The Fall of the Communist Party

The American Communist Party was founded in 1919 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. A small squabbling sect through the 1920s, it emerged from the Depression era as America’s strongest and most influential radical movement. Within a decade it would also be the most maligned and persecuted.

While attacked from without, the Party’s internal politics managed to alienate much of its own following. American Communism’s mechanical application of Marxism-Leninism and its internal reliance on “democratic centralism”¹ provoked a turnover in membership estimated at 30 percent per year. Its dogged following of Soviet direction presented its rank and file with a heart-wrenching series of policy reversals, exasperated its non-Communist allies, and lent evidence to the charge that the Party was the agent of the USSR. The best-known of these flip-flops occurred with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact in 1939. Up to the very moment the news was released, the American CP had been energetically promoting a policy of collective security against Germany. With the pact, its policy changed overnight to one of extreme neutrality.² By 1958, the strains of the Red Scare and internal dissatisfaction permanently reduced the Party to the tiny sect it had been in the 1920s.

Yet, 750,000 to 1,000,000 Americans passed through the CP ranks over its seventy-five-year history. During the Party’s heyday (largely the Depression era through World War Two), Americans of all stripes flocked to the red banner. Beginning the 1930s with 7,500 members, the CP had 60,000 members seven years later. In those desperate years, the Party offered uncompromising antifascism and a coherent program for social and economic justice. It held out hope for a better world.

Despite its habitual myopia, the CP made vital contributions³ to American life. The Party not only provided a departure from a traditionally narrow political dialogue, but as the engine of the Left it mobilized and sustained many a progressive cause. It was the first national party since Reconstruction to believe in and fight for civil rights.⁴ The Party sent organizers to the Deep South as early as 1929, insisted on racial equality in labor unions, and supplied legal aid to African-Americans caught up in the lynch-law legal system of the South.

Communists agitated for such radical notions as the right to organize labor, the eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and social security. Through the 1930s, Communist labor organizers formed the backbone of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and were instrumental in organizing the auto, steel, and rubber industries, as well as maritime, mine, and migrant labor.

With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, the Communists switched back to a prowar line. Under the Democratic Front policy, the CP cooperated enthusiastically⁵ with the war effort, insisting on a no-strike pledge for the duration. Fifteen thousand Party members marched off to fight. In 1944, under the direction of Earl Browder, the CP attempted to tailor itself to American conditions by abandoning its designation as “party” for Communist Political Association, indicating it would now function as a pressure group.

Though the Party carried an influence far greater than its numbers, it never achieved mass acceptance. At the height of its popularity in 1944, Party membership did not exceed 100,000 out of a population of 140 million.⁶ In 1945, the period of cooperation that had brought the Party its greatest success came to an abrupt end through criticism from abroad.⁷ After some infighting, the Party took a sharp turn to the Left, expelled Earl Browder as an “enemy of the people,” and reformed itself as the Communist Party U.S.A. under the leadership of Browder rival William Foster. Ironically, this change of policy later figured in keeping top Party leaders behind bars for years.

With the close of World War Two came the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, the beginning of the Cold War, and the ascendancy of the Right. The massive propaganda campaign that followed painted the CP in demonic shades as a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government. The subversive label was pinned on the Communists only partly because they believed in international communism, but more because for decades they had fought effectively for causes considered anathema to the newly elected reactionaries in Congress.

In 1948, the twelve top leaders⁸ of the Communist Party were indicted under the 1940 Smith Act—not for any overt illegal acts, but for the twice-removed speech crime of “conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government.”⁹ The gist of the indictment was that in dissolving the Communist Political Association and resurrecting the CPUSA, the Party had entered into a revolutionary conspiracy dating from April 1, 1945. The notion of “conspiring to advocate” is crucial, for with this the Justice Department was able to conduct mass trials based on sympathetic association alone, obviating the need to prove the case against each individual. As will be seen in the following interviews, the Justice Department and the FBI were intent on imprisoning Communists simply for being Communists.

So began the longest trial in American history. Nine months and four days later, the eleven were convicted and sentenced to five years¹⁰ in prison. No sooner had the Supreme Court upheld the convictions than the government began a nationwide sweep, arresting the second ranks of leadership in fourteen states and Puerto Rico.¹¹ The Justice Department began a series of eight prosecutions based on the membership clause of the Smith Act, which paradoxically carried a heavier penalty—ten years—than did advocating the overthrow of the government.

In 1950–51, the Party initiated its “five minutes to midnight” policy. Anticipating a period of fascist repression in America, four¹² of the eleven top leaders jumped bail and disappeared underground. With them were several thousand others, organized into an operational structure designed to withstand the coming storm. They would live this shadow existence for five to six years before surfacing. (Veterans of that experience tell their story in the next section.) In 1956, the Bureau of Internal Revenue seized Party offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, as well as the Daily Worker offices in New York, Chicago, and Detroit.¹³

Federal anti-Communist legislation rapidly supplemented the Smith Act. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act¹⁴ compelled all elected union officials to sign oaths that they were not Communists. In 1950, the Internal Security Act authorized concentration camps for emergency situations and demanded the registration of all organizations determined to be “Communist-dominated.” The registration clause required the full disclosure of membership lists and finances and the self-labeling of the registered organization as “subversive” on all stationary and other printed matter. It also permitted the deportation of any alien (resident or otherwise) who was a member of an organization required to register. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act allowed aliens to be arrested without warrant, held without bail, and deported for actions that had been legal when committed. Aliens could now be deported who would have been inadmissible at the time of their entry if the act had been in force. This allowed the deportation of scores of ex-Communists who had long ceased being Party members. Many deportees had lived in the United States so long that they no longer spoke their native language and faced separation from wives and children. In 1954, the Communist Control Act was passed into law, stripping the Party of “all rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies.”

By 1953, thirty-nine states had passed sedition laws aimed at the Communist Party. By 1955, the number was up to forty-four, sixteen of which denied the CP the status of a political party. By 1951, more than 150 cities and counties had passed anti-Communist legislation. Many municipalities required Communists to register at city hall. Los Angeles County required any “subversive” traveling through the jurisdiction to register with the sheriff. In Jacksonville, registration was extended to anyone who communicated with a present or former Communist. A few towns passed “get out or else” ordinances. Both Birmingham, Alabama, and Macon, Georgia, required Communists to leave town in forty-eight hours or face six months in prison.

Party numbers began an irreversible decline. By 1951, the toll taken by external persecution and internal dissatisfaction dropped the list by more than half from its 1944 peak. But it was the news events of 1956 that devastated Party ranks. At the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow, Khrushchev publicly revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes. Then, within months, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian revolt. More than all the persecution, these two events dismantled the Party. For decades, American Communists had extolled the international leadership of Stalin and dismissed reports of his purges as reactionary propaganda. Now they were morally shattered, unable to deny the blood staining Stalin’s regime. Membership stood at twenty thousand at the first of the year but dropped by half before the year was out. By 1958, less than three thousand members remained in the Party.

One hundred and forty-five Communist leaders were tried under the Smith Act; 108 were convicted and given sentences totaling more than four hundred years. At least twenty other Communists were imprisoned under state or local laws. Fifty-six thousand current or former Party members underwent deportation investigations. One thousand were eventually deported, with the majority first stripped of their citizenship. William Pennock, a Smith Act defendant, committed suicide. Robert Thompson, imprisoned under the Smith Act, died after his release from injuries suffered in prison.

STEVE NELSON

A carpenter by trade, Nelson joined the Communist Party in 1925 and worked as an organizer in the Pennsylvania coalfields. During the Spanish Civil War, he was one of the leaders of the 15th International Brigade. By 1950, he was chairman of the Western Pennsylvania Communist Party. In August of that year he was indicted for “conspiring to overthrow the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” In the middle of his trial, he was arrested by the FBI under the Smith Act to face identical federal charges. Convicted in both trials, he faced twenty-five years in prison.

Everything changed at the end of the Second World War. The ally Russia became the enemy. Anybody who had sympathy was suspect. Because I was local Party chairman, because I had studied in Moscow and fought in Spain, I was the devil himself.¹ I was the creature who came to destroy Pittsburgh.

What we had been doing, back in Pennsylvania in the thirties for example, was organizing the unemployed. It was the Party’s idea to wage a campaign for unemployment insurance. We were the first to demand relief. We tried to get Congress to pass a bill that studied the unemployment question, to set up a system to get paid when you’re out of work.

There was a group of local politicians interested in making use of this Red Scare. They organized a committee called ABC, Americans Battling Communism. Judge Musmanno was the main culprit. He had studied law in Mussolini’s Italy, and after the war had been in the American military government in Italy. He thought he was watching the Communists come into power, and was frightened by the Italian partisans.² He started the committee.

In August 1950, Musmanno came after me. He became the private initiator of the arrests.³ He arrested three of us: James Dolson, a reporter for the Daily Worker, then sixty-eight years old; Andy Onda, a Steelworker organizer; and myself. We were charged with sedition, conspiring to over-throw the government of Pennsylvania. They confiscated all the books at the office. Three thousand books and pamphlets, everything we had. When the trial opened, they had two dollies filled with books wheeled into the courtroom. These became the evidence against us.

About three months into the trial, I was driving to Philadelphia late one Friday night and crashed in a storm. I hit a tree and broke my knee and my leg in two places. I was separated from the trial. It was near the end—the judge was about to charge the jury. My two friends were convicted, but I would have to come back and have a separate trial, all over again.

I was staying at a friend’s in Philadelphia after my release from the hospital. I required the doctors’ constant care and wasn’t allowed to go home. One afternoon, I was lying in this hot apartment by myself. My leg was in a splint with steel pins and I couldn’t move, and who walked into the apartment but Musmanno! He was with two local detectives. I got so goddam mad, I yelled, “Who the hell let you in?” He just grinned. He had the nerve to ask, “How are you, Steve?” Even the detectives with him were embarrassed. “Get the hell out of the house, you dirty rat,” I said, and I reached for my crutch. He beat it out of there. Apparently, he hurried back to Pittsburgh to impress on the politicians there that I was recovering quickly and the trial would have to start soon.

