A Red Scare in the family

When my uncle Walter ‒ my mother’s brother, twenty years her elder ‒ died in 1998, I found a plain brown envelope long since tossed aside on a shelf in his bedroom closet. Inside, to my astonishment, were the records of a minor episode in the 1950s Red Scare ‒ minor historically, but all-too-major for him and his family, the explanation for a traumatic episode my mother had sensed as a child but never understood in detail. I have long wanted to tell the story I accidentally uncovered, and the time now seems disturbingly apt. We need reminders, in the current climate, of the costs of intrusive government surveillance, judgment, and suspicion ‒ the danger of “national security” rhetoric giving cover to police-state tactics.

A well-known historian of the Cold War era once insisted to me that McCarthyism had only a limited reach, and left most Americans entirely unaffected. My uncle would have begged to differ. Walter was a man of no obvious importance or prominence. He was once close friends with Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey and Scott Meredith ‒ but as they became famous and he did not, they all left him behind. No one in his family or small circle of associates ever did anything to draw particular attention to themselves, politically or in any other way. Yet they found that they had been scrutinized, reported upon and branded as disloyal to their country.

His parents, my grandparents, were unquestionably far to the left politically. His father Israel (Isidor in English) was born in the Jewish community in Mogilev in Tsarist-ruled Byelorussia, and came to the US in 1916. A cobbler, he worked most of his life in shoe factories, and was a naive believer in communist ideals. His sole outlet ‒ beyond screaming at the newspaper and frightening my mother in her childhood ‒ was his local lodge of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, a mutual-assistance society that provided insurance and support for Jewish workers as part of the larger International Workers Order (a far-left, often communist-aligned labor organization that likewise focused on insurance and workers’ benefits). Israel stubbornly clung to an idealized image of Stalin as a proletarian champion, and to his dying day denied all revelations about his hero’s brutality (and anti-Semitism) as capitalist propaganda. (He and his lodge also pursued the decidedly un-Marxist Zionist cause.)

Walter’s mother, Fannie, shared her husband’s left-wing leanings, but her early experiences in Russia left her deeply suspicious of radical agitation ‒ and terrified of expressing strong opinions that attracted the attention of authorities. She grew up in the large Jewish community in Vitebsk, Byelorussia (a younger cousin, through her mother, of the artist Marc Chagall, who memorialized that world). Her family lived in a climate of constant fear. Her mother’s father had been kidnapped into the Tsarist army as a child, and lost all knowledge of his family. Her father Avram was a radical leftist agitator, a path her younger brother Wolf also followed. Her mother was a leftist educator who risked official displeasure by teaching peasants to read. Every knock on the door sparked a rush to hide their books from view, in fear of informants or the Tsarist authorities. Before Fannie left for America in 1913, her father was chased through the streets by the secret police and run off a roof to his death. After she left, her teenage brother was gunned down during a Bolshevik demonstration.

Both Israel and Fannie were active in the labor movement after they arrived in the US, though Fannie always remained fearful of being too openly political. In the 1930s, they settled into the new IWO, in Lodge 153 of its large Jewish subdivision ‒ known from 1944 as the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order.

Their first child, my uncle Abraham Walter (he always went by Walter), was born in Brooklyn in 1920. He was named for Fannie’s father and brother: thus even his names were a constant reminder of her family’s fates, and the consequences of their politics.

The Great Depression made college impossible, so Walter worked in radio factories and then as a radio repairman, until the Army called in 1943. He served in the Signal Corps from 1943-45, setting up communications lines for headquarters as the front lines advanced. His service was unblemished, if commonplace: he served in Italy, France and Germany, participated in the August 1944 amphibious landings in southern France, and received the Good Conduct Medal; a letter of commendation from his commanding officer at the end of the fighting noted that his rank did not “reflect his performance of duty,” but only the lack of available promotion slots.

Walter never shared his father’s passion for politics, or his attraction to Marxism. But he had followed Israel into the IWO lodge in 1939, for the health and life insurance he could not otherwise afford. Upon his return from the war, the now-renamed JPFO presented him with a personalized commemorative case for his discharge papers. Given what he would experience five years later at the hands of his own government, the organization’s accompanying form letter was steeped in unintentional irony.

Greeting him as a “Front Line Fighter for Freedom,” the JPFO expressed its pride in him and in the US forces, including 500,000 Jewish Americans, that had “helped mete out the justice of the sword to the racist-fascist force that destroyed much of the world’s physical and human wealth, including 6,000,000 of our Jewish people.” But, in keeping with the group’s leftist mission, it warned that “the roots of insecurity, bigotry and hatred have not been completely destroyed,” that “the forces of reaction are already secretly scheming and openly acting in industry, in education, in the halls of Congress and in the community ‒ to continue to divide, discriminate and exploit.” They urge continued membership “to assure that you and yours will have a life of freedom, security and peace,” with equal opportunities in job security, education and all other areas “by acting against the divisive forces of anti-Semitism.”

