INTRODUCTION “THE BEGINNING”

Sometime in 1934, two men got off separate trains at Union Station in Washington, D.C. They had arrived in the nation’s capital to fight on different sides of a war. It was a war few Americans knew, or even now know, was raging all around the capital. One man, in his early thirties, had come to expand the reach of the secret Communist apparatus already entrenched inside the U.S. government. The other man, age sixty, had come to expose it. The name of the younger man was Whittaker Chambers. Later, he would become the most famous ex-Communist to bear witness to the conspiracy he had served. The older man, William A. Wirt, would die in obscurity.

Chambers, who was working directly for Soviet military intelligence, had come late that spring or early summer of 1934 for an appointment with Harold Ware, leader of a secret, tightly organized Communist network based in the new government agencies that had mushroomed since President Franklin D. Roosevelt had embarked on his “New Deal.”1 Chambers met Ware at the Childs Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue NW, not far from the Hotel Bellevue (now Hotel George), where Soviet general Walter Krivitsky, another great ex-Communist witness-to-be, would die by violent means six years later. He was murdered, Chambers would later write, “by the same party which he and I both devotedly served, but from which we had both broken.”2

In 1934, Chambers’s break was still five years away—an eternity. For now, he was conferring with Ware and, later, with another underground party leader, J. Peters, about his new mission to help move “career Communists” out of the New Deal agencies, such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) and the NRA (National Recovery Administration), to reorganize them in the main government departments. The party’s first objective: the State Department. Later that same afternoon, Chambers would meet the first member of his new cell. His name was Alger Hiss.

William A. Wirt, traveling with his wife to the nation’s capital from Gary, Indiana, in April 1934, knew nothing of this key vector of the Soviet-directed assault on the American republic about to take shape. Wirt, a nationally noted schools superintendent, didn’t know who Whittaker Chambers was, let alone Harold Ware and Alger Hiss. He knew nothing about other secret Communists at the AAA—Lee Pressman, John Abt, Charles Kramer, and Nathan Witt, for example. Wirt nonetheless believed a secret revolution was under way, and he was in Washington to testify before a select House committee about his unexpected brush with it.

His evidence came from a series of conversations he’d had with government personnel in meetings and at a soon-to-be-notorious dinner party regarding their “concrete plan” for the “proposed overthrow of the established American social order,” as Wirt put it. These officials, it bears notice, were mainly employed by the same New Deal agencies from which Whittaker Chambers was to marshal forces to fan out across the U.S. government. Wirt’s assessment of the radicalism within the folksily titled New Deal had preceded him to Washington, having made it into the Congressional Record and then the newspapers. “The fundamental trouble with the Brain Trusters,” he wrote, “is that they start with a false assumption. They insist that the America of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln must first be destroyed and then on the ruins they will reconstruct an America after their own pattern.”3 Out of the political pandemonium that ensued, a select House committee emerged to investigate—or, as the Democratic New Deal majority preferred, to lay the matter to rest.4

On April 10, 1934, in the same caucus room where Whittaker Chambers would testify fourteen years later, witness Wirt would have his say, but barely. The powers that be understood that Wirt’s story of radicalism in the Roosevelt administration might distract from or even halt their political momentum. Thus the select committee of three Democrats and two Republicans would merely go through the motions—and not even all of them. Contrary to custom (and by party-line vote, 3–2) Wirt wouldn’t be allowed to read his ten-minute opening statement, wouldn’t have benefit of counsel (3–2), and wouldn’t be permitted to rebut charges against him (3–2)—not even after he was falsely accused of having been jailed for German sympathies during the World War (1917–18).5 Hitler, too, would be invoked to smear Wirt. Most important of all, the committee voted (3–2) not to call any of the key administration officials Wirt cited in his testimony—not the Agriculture Department official who told him about talk in the AAA about retarding the economic recovery in order to speed up the revolution, nor the housing officials planning to collectivize American workers in government-planned communities, nor the “brain trusters” advocating the seizure of the economy and the destruction of laissez-faire. House Democrats preferred, in the words of the scathing minority report on the Wirt investigation, to leave Wirt’s testimony as hearsay. Then it could be smacked down by denials in the press and majority rule.