A couple of weeks later there was a knock on the door, and six men crowded into the apartment. One of them pulled a paper out of his pocket and announced, “Nelson, you are under arrest for violation of the Smith Act.” Now I was held on federal charges with five others, including Onda and Dolson, who were arrested during the closing arguments of their sedition trial.

My “fair bail” was set at fifty thousand dollars. I couldn’t meet it, so they put me in an old jailhouse in South Philly. It was a dirty place. They threw me in with a group of demented guys. I still had this cast on my leg with the steel pins, and I had to put solution on it every few hours. There were seven guys in a cell that was big enough for two. I remember one of them, this big husky guy with a couple of gashes on his face and a big one across his belly. He was a vet, just back from the Korean War, and he used to talk about the voices that called to him in his head. I’ll tell you, it was an awful place to be in. Well, my wife raised hell, and finally they were able to get me out after about twelve days. I was brought back to Pittsburgh and ordered back to trial on the state sedition charges.

I came in on crutches. The presiding judge, Montgomery, was also a founding member of the ABC. He said, “Two weeks’ time, the trial starts.” I felt I couldn’t do it; I still had the shakes, and my leg was inflamed—the pins weren’t taken out yet. We argued about it, and finally he agreed to appoint two doctors to examine me, to decide whether I was fit to stand trial. One was a psychiatrist, the other the chief physician of the United States Steel Corporation.

These two doctors examined me, admitted me to the hospital, and ordered tests. They took a spinal tap, and after that you have to lay prone for twenty-four hours. You can’t move. So I was in the hospital bed, and my wife and two kids were sitting in the corridor. Anybody who wanted to visit me had to be checked out first. And at some point this fellow comes right through the front doors of the hospital. He was mumbling something like “I’m gonna get that son of a bitch Steve Nelson.” Before they could stop him he entered my room, and came up to me and said, “You’re the son of a bitch who’s responsible for my two brothers dying in Korea.” And he shoved his hand in his jacket and pulled out a gun. Now there was this old man, a miner, still in pretty good shape, lying in the bed next to me. He saw what was going on. And when the gun came out, he jumped up and grabbed the guy. There were doctors and nurses all over the place, but this guy just walked out. Nobody bothered to get the police, nothing, and he was never caught. It was even reported in the newspapers.

Now the doctors had a difference of opinion. The psychiatrist wanted to postpone the trial, but the physician felt I was ready. We haggled over it in court, and finally the judge granted me two more weeks. I spent that time looking for a lawyer. There were two left-wing lawyers in Pittsburgh who were willing to take my case, Schlesinger and Steinberg,⁴ but they had been put on trial by the Bar Association. I ended up writing letters to about thirteen hundred lawyers. Most claimed that they were busy, that they couldn’t take that much time off, and so forth. Some were just out-and-out vicious, saying, “I wouldn’t defend you for all the money you could get me.” A couple were friendly, but I didn’t get any takers.

I said to my friends in New York, “For Christ’s sake, get me somebody.” They sent one guy who’d just had his cataracts removed. In those days, see, you had to wait almost seven or eight months before you could read again. The man hadn’t read a newspaper in a year. What good was he going to do me? He was in bad enough shape himself and he was already being smeared as a Red. So when Judge Montgomery asked me, “Are you ready?” I said, “No, I haven’t got a lawyer.” He said, “Monday morning, the trial starts at nine-thirty, with or without counsel.”

I went in the courtroom that morning. Only my wife came in with me. Montgomery said, “Mr. Nelson, did you get a lawyer?” I told him I hadn’t. “Well,” he said, “you go in the corridor; there are a number of lawyers there, and you come back here into the courtroom with one of them.” So I went out there and I asked questions, but there was no one to my liking. I came back and the judge asked, “What about Mr. so-and-so, didn’t he agree to take your case?” I said, “He said that he would take it, but the man doesn’t know a thing about this kind of case and I couldn’t possibly take him.” Montgomery said, “Well, I spoke to him.”

“You spoke to him? In that case, I have good reason not to accept him. I’m not going to pay for the rope that’s going to hang me.” Then he said, “Call in the prospective jurors.”

What’s a man, who is not a lawyer, who is a workingman, going to do in that situation? Seventy people piled into the courtroom. Montgomery looked around and said to one of the lawyers, “You sit down with Mr. Nelson. Help him select a jury.” This lawyer was a friendly guy, a local guy. He said, “What the hell’s going on? I’ve got my own case coming up at two o’clock. I can’t get tied up with this.” “Put that on the record,” I said, because I wanted it known what they were doing to me. When I said that, the lawyer backed down. “All right,” he said, “I’ll help you the best I can.” And then he sat down with me while I wrote out questions. We knocked out fifty prospective jurists before we selected four. The ones that I accepted, the prosecutors rejected. Finally twelve-thirty came around, and this lawyer stood up. He said, “Your honor, I have to get to my own case.” And that was it. Montgomery told me, “I’ll appoint another man to help you finish the selection of the jury, but I’m going to limit the questions to five.”

I knew how to ask the right questions because I had paid attention in that first trial. I learned how to find the shading. But I wasn’t always right. Some people I thought were good turned out to be bad. They were clever enough to hide. But finally the jury was selected, and the next day the trial started.

Now mind you, the main witness was Musmanno. He and the presiding judge, Montgomery, were founding members of this Americans Battling Communism. And Musmanno’s nephew, Cercone, was the assistant prosecutor. Also, Montgomery was running for state supreme court that year, and he was looking for a conviction to help him in the election. Lewis, the head prosecutor, was being advanced to county judge, and one afternoon during the trial a tailor came into the courtroom to measure him for robes. So you see it was all about making political gains in the election.

Musmanno was the expert on the literature from the point of view of the prosecution. I cross-examined him, grilled him for two days. I brought up his past, his Mussolini days, how he had once written a letter to the Pittsburgh Press referring to “the heroic work of the Fascisti.” We wrangled over books and quotations and meanings. He sat there with a pile of stuff he had seized from my office and said, “I regard these books as more dangerous than any firearms.”⁵

That was the evidence they used to prove I was seditious. They tried to set it up that I believed in whatever Lenin or Karl Marx or Engels said. It didn’t matter that there were different historical periods, different situations and circumstances. They would say, “You fought in Spain. You went to Moscow. You were studying how to make bombs, how to destroy things.”

Matt Cvetic was another one of the state’s witnesses. He was the big hero. In April of that year, the film I was a Communist for the FBI, ostensibly written by Cvetic, had its world premiere in Pittsburgh.⁶ It was a film made up of lies. There’s a character in it, Steve Nelson, who commits a murder. Not me, supposedly, but the same name, and the guy who ghost-wrote the screenplay for Cvetic also belonged to ABC, along with Musmanno and Judge Montgomery. The mayor even declared the opening “Matthew Cvetic Day.” He sponsored a parade that marched right by the courthouse where Onda and Dolson’s trial was being held. The damned thing was playing while my case was going on.

There were headlines throughout the trial that I was an inspector for the Red Army, that I came to Pittsburgh to sabotage the mills. They said that I was a master spy, that I knew Oppenheimer, that he had stolen the atomic bomb for me to give to the Russians.⁷

The problem is that if you belong to the Party, it means that you’re part of a conspiracy. How can you disprove conspiracy? It isn’t possible. It took the jury twenty-three hours to convict me. Montgomery gave me the maximum sentence, twenty years in prison. There were fines too, but who cared about those? I wasn’t going to pay them.⁸ I had no money. So I was sent off to Allegheny County Prison, no bail allowed. Our friends in the courtroom proceeded to file papers to allow me bail, but that took seven months. I was in the slammer all that time. I don’t need to tell you what it was like to meet my wife and kids coming in. I’d talk to them through the double screen, six feet apart, cops on both sides. Imagine my kids, nine and eleven years old, being brought in, and thinking, “What crime did my father commit?”

Everyone at the jail knew I was coming. They were waiting for me. I was a pretty notorious guy. You know, the officials there were awful. They never actually hit me, but they were nasty in every other way. Oh, there were so many things. They put me in isolation—they called it the hole—three times, nine days each on bread and water.

The hole was a crazy place, each cell completely empty except for a seatless toilet that flushed once every twenty-four hours, no bed, no chair, no running water. At night, they’d shove a plywood plank, sixteen inches wide, under the door, and they’d throw you in one blanket. The hole had about eighteen or twenty cells that faced a corridor about twice as wide as each cell was deep. There were washbowls against the other wall of the corridor, but you had to be let out of the cell to be able to use them, and this happened only once a day.

After a while, I became very popular. The prisoners were more and more with me. While I was still inside, a bunch of prison riots broke out all over the state. The officials feared that there would be one in our prison too. And goddamm it, the idea of starting a fire got into some of the men. The guys in the broom shop talked about sabotage, which I was against. When the men approached me, I said, “That’s the worst thing you could do. It’s not going to change a thing. All you’ll do is hurt the men locked in here. I’m opposed to it.”

I don’t remember the details now, but for some reason I was put on the shelf—that’s what they called solitary, because it was on the top floor. While I was there, I heard sirens blowing, lots of them. There was huge commotion going on. Later, I found out that fourteen fire engines turned up. Who did it, I don’t know, but someone had started a fire in the broom shop and burned it down. They put kerosene in the buckets that were supposed to be filled with water. When the fire started, this so-called water was poured out, and it caused an explosion. The broom shop burned down. Forty thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

The warden came onto the shelf, accompanied by the press, and said to me, “You’re the one that was responsible for this thing.” I said, “Oh, yeah? I had a long match, I was able to strike from here way down three blocks away.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told them, “I couldn’t have possibly done it. I’ve been here for three days now.” Finally they gave up and walked out. The newspapers reported that I was in solitary and couldn’t have started the fire.

