say.
HUAC sent out letters to a bunch of people, invitations to become informers, saying, “We happen to have you on the list, but if you want to come in confidentially and cooperate with us, we’ll arrange that.” Somebody brought me a copy of this letter. So I called a press conference and said, “Here’s the kind of stuff these people are doing to suborn people into becoming stool pigeons for HUAC.” At the end of that hearing, they had taken such a beating politically that every member of the Chicago delegation in Congress took the floor to protest their misdeeds in the Chicago area. We started the Committee to Abolish HUAC in 1960, and the committee was abolished in ’75. But after the ’65 hearing they never left Washington again.
When HUAC was abolished we had to give ourselves a broader focus and another name, so we took the name of National Committee Against Repressive Legislation. In the later years of HUAC we had become involved in a number of other things—repeal of Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950,4 which we did together with the Japanese-American Citizens League. We had a campaign against the no-knock law and had been successful with that. We fairly had the Internal Security Act nullified.
HUAC had reached the point where they decided it was counterproductive to call in hostile witnesses. They ceased being a show, ceased going around to your hometown, they lost all of their umph and they weren’t getting the press anymore. They were fairly much limited to calling in some prominent anti-Communist so-called expert to be a consultant, and that had no juice in it.
Then Un-American Activities Committee became a bad word, so they became the National Security Committee instead.5 The more they cleaned up their act, the less reason they had to exist, because to have a constitutionally observing committee doing witch-hunting is a contradiction—you can’t observe the Constitution and conduct witch hunts at the same time.
In our Chicago suit, we were able to interrogate the associate director of the FBI under Webster, and we asked him for the number of informers in Chicago in the years ’66 to ’76. The number was five thousand, one hundred and forty-five paid political informers. These aren’t the ones working on the Mafia and criminal cases, these are political. And not one arrest or prosecution ever resulted from that number of informers, not one case flowed from it. So this is enormous big business.
Now the Cold War was something bigger than the FBI by far, but the FBI implemented it. Its hundreds and thousands of press contacts were manipulated, were fed materials. The FBI made a major imprint on the ideology of America.
One interesting part of my FBI file covered a trip that I planned to make to Cleveland, where Frank Wilkinson and I were going to be on the Mike Douglas show, a nationwide phone-in television broadcast. My file revealed that the producer of the show was one of the guys that cooperated with the FBI, and so he arranged to have the script for that interview written by the FBI offices of Chicago and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles office wrote the questions to be asked to Frank Wilkinson and the Chicago office the questions to be asked me.
It was interesting that the FBI was writing the script of a television broadcast. Their entry into the American mind was so profound that it implanted a blind kind of anticommunism, which still exists.
When we started out to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, people thought we were crazy, “Nobody’s ever going to abolish that committee—you guys are nuts.” I don’t think it would have happened without us. Obviously changes happened that made it possible. But no member of Congress would take them on until we got Jimmy Roosevelt to do it, and he was spurred to do it by a petition of thirty thousand names from his district asking him to do it. Then we gradually built it up so we had six people that dared speak out, then it was twelve. We had found out early on that there were at least a hundred members of the House who really disliked the House Un-American Activities Committee, but were afraid to deal with it because they thought if you take them on, you’ll be branded soft on communism and you’ll be destroyed. They had destroyed congressmen who did that. We changed that. We forced them into retreat.
First of all, we took ten districts and worked like hell to get a base there so we could get the representative to do it. Then we moved out to fifty districts and worked on the fifty districts, and kept moving it up and moving it up. Then we began to get test votes on things like cutting their appropriations. The man who implemented the first cut was a guy named Frank Annunzio, who was the Mafia guy from Chicago [laughs], but he was in a district where I had a lot of friends, so I met with him. He agreed to do it.
I was called in front of the Senate committee first in ’54, then in ’59 I was called before HUAC. Then I was called in ’61 again before HUAC. Then in ’63 I was called twice before SISS.
The first time they subpoenaed me, I got to Washington and they said, “Oh, didn’t you know we called the hearing off?” I said, “Wait a minute, I had to spend airfare to get here and take off a day from work. You guys have got to pay my expenses.”
They said, “Okay, as long as we’re paying expenses we’ll have a hearing.” So they had a closed hearing. Then they subpoenaed me a second time to ask the same questions—the record was exactly the same as the closed hearing—so that I would receive adverse publicity and lose my job.
The ’61 hearing had to do with a conference that was called after the Supreme Court came down with a decision which upheld the basic constitutionality of the Internal Security Act. There was a national conference called to focus on that. Now that conference was initiated pretty much by the Communist Party, but the majority of the people in it were not Communists. But it was one of these stupidly organized things where the guy that rented the auditorium where we met had a month before been an official representative of the Communist Party somewhere else. It gave the FBI a marvelous opportunity to attack this thing through HUAC. The Chicago committee had voted to officially send delegates, and I went. So I was subpoenaed again to show the Red threat. [Laughs.]