Indeed, within an hour of Wirt’s hearing, such denials “followed in rapid order.”6 So, too, did a countercharge from the dinner party attendees, all midlevel government officials (five U.S. and one Soviet) Wirt had cited for what he described as revolutionary statements. Not only, they told the press, had they not made any of the statements Wirt alleged, Wirt himself had monopolized all conversation to the point where no one else had been able to say anything at all. As they told it, he just never stopped talking.

The world laughed. William Wirt became the butt of jokes throughout the administration and press corps. This front-page Miami Daily News story, headlined LAUGHING THROUGH, is not untypical.

It is hard on the good Dr. Wirt and hard on the politicians who sought to use him to make political capital, but it has been a blessed relief for the nation. A nation needs a good laugh now and then … Laughing again, the country can resume its march, not to revolution, but to prosperity.7

The piece also showcased a few lines of widely published doggerel by brain truster Donald Richberg:

Cuttle-fish squirt;

Nobody hurt;

And that’s the end

Of Dr. Wirt.

FDR, too, got into the comedy act a few days after Wirt testified. On returning to Washington from a fishing trip, the president addressed an improbably colossal welcoming committee at Union Station—cabinet secretaries, thirty senators, two hundred representatives, three thousand people, and the Marine Band playing his campaign theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Playfully, the president chided the legislators for, in his absence, having gone “from bad to Wirt.” “When he made the pun about Dr. Wirt,” The New York Times noted, “he paused to let the crowd follow his meaning, but only a few responded.”8

After the next round of hearings devoted to the dinner party, everybody was in on the joke. The dinner guests all reprised under oath the stories they had already told the press. As hostess Alice Barrows put it, “As a dinner party it was not a success because Dr. Wirt talked all the time.”9 Of course, this meant that Wirt, silenced by committee rules and looking on at the witnesses with “clinched hands,” was not just an old bore, he was also a liar.10 Which must have been devastating. Barrows, a U.S. Education Office official, had been Wirt’s secretary for many years. But Barrows was also a secret member of the American Communist Party and a KGB source dubbed “Young Woman.” She would continue to serve the KGB for years, even if her Moscow masters chided her for engaging in serial love affairs with Soviet diplomats.11 Whom was she serving under oath in 1934, truth or Stalin?

The same question might be asked of the next dinner guest to testify, Hildegarde Kneeland, a senior economist at the Agriculture Department. Kneeland might not have had so colorful a file as Barrows, but she, too, is ID’d in KGB archives as a secret party member and “intelligence contact/informant” who would be “in contact with Victor Perlo,” leader of the notorious Perlo Group, another Communist underground apparatus.12 “I want to say that it was impossible for me or for anyone else to have taken part in the talk that followed dinner,” Kneeland told the committee. “The evening was his, I mean, Dr. Wirt’s.”13

Really? Or was the fix in? Naturally, the other guests—Mary Taylor, editor of an AAA publication that pushed government-planned agriculture as part of a government-planned economy,14 Robert Bruere of the NRA, and David Cushman Coyle of the PWA (Public Works Administration)—concurred with their friends. The final guest, Laurence Todd of the USSR propaganda agency TASS, also denied Wirt’s story, including the charge that Todd had described Roosevelt as “only the Kerensky of the revolution,” who would later be replaced by “a Stalin.” “It was a most wearying experience,” Todd told the committee.15

How tiresome. How ridiculous. How could “Todd and a few little women,” as Chairman Alfred L. Bulwinkle (D-NC) put it, be leading a revolution? The morning papers dubbed Wirt the “4-Hour Monologist.”16 It was all a big joke, which is how posterity remembers William Wirt—if, of course, it remembers him at all.

There was nothing funny going on, however, at least as far as the committee Republicans were concerned. Refusing to sign the majority “opinion” that Wirt’s statements “were not true,” the minority members scored the Democrats for refusing to permit any witnesses besides the dinner guests to be called, which prevented a bona fide investigation of Wirt’s charges. Thus “the majority members made it inevitable that the proceedings would be a suppression of the truth rather than an uncovering of the truth.”17 This, alas, would not be the last time, and such suppressions of the truth—cover-ups—would involve Republicans and Democrats alike.