About a week before I was finally released on bail, I was in the prison barber shop. Now, the barber shop was arranged in a pit: three chairs, three barbers, and the guards above, watching everything. The barbers were more or less favored, short-term guys. One of the them was maneuvering to get me in his chair, letting other guys pass him by. When I sat down in his chair, he leaned down and said, “I knew one of the jurors who was in your case. He was for you.” “Yeah?” I said. “How the hell was he for me? I was convicted.” “Let me tell you,” he said. “Let’s get out in the yard.” We moved out of the pit, actually went and played chess, and he told me, “Number six juror, a guy named Roman, hung out at Eagle’s Bar in Etna. The night before your case went to the jury, he was there and some guys began to taunt him—‘You’re going to send that son of a bitch to prison.’ He insisted, ‘I ain’t going to do anything like that. He ain’t guilty.’ When he went home, four guys waylaid him and knocked the shit out of him.” Of course, the next day he voted to convict me.

That’s all the barber knew. The case was still pending in the state supreme court; all of this was still of the utmost importance to me. As soon as I was released, I found out where this juror lived and went to his house. He didn’t want to talk to me at first, didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. He told me how he had so much trouble because of the case. He had lost two jobs. Finally I said, “The case is over. Please tell me what happened in the jury room. You owe it to me.” “All right,” he said. “I almost didn’t make it to court that day because I had been so badly beaten the night before. On the first ballot, there were four of us that voted against conviction. One by one they caved in, until I was the last one holding out. We fought for hours. They yelled so much. They were all against me. They called me a Communist and told me I wasn’t doing my patriotic duty. I finally just went berserk. They got the jail doctor to come up and give me a shot of something, and after that, I threw in the sponge.”

That’s all he told me. I never found any concrete evidence, but I’ve always suspected that the men who picked a fight with him weren’t at the bar by accident that night.

Now I was out on bail, but I had to go through three months of another trial—the Smith Act case, along with five other people. Essentially the same case as the state one, just with different witnesses,⁹ but you can always find people for sale who will testify to anything. The evidence was the same, although this time we managed to find a lawyer. Even Cercone was back, as an assistant to the U.S. Attorney General. I could go on about it, but the end result was we all were convicted and given five-year sentences. In the meantime, my lawyer successfully argued in front of the supreme court of the State of Pennsylvania that the state’s sedition act had been superseded by the federal Smith Act. The opposition appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but they upheld the decision of the local court, and in 1956, my twenty-year sentence was reversed.

In that same year, the Smith Act case went to the circuit court in Philadelphia, and the judge ruled that there had been tainted evidence against us. One of the prosecution witnesses, Mazzei,¹⁰ had perjured himself, and so the judge reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. Now we were forced to go through that all over again, just because one of their goddamn witnesses happened to have been a liar. It put the burden on us.¹¹

You hear so much about the FBI in those days. I’ll tell you, they came to me once after I had left the Party. I was working as a carpenter in New York, and I used to get up very early. One morning around six-thirty, I was shifting tools around in the back of my car when two guys accosted me. I knew exactly who they were and what they wanted. When they tried to talk to me, I turned around and said, “Get away, you bastards! You tried to frame me and now you want me to talk to you?” I grabbed for my hatchet, and they ran like rabbits. [Laughs.] I mean, I wouldn’t have done anything, but I was so mad, and they were surprised. That was the last time I ever saw them.

But all along, that’s what it was. All this fear just from people sticking up for themselves. All that over this little Communist movement that was in bread-and-butter kinds of issues. During the Depression, we fought against farmers losing their farms; men and women who couldn’t pay their taxes. We said they should have set a moratorium on mortgages, stuff like that. We fought for better schools, and down the line. Now this was really what the movement that was called Communist was all about. We were not what they painted us to be. Even in the worst days of the Communist or Socialist parties, when they were sectarian and full of dreamers, we were never what they painted us out to be.

LORETTA STARVUS

In 1931, Loretta Starvus was a seventeen-year-old factory girl in a Rhode Island mill town. During a bitter strike she joined the Communist movement, and she stayed for twenty-seven years—primarily as a labor organizer, then briefly in the mid-forties as the district organizational secretary for California and a member of the state committee. On July 26, 1951, she was arrested, along with eleven other leaders of the California Party. Late in August, three more were arrested.¹ They were charged under the Smith Act with conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the government of the United States.

The national leaders of the Communist Party had already been arrested and convicted in New York City. Then, when their appeal was denied, a number of them skipped bail and went underground. I must confess when I heard that, I was quite shaken. I have never run away from anything. I felt it was wrong to go underground. It gave credence to the charge that we were a secret organization. I couldn’t understand how they could do such a thing, because of the danger to the others who were going to be arrested. The government used this to justify arrests and deny bail. Then they started to arrest people in California.²

I’d been working as a waitress in a bakery and restaurant on Van Ness Avenue. I had been under surveillance for weeks. The cars were outside the restaurant, and big sleazy guys would come in and have coffee and then go back and sit in the car. So of course, you’re not stupid, you figure they’re watching you.

Early one morning in July of ’51—about seven o’clock, I guess—the doorbell rang. That was very early for a doorbell to be ringing, and my husband had gone off to work. I went downstairs, and the kids—Joe was eight years old, and Mary was three—were looking down from the top of the stairs. I looked through the glass panel and there were five, six men there. They demanded I open up. I said, “Who are you?” They said, “FBI. We’ve got a warrant for your arrest.” I said, “Well, where is the warrant?” And they said, “We don’t need one.”

I said, “I’m not letting you in,” and I double-locked the door. I called a friend of mine who was in touch with pro-labor lawyers and I told her, “The FBI is downstairs and they want to arrest me. You’d better get in touch with the lawyers, because I’m not going to open the door for them. They didn’t show me a warrant.” Of course, I figure, the Constitution is protecting me. I was not going to show any fear. Anyway, they broke through the door. They threw their weight on it and they came up. I refused to get dressed. I thought, “These bastards!” I had a red bathrobe on, and I figured, “Let them take me in a red bathrobe!” The FBI were standing around and I was berating them. The children were hanging on to me, I was telling them, “Don’t be afraid, look at these cowardly men. Five, six of them coming here, breaking into our house.” And then I would turn and say, “Why don’t you go down to Mississippi and arrest the lynchers there?” They just stood there. And of course, I realized later that they themselves were unsure how to handle this situation.

They wouldn’t let me get to a phone. They were going to send up a woman to take the children away. So I told them, “You’re going to have to take me the way I am, goddammit, unless I have the opportunity to make my own arrangements for the children.” So I called the woman next door. I said, “Will you take the children?” So anyway, she did. When the FBI sent this woman up, my children said, “Who’s the lady, mama?” I said, “That’s no lady, that’s a goddam cop!” [Laughs.] And the woman flinched. She wanted to come in when I was putting my clothes on, and I said, “Come on, get off it!” The children and I went in the bathroom while I was getting dressed. So Helen came and she took the children. The FBI gang proceeded to lead me down the stairs. They were going to help me! [Laughs.] I said, “Don’t you dare touch me!” Their hands were trembling, because I had held them off for forty-five minutes, an hour, and they were off schedule. They were planning to have all of us arraigned at once, most likely for the media.

The panel that indicted us was in Los Angeles—that was because it was a reactionary judiciary. San Francisco had some liberal judges. The judge set the bail at seventy-five thousand dollars each, except for two of us women. They allowed me out temporarily on two thousand dollars bail, to arrange for the children. They surrounded me everywhere I went for those two, three days. In fact, Life magazine had some reporters there. They wanted to get a story. I figured I couldn’t get a sympathetic story, so I refused. I said, “I don’t want my children to be subjected to this kind of stuff.” They promised they would do a favorable piece, and they did. They took pictures for a column, “Women of the Week.” They had Judy Garland, and Claire Boothe Luce, and I was the third one, with the two children. So that’s how my family in New England learned about the arrest.

Now the Constitution states that it has to be reasonable bail. So how could seventy-five thousand dollars each for workers be reasonable bail, for Christ’s sake? And Karesh,³ he was a prosecutor, an arrogant guy who was out to make a name for himself. He said that we were traitors, worse than drug dealers. In those days, you know, we didn’t even have drug dealers. But we were more dangerous than drug dealers. He was the prosecutor who asked for this big bail. It was outrageous. Eventually, he got to be a judge. It was just a way of spreading fear, and they kept us like that for more than six months. And then back in jail for another month while we were fighting again for reasonable bail. There were three women with children—Dorothy Healey had one child and so did Rose Chernin, and I had the two. The bail was moved up to, I think, one hundred thousand dollars for some of us.⁴ And there we were.

Now, some of us could’ve gotten out, because there were people who were willing to put up money for us mothers. But if we had agreed, we would’ve set a precedent for high bail. None of us could do a thing like that. So we stayed. That was quite an experience. We were political prisoners, and on the main, we were looked to with respect in prison, no question about that. The other prisoners couldn’t believe what we were in jail for, it frightened them. They’d say, “How can they tell you what to think?” They couldn’t believe it. I remember Rose Chernin was sitting next to a very sweet-faced lady and the woman asked her, “What are you here for?” Rose was trying to explain, and the woman kept shaking her head about what a horrible thing it was. And then Rose asked, “What are you in for?” And the woman said, “Murder.” [Laughs.] And Rose is sitting there with her mouth open.