I started out by saying, “The first reason why I’m not answering your questions is that I’m descended from a man named Giles Cory who was executed in 1692 during the Salem witch hunt. You can understand that my family has a long tradition of opposing witch hunts. I oppose this one and that’s why I’m not answering your questions.” And he went bang, bang, bang on the gavel.
The interesting thing was by ’61, the role of the news media had changed enough so that the lead of every story on that hearing read, “Descendant of Giles Cory called before HUAC. . . . ”6
Along with Richard Criley, Wilkinson was a prime mover in the formation of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. For his work for integrated housing and civil liberties, he was hounded by the FBI for thirty-eight years. In 1964, the FBI learned of a plot to murder Wilkinson. They knew the place, the time, the date, and even the name of the assassin—and they stood by that night to watch. We met in the compact offices of the First Amendment Foundation in Los Angeles.
I did not learn about the FBI’s surveillance of me until 1980, when I was sixty-five years of age. It began in 1942, and they followed me for thirty-eight years. What they did, and how they did it, is all something that’s come to me from the settlement of our lawsuit.1 Under Civil Discovery (not FOIA) we got amazingly valuable data from them showing what conversations were wiretapped, which of them were with informants, the names of informants, in case after case, and details that were never available to us under the FOIA. That gave us the information we needed.
The settlement provided that the FBI had to remove every page that they had on me in all fifty-nine offices. They offered to burn them. I insisted that they be placed in the National Archives under seal so that historians later on can look at these things and understand what we call the McCarthy Era, which in my opinion was really the J. Edgar Hoover Era.
There is not one line in the entire one hundred and thirty-two thousand pages that indicates any criminal activity or thought of crime on my part. Nowhere in that file can you say it began because . . . I can tell you what I was doing at the time it began, but not why, because no one knows.
I come out of a very Methodist, Republican background. In Beverly Hills High School, I was head of Youth for Herbert Hoover. At UCLA, I was the conservative fraternity man, who ran for student body president against those we referred to as radicals. I’m not very proud of that, but that’s part of the background.
I planned on the Methodist ministry all my life. As a graduation present from UCLA, even though it was the seventh year of the Depression, my family gave me a trip to the Holy Land. I left filled with Christmas carols, and when I arrived in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, 1936, there were so many beggars in front of the Church of the Nativity that I was unable to get in. I was shocked by the contradiction of two thousand years of Christianity and still beggars at the birthplace of Christ. You can say the same thing about five thousand years of Judaism, or twelve hundred years of Islam. All three Western religions were there.
I felt the church was hypocritical, and I decided not to become a Methodist minister. But I was determined either to practice the religious ethics that I had or admit I didn’t give a damn.
I did not come home at that point. A fraternity brother and I bought bicycles and spent that whole year, just before the outbreak of World War Two, bicycling from Jerusalem through every country in Europe. Never going to hotels, sleeping in the streets, unbelievable trip. I lived under Mussolini for three months, I was a guest of Franco in Spain for a few days, and I lived under Hitler for three months. I went into Poland and lived in the ghetto of Warsaw.
I came back to Los Angeles more shocked than ever about the hypocrisy of religion. Many of those countries were Christian countries. I came back a great disappointment to my family and my bishop.
At that point the archdiocesan director of Catholic Charities came to my home, a Monsignor Thomas J. O’Dwyer. He was starting a campaign of slum clearance in L.A. I remember seeing that Roman collar come in my house, and my anger at him, I remember almost shouting at him that you can’t blame the Methodist Church for the ghetto of Warsaw—that’s a Catholic country.
After I did all the talking, he very calmly said, “My son, you did not need to go so far to get so excited.” He drove me eight miles from my home in Beverly Hills and showed me housing conditions in Watts and the barrio equal to what I’d seen in Bethlehem. I couldn’t believe that we had the problem right where I’d grown up. He then offered me a job at fifteen dollars a week as his secretary, and I grabbed it.
I worked with him for the next three years. We got the housing authority administrative laws through the state. We got the first three housing projects built, and by 1942 they were ready for occupancy. But ’42 is five years before restrictive covenants were outlawed and twelve years before Brown v. Board of Education. Los Angeles was rigidly segregated.
The only place in Los Angeles that was naturally integrated was Watts, which, at that time, was one-third white, one-third African-American, one-third Hispanic. The housing authority, still operating under the old 1896 law of the land, Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal, decided to build three projects and separate the Hispanics, whites, and blacks. They were segregating people that were already integrated. So Monsignor O’Dwyer, myself, and a committee we had of the YWCA, the Catholic Women’s Club, League of Women Voters, groups like that, set up a picket line to demand open occupancy. The press paid attention to the fact that a leading Catholic prelate was there.
