It is already very hard to remember that, only a generation ago, there were . . . Americans who believed our society was not merely doomed, but undeserving of survival . . . crying out to be exterminated.
—Murray Kempton
GRADUATING FROM HARVARD with full honors after only two years, it was natural for Noel, an international-minded idealist, to take the Foreign Service exam. The written part he passed with flying colors—one of eighteen young men (they were all men) chosen, out of three hundred candidates. The judges of his oral examination, however, found the bright, multilingual youth emotionally immature and not ready for overseas assignment. “Lacking in social experience,” they wrote, “he has good breeding and is distinctly a gentleman.”
On September 1, 1926, the excited newlyweds, Noel and Herta—for she had followed him from Zurich to Cambridge three years earlier—boarded a Washington-bound train. To mark the day, and following the tradition of the times, Noel posed for a formal photograph by a prominent Washington photographer. The handsome young man is looking directly into the camera, a serene smile on his lips, eyes wide with anticipation, eager to begin his life of service.
In the late 1920s, Washington, DC, kept an unhurried pace. Lights in government offices rarely burned into the night. Seven hundred clanging streetcars ferried Washingtonians from the distant suburbs of Chevy Chase and Silver Spring to the Pennsylvania Avenue hub. Most passengers—gentlemen in straw boaters and ladies in the loose frocks of the Jazz Age—were there because the government was. Foggy Bottom, where the State Department stands today, was a “Negro” slum, and Georgetown had not yet been discovered as a picturesque enclave for the wealthy. Over one-quarter of Washington’s population was black, but African Americans were barred from most department stores, movies, and government cafeterias.
In those pre-air-conditioning days, Washington’s climate was officially deemed “subtropical,” particularly interesting for the study of insects. The Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument drew sparse clusters of wilting tourists; there was no Jefferson Memorial, or yet a Supreme Court building. Security was virtually nonexistent in the nation’s capital. The State Department occupied part, not all, of a sprawling architectural monstrosity next door to the White House, sharing space with the War and Navy Departments. During the summer, President Calvin Coolidge—who did not have a telephone on his desk—usually called it a day at lunchtime. The four-hour day was Coolidge’s notion of an effective presidency.
Washington—a provincial outpost in a continent-size country—felt remote from foreign crises. What difference did Japanese aggression against China really make to us? The capital was also cut off from its own nation’s growing distress. News came slowly, mostly on the radio, and the newspapers were largely Republican owned and sluggish in reporting the bad news seeping from the heartland. The town—for it could hardly be called a city—was decades from becoming capital of a world power.
Coolidge—a pro-business, pro–tax cuts, laissez-faire executive—presided over a prosperous, self-satisfied, and self-absorbed nation. The twenties still roared. Coolidge disdained market regulation, almost as much as he discouraged American membership in the League of Nations. “The business of America,” he famously intoned, “is business.” He sought to be and succeeded in being the least interventionist president in American history. When he spoke—a rare event—it was to urge Americans to pour their lifetime savings into the bottomless pit of the stock market. The day his own Treasury Department urged him to take control of the investment market, he turned away and retreated to the White House basement to admire apples sent him by a Vermont farmer. To Will Rogers’s question of how the president kept so fit in a job that had broken Woodrow Wilson, Coolidge answered, “By avoiding the big problems.”
When Wall Street crashed in 1929, “Silent Cal” was as astonished as anyone, but by then he was enjoying a peaceful retirement in Northampton, Massachusetts. His punishment for driving his nation into an iceberg was to witness the closing of his hometown bank, the Northampton Savings Bank—and the daily sight of neighbors, homeless and jobless as local factories, one after another, shuttered.
For Noel Field, however, the world was still a place of promise. Inside the State Department’s gleaming marble corridors and mahogany-paneled chambers, he shared space with some of his generation’s brightest and most ambitious young men. State was a gentlemen’s club of Ivy League graduates. Having secured a coveted spot in the West European Division, Field quickly earned a reputation as a talented researcher and drafter. “Field was one of the most brilliant men we have ever had in this Division,” wrote one of his superiors. Soon, he was charged with helping prepare for the upcoming naval disarmament conference in London.