The national leadership insisted that we defend Marxism and not stand on the First Amendment and the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and press. Why they did it, who the hell knows.⁵ We in California decided we were going to stick to a constitutional defense. Otherwise we would be cutting the ground out from under us. Our defense was the right of free speech. The government was trying to convict us on ideas, not on acts. They were saying that just reading Marxism or believing it was an overt act. What they put on trial was writings out of context. They would read certain things that Lenin might have said, or Marx might have said. Really, that’s what was on trial, was the books!⁶

Oleta Yates was the only one who was going to take the stand. She also helped research the defense. A brilliant woman. When she was on the stand, she raised the question of constitutional rights and the marketplace of free ideas. The prosecutor demanded that she give names, and she refused. Then the judge took over the questioning, and then he sentenced her to five years for contempt of court—a year in prison for every person she refused to identify.⁷ She began serving immediately, that very day. Some of us got out on ten to twenty thousand dollars bail. People like the Hallinans⁸ put up the bail for me, and different people, not necessarily CP people, but people who were outraged at what was happening. When we got out on bail, Oleta stayed. During the trial, she was in several months. I used to bring her lunch and meet with her, because she was studying all the time, looking up references. She died a few years later, she developed lupus.

Years before, when I was on the East Coast, my husband had been a district organizational secretary for the Young Communist League. It was a very tough time in Philadelphia, we were starving half the time. There had been this black man there that I had known only because he talked with my husband. He appeared to testify against me in court. He said that I had gone to Moscow and learned how to shoot, that I was a crackerjack sharp-shooter, and that they taught me and others who were there how to overturn streetcars. My children thought that was the funniest thing! [Laughs.] Mama overturning streetcars! It was a lie from beginning to end. It was like being denounced as a witch. How can you prove you’re not a witch? Of course, this kind of nonsense hit the headlines.

So when the jury went out, they stayed out six days. Well, you figured at least it wasn’t a hanging jury. For me, each day was important, and I gloried in that one day. No point in suffering ahead of time. But when they finally came out, the women on the jury were wiping tears from their eyes. Something happened in that jury room. Because you wouldn’t have had that kind of reaction. So the judge asks what the verdict was, but of course he knew it already. Then he stopped the proceedings and he told the jury that what happened in there is secret, cannot be revealed, and if anyone reveals it they will be subjected to the full extent of the law, jail and fines.⁹

Before sentencing, each one of us had the opportunity to speak. I told the jury that I had always fought for what I considered to be justice, and whatever the judge says does not make this injustice right. My ideas came from my experience, I didn’t know Lenin from a hole in the ground—that wasn’t why I was organizing. It was because I was robbed of my childhood. I went to work at fourteen. I’d always done the best I could, and if there were any failings it was that I wasn’t wise enough to do it better.

I received the full extent of the five years and the ten-thousand-dollar fine. It was appealed, but we had to go to prison, right then and there, for about five more weeks before we got out on bail. We had to fight for bail again. We had to take the stand and testify as to who put up the bail.

My family really suffered. I didn’t know how fully until much later. My children, and all the children, paid a price—they were scarred by this experience. My younger brother, who was involved in the defense industry, had gotten himself a job as an estimator, a good position, and during the war he had been sent overseas to do construction for one of these big companies. I hadn’t seen him since he was a kid. When I got arrested, his security clearance was taken away from him and he was no longer allowed to leave the country. They took his passport. Ten years later, during the Kennedy administration, he was cleared.

Then I found out that all kinds of cousins were approached, both on my father’s side and my mother’s. No matter where they were, what part of the country, they were visited and questioned because they were looking for those people who had jumped bail. My cousins didn’t know me from a hole in the ground! It was a blot on the family name, you know. My parents were glad I had used my married name!¹⁰ [Laughs.]

The appeal for reasonable bail was going back and forth between the Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court ruled in our favor. Of course, the question of bail was important for more people than us. It was important for all people arrested. And so the appeal for reasonable bail, it gets a name—The United States v. Stack. Mickey Cohen used my case in his appeal for reasonable bail. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Mickey Cohen—he was an L.A. gangster. He was kept in jail with high bail. He took shelter under this law that was upheld by the Supreme Court. [Laughs.]

It took seven years from the day we were arrested to the day the Supreme Court heard our entire case. And then, based on the First Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that it was an unfair trial. There were errors made in the constitutional interpretation, based on the cases of Al Richmond and Slim Connelly, who were from the labor press. The convictions were overturned for those two. That’s how it went. So if they wanted to retry us, it would have to be retried without those two people, see. The conspiracy was broken.

After the trial, when I came back to San Francisco, it was difficult for me to get work. At that time, San Francisco was a union town. I had been a member of the waitress union. My husband tried to keep up my dues. But the union refused to take the dues, because in their eyes I was a criminal. I couldn’t get back on waiting. I knew that whatever job I would get, the FBI would visit the employer and that would be the end of that job. I got work with a woman who gave me the cover of a catering job, so I was making a living that way. It was private catering.

Before I was arrested, we had lived on Green Street, and right across the street was a family with a boy Joe’s age, whose name was Woody. The boys used to play together. Woody would come over to our house and Joe would go over to his house. Woody’s father was the sports editor of the Examiner. Back then, I used to talk to the mother—she was pleasant. He was always a sourpuss. But the thing is this. It’s after the trial and I’m catering a party at the Livingstons’, they’re big-money people here. I was working under a different name. And I met this Woody’s mother there. I was presenting her with a tray of hors d’oeuvres when she said, “Why, Loretta! How are you?” and “How is Joey?” I said, “Fine,” and I walked away. Well, she must’ve mentioned to her husband that Loretta was there, working under a different name. A week later there’s an item in Herb Caen’s column, who also worked for the Examiner then. He wrote that he saw me there and added some snide remark that although she’s a Communist she was avidly interested in fashion. Now that was a lie from beginning to end. The son of a bitch. He also revealed where Oleta was working. Everything fell down on this poor woman who had given me the job. She was an excellent caterer, and when this showed up in the paper, the catering system lowered the boom on her. She lost a lot of work.

Some time after the Supreme Court decision, my one-hundred-dollar deposit for a place in the ILWU co-op apartments here in St. Francis Square was rejected by HUD in Washington, D.C. They claimed I was a security risk.¹¹

DOROTHY HEALEY

A Party member from 1928 to 1973, Healey led the Southern California District for more than twenty years and served on the Party’s national committee. She is now a vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 1951, she was arrested under the Smith Act. A warm, vibrant woman, she pulls her feet up under her as she leans into an overstuffed chair, takes a puff on a cigarette, and begins her story.

There was a significant difference between testifying before state or federal so-called investigating committees before 1947 and after. Before 1947, the committees inquired and concentrated solely on one’s individual activities and/or membership in the Party. In ’47, they discovered the little wrinkle that one way to trap witnesses was to try to force them to talk about other people. If you refused to talk about others’ activities or membership in the Party, then you could be held in contempt. And the only way not to be held in contempt was to use the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. But once you had answered any questions before a committee that indicated you had a knowledge beyond that of the person on the street walking by, you had waived your right against self-incrimination. People were subpoenaed before federal grand juries to testify, never about oneself but about other people. When you refused to do that, you were held in contempt of court.

People who got called frequently, as I did, soon learned that in the post-’47 period, if you were asked a question by any of these committees, and you answered them with a very long speech on any one of a variety of subjects, they soon forgot what the question was and didn’t notice whether or not you’d ever answered it. So I would make very, very long speeches and they would be exhausted by the time I was through [laughs] and go on to the next subject.

When I testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it was an executive session and the only person allowed in with me was my attorney, Ben Margolis. When they started trying to press on other people, I, of course, took the Fifth. But then I would walk outside of that hearing room and the press would be there, and I’d say, “Of course I’m a member of the Communist Party and all of you know it, and I have no objections to the world knowing it. There is nothing secret about it. But the fact is that this committee has no right to ask these questions because it cannot legislate on questions that come under the First Amendment.” It was always so humorous; the secrecy inside, but the public admission on the outside.

Before 1947, I never had any objection at all to speaking quite freely on my activities as a Communist and what I was doing. Then it was mainly the California state committee, with Jack Tenney as the head. They were trying to establish this theory of a conspiracy that worked behind the scenes, that preyed on all these innocent people. Of course, people like me had no hesitation in answering all questions and in discussing in great detail what was happening.

As a matter of fact, I used to take particular delight when Jack Tenney would call me, because I had known him in the period when he was on the Left, when he used to meet with Communist Party officials and wanted our support. He had been the head of the Musicians Union, a very despotic head, but the Musicians Union was not famous for democracy anyway. He broke with the Party over two questions. First, within his own union a rank-and-file group started to challenge him, and he wanted the Party to denounce it. The Party, of course, refused to denounce it—it was a legitimate movement. He had also been one of the nominal leaders of the Labor’s Nonpartisan League of California.¹ He wanted the support of Labor’s Nonpartisan League for something that he was running for, and they refused to do it. He then became one of the most vitriolic of the Red-baiters and attackers.

When he questioned me, well, I’d sit back, smile, and say, “Now Jack, you know the answer to that. We discussed that in the meetings with the Party that you attended!” [Laughs.]

One time, the U.S. Senate subcommittee, the Dodd Committee, sub-poenaed Pacifica Radio because, among other reasons, I was a publicly known Communist and had a program on KPFK.² They were threatening to take it to the FCC and revoke the license of Pacifica. So the entire board of Pacifica and the staff people were subpoenaed. And I, of course, was included in that.

The others just wouldn’t testify. I testified [laughs] and had a great time exposing Dodd as a representative of the mining interests in the Congo. This was the old man Dodd, the father of Chris Dodd, who also served in the Senate. I made the usual soapbox speeches that I enjoyed so. Nothing came of it, because of course they couldn’t legislate in regard to the radio and the FCC never got: involved.