The housing authority gave in. “Okay, Father, we’re going to mix ’em—who do you want to run it?” O’Dwyer said, “Let’s try Frank.” So from a picket line, I’m taken inside to become the manager of the first integrated housing project in Watts in 1942. When we got the FBI files, we found it was that month that the FBI first named me as a national security risk and began following me. Over the next thirty-eight years, upwards of seventeen million dollars was spent on this effort. Everything that I considered to be McCarthyism was found to be orchestrated directly by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Chavez Ravine lost me my job. I started out in ’42 as manager of the project in Watts. By ’52 I had been manager of half a dozen projects and was then assistant to the director at the housing authority, charged with site selection for a one-hundred-and-ten-million-dollar slum clearance program for the City of Los Angeles.
I was in an eminent-domain proceeding on the necessity of taking Chavez Ravine for a housing site which I had selected and the city council and mayor had approved when the FBI came in with a dossier on me developed by Chief of Police Parker and turned it over to the owners of the slums whose lawyers were fighting us in court. So in the middle of my testimony on the correlation between disease and delinquency and bad housing, rat infestation, stuff like that, the opposing attorney suddenly stops his cross-examination and asks, “Now Mr. Wilkinson, what organizations, political or otherwise, have you belonged to since 1929?”
Up to that point, my civil liberties record was lousy. I had signed every loyalty oath California and the federal government ever had—anything to save slum clearance programs. Beginning in ’42, I took a loyalty oath, swore that I was not a Communist. Every year in the housing authority as I advanced, and as the domestic Cold War set in, I took a loyalty oath. I was liaison with the American Legion and the VFW, all the veterans’ groups. Every time the loyalty oath came up, we called a press conference, invited all of the veterans’ groups in their uniforms, and the mayor, and the housing commission, and with the flags and all we proudly said we were loyal.
I had reached the point a couple of months before of feeling sick and tired of trying to prove I’m loyal. My lawyer had been a liberal at UCLA when I was the conservative—now he was working for a large Republican law firm. He knew me in terms of my Youth for Herbert Hoover business and my fraternity/sorority leadership. But it was the second year of the Korean War, the Rosenbergs were due to die within a year, the Hollywood Ten were in and out of jail, the first Communists were on trial. He remained quiet, and I refused to answer the question and I was fired.2
By ’56, I had developed a civil liberties consciousness. I came under the influence of a great philosopher, Alexander Meiklejohn, who later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom under President Kennedy. It was from him I learned the absolute concept of the First Amendment: it ain’t no difference who Congress might be targeting, whether it be Communists or Nazis, as long as it was speech, it had to be protected.3
For three years I’d been assigned by the local ACLU to try to get somebody who was subpoenaed before the committee not to use the Fifth Amendment but the First Amendment, and if need be go to jail. The ACLU felt that some of the dicta in one of Earl Warren’s decisions showed that the Supreme Court was ready to take on the First Amendment violations of the Un-American Activities Committee. But everyone was afraid to do it, because it was a year in jail. The Hollywood Ten had already been in, and that had had a terrifying impact upon people. The Fifth Amendment was the way you kept yourself safe.
By that time, I’d seen teachers and musicians and lawyers and doctors and trade unionists, every kind of person, wiped out, their jobs taken away from them, by the Un-American Activities Committee—all people I knew were doing nothing illegal or wrong, but whose ideas were enough for that committee.
I had already made up my mind that if I ever did get a subpoena from the House committee that I’d go to jail. Then I got a subpoena. I went to ACLU and said, “We don’t have to look anymore—I’ll be your guinea pig”
We tried it, and the committee was so dumbfounded that I wasn’t using the Fifth that they backed off. They never cited me for contempt—I walked away from it. They couldn’t believe it. At one point the chair asked, “Did you use the Fifth Amendment?”
I kept saying they violated the First Amendment, I’ll answer nothing, not even my address. Then they asked again, “Are you using the Fifth?” and I’d say, “My answer is my answer.”
Finally the chair, Clyde Doyle, came clear down from the podium where the committee is sitting and looks in both my ears and says, “The committee notices that you’re wearing a hearing aid, you’re deaf. When we asked you if you’re using the Fifth Amendment, did you hear us?”
Our efforts in organizing protection of the subpoenaed people in Southern California and San Francisco had proven so successful that I was brought to New York to work nationally. I went to Gary, Indiana, to Boston, Philadelphia, finally to Georgia. We had skills, we knew how to get people together to fight back and develop rallies and get good lawyers and public relations to save jobs.
In ’58, I was brought down to Atlanta to work with Martin Luther King’s father and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. The FBI were waiting for me. They had me under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Within a minute after I arrived at my hotel I was subpoenaed by HUAC. So again I called the ACLU and said we got another subpoena here, let’s go. The national ACLU took it all the way to the Supreme Court. We would have been happy to get just Warren and Douglas or Warren and Black on our side, anything to get the dialogue going in the court. The vote was five to four; we had Chief Justice Warren, and Black and Douglas and Brennan. One more vote and we would have won.