Despite his success, Noel still felt an outsider looking in, still in search of a deeper fulfillment than any bureaucracy could offer. “I have been a pacifist,” he wrote his mother on December 19, 1926, “I have been a socialist, I have been a liberal, I have been an atheist—I have espoused many a cause . . . but what do I do? I have believed that I could stand firm to my ideals in the diplomatic service. But can I?” he asked. “Unless I ground myself firmly in some deep and lasting foundation, I will be torn loose and drift in the stream instead of battling with it and guiding its course. I must base my life on an inner, spiritual plan, grounded in high ideals.” Of his job at State, he wrote, “I am dissatisfied. It’s so very different from what I dreamed of as a boy.” Noel still missed and was obsessed with his father. “I know that Father would not be pleased if he saw deep into me. He would find that I am wasting energies.” He yearned for a deeper reward. “If I can’t be a guiding star, a leader of men, as I once dreamed, at least I will try to be a light which will brighten the path for others.”
Noel and Herta settled into a shabby two-story walkup near Union Station, in a seedy neighborhood deemed unsuitable for a State Department official. The Fields liked it that way. They did not join the socially ambitious, young diplomatic set. “We had neither servants, nor even a car,” Noel recalled, “and when we invited colleagues for dinner, my wife was the cook, the maid and the hostess all in one.” They also liked having “Negro” neighbors, with whom they socialized. This, too, was radical behavior for the times. The only African Americans Noel encountered at State were messengers and the waiters who served the secretary of state in his private dining room.
“The race problem interests me more and more,” Noel wrote his mother in the spring of 1927. “It may be my undoing so far as my career is concerned, for it is a crime for a man of my position to talk with colored people more often than with whites. My most pleasant evenings here in Washington have been in their midst.”
Field’s humanitarian instincts were real and ran deep. In 1927, he wrote his mother pleading with her to help save “the great Negro college down South,” Fisk University, from bankruptcy.
On the way to his office each morning, Field passed men in business suits lined up for a handful of menial day jobs. Noel did what he could for the hungry huddled in church doorways. Sometimes he invited “hoboes”—as they were called during the Depression—home for a meal. By night, he found solace and inspiration in John Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital; and Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
Allen Dulles—who had last seen Noel at his father’s home in Zurich—ran into Noel demonstrating with a group of his black friends against a segregated Washington theater. “Come join us, Allen,” Noel urged his friend. Dulles and his wife, Clover, politely declined. They had tickets to the performance Noel was picketing.
“Mother,” Field wrote, “if I don’t make a success in the Foreign Service—don’t be too surprised or too pained,” he said, as if preparing her for his future. “It’s a brilliant career and all that—but brilliant things often have no soul. I remember Father’s admonition . . . not to be deterred from doing what was right simply for fear of what those around me would say. . . . If I lose my job it will be because of my beliefs, and these, I know, Thee would not want me to sacrifice.”
Noel assured his mother, however, that he was no longer that anguished, vacillating youth. “I was different,” he wrote her on January 8, 1927, “when I spent day and night groveling and worrying and self-torturing; that was wrong and useless and there’s no danger of my doing that again. It’s so different now. There’s no self-torturing, no long introspection.” Noel was silent about the source of his new peace of mind. He was clear, however, regarding the government he still served. “I am being rent asunder between loyalty and deep conviction that this same government is wrong, wrong, wrong in its dealings with other nations.” He does not elaborate why Washington was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Though by 1927 Noel had begun to explore a radical new faith, bursts of youthful exuberance—and pride—still occasionally broke through his discontent. “I wish I could send Thee some of the crocuses,” Noel wrote his mother, on March 14, 1927, “that dot the White House lawn,” unmistakably proud of his proximity to the presidential garden—and the seat of power. “A year or two ago,” he wrote, “I would have thought myself a lunatic even to have dreamt of someday being in a position to observe the secret weaving of history while sitting at a desk of the Division of Western European Affairs. . . . It’s rather a nice feeling to see how indispensable I’ve become in the Department and to hear them worrying about what will happen while I’m away at Xmas,” he boasted. “My chief told me I’d probably find my desk snowed under with documents when I get back, because everybody will say, ‘Oh, let’s leave this til Field gets back, he knows all about it anyway.’ ”
In the same letter to his mother, Noel casually mentions, “Sunday night, after the picnic, several of us went to hear William Foster, the Communist candidate for President, speak.”
The secret radical was nonetheless dazzled by a visit from the greatest hero of the day. On June 23, 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” brought his magic to the State Department and revived Noel’s flagging dreams of greatness. “This morning,” Noel exulted, “when Lindbergh visited the State Department, I stood right next to him—and all I saw was a tired, lovable boy, with bloodshot, exhausted eyes, absolutely unaffected, without a trace of the pride which the spectacular triumphs from city to city would surely have created in most men. . . . Nothing that has happened in recent years has again given me as much faith in humanity and revived my belief that fundamentally every man is good at heart. Napoleon is called great because he slaughtered millions. Pershing is honored because he smashed the Huns. But has the world ever before witnessed mankind worshipping a hero not of war, but of peace—not a bombastic, triumphant giant, but a simple-minded, pure-hearted young boy, who in his whole character represents the very best that is America—to see not only this country but all mankind rejoicing in this symbol of youth and courage and simplicity, is in itself, one of the most marvelous wonders I have experienced.”