I have been arrested many times, but in 1951, I was arrested under the Smith Act. There were, in the beginning, fifteen of us—Bernadette Doyle was later severed for ill health—charged with conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence. The key word there, of course, is “conspire,” because under conspiracy law you don’t have to prove that the individual defendant ever actually did anything, but that other named people could do it. At this point, the Supreme Court had already upheld the first Smith Act case on the ground of a future danger. Not that there was any clear and imminent danger, but that at some unknown time, unknown and unnamed people could so conspire. We were in jail for four months before the trial actually proceeded, because the presiding Judge Mathes placed the bail at fifty thousand dollars. We appealed, the appellate court ordered him to lower it, and he wouldn’t do it.³

Finally we took it to the Supreme Court and ultimately we were released on ten thousand dollars for some of us and five thousand dollars for the others. The trial lasted six months. The bulk of the testimony against us was actually the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and Lenin. It was hysterical to watch these prosecutors stand up with passion in their voices and read from Karl Marx about “you have to shatter the bourgeois state.” Of course, to Marx that simply meant that you had to find and install a new state administrative machinery. But to the prosecution and probably to the jury, it meant blood flowing in the streets. It was ridiculous to see books being used in this way. Another time, the prosecutor read from one of the speeches I’d made about how people had to continue to study and read all their lives, and he said, “Imagine, these people in their middle ages! They’re talking like you still have to study!” Well, clearly to him, there could be no greater proof of conspiracy than if middle-aged people would continue to study.

There were about twenty-three witnesses for the prosecution. Some of them were very funny. One of the FBI informers, a man named John Lautner,⁴ claimed that he’d given me a collapsible mimeograph machine to prepare for the days when we would really try to overthrow the government. He said that it was the kind of collapsible mimeograph machine that I could fold up and carry in my bra from New York to Los Angeles! [Laughs.] The image of this always staggered me. I kept trying to visualize such a contrivance. But that was really par for the course. There was some woman who claimed she used to bake cakes for People’s World parties, and that part of the conspiracy was to trap unwary people into our coils by giving them dessert. It was hilarious.⁵

The jury was out four days. When they came back in, all the women had red eyes. It looked like they’d all been crying. We knew they’d come in with a verdict of guilty. Our bail was immediately revoked.

In order to get bail after conviction, the judge did something that was totally unheard of. Anyone who offered to provide bail for us had to take the witness stand and undergo questioning from the court on who they were, why they wanted to do this, and what were their connections with us. My brother offered to go bail for me. He was not anywhere near the Communist Party, was extremely unhappy about his sister’s involvement, but a very loyal brother. Of course, the newspapers published the fact that the judge questioned him. My brother had been slated to become head of the anesthesiology department at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and the appointment was promptly canceled.

This happened to other people as well. The punitive arm simply chilled the atmosphere for anyone who wanted to provide bail. Finally, we had to go to the Supreme Court to get the bail lowered, but we got out one month after the trial. We were sentenced to five years in prison and ten thousand dollars fine. Five years later, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions of Rose Chernin, Slim Connelly, Henry Steinberg, Al Richmond, and Frank Spector and ordered that a new trial be held for the rest of us because of insufficiency of evidence.⁶ Some three or four months later, the government withdrew the indictments against us on the ground they could not get such evidence.

The harassment didn’t end after the Smith Act case was dropped. In 1950 came the McCarran Act, which ordered the Party to register as a foreign agent of the Soviet Union. Of course, we refused to do it. KPFK, for a while, tried to carry out the provisions of the act. I was furious at them. Part of the McCarran regulation is that when a Communist spoke publicly on radio or television, there had to be a disclaimer before they were introduced, saying that so-and-so was an agent of a foreign power. KPFK was real scared about what was happening because of the congressional investigations and whatnot. They tried to figure out a way of complying with the law that wouldn’t be too outrageous a violation of the First Amendment. I said, “If you use it, I’m just not going to appear; I’m going to blast you and say why I’m not appearing.”

I was never sentenced under the McCarran Act, but the potential sentence was five years and ten thousand dollars for each day you refused to register. My mathematical son once figured out that I would have been in prison for at least twenty-seven thousand years and the fine would have amounted to fifty-five million dollars for the length of time that elapsed between when the Department of Justice ordered me to register and when the Supreme Court overturned it.

When the FBI would have carloads of agents outside our home, before we were arrested in ’51 under the Smith Act, my neighbors loved it, because they figured we were the safest neighborhood in the city. [Laughs.] Three carloads of agents, day and night, out there. When I would take my son to elementary school, a few blocks from the house, these three cars would swoop in and follow me. When I’d go shopping at the market, they’d get out of their cars and come traipsing into the market to follow me as I shopped! [Laughs.]

Once, I was sitting at a restaurant underneath the Communist Party headquarters, reading a paper, and one of the FBI agents, whom I of course knew by this time, came in. There was an empty seat beside me, and he said, “Do you mind if I sit here?” I looked at him and said, “It’s a public place,” and kept on reading. He said, “Now, look, Dorothy. I really want to talk seriously to you. With this decision of the Court, you know, we have great power now. But if you will cooperate with us, like Elizabeth Bentley⁷ did, we will guarantee that neither your mother nor your son nor you will go to a concentration camp.” He was referring to the fact that in 1940s, the FBI, whether or not it was legal, had designated certain individuals to be placed in concentration camps in the event of hostilities with an enemy nation; I was on that list. There was no federal legislation until the McCarran Act came along that allowed for that. But my file shows it as early as 1941.

I stood up, and I placed my hand over my breast and I said, “This man is attacking me! This man is attacking me!” Everybody in the restaurant knew me, and they all came flocking over to see what this terrible man was doing. In the meantime I got up and walked upstairs to my office. It felt wonderful to be able to put the FBI on the defensive for once.

They followed me everywhere I went. Most of the time I didn’t give a damn. I never went anywhere that I cared whether they came. But sometimes just to have fun, to vary the routine, I’d drive real fast in front of a streetcar, then turn quickly to my left to get away from them and then circle around, or I’d drive through parking lots and then circle out. One night I got a phone call—“Dorothy, please, it’s only a job we’re doing! You don’t have to endanger yourself or our lives because of it!” [Laughs.] It was so plaintive.

In later years, when my son was in junior high and his friends would come over, he’d tell them what I’d tell people who’d come to my house: “Never say your name out loud.” We had this experience where one of his friends came over and mentioned his name. His father was a lieutenant colonel and the next day the father got a phone call—“Do you know your son is consorting with Communists?” So we learned never say your name out loud, and it became a habit that when anybody was going to mention a name, you’d say, “Write it. Don’t say it out loud.”

The phones were tapped. My FBI files showed they started tapping the phones in ’46. They also tapped my mother’s phone. She lived in the front house, and I always thought that God had punished them, because they listened to all her phone calls, and my mother could go on for hours!

I don’t know if the FBI ever stopped hanging around. Under the Freedom of Information Act, they had to send me a package of documents of their dirty tricks. The things they pulled were vile. For example, I’d testified before the Walters Committee, HUAC, in executive session. So the FBI printed up a leaflet, supposedly signed by black Communists, saying Dorothy betrayed the Party in these secret hearings and testified as an agent of the FBI about all our memberships. Then they circulated that leaflet around as if it ostensibly came from black Communists. It was the most childish nonsense.

I found an enormous difference between the FBI reports of the 1930s and 1940s and those of the early sixties. They became far more sophisticated. In the early days they were pretty stupid and clearly didn’t know what they were doing. By the sixties they were very aware of how to stir up trouble, how to turn people against one another, how to get enmities aroused. They were very skillful, and very knowledgeable. I’ll always be curious who in the FBI initiated this far more knowledgeable kind of investigation. I don’t think it could’ve come from practice, because that presumes they had the brains to learn from experience. I don’t think there was that capacity! [Laughs.]

You know what amazes me? Hundreds of Communists were arrested throughout the country under the suspicion of being traitors, of selling or giving secret information to the Soviet Union, yet no evidence was ever brought forth. If there was ever an opportunity for the government to have judicially substantiated their claim that we were traitors, the Smith Act trials would have been the time. But no one has remarked on the fact that not one Communist of the hundreds who were arrested during that period was ever so charged.

JUNIUS SCALES

A warm, voluble, man, Scales joined the Communist Party in 1939 while a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and remained a member for eighteen years. After two years in the underground, he was arrested by the FBI. He is the only American ever imprisoned for mere membership in the Communist Party.

The Cold War began in ’47, and you could see the lines being drawn. Anticommunism was growing to an enormous intensity. Things got so bad, in the press and all throughout North Carolina, in every walk of life, it just was insanity. So the head of the Party in the South and the new head of the Party in the state asked me on behalf of the national office if I would consider taking a stand as a public Communist, being a spokesman and so on. I thought about it, and I guess one of the big factors that made me do it was that I hated the duplicity of not being able to say “Yes, I’m a Communist” instead of saying “I’m a Communist sympathizer.” So that appealed to me.

Finally, with many misgivings, we put out a leaflet on the high cost of living, but instead of signing it with the state organizer’s name or just his postbox in Winston-Salem, we very unobtrusively put “Junius Scales, Chairman, Box 62, Chapel Hill.” Well, the next day there were hysterical headlines all over the state—front page, eight columns, all the way across: “Prominent North Carolinian Says He’s a Communist.” From then on, I couldn’t sneeze without being a public figure. That went on for the next twenty-two years.

It caused a lot of controversy and a lot of threats, especially later on. I had three crosses burned in my front yard, and slept through every one of them! I found the charred crosses in the yard the next morning, so it didn’t have much effect. Things got very tough. I was watched by the FBI twenty-four hours a day for years. I remember in 1950 the FBI would follow me through Chapel Hill, two or three carloads of them. I’d walk across the campus and they’d go out like extended order drill in the Army. I’d have a dozen guys encircling me, moving as I moved, signaling to each other. It was a lot of malarkey, supposed to intimidate me. But it had a very practical effect. I couldn’t go to a meeting and bring a traffic jam with me, or a crowd of FBI agents.