Carl Braden4 and I went to jail together. It was a one-year maximum sentence, and we served it in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Lewisburg Penitentiary. We were moved around all the time, due to the FBI’s in-prison surveillance of us. Everything we did was attacked. I just got a stack of documents with every letter that was written to me or that I wrote while I was in prison. The FBI copied everything.
We were treated very poorly in prison. Our bunks were searched for contraband, I’d say, three nights a week. We’d catch ’em at it. When everybody else went to church services we’d come back early and find five guys going through my foot locker trying to find something illegal.
The inmates in the South were illiterate. Four hundred moonshiners and bootleggers with a third-grade education. Forty of them signed their names with an X. But when I came in, the warden said, “I know all about you—we don’t want any teaching here.” So for six months I was not allowed to help these guys so much as learn their alphabet. Then we went to the warden and pointed out to him that the only time these guys get any recreation is Sundays. Their primary recreation is comic books, which most of them couldn’t read, but they loved the pictures, and the library, a very lousy library, did have comic books. So we said to the warden, “If you will open up the library Sunday, we’ll take charge and we’ll issue comic books and we’ll get every one collected two hours later.” He agreed. So the guards came that first Sunday and opened it up at two o’clock, came back at four to close it up, glaring at us, hating us. We became the heroes of the prison because we got the library open on Sunday.
That was on a Sunday afternoon at four o’clock. The following Tuesday morning our names are called out to go to Control, and we went in. We were jumped, slammed, handcuffed, stripped of everything, even my hearing-aid batteries, put on a bus, and shipped north without telling us anything. Two days later we arrived at Lewisburg Penitentiary and put into solitary for seven days.
At that time Aubrey Williams, who had founded the Committee to Abolish HUAC and had been a New Dealer under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, was writing to me two or three times a week. He wrote to South Carolina and his letters came back “Address Unknown.” So he called up James Bennett, a friend of his who was the director of the Bureau of Prisons, and asked him where we were. Bennett said, “They’re still in South Carolina,” and Aubrey said, “That’s not true—mail isn’t going through there.” So Bennett checked it out and told Aubrey, “Your boys got caught spying for Russia and they’re now in solitary up at Lewisburg Penitentiary.”
Aubrey said, “How can you spy for Russia from inside a prison?” It was checked out again by Bennett, and he found out that these two guards who had to give up their good Baptist Sunday services to come open that library up had gone four miles away to a military airbase and reported they had seen Carl and me looking out of the windows of our prison at that airport and were reporting the military planes taking off to Russia. On that basis we were picked up and sent north. We were accused of everything, everything.
Up on a prison farm outside of Lewisburg we were accused of teaching communism. We got into trouble up there because . . . Well, I’ll tell you. In South Carolina, the only place that was integrated was the federal prison! We had a joke, if you could just get Strom Thurmond in there for one weekend, we could clean up his act. They were all moonshiners and bootleggers who have only one enemy, the revenue agents. Blacks and whites hit it off perfectly. So sitting together, fraternizing, was no problem. When we went north, the Lewisburg Penitentiary and the prison farms outside of there were sharply segregated. There’s an invisible color line. All the white inmates sat together, and the blacks sat there. So, of course, Carl and I went and sat deliberately at black tables and struck up friendships.
While we’re eating at one of these places, an inmate came up to me but was overheard by an inmate who was three feet away. This guy said they used to have a public forum, and if they could get a forum started did I know anyone who would come and speak? I laughed at him, I said, “A forum at this place?” He said, “Yeah, we used to have one.” I said, “Well, okay, if you can get one, I’ll get you some speakers.” I offered him Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, and a couple of other very prominent names. This other guy goes to the warden and reports that he heard me arranging classes on communism. So the warden calls me in and says, “Pack your gear—you’re going back to solitary.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“You know I told you don’t do any teaching here. You’re teaching communism.”
“I have not.”
By that time, my morale was so low that instead of saying “Well, fuck you” or something like that, I said, “I did not.” I began to cry, because I couldn’t stand going back to solitary without my hearing aid. They would take it away in solitary. The only time that concrete wall opens up is when they make a call in the hallway outside. A big lever opens up all the solitary cells and if you push your door you can get out, and you go lockstep to the toilet or lockstep to eat. I couldn’t hear, so I never got that chance. I was always unable to get out. So I really broke down and said, “I have not been doing anything wrong, I assure you.”
“Well,” the warden said, “you go back to your bunk and you think about it.” I went back to my bunk, and that afternoon went by. I was scared stiff. The next morning I went into the bathroom and a guy came up to the urinal next to me and whispered, real softly and quickly, “Your problem is you’ve been sitting with the blacks. Secondly, don’t try to organize any forums.”