In two decades, Charles Lindbergh, like the young man who gushed about him, would make a terrible choice: the former chose friendship with Hitler; the latter, with Stalin.
Noel Field’s path to an alternate faith was gradual, and tortured. He yearned for a life of meaning—undergirded by a belief system that assuaged all his self-doubt, in ways that his Quaker belief did not. His after hours were spent reading tomes that confirmed his growing dissatisfaction with America. Charles Beard’s sharply critical Rise of American Civilization “is by far the greatest history book I’ve come across,” Noel wrote his brother, Hermann, in early 1927 after reading Beard’s work, which posits economic self-interest as the primary driver in American history. “It’s completely changed my view on this country’s background.” On November 14, 1927, he asked his mother to send him the following books:
The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia by Huntley Carter
Chains by Henri Barbusse
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by David Riazanov
The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class by Nikolai Bukharin
He also began to subscribe (secretly) to the Daily Worker, the American Communist Party organ.
“My real life,” Noel wrote his brother, Hermann, on October 23, 1928, “begins in my free hours—in the evenings and in the early morning hours—studying, writing little essays . . . trying to understand the reality behind the mask of things.”
To his mother, who must have complained about all the books he was asking her to send him, in an undated letter from the same period, he wrote, “A number of the works I am studying I can get in the Library; but most of them are socialistic and I therefore prefer not to compromise myself by borrowing them; that is why I want them to keep.” Then, more poignantly, he adds, “Thee sees, Mother dear, I can’t go on indefinitely not knowing exactly where I stand in this world—whether I am a Socialist, or a Liberal, or a Radical or a Democrat—these are all questions that bother me ever stronger, and I’m determined to make up my mind soon; but I can’t do that until I know something definite about all these movements—and my aim is to gain this knowledge before next summer. I think this will explain to Thee the general trend of the books I am seeking.”
It is remarkable that in his midtwenties, Noel still put almost total faith in books. He had lived a sheltered, family-centered life. Herta was an extension of his childhood; they had been together since they met in grade school. A romantic, idealistic young man, Noel shied away from real life experience in favor of dusty tomes by largely failed revolutionaries. There was one exception: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose revolution appeared a shining success. Noel devoured Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?.
“Last week we saw ‘the Fall of St. Petersburg,’ ” Noel wrote his brother in late 1927, “a Bolshevik film which is as great if not greater than Potemkin, in fact I sat through three performances and might have seen a fourth if I had time.” Noel’s fantasy of the workers’ paradise was shaped partly by the same public relations genius who mobilized world outrage after the Sacco and Vanzetti executions. Willi Münzenberg, still operating under cover, mass-produced articles, newsreels, and bestselling books about the rising Soviet phoenix, side by side with “exposés” of capitalism’s decay. Everything beamed to the West about the Soviet state was triumphant: the willing collectivization of the peasantry; five-year plans ahead of schedule; smiling, muscular workers parading beneath the heroic portraits of the icons Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
It wasn’t only Soviet propaganda that gushed disinformation. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, also spun a pro-Stalinist line. “It is better, no doubt,” Duranty wrote in his arrogantly titled memoir, I Write as I Please, “for a foreign correspondent to stick to the facts as far as he can, and allow the interpretation to be provided editorially by his home office, but if the latter lacks sufficient information, as was the case about Russia . . . it is the duty of the correspondent to fill the gap where he can.” “Fill the gap” the Timesman did, writing with pride, “Stalin himself expressed my attitude rather neatly the last time I saw him. . . . He said, ‘You have done a good job in your reporting of the USSR, although you are not a Marxist, because you tried to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and explain it to your readers.’ ” Rare praise, indeed, from one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest tyrants, who dispatched most of his own country’s truth tellers to the Gulag or to oblivion.
On the eve of 1928, Noel wrote his resolutions for the coming year:
Remember that self-control is the first requisite for self-fulfillment. Practice self-control of the body as well as of thought and emotion.
How unworthy that wish not to meet your colored friends while walking along with your business colleagues. And you a socialist!
Have the courage to be yourself. There is no need to flaunt your views to those who do not understand.