I lived in a mill house in Carrboro. The FBI had everybody on that street thinking they were doing the Lord’s work and the government’s work by reporting anything suspicious going on at the Scales house. They rented the upstairs of one house and kept constant surveillance on everybody that came and went. Around late 1950 I started taking precautions to throw them off. It wasn’t as difficult as you might think, they were awfully stupid. [Laughs.] With all that surveillance, I could crawl out of my back door and by keeping in shadows and going in the ditch and so on, I could get out at night and they wouldn’t know it. They had informers, and later they’d find out that I was a hundred miles away. It was a terror tactic. It didn’t affect me, but it bothered other people. It was very disconcerting. Some of my lieutenants, for example, would find two cars parked in front of their house full of FBI agents. They’d be there all day, follow the kids to school. If the wife went shopping, they’d go along too. But when I married the second time, it was understood that I’d probably be going to jail.

The government didn’t want to indict me until they knew they could arrest me, so they indicted me under the Smith Act on the afternoon and arrested me in the evening. That was in November 1954.^l They put me in the backseat of a car. I was flown back to North Carolina handcuffed and in leg irons in a Navy plane and arraigned that night, about eleven o’clock. They’d gotten the indictment in North Carolina from a grand jury in North Wilkesboro, and they put me in the Shelby County jail, where I stayed for about five or six days. Altogether I was in jail about a month before the trial in Winston-Salem.

They set the bail at one hundred thousand dollars, and today that would be like setting the bail at one and a half million or something like that. It was just staggering. Of course, my mother was devastated by my arrest and all the publicity, which was national this time. And of course the state papers went crazy. An old high school chum who was a judge and later became a congressman tried to get me a lawyer, without success, because I was about as unpopular as anyone could get. I argued my bail down from one hundred thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars, and that was just an opening wedge, I expected to get it down to about ten thousand dollars or so. But my mother went and put up some bonds she had as collateral, without my knowing it or wanting it. I thought that was much too high a bail to get out on. Anyway, I was out, and my wife, Gladys, came down and we went to New York in time for Christmas.

I couldn’t get a local lawyer, I tried every way, but I finally got a lawyer from Washington, D.C., whose name was David Rein. He was a wonderful guy. He would defend anybody before the Un-American Committee. His clothes were threadbare, he was on the verge of poverty himself! He and his partner, Joe Forer. He’s dead now, but he handled the whole trial by himself. An incredible job.

At my first trial, in the spring of ’55, they had two stool pigeons as witnesses, maybe three. It lasted about nine days, and a lot of it was reading from books. They used books that I’d read or given to other people or sold to other people. It was just a mishmash of books.

You can take Marxist literature and make a good case for advocacy of violent overthrow. Or you can take the same authors and make a very good case for a gradualist approach to socialism. It all depended on when they were writing. When there was armed uprising going on, they tended to be violent. When things were stable, they tended to be quite the opposite. But the jury didn’t have the foggiest notion of what was going on. All they knew was that this guy was bad or had gotten into bad company. I think it took them an hour and a quarter to decide I was guilty. The judge had a weekend planned, so the next morning he sentenced me to six years in prison, which was the heaviest sentence ever given in the Smith Act cases.

John Lautner was a stool pigeon who was at both my trials. Previously, he had been a very unimpressive kind of Party hack, with a routine job. He had been unjustly accused of being an FBI agent. So in Cleveland he was confronted, and a guy who is still in the Party, appropriately enough, beat him up. He was ostracized, his wife divorced him, his whole life was ruined. He sat for six months, I don’t know if he was becoming an alcoholic or what, he finally wrote J. Edgar Hoover, and of course they responded.

Ignorance got in his way frequently. He said he didn’t know me, but he did. He had become a vicious person, he just lived on hate. His job was to characterize the Party, and his testimony didn’t vary much. He spoke a good deal about force and violence, and it was absolute malarkey, because nobody I’ve ever talked to in the Party leadership can recall any advocacy of violence. In fact, nobody even thought about it until the first Smith Act trial. That shows what great theoreticians we were—nobody had even thought about the road to socialism, that was a never-never land, which is where it belonged, I guess.

They never tied the Party to any overt act, other than meetings and books. It was simply membership in my case. I wasn’t tried on the basis of any conspiracy. And yet in the opinion of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, of course, it was conspiracy. Dave Rein, who was still my lawyer then, said that was an interesting concept, since no one at the trial had known about a conspiracy. The jury hadn’t been instructed about it, and it had never occurred to the prosecution or the defense that there was a conspiracy.

The McCarran Act and the Smith Act were both disabled because of my case. Years and years later, after I’d finished sitting in Lewisburg, the whole thing collapsed from the weight of its own contradictions.²

After the first trial, when the case was on appeal, I had to be more cautious than ever when traveling in the South, because I was more easily recognized. I didn’t travel as much, and I did it differently. I’d try to get people to some neutral place like Philadelphia or New York and try to discuss Party work there. The key people were black, some of them, but because of the difficulty of meeting with blacks, I had to rely more on two white guys. So we would work out ways of getting together and I would meet them on the edge of the South. I went to the South several times, in fact, I made a trip throughout the South troubleshooting for the Party and trying to get some support against the Smith Act. I was supposed to meet with William Faulkner, but the old buzzard went on a real toot and they hauled him off to the hospital in Memphis the day I was there. We must have passed, me on a bus and him in an ambulance. I never got to see him. One of my old comrades there was a drinking buddy of Faulkner’s and he said he really tied one on that time and they hauled him off. I don’t think Faulkner had any idea this guy was an old Red.

I was in litigation for—let’s see, I was arrested in ’54, I finally got out of prison at the end of ’62. So I was in constant litigation for seven or eight years. And always financial problems—nothing like a court case to keep you broke. The Party was supposed to supply money. The only reason I got Telford Taylor as a lawyer in the appeals stage from the first trial was that the Party insisted I get someone of national renown³ and Telford said he would do it for ten thousand dollars. So the Party agreed and signed in blood that they would stand for the ten thousand dollars, and I had a committee that knocked itself out up here in New York. They raised money for printing and God knows what, it was endless.

I never could talk about my own case and make a pitch, it absolutely mortified me. Finally, I was at the end of my rope, and who should show up in the middle of a meeting I’m having but Paul Robeson. He interrupts me, gets up on the stage, puts his arm around me, and makes a speech.⁴ It moved me to tears then, and it has ever since. He must have raised three or four times what I could possibly have gotten. I never asked him to come to any fund-raising things, but he had a radar, he would show up in somebody’s apartment even, and he’d have an accompanist and he’d sing and make a pitch for money.

Paul Robeson had been my friend since ’46. When he visited the Soviet Union in 1949, they fished out for him one of the Jewish poets⁵ they’d had in a concentration camp. This poet knew the room was bugged, but he indicated to Paul that he knew he was going to be done in. And he was. Some of that got to me secondhand. Paul wouldn’t talk about it with anybody. He did with his son, but he felt that it was so appalling and it would be a blow to the socialist movement. So much more was involved, terrible as it was, so he decided to keep his mouth shut, which I think was a mistake. But many years later I could understand what motivated him.

I left the Party at the end of ’56, along with eighty-five percent of the membership, over the horrors of the Kruschchev reports—that was just staggering—followed by the Hungarian invasion. One of the first things they did when I left the Party was to stop my money-raising arrangements. And yet mine was a test case for the Smith Act, which could have put them all in the poke. They were all vulnerable, but they were disrupting my efforts to raise money.

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction and sent it back to the trial court. And, of course, they started all over again. So in ’58 I had a second trial, which lasted three weeks. Telford⁶ was marvelous at cross-examining. One witness said that she had never known the Party advocated force and violence until after she had offered to inform on them.⁷ I thought I would die. Things like that are so crazy. But it didn’t make any difference. I was a Red, an admitted Red—although by this time I was an ex-Red—by the second trial, I’d been out of the Party for a year. When I went to jail, I’d been out of the Party almost five years.

The climate had changed a little by then, but my lawyers both knew that the odds of winning it in court were slim, it would have to be on appeal. In 1961, it ended up in the Supreme Court again, a five-to-four decision against.

It was argued before the Supreme Court three times. They ordered a reargument. So the third time, Telford still thought he was going to win, thought he was going to get a five-to-four the right way. Warren, Brennan, Douglas, and Black were my four. Funny, when I’d been sitting in jail three or four months, there was not a single Smith Act case on the books anywhere—they’d all been dropped. One of my lawyers said, “You know, if your case came up now, you’d win either five-to-four or six-to-three.” [Laughs.] That was very comforting!

When I’d been in Lewisburg maybe five months, McNeil Smith, my Greensboro attorney, went up to Washington and had a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who later became the Attorney General. He said, “He’s got to name names.” This is J. Edgar speaking through Katzenbach, of course. “It doesn’t matter if they’re people we already know or if they’re dead even. He’s got to name names, and he can be out in a matter of days.” So Mac traveled all the way to Lewisburg to tell me this. I’d hardly greeted him when he gives me this proposition. I said, “I’ll rot first.”⁸ And he gets a big smile on his face. We had a lovely visit. It was common knowledge among most of the inmates at Lewisburg that I was there because I wouldn’t squeal on my “mob.” [Laughs.]

I got along well in Lewisburg. There’s no describing the horrors of prison, but . . . Oh God, I was a close confinement prisoner, which is the highest category. Close confinement means you’re the highest priority of being watched, you’re the most dangerous. I was in solitary for about six weeks, which was all right with me, because this was sort of a quarantine section. I read Proust and had a wonderful time. It’s not like the hole. I’d go out for meals, but I was all by myself and there was no way of communicating to others except at mealtimes. Then I went into what they call “the Jungle,” which is a dormitory with double-deck bunks, and down the middle of this long room were single-deck bunks, and on the far side more double-deck bunks. A huge, crowded room, the Jungle was deadly.