Wirt continued to press his case, at least for a while. After being branded a liar by the committee (3–2), Wirt addressed the American Legion in Chicago. Two radio stations planned to broadcast his speech warning that the New Deal would lead America to socialism or Communism, but then abruptly did no such thing. WMAQ “found it advisable” not to broadcast, according to a Legion official, while WIND, after appearing to introduce the Wirt broadcast on the air, suddenly discovered the necessary telephone wires were not in place.18 After that, Wirt disappears from the public record until 1938, when he died of a heart attack, by some accounts broken by his experience.

That wasn’t quite the end of the William Wirt story, though. On April 10, 1940, the sixth anniversary of Wirt’s testimony, one of the three Democrats who had effectively run the select Wirt committee published an extraordinary confession in the newspapers—or, at least, in some newspapers (not The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, or The Washington Post).

From The Observer-Dispatch, Utica, New York:

O’Connor Admits Helping to Discredit Dr. Wirt

Former Representative John. J. O’Connor (D-NY) “confessed” in a statement today that he had helped prevent a thorough investigation in 1934 of charges by the late Dr. William A. Wirt that a group of New Dealers were plotting a new American revolution.

O’Connor, who was defeated for renomination in President Roosevelt’s 1938 “purge,” said he was sorry for “turning the thumbscrews” on Wirt and expressed belief that most of the latter’s charges had come true.

Wirt, a Gary, Ind. schools superintendent, created a national furor six years ago by asserting that there was a deliberately conceived plot among New Dealers to overthrow the established social order in this country and substitute a planned economy.

O’Connor ranked next to Chairman Bulwinkle (D-NC) in a special House committee which investigated Wirt’s charges.

In his statement entitled “Confession is Good for the Soul,” O’Connor said his participation in the Wirt incident was “in my early, rubber stamp support of the New Deal.”

Soon after its appointment, he declared, the committee met “and discussed rules as to how to handle Dr. Wirt and to prevent the minority Republican members from converting the hearings into an investigation of the truth of the charges.”

“The procedural motion, which I personally presented,” he said “limited the hearings to an examination of Dr. Wirt under oath to bring out the names and the exact statements of his informants. Over the protests of the minority members, any examination of the other persons, connected in any way with said activities was precluded … [ellipsis in original].

“Dr. Wirt was not allowed to have his counsel cross-examine witnesses, nor was he called in rebuttal after they had presented their ‘well-staged’ denials.

“I use the word ‘well-staged’ advisedly because it was known that at least six of them met and rehearsed their denials of what they had told Dr. Wirt.”

The former Congressman, now a Washington lawyer, recalled the famous dinner, given at the home of Alice Barrows, office of the education executive, which Wirt attended. It was there, Wirt said, that he heard a boast that President Roosevelt was “The Kerensky of the coming American Revolution.”

For his charges, O’Connor said, Wirt was “dishonored and purged and retired.”

“The pack got the smell of blood and tracked down the prey: A great job was done. Little did we know that most of the happenings which Dr. Wirt said the plotters had predicted would come to pass” [emphasis added].19

This mea culpa of collusion, witness tampering, and character assassination is extraordinary. It is also obscure—a single voice of vindication for a singular voice. It’s not so much that O’Connor has thrown into question whether a careful investigation of William Wirt’s charges might have averted the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government that marks the middle decades of the twentieth century and beyond. More revealing is the harsh light he shed on the political mechanism by which elected U.S. officials automatically sought to shield an apparent conspiracy from investigation, against an airing of the facts, even as they also casually sacrificed a good citizen to do so. This was, alas, the beginning of an era—an era of American betrayal. In such an era, O’Connor’s confession, too little too late, would be buried as well, lost from what we retain of the historical record.

O’Connor would also write:

Maybe in our hearts we knew the plot was not idle gossip and we lunged at the discloser to appease our conscience.

Many times privately have I apologized for my part in turning the thumb-screws, and I take this occasion to do so publicly.

May Dr. Wirt’s honest, patriotic soul rest in peace.

His was “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”20

More “voices of one” would follow William Wirt, some famous, most of them quickly forgotten, each recklessly attempting to break the conspiracies of silence, suppression, and obfuscation arrayed against them.

What follows is dedicated to them all.