Let your voice express the harmony of personality toward which you are striving; let it be quiet, gentle, slow, expressive, confidence awakening—like Father’s.
If you must wear a mask to the world remove it at least to your wife. Let her know the truth about you.
The days’ events continued to fuel Field’s radicalization. Following the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover, he wrote his mother, “I was thoroughly disappointed with the result. But there is one good thing in it: the breaking up of the ‘Solid South’—and I’m hoping that it will mean the end of the Democratic Party—founded on race hatred—and the formation of a new, progressive party to oppose the present dictatorship of Big Business—for Hoover means little else, to my mind.”
By July 18, 1929, his dissatisfaction with the lack of real reform had hardened into cynicism.
“I have lying before me on my desk,” he wrote his mother, “a voluminous letter to Hoover from Paul Otlet, seeking support for his perennial World City Scheme. The poor old man, if he only realized the guffaws such a letter must cause here. Naturally, the answer is in the most routine form, drafted by one of the clerks in our office and all the many documents he sent will never get anywhere near Mr. Hoover. It make me heartsick to think of all these idealists riding their own particular little hobby to salvation and believing that someday surely the world must recognize them for their great ideas. And to think that once I was on the way to becoming one of them! Every day I get more impressed with the immeasurable and yet inevitable cruelty of the world.”
The young idealist who, seven years earlier, founded the “Peace League of Youth,” calling for “young men and women of every land to make a new beginning,” now discovered that the world was a colder, tougher place than the one for which his father had prepared him. In 1929, the rest of the country, too, was stripped of its optimism.
They were called Hoovervilles: corrugated tin, cardboard, discarded oil barrels, and scraps of lumber rigged up to shelter humans who had hit rock bottom, shrines to another failed president. In New York City, a Hooverville stretched along Riverside Drive’s magnificent mansions. Yet Herbert Hoover had a proud record for humanitarian intervention and was credited with the rescue of starving Belgians in the aftermath of World War I. But now, with factories quiet and banks closing, twenty million of his countrymen were out of work as the Depression blazed across the land. Hoover was as parched of fresh ideas as the Dust Bowl of rain.
During the last months of 1929, the crash wiped out forty billion dollars in stocks. The bankers and businessmen recently admired by Americans were now themselves lining up at soup kitchens. Author Thomas Wolfe described the new nomads—bankers and grocers the week before—lining up to use the public latrines in front of New York’s City Hall. “Just flotsam of the general ruin of the time—honest, decent, middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want, and young men, many of them boys in their teens, with thick unkempt hair. These were the wanderers from town to town, riders of the freight trains, the thumbers of rides on the highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of America . . . hungry, defeated, empty, hopeless, restless, driven by they knew not what, always on the move, looking everywhere for work, for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor crumbs.”
Eric Sevareid, the future network news correspondent, was one of the twenty-year-old wanderers in the early 1930s. He recalled that “cities were judged and rated on the basis of their citizens’ generosity with handouts.” “You did not,” Sevareid recalled, “attempt to travel to Cheyenne, Wyoming if you had any alternative. You were apt to be chased from the yards there not only with clubs, which was fairly common, but with revolver shots, and it was a long walk to the next station.”
Across the country, farmers with World War I rifles formed gangs to stop banks from foreclosing their mortgages. Farmers had never shared the rest of the nation’s prosperity and, after 1929, when the bottom dropped out of food prices, they staggered under debts they had incurred when crops were worth four times as much. Washington, DC, the last to feel what ailed the rest of the country, finally felt the Depression’s concussive force in the summer of 1932.
They were the Bonus Army: twenty-five thousand destitute veterans of World War I who turned every patch of green space in the capital into a disheveled campground, and waited in vain for Congress to pay them their promised bonus. The vets couldn’t wait until 1945, when their bonuses were due. Like millions of other Americans, they were out of work and impatient for relief promised them by the country they had served. Their mortgages were due and their children were hungry. In the wilting heat of Washington’s summer, the vets, medals pinned on their faded uniforms, drilled and sang old war songs as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, where they had marched in a Victory Day parade not long before.
Many of the capital’s residents tried to avert their gaze from the grim, unwashed, unshaven faces. Noel Field did not look away. He joined the marchers. A colleague spotted Field and remarked how proud he looked marching with those sad, tired men; how his eyes shone; and how shocked he was that the Bonus Army’s leaders could not get a hearing from President Hoover. Indeed, for the first time since the end of the world war, the White House gates were chained shut. The marchers, who had traveled such a long way to claim their last hope, had nowhere to go.