I never had any time to myself. I felt like I never could think about anything, I’d have to wait till lights out. I wrote a letter to my kid at Christmas by the reflection of the searchlights on the wall. You couldn’t even do it in the john, because there were no partitions. The joke was they were so close together that you didn’t know whose behind you were wiping.

My two prison buddies who saved my life⁹ said, “Why don’t you apply for honor quarters?” So I did and got a room about eight by thirteen. It had places to have your clothes, a foot locker, a bed, a sink, and a window. And they didn’t lock the door. You could go to the john without any problem at night.

While I was in prison, our next-door neighbor, who was a loyal Party member, raised two hundred dollars in her Party club. The section organizer heard she was raising money for me. Here was this woman who’d been in the Party for twenty-five years and she’s in a room full of people that had been in the Party as long as she had, and this jerk comes in and says that it’s against Party policy. She asked why, and he couldn’t answer. So she and the whole roomful resigned from the Party on the spot. They went next door and turned over the money they’d raised to my wife.

Gladys was working. She had a job as a teacher and she lived off that. Occasionally people contributed so she could drive to Lewisburg. But otherwise, that was it. We didn’t have a pot to piss in. But I was lucky in prison. It’s a very dangerous occupation. In fact, if you have any insurance, they cancel it.

Just before I went to prison, a committee was formed that became very active in agitating for my release. Norman Thomas,¹⁰ who was close to eighty then, was a ball of fire. I remember sitting in his office and him saying, “We need a committee. We need a group of four to be an anchor.” He gets on the phone and calls Robert Goheen, who was president of Princeton at the time, and he agreed immediately. Then he called a Republican civil libertarian, whose name escapes me at the moment, he agreed immediately. And then he volunteered himself, and for the fourth he called a local number and said, “Hallo, Reiny?” This was Reinhold Niebuhr!¹¹ He came along immediately. Not a squawk.

So then he starts thinking of others he can get to sign up with the committee. Jesus Christ, what a list we got up. Among the initial recruits were Martin Luther King, Jr.,¹² and W. H. Auden,¹³ just to give you an idea.¹⁴

King got a number of other prominent blacks, like the president of the Pullman Porters—A. Philip Randolph.¹⁵ This committee grew, and my wife was the firebrand that kept it going. They kept getting more and more prominent names, and it got to be a real pain in the ass to the Kennedy administration. Bobby Kennedy really handled it—John didn’t know beans about it. Finally he sent for Norman Thomas, and Thomas came down there with his usual cordiality and charm. Bobby Kennedy nods when he comes in and says, “Stop the pressure.” So Norman says, “I beg your pardon?” He says, “Stop the pressure! I’m getting all this flak.” And Norman says, “In exchange for what?” [Laughs.]

Kennedy said, “The whole department is against me on it. I want him out. I think the sentence was outrageous.” Of course, what happened was that Katzenbach and the other assistant attorney generals, they all backed J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hoover versus Kennedy, really. Hoover had a definition of what an ex-Communist was. It’s somebody that named names and said everything that was good before was bad now, otherwise the guy was still a Communist.

Kennedy says, “Okay, I will give his release serious consideration.” But he wanted the pressure stopped. Gladys, my wife, said, “Absolutely not. It took months to get this pressure built up. I’m not about to take it off.” Finally it got to the point where the New York Times had five editorials saying that I was a political prisoner and shouldn’t be. The New York Post under Jimmy Wechsler¹⁶ had—I lost count of those editorials, but he had six columns that he wrote on his own, just devastating. David Dubinsky¹⁷ read one of them. It had a picture of Gladys and my daughter the day before I went to prison, and it got him and he called Wechsler and said, “What do you want me to do?” And he said, “Call your friend Bobby Kennedy.” So not only did he call Bobby Kennedy, but he got George Meany¹⁸ to write a letter. [Laughs.] Just a two-cents formal thing that he thought the sentence was too severe and so on. Just the name and the Dubinsky name—I think that really turned the tables. On Christmas Eve of 1962, to my utter amazement, I was on my way home. That was after a year and a half in prison.

These days, I’m not a Communist, even with a small “c.” I don’t think I’m even a Marxist. I do admire Marx, but I’m not very strong on Lenin at all. I think I would like Trotsky better, but I don’t think I could get to the front door without fighting with either of them. I believe in socialism. I don’t know how we’ll survive without it.

¹The principle that allowed Party members to participate in policy discussions and elections, but required that they ultimately follow decisions made at higher levels. As one ex-Party wit put it, “It meant all the democracy was centralized somewhere else.” Although not drastically different from what was practiced within the autocratic machines of the Democratics and Republicans, the perceived gap between word and deed increased as the CP staked its claim as the defenders of democracy.

²The deleterious effects of this switch might have been lessened if the Party had defended the pact as a forced necessity. In the prewar years the Western nations had been all too willing to appease Hitler (witness England’s own 1938 pact with Germany) and the Soviet Union had been repeatedly rebuffed in its efforts for a united front against the Nazis. Instead, American Communists attacked those who held to the anti-Nazi front, alienating the very groups they had labored so hard to create. In a further irony, this policy switch put the CP in bed with the decidedly pro-fascist America First, among whose adherents were Henry Ford (an early financier of the German Nazi Party), Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Sr., and lone eagle Charles Lindbergh.

³One of the many ironies of the CP lies in its internal discipline, which was key to its many positive accomplishments. Unfortunately, discipline also made it vulnerable to Stalinism and ideological rigidity, which contributed to its undoing.

⁴See “Fighting Jim Crow.”

⁵As was its predilection, the Party was blindly enthusiastic, going so far as to support the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans.

⁶The American CP was among the weakest in the Western nations. In comparison, the strongest was the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), which registered two million members out of a population of 45 million and won 25 percent of the seats in the 1946 parliamentary elections. The PCI followed the Socialist Party by eleven seats, making it Italy’s third most powerful party.

⁷An article penned by French Communist leader Jacques Duclos criticized Browder’s policy of cooperation with capitalism. Although the article’s final intent was ambiguous, Party leadership, with its collective eye to the tea leaves, chose to interpret it as marching orders from Stalin to repudiate Browder.

⁸William Z. Foster, Eugene Dennis, Robert Thompson, John Williamson, Benjamin Davis, Henry Winston, John Gates, Irving Potash, Jacob Stachel, Gilbert Green, Carl Winter, and Gus Hall. Foster was later severed from the case because of poor health.

⁹Such are the exigencies of ideology that in 1940, when the Smith Act was first used to jail the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, the CP loudly supported the persecution of their Trotskyist rivals. This, and the support for the wartime internment camps, raised serious doubts about the Party’s commitment to civil liberties.

¹⁰With the exception of Robert Thompson, who, in deference to his heroic war record, received a three-year prison sentence. For more on Thompson, see Sylvia Thompson under “The Arlington Case.”

¹¹In January 1951, the Justice Department announced to congress that it planned 12,000 to 15,000 more Smith Act prosecutions.

¹²Robert Thompson, Gilbert Green, Henry Winston, and Gus Hall. Hall was arrested in Mexico City four months later. Thompson was caught in the California mountains in 1953. Green and Winston surrendered on Party orders in 1956.

¹³During the years 1950 to 1953, Communist newspapers were banned from the newstands of New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. In L.A., reporters from these papers were banned from attending city council meetings.

¹⁴For more on the Taft-Hartley Act and the stories of those who were prosecuted under it, see “Breaking the Working Class.”

¹In 1931, Nelson attended the Lenin School in Moscow: “It was like a college where you would learn systematically, read books, hear lectures on organizing and political thought, all sorts of world topics. It was not at all like it was presented, that we were there to learn how to violently overthrow the American government. In fact, sabotage was rejected. It was considered an anarchist’s weapon. Sabotage meant destruction of property and killing—that was absolutely taboo.”

²Like most of the European resistance groups, the Italian partisans were predominantly Communist. Since the end of World War Two, the CP has been a respected element of the Italian political scene. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the moderate wing of the Party split off to form the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).

³Apparently, Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno also wore a sheriff’s hat, for it was he that led the raid on Nelson’s office at Party headquarters.

⁴In June 1950, the month the Korean War broke out, Hyman Schlesinger was arrested at a Pittsburgh bus station, handcuffed, taken to jail, denied an attorney, and assaulted by a guard in the presence of the state judge who supervised his arrest—Michael Angelo Musmanno.

⁵One bit of evidence entered against Nelson was a political cartoon from a leftist journal found in his home. The cartoon showed the devastation of Korea by United States forces. Nelson objected, protesting that he hadn’t drawn the cartoon, and why didn’t they read the accompanying article? His objection was overruled.

⁶“I was under the toughest orders a guy could get! I stood by and watched my brother slugged. . . . I started a riot that ran red with terror. . . . I learned every dirty rule in their book—and had to use them—because I was a Communist—but I was a Communist for the FBI!” Described by film critic Leslie Halliwell as a “crude and shoddy Red-baiting melodrama,” Cvetic’s 1951 film bio was nominated for an Academy Award as best documentary of the year.

⁷See Steve Nelson under “Atom Spies.”

⁸In addition to the twenty years, Nelson was fined $10,000 and ordered to pay court costs of $13,291, which included the expenses of Cvetic and the other prosecution witnesses.

⁹In fact, Matt Cvetic was a prosecution witness at this trial as well. This time he arrived decorated with the American Legion’s Americanism Award, which had been pinned to his chest by the governor of Pennsylvania and Miss America.

¹⁰Joseph Mazzei, a movie-theater manager who was arrested the following year for molesting a young boy in the theater he ran. Claiming that he had served as an FBI agent in the Pittsburgh CP from 1941 to March 26, 1953, Mazzei boasted that he had been trained to blow up bridges and poison water reservoirs, and “how to eliminate people.” In 1956, the U.S. Solicitor General labeled him “a psychiatric case,” and the Supreme Court agreed.