Oh my God . . . I turned around—where is this guy? By that time he’d disappeared. I hardly saw him, I just heard his voice. So I hurried to the warden, came in beaming into the warden’s office. “Hey, I finally figured it out. Thank God I’ve got a friend here.” I didn’t talk about eating with blacks, I said, “This guy came up to me and said you used to have a forum here, and I gave him the names of Martin Luther King and these others who would come if you ever had a forum here.” The warden just glared at me.
I said, “Thank God, I’ve got friends here who told me what happened. That’s what your problem is.” He said, “Look, Wilkinson, for every friend you’ve got here, I’ve got six. You keep your nose clean or you’re going to solitary.” I spent my last six weeks under that pressure.
The guy in the bunk next to me turned out to be the guy who informed—he hated me. So I slept with one eye open. Every motion of the bed next to me, I’d jump, thinking somebody was going to kill me. And no inmate would ever snitch. If you snitched, you’d get killed. I just went on that way. Life in prison was very rough.
When we were finally due to get out, Pete Seeger and others planned a welcome-home rally at a big auditorium in downtown New York, and that was wonderful. But the FBI got wind of it, came to the prison, and told them not let me out at eight A.M., which I was entitled to, but hold me until five P.M. so I could not get into New York in time for this rally. They said buy him a ticket to California, put him on a Greyhound bus.
But the inmates were always wonderful, other than the real snitches. So they came to us and told us. We had twenty-four hours to find some inmate that was leaving to get the word out. One inmate only was getting out the next day, and he was the most unlikely guy you can imagine. He was totally isolated from the rest of the prison population. He wore a yarmulke and a prayer shawl, read the Torah all day long. He was a black Jew from Brooklyn. I’d never known of black Jews until I met them in prison. We sat down with him and explained what our problem was, and he memorized Pete’s phone number. He got out the next morning, got to a telephone, and told them the problem. We said, “Tell people we can’t get there until ten-thirty. Have a car behind the Greyhound bus at Lewisburg at five o’clock.”
They held us right to the last minute and put us on the bus. They thought they had fixed us good. The doors close and we jumped right back out in front of the prison authorities. Five carloads of people were waiting there. We hop in a car, turn around, and get into New York at ten-thirty at night. Right until the end they were screwing us.
From then on, they tried to disrupt every speech I made, every speech Carl made. Forty-one separate talks I was scheduled to make, the FBI attempted, and did in some cases, disrupt. That was documented in just the first four thousand pages we got. We got ten times the audience we would have if they’d just let us alone.
In 1983, we received a document under FOIA dated March 4th of ’64 that reads: “From Agent in Charge, FBI, to J. Edgar Hoover. Subject: Frank Wilkinson. ‘Name blacked out’ to assist in assassination attempt on Frank Wilkinson when he speaks tonight at eight o’clock P.M. at 13130 Bloom-field Avenue, Sherman Oaks, California. Then, ‘name blanked out’ will stake out the residence to witness the assassination.”
When I’m not killed that night, there’s another document dated the next day, March 5th of ’64: “Agent in Charge, to J. Edgar Hoover: No attempt was made on the life of Wilkinson last night, we’ll watch for further developments.”
That was what we got under FOIA nineteen years after I would have been killed. In 1989 we got the same document free of redactions. They still don’t tell us who is going to kill me, but the person who was staked out to witness my assassination is now identified as “Confidential Source: LA3184, Head, Anti-Subversive Detail LAPD.” So working with the FBI is the commander of the Red Squad of L.A., waiting for me to be killed that night.5
I called up the guy whose house this was—I didn’t even remember having been there. He said he remembered very well, because people were worried about two men outside in a car. So he went out and took down the license number. He called the police and said there’s two men in a car outside that’s worrying my guest. The car drove off in five minutes. He went the next day to the department of motor vehicles and asked who drives such-and-such a Plymouth, license number so-and-so. The department of motor vehicles said there’s no such license plate existing.
While husband Frank fought HUAC, Jean took on the arduous task of guarding the home front. For more on Jean Wilkinson, see under “Red-ucators.”
Since Frank was gone most of the time traveling, we had a big dog. I used to walk him at night to check the cars parked out front, where the two FBI guys were sitting. They were almost always there. The arson squad were the only friendly authorities that we ever encountered. They really seemed sincere—I guess there’s something about protecting people from fire that overrides political considerations.
I don’t remember how many times they were out to our house because of threats. Once when Frank was away, I went to have dinner with some friends in the Hollywood hills. My son Tony called to say, “Mom, we’re all right, but somebody tried to bomb our house.” By the time I tore down the hill and got to the house, the fire department was already there.
We lived in the upper unit of a duplex. The owners, a lovely couple, lived down below. My two kids—the older boy wasn’t living at home by then—had been downstairs playing games with the other kids. Then my daughter, Jo, went upstairs to where our dog was—supposedly the big protector, he didn’t care. On her way, she saw this bottle with a fuse in it. She thought it a little strange but didn’t do anything about it. She went on upstairs and a few minutes later the bomb went off.