The deadlock between the vets and the White House grew long and bitter. As the city’s orderly routine unraveled into mayhem, its grand boulevards littered, its parks spoiled, Hoover ordered the army to act. On July 28, 1932, a force of tanks and cavalry under the command of General Douglas MacArthur stormed the Hoovervilles. Soldiers torched the vets’ camps, shooting giant flames into the scorching Washington night. A young aide to General MacArthur, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, later recalled, “The whole scene was pitiful. The veterans, whether or not they were mistaken in marching on Washington, were ragged, ill fed, and felt themselves badly abused. To suddenly see the whole encampment going up in flames just added to the pity one had to feel for them.”
In full regimentals, saber drawn, Eisenhower’s commander felt no such pity as he rode his troops into the bivouacked vets, driving them across the Anacostia River, a tributary of the Potomac. The air over the capital was thick with smoke and the acrid odor of burning trash. A vet and a baby were killed in the melee, many others injured.
Worn out, hungry, and defeated, the vets soon joined the two million Americans roaming the country in search of work.
Noel Field had seen his country at its most heartless. For a young man with a powerful urge to ease suffering, the sight of the general on horseback driving the pathetic marchers—veterans!—across the Potomac was an indelible image. A government that had no better way to deal with its most vulnerable population did not deserve support. President Hoover, like President Coolidge before him, was obdurate before the crisis that overwhelmed capitalism and democracy. Field wanted a country that was better than the one he found, one that would feed and educate its most oppressed. He was not alone.
“Moneymaking,” Edmund Wilson wrote, capturing Noel’s distress, “and the kind of advantages which a moneymaking society provides . . . are not enough to satisfy humanity—neither is a system like ours, in which everyone is out for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.” Wilson urged that old institutions “should be dynamited . . . and new ones . . . substituted.” Wilson seemed to be calling for revolution.
The thrill of a secret life—as well as his father’s continued influence—shine through a letter Noel wrote his mother on November 7, 1929. “I’m having the most interesting days of my life in the State Department,” he wrote Nina Field, “working on the [London] Disarmament Conference. The meager accounts appearing in the press don’t give the faintest hint of how thrilling it is to be on the inside of these events. I’m beginning to realize what Father must have felt like when he was admitted into secret events at the end of the War—about which everybody else was in the dark.”
A decade later, J. B. Matthews, a former Communist Party member, testified under oath to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a subcommittee investigating Communists in the government. “I had lived in Washington one year in 1928,” Matthews told the committee, “and knew one of the younger men on the Department of State staff who was a Communist.”
“Who was that man?” Chairman Martin Dies asked.
“Noel Field,” Matthews answered.
The nation, however, chose elections over revolution. The American Communist Party always had more support from intellectuals than from workers. On March 4, 1933, Americans chose a jaunty, optimistic man who declared, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Two days earlier, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had seized power from a deadlocked legislature and a dying executive. It was, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s later words, “no ordinary time.” Some urged the new president to assume dictatorial powers. “The situation is critical, Franklin,” the premier columnist Walter Lippmann warned FDR. “You may have no alternative.”
Roosevelt resisted that advice. “My aim,” the president announced, “is to obviate revolution. . . . I work in a contrary sense to . . . Moscow.” Instead, he transformed the government into an engine of change. He decreed a bank holiday, and the same week sent Congress an emergency banking act to reopen the banks, and increased the power of the Treasury. It did not hurt morale that among the new president’s first acts was to call for the repeal of Prohibition. During his first hundred days he pushed through an avalanche of measures to stabilize the economy and restore the traumatized nation’s confidence. Crucially, FDR made relief a federal responsibility, forming the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Industrial Recovery Act and providing mortgage help for farmers. Most relevant for Field, FDR also established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.
The rich, mellow, paternal voice of the new president reassured much of the country, but not those whose alienation ran deeper, who craved more certitude; revolution, not reform. To Noel Field, FDR was merely patching up the failed old system. Field wanted to replace it. FDR’s cheerful anthem “Happy Days Are Here Again” rang hollow to Noel, who memorized the “Internationale” in Russian. With its rousing summons to “Stand up, stand up, damned of the Earth, Stand Up ye prisoners of starvation,” it was an incomparably headier tonic.
All the while, Field’s star at the State Department shone ever brighter. His colleagues praised his memoranda on naval disarmament, and on the mounting troubles with Mexico. Whatever the assignment, he seemed up to the task. “When I came to the State Department in 1936,” Alger Hiss, Noel’s friend and soon-to-be comrade in the Soviet underground, recalled, “I heard people say, We haven’t had anybody who could write [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull’s speeches since Field left.”