¹¹Eleven months later, the case was dropped for good following the recantation of yet another another prosecution witness, seventy-three-year-old Alexander Wright.

¹The fifteen were William Schneiderman (West Coast leader), Al Richmond (executive editor of the Daily People’s World), Carl Lambert, Albert Lima, Loretta Starvus Stack, Ernest Fox, Bernadette Doyle, Oleta O’Connor Yates, Philip Connelly, Dorothy Healey, Rose Chernin, Harry Steinberg, Ben Dobbs, Frank Carlson, and Frank Spector.

²On the day of the July arrests, U.S. Attorney Ernest Tolin announced in Los Angeles, “This is the first move in a program to destroy the Communist Party in the West.”

³Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Karesh, described by codefendant Al Richmond as “pumpkin-faced, a mobile jack-o’-lantern.” (Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973], p. 304)

⁴In fact, bail was reduced to $50,000 each, or $750,000 for the group rate of fifteen. This represented a fortune to workers whose salaries ranged from $40 to $50 a week. Bail was further dropped to $5,000 to $10,000 each on appeal to the Supreme Court.

⁵The national leadership, which by this point was largely in hiding or in prison, was attempting to set down the “five minutes to midnight” line, which held that the United States was about to enter a period of fascism, not unlike that of Italy in the twenties and Germany in the thirties. With this in mind, they criticized the California defense as being too “legalistic” and not sufficiently “political.” Al Richmond analyzed the national leaders’ own trial tactics: “It appeared the defense was demanding the jury corroborate the correctness of the Communist Party’s policies.”

⁶Even though the books and therefore the theory were on trial, most prosecution witnesses readily admitted an unblemished ignorance of both. Such a witness was Butch Saunders, a mariner who had attended a Party school:
Q. Did you read some books on dialectical materialism?
A. I tried to read on it. It was over my head.

⁷Yates ended up with eleven contempt citations, earning her a four-year prison term, plus an additional stipulation independent of the sentence that she was to remain in jail until she gave over the names.

⁸San Francisco’s Vincent and Vivian Hallinan. Vincent was a brilliant and very tough left-wing lawyer who took on many such cases during this period. In 1952, he ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket, largely from a jail cell.

⁹When asked about this event, Ben Margolis, one of the defense attorneys, responded, “When the jury was polled, there were three women who cried. I don’t think their crying indicated anything other than they didn’t really want to do what they did. We were quite angry at the judge for refusing to allow the jury to be interviewed, not because we expected to find anything in particular, but because it was just another instance of depriving us of rights that we had.”

¹⁰At that time, Stack was her name by marriage.

¹¹In 1952, Congress passed a rider, the Gwinn Amendment, to the Housing Administration Act, decreeing that no public housing shall be occupied by a current member of any organization on the Attorney General’s list. Occupants were supplied the AG’s list, along with a loyalty oath. Even though the government announced in 1956 that it would no longer attempt to enforce the amendment (after losing some twenty court cases), alleged Communists continued to be threatened with eviction from public housing.

¹Founded by AFL and CIO unions in 1936 to work for Roosevelt’s reelection. Its chief contribution probably came in the form of getting out the vote.

²An affiliate of the Pacifica Radio Network (founded by a group of pacifists who had been incarcerated during World War Two), KPFK began broadcasting out of Los Angeles in 1959. Healey hosted a fifteen-minute program called Communist Commentary, which later expanded to an hour. After she left the Party in 1973, she changed the name to Marxist Commentary.

³U.S. District Court Judge William C. Mathes, Texan, graduate of Harvard Law, and a devoted member of the American Legion, claimed to be so baffled when the Supreme Court ruled his bail decision to be unreasonable that he needed at least six days to think about it. Twenty-three days later, he ruled that indeed it was reasonable. It took the circuit court of appeals to overrule him and set the lower bail.

⁴Lautner was employed by the Justice Department at $125 per week (a pay scale that matched that of the middle 30 percent of American families at that time) and furnished with an office in Washington. He was paraded across the country as the chief prosecution witness in every Smith Act trial after 1950, as well as many congressional and SACB hearings. In the instance of several other Smith Act trials, it was revealed that the questions and Lautner’s answers to them had been written out beforehand by the prosecuting attorney.

⁵Another FBI informer, Daisy Van Dorn, provided one of the prosecution’s prized exhibits, a book, History of the Civil War in the USSR. She had identified it as the top-secret plans for the overthrow of the government, smuggled into the United States by Russian sailors. Testifying that she had won the book at a CP raffle, she claimed two of the defendants had warned her to keep its contents secret. Defense attorney Branton then produced three copies that he had checked out from the Los Angeles public library.

⁶According to Al Richmond’s A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), the reversal of all the convictions rested largely on the meaning of “organize” as used in the Smith Act. The defense contended that it described the formative act of bringing into existence. The prosecution and the judge insisted the word also embraced ongoing administrative and organizational functions. The Supreme Court sided with the defense. As the CP was last “organized” in 1945, the statute of limitations had long since expired when the defendants were indicted in 1951. Subsequently, Smith Act charges were dropped against eighty-one other persons throughout the country.

⁷A notorious professional witness and the source of many extravagant charges. See Joseph Rauh under “The Purge of the Civil Service” for more on Elizabeth Bentley.

¹See Scales’s account of life in the underground and his eventual arrest under “Five Minutes to Midnight.”

²One contradiction arose from the requirement of the McCarran Act (1950) compelling Communists to register as members of a subersive organization. When this piece of legislation was pending, Congress realized that since Party members were liable to prosecution under the membership clause of the Smith Act (1940), compelling them to register under the McCarran Act would be a violation of their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This encumbrance was supposedly resolved by section 4(f) of the McCarran Act, which provided that Party membership “shall not constitute per se a violation” of the McCarran Act “or of any other criminal statute,” thus avowedly immunizing Party members from prosecution under the membership clause of the Smith Act and eliminating self-incrimination as a defense against compliance with the registration requirements of the McCarran Act.

³Telford Taylor served as a brigadier general during World War Two and was chief Allied prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

⁴In part, Robeson said, “I must tell you something about this young man. . . . I have known him for many years. We are old friends. In all that time he has been fighting the good fight—our fight, his and mine—against racism and for democratic rights in the South. . . . His roots and my roots are in North Carolina—my ancestors, slaves; his, slave owners. We stand here tonight as two brothers in the struggle for human decency.”

⁵Upon his arrival, Robeson was immediately alarmed by the anti-Semitic character of the state-orchestrated campaign against “Zionism,” “Titoism,” and “cosmopolitanism.” Concerned about his many friends in the Jewish community, he pressured the Soviets for a visit with poet Itzik Fefer, a former Red Army colonel and head of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Fefer reportedly assessed his likely fate by drawing his hand across his throat.

⁶Telford Taylor was one of two lawyers representing Scales during his second trial and argued his case before the Supreme Court.

⁷This appearance marked Barbara Hartle’s debut as a professional ex-Communist. Sentenced to five years in the Washington State Smith Act trial of 1953, she soon began singing her way to freedom. Ultimately, she named 470 people, including her former husband and her ex-lover. She was still naming names in 1963, although by then there was some suspicion that she was inventing them.

⁸McNeil Smith remembers this story somewhat differently. In conversation with the author, Smith recalled that the offer to name names came up during the second trial and was soundly turned down. He remembers speaking to an official at Justice, but not Katzenbach. Smith surmises that the possibility of cooperating arose during the visit to Lewisburg but was not, as he remembers, a direct offer from Justice. Telford Taylor, however, recounted to the author a conversation he held directly with Katzenbach, in which the deputy attorney general did indeed insist that Scales name names.

⁹In his memoirs, Scales tells of a fellow prisoner, an Italian underworld figure, who complained he couldn’t get a square deal in court as it was assumed that because of his heritage he was Mafia. Scales suggested that he have his lawyer read a chapter of Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology entitled “The Myth of the Mafia.” The gangster was so taken by the book that he had everyone in his mob read it as well. Later, the mob returned the favor, protecting Scales from a psychopath who was stalking him with murderous intent.

¹⁰Norman Thomas (1884–1968), anti-Communist leader of the American Socialist Party, ran for President of the United States six times on the Socialist ticket. Many of his early proposals became law under the New Deal.

¹¹Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), eminent Protestant theologian and philosopher of ethics, was a politically liberal anti-Communist. He was highly influential among members of the Democratic Party brain trust of the fifties and sixties.

¹²Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68), head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was the principal leader of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

¹³W. H. Auden (1907–73), was considered the foremost English poet of his generation; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

¹⁴A partial list includes Roger Baldwin, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, John C. Bennett, Van Wyck Brooks, Theodore Draper, Robert Heilbroner, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, I. F. Stone, Edmund Wilson, Pablo Casals, and C. Vann Woodward. Eleanor Roosevelt also wrote a “strong letter of support” to JFK.

¹⁵Asa Philip Randolph (1889–1979) was the founder and first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and was elected vice president of the AFL-CIO in 1955. A militant Socialist early in his career, Randolph was a longtime presence in the fight for civil rights.

¹⁶James Wechsler (1915–83) was editor and columnist for the New York Post. Although a member of the Young Communist League for a brief time in the thirties, Wechsler was well known as an anti-Communist liberal. One of the first journalists to criticize Joe McCarthy, he also became one of the first hauled before his committee. There, after a great deal of sparring, he submitted a list of names that he asked to be kept confidential. Joe, of course, released them almost immediately.

¹⁷David Dubinsky (1892–1982), president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was an influential anti-Communist in labor and government.

¹⁸George Meany (1894–1980), dictatorial president of the AFL (1952–55) and the AFL-CIO (1955–79), devoted much of his time and influence to a vociferous war against communism.