It damaged the downstairs porch, windows, front door, and some other stuff. It didn’t damage our place. But it scared the landlady and landlord out of their wits. He had just come home from the hospital after having his voice box removed because of cancer, and he did not need anything like this. They were very apologetic, but they were too scared to let us stay there. So I had to look for another place to live. That was hard. I don’t look dangerous—I look like a schoolteacher or a librarian, so people trust me. There was no problem about getting a house, but then I would think, “Oh God, am I going to tell them that we may get bombed? What am I going to do?” I went through such agony. I never told them, but I died about it.
Some of our wealthy friends, in encouraging Frank’s proclivity for taking on causes, had told us, “If ever you need money, just come to us.” So I thought, “Why don’t I borrow some money and put it down on a house?” I floated that idea around—nobody wanted to be involved. But the next thing I knew they had raised ten thousand dollars to put down on a house to buy for us. It was a duplex—we could live upstairs. Frank had already been found guilty and had to go to jail, so we fixed this place up and it was wonderful.
Earlier on after Frank was fired from the housing authority, our two boys were denied attendance at the YMCA summer camp. They were all set to go, but when all this came out the Y had second thoughts—they didn’t think our kids should go to camp. They were seven and nine, real threats to the community. This hurt Frank particularly because the church and the camp was part of his upbringing, and these people knew him personally. Frank’s old Sunday school teacher was an official of the summer camp. The Y finally decided that if Frank and I did not visit them on parents’ day, the two little boys could go.
Most of the neighbors were quite good. I remember the milkman arriving one morning, laughing about how funny it was that the newspapers were saying that Mr. Wilkinson was a “Commonist” and that was just the funniest thing he had heard. But there were people around all the time that I had to watch out for. I’m not very courageous physically. I had to get over that. In the worst times we had people come and guard the house.
One time, Frank was on the television debating somebody, I don’t remember whom, some creep, and the debate was hot and heavy. My kids and I and a few friends were watching it when the phone rang. A voice said, “When this thing is over, we’re going to kill him.” I called the police. Well, they sent two policemen out to the house. I let them in and told them what it was about. Then I took a few steps to the den, where they saw the television, and one of them said, “Oh! It’s him!” and just left.
The second one hung back and said to me very quietly, “If anybody comes around, call again.” The first one was not going to have any part of us. So we always felt that the police were our enemies, and certainly the FBI, and the FBI records show it.
Frank’s office was bombed at least once. In fact, recently I found a list of items that were taken in burglaries. No money or anything like that, it was always the files, the political stuff, that they wanted.
One of the scariest times was a big rally in New York with about five thousand people just before Frank and Carl Braden went to prison. That was just after the Hungarian Revolution,1 and all these crazy Hungarians were out chanting in their broken English, “Ve vant Vilkinson!
They were paid to show up and agitate. They were told, “This is the price of your Americanism. This is what America is, free speech. You go and yell at Wilkinson, who’s a dirty Communist.” And of course they hated communism, so they were happy to do that. They didn’t have the faintest idea who Frank was, but they were yelling. We came out of the building, and it was scary. They were physically threatening, and the police, who were on horseback, were very aloof and not too interested. We never had the feeling that the police were interested in protecting us, never.
The big thing that McCarthyism did to me was to make me poor all my life. There are lots worse things. I’m not saying that I haven’t had one great life, ’cause I have. On the positive side, I know we were rich in the friends we had, marvelous people who have made a mark on this country. That was exciting, to participate in big movements and feel that you’re a part of it.
The children even said this to me, that they felt rich because they got to know so many great people, Pete Seeger being tops because of his singing. The Meiklejohns were very dear, Alexander and his wife, who remained my friends until they died here in Berkeley. Across the country we had the greatest support. So the kids felt, “Wow, we aren’t nobodies, and we aren’t forgotten.”
Once when the kids and I drove back East to see Frank in prison, we went up to see the Seegers, Pete and Toshi and the kids. I’d written to them and told them we just wanted to come by and say hello, but they insisted we stay the night. They put us up in the barn, which they had fixed up with beds. My daughter, who plays the guitar and is just crazy about Pete Seeger, kept saying to me, “Don’t you dare tell him that I play!” After dinner Pete just took it for granted, he got out all the guitars and the banjos and they all had a jam session.
Then in the morning we were wakened by Pete Seeger and his son Danny coming up the hill picking at the banjos, singing “Wake Up, Darlin’ Corey.” Now what more can you ask out of life? Do you blame my kids for thinking, “This is a good life we’re leading, it’s just great.” So I don’t want to mislead you, it was not all tragedy.
A long-standing member of the Communist Party, Brown found himself at the center of the first major demonstration against HUAC. For Brown’s story of life in the Communist underground, see under “Five Minutes to Midnight.”
In 1961 the Committee on Un-American Activities came out here to San Francisco. That was when these big demonstrations started. This was a subcommittee of the main committee headed by this guy Willis from Louisiana. We called them the Un-Americans—they didn’t like that.
This particular hearing was focused on education, mainly teachers and professors who got caught in, quote, “the Communist conspiracy,” or who were Communists. The committee was going to expose them, that’s what they were here for. They subpoenaed some of us who weren’t in the educational system to prove the connection with them. Anyway, they subpoenaed me too. And that was when the great Friday the 13th happened, Black Friday. Which was when [chuckles] the police washed the kids down the stairs at City Hall.
We had a little fracas inside the hearing room before that day. Here I am subpoenaed, I’ve got to appear, chambers are crowded. I got a telegram that says the cops gotta leave me in the chambers, but they don’t leave anybody else in unless they’d been subpoenaed or supported the committee. Except here comes some woman. She walks in and she’s got what we called the white card, which only right-wingers got. Willis’s header-upper, I forget his name, he was the chief attorney for the committee, he had arranged with the American Legion for these cards which would allow five people in with each card. This woman came in on a card. The place was jammed and they let her in, wouldn’t leave anybody else in.
I had a suit on. I was being subpoenaed, so I better come in a suit. This woman comes to me thinking because of the suit that I work for the committee. She says, “Where can I sit?” She showed me this card. I said, “Oh, come here with me.” So I went to the press box and I said, “Hey, you see what’s happening, this woman’s got this card, but they won’t let anybody else in.” [Laughs.] Well, she got wise to me then and snatched the card back.
About eleven o’clock that morning they were going to have a recess. I’m looking around and the only black person in there was—she’s dead now, I forget her name—she was one of our comrades and she had also been subpoenaed. She’s the only black person in there, the others were on the outside. So when Willis said he wanted to call a recess, I says, “Your honor, I wish to get a redress of grievance from my country.”
He didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. He looked at me, and so I says, “Here you got all these people on the outside and you have one black person here and that person’s subpoenaed—how come there aren’t any black people in here?” He starts banging the gavel. Pretty soon he ordered the cops to throw me out, which he did, but I got a subpoena so I gotta come back in. So that noon hour when they adjourned for lunch, we got together all the defendants and we decided we’re gonna have a protest in chambers, so we started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and holding speeches and using their microphones and all that kind of stuff. Then they come back in at one o’clock and he bangs the gavel and we all want our redress of grievance. They had to clear us out, so they brought in a squad of motorcycle cops. They came in and grabbed us, arrested us, mishandled us. Pretty brutal with some of us, particularly myself, tore my suit.
All the kids thought we were wonderful! You’ve got to understand, the students came to protest that their teachers and professors were being subpoenaed—what the hell was all this about, see? Then it broke into the papers, so more students came and they began to picket, and then they got to where they wouldn’t leave the students in, they says there’s no room for them. The students began to chant, “Open the doors! Open the doors! Open the doors!” So this hearing’s being held in City Hall and the judges in other courtrooms began complaining about the noise. Pretty soon they issued an order to stop it and all that kind of crap and the kids didn’t give a goddam about it.
Every day the crowds grew bigger. They’d throw us out and that got in the paper, so more kids came. I never saw so many people come to protest what was going on here. One day there was five thousand people outside City Hall protesting and the committee walked out on the top balcony to look down over the crowd. Somebody gave a “Heil Hitler,” then everybody did. It was something else, it was really something else, five thousand people giving them the “Heil Hitler.”
So that Friday I come in, it was Friday the 13th, and the sheriff had arranged with the student delegation that he would see that a certain number of seats was reserved for them so they could hear. He never kept the promise. Geez, that asshole. The sheriff went off someplace, he’s supposed to have a speaking engagement. The mayor was out of town. It’s all a frame-up. Nobody was there, nobody was in charge, except the sergeant of police who ordered the hosing. They got the fire hoses to wash the students down the stairs. The only thing was that [laughs] if there had really been a fire that system was horrible, because there was no pressure—all that came out was just enough to give them a bath across the marble steps. The marble steps were slippery and the kids all joined arms and sat down. They wouldn’t budge. Finally they had a really brutal assault. The cops got ’em from behind and pulled them down all these marble stairs. Some people hurt their backs. Anyway, that was the Battle of City Hall.
Did you ever see the Chronicle? The whole front page was nothing but a picture of the cops washing people down the stairs. [Laughs.]
Oh yeah, I testified, you’re damn right. We had looked up the details on Willis. That year ten thousand black people had registered in his parish. They disqualified nine thousand of those ten thousand. I says, “You know the honorable chairperson of this committee, Edwin Willis, he was elected to Congress with nine thousand votes. I got thirty-five thousand votes here in San Francisco1 and I couldn’t be elected dog catcher. How did you get to be elected?”
Oh, that did it, see. Threw me out. The cops would come where I was testifying and take me out of the door and throw me out. I had to testify three times and Willis threw me out three times.
When it first started, they asked me about my education. I said I was only able to go to grade school and one year of high school. But I says I hold a Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks—see, I’d just gotten beaten in the head. This attorney for the committee, he never paid any attention. He was always reading his stuff. So he looked up at me. He looked me in the eye. I told him I graduated from the school of hard knocks.
It was a great demonstration. San Francisco and the whole Bay Area was in an uproar. Mayor Christopher came back from out of town and he says, “Well, that’s it. The next time any of these committees want to hold a hearing in San Francisco, they can go to the armory.”
The people of San Francisco ran that damn committee out of town. We chased the bastards out of town. They had to leave through the back door.
The wife of Archie Brown. For Hon Brown’s story on the Communist underground, see under “Five Minutes to Midnight.”
I’ll tell you another thing. The House Un-American Activities Committee made a movie about the City Hall demonstrations called Operation Abolition. They took all the film clips and they mixed things up. They got Harry Bridges coming early and he came on the last afternoon, and they maneuvered all this stuff to suit themselves. It’s a hilarious movie—we saw it a couple years ago. But it was really scary in those days.
It has the head of the committee sitting in his office in Congress with the American flag flying talking about the danger and all this kind of stuff. And then they have clips of Archie on the stand. He gives his name. “My name is Archie Brown. I live at 1027 Brussels Street, San Francisco. I have a statement I want to read.” Then it begins. They shout him down. They won’t let him speak. He yells at them that he wants to speak, and so it goes.
They showed this movie in every American Legion hall throughout the country and to schools.1 We would get reams of letters from classes. You could tell they were all from a class because they’d be from some small town in Timbuktu and all addressed to Archie Brown at 1027 Brussels Street, San Francisco. He’s got them someplace. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” “How can you be a traitor?” And on and on, and every once in a while, somebody would write, “I’m very interested in knowing more about communism, please send me more information.”
1Passed on June 13, 1866, and sent to the states for ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment defined U.S. citizenship and forbade the states to deny the rights of citizens. If any state denied qualified people the right to vote, its representation in Congress would be reduced proportionally.
2American Friends Service Committee, founded in 1917 by the Quakers to provide relief and reconstruction aid to war-torn Europe. In 1947, the committee shared the Nobel Peace Prize with its British counterpart, the Friends Service Council.
3The Magnuson Act of 1950 required all seamen and waterfront workers (including those on the Great Lakes and Western rivers) to receive a security clearance from the Coast Guard.
4Title II provided concentration camps to be used in times of national emergency, invasion, or insurrection. Anyone who was a member of the Communist Party since January 1,1949, was to be detained without trial. The camps held in readiness were those previously occupied by Japanese-Americans during World War Two. Tide II remained on the books until the fall of 1971.
5In 1969, HUAC renamed itself the House Internal Security Committee.
6Old Giles Cory had stood mute before the court, refusing with his silence to place himself on trial. The placing of rocks upon his chest was a time-honored method of inducing testimony; few in the history of English law had had the fortitude to endure it. Tradition records that before his chest was crushed, Cory’s only utterance was to gasp, “More weight.”
1Brought on Wilkinson’s behalf in 1980 by the ACLU of Southern California, settled in 1987.
2Wilkinson’s refusal made headlines in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. The court disqualified him as an expert and struck his testimony from the record. The city council passed a resolution calling upon HUAC to investigate the housing authority. The Los Angeles housing program collapsed, and Chavez Ravine became the home of the Dodgers. Wilkinson was reduced to janitorial work in a department store at $1 an hour, on the condition he tell no one where he worked.
3Eventually, Wilkinson was hired as the secretary of the Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedom, an enterprise dedicated to organized resistance against HUAC.
4Carl Braden was also called before HUAC at this time. Both he and Wilkinson stood on the protections of the First Amendment and refused to answer any questions. They were both convicted of contempt of Congress. For more on Carl, see Anne Braden under “Fighting Jim Crow.”
5The identity of the Red Squad commander staked out to witness the assassination has long been a puzzle, though Daryl Gates’s autobiography, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (New York: Bantam, 1993), offers a possible answer. Gates was transferred from the captaincy of the Highland Park station to head of intelligence in June 1963. One of the units he oversaw in his new function was “deep within Intelligence . . . unknown to most. This unit dealt with Communism, Communists, and other subversives.” It was headed by one Lieutenant Carl Abbott.
1October 23 to November 4, 1956, when the fledgling government of Imre Nagy was crushed by Soviet troops.
1Brown ran for the San Francisco board of supervisors three times from 1939 to 1959.
1Rendered with all the melodrama of a grade-B gangster flick, Operation Abolition proved to be a camp favorite on college campuses. Civil liberties activists followed it on the circuit with their own film, Operation Correction, which straightened out the scrambled footage and twisted faas. For instance, one reason why so many “known Communists” had been present at the demonstration was that HUAC had subpoenaed them.