Walter did not continue his membership. Since he had never used his health insurance and had no dependents for life insurance, he quit the group in 1947 ‒ months before the Attorney General declared the IWO a subversive organization. (He may also have been seeking to distance himself from a burdensome Jewish identity; at about the same time, he tried unsuccessfully to launch a small printing company and a literary agency, for both of which he briefly anglicized his last name.) His father stubbornly stayed with his friends as recorder for Lodge 153. Walter’s sole political activity was voting. Like many of his relatives, he registered with the American Labor Party, a union-aligned New York State group which, like other small New York parties, generally endorsed major party candidates ‒ usually Democrats, occasionally Republicans, and the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace for president in 1948. Though the ALP attempted to bar Communists at its founding in 1936, the party soon became a mixture of conventional labor activists and committed Communists ‒ issues to which Walter paid little attention. (Under increasing attack for suspected Communist infiltration, the ALP would finally disband in 1956.)

Living on veteran’s support for several years, Walter secured a two year technical degree from the RCA Institutes in New York, graduating with honors in 1950 and going to work for a cyclotron lab at Columbia University, designing and building electronic equipment for its nuclear researchers. He also enrolled in Brooklyn Polytechnic’s night school, pursuing a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering on the GI Bill of Rights (later with an exam-based veterans’ scholarship from the state of New York).

At some point in 1950, Walter also applied for a job with the US Atomic Energy Commission. In late November, he was given a personnel security questionnaire, part of the legally required background check.

On July 26, 1951, the New York office of the AEC handed my uncle a large brown envelope ‒ the same envelope in which I would find the cache of documents, forty-seven years later. Inside was a neatly typed three page letter from the manager of the NY office, together with extracts from the Atomic Energy Act laying out the requirements for security review.

The AEC informed Walter that their investigations into his “character, associations and loyalty” had raised questions concerning his eligibility for security clearance. Two pages of allegations followed. At no point was his front-line military service mentioned.

The AEC noted Walter’s membership in the JPFO from 1939 to 1947, for the stated purpose of obtaining low-cost insurance, and his resignation in August 1947 as he no longer needed the benefits. The JPFO and the parent IWO were listed as subversive organizations by the Attorney General under Executive Order 9835 (Truman’s “Loyalty Order” of 1947). Records of the Manhattan Board of Elections showed his membership in the ALP for most of the 1940s. The Special Committee of Un-American Activities, the Commission noted, had declared in 1944 that Communists had sought for years to take over the party, and, while unsuccessful beyond New York City, they had succeeded in capturing the Manhattan and Brooklyn sections.

This information came from my uncle’s own disclosures in his questionnaire (he did not conceal his JPFO membership) and from public records. But there were far more worrying sources at work. “It was reported,” the letter told him, that in his family’s Lower East Side apartment “it was observed” that they had the communist Daily Worker and the Yiddish-language Morning Freiheit ‒ the latter being “reportedly… pro-Communist.” (Their investigators evidently did not determine this point for themselves.)

“It was reported” also that his father Isidor “has also been known as Israel” ‒ a separate charge, by itself, on the list of accusations. It is hard not to conclude that the name “Israel,” redolent of Judaism and its presumed taint of leftist radicalism, was felt to be worrisome in its own right ‒ particularly as a supposed ‘secret’ identity.

And worse still followed. “It was reported” that in 1939 or 1940 both his parents “glorified and praised Russia,” that his mother “predicted there would be a war some day between Russia and the United States and that Russia would win,” and that, when “asked why she did not go back to Russia if she liked that country so well, she replied that she and her husband had been ‘sent’ over here for a ‘reason’ which she refused to divulge.”

Checks had also been made on more of his family members. It was noted that his parents, sister Pauline and her husband Harry, were also members of the ALP; that, according to the New York City Police files, Pauline signed a Communist Party nominating petition for a city councilman in 1948, and that Harry signed a CP nominating petition for governor in 1946.

Walter was requested to make a written response within 10 days, and was allowed to request a hearing before a security board, where he was entitled to be represented by counsel, and might submit documents or witnesses.

This letter instantly plunged the family into crisis. The details were kept from my mother, still a child at the time, but she could hardly escape the air of panic that gripped the apartment. All of Fannie’s anxieties seemed instantly justified. Not only had her husband’s minor leftist activities drawn the attention of the authorities, as she had always feared, but they were being reported upon by others in their building ‒ whether to AEC investigators, or in past complaints to the FBI. Fannie had a lifelong terror of attracting attention, ingrained from the traumas of her childhood under Tsarist persecution. She never offered strong opinions on anything political ‒ let alone cartoonish pro-Soviet boasts to the neighbors.

Fannie was convinced that the source of these slanders was the woman in the apartment directly below, remembered by my mother as a “nasty buttinski.” Certainly she was never a guest in my grandmother’s home. Fannie was sure the neighbor was rooting through her garbage for suspicious newspapers, and was sure she had invented the supposed pro-Russian outbursts out of sheer malice. But the fact of being spied on, reported to a watching and suspicious government by her own neighbors, touched off all the dark memories of her early years in Vitebsk.

(There were still more reasons to feel under siege. Walter’s closest friend and army buddy, Hyman, received his own government employment security questionnaire, and gave Walter a copy. It named Walter, Pauline and Harry as having “by their actions created the impression that they are or have been Communists or in sympathy with the aims, ideologies and purposes of the Communist movement.” Hyman was asked whether he had “ever sided in, acquiesced in, or participated in any activities” by these or other people “in behalf of the Communist Party or the Communist cause,” and to what extent he was or had been “under the influence, control or dominance of these individuals.”)

The AEC letter pushed Walter into a rage. His closely typed four page response, rebutting the charges at great length and with acerbic passion, was dated two days later, July 28, 1951. He hoped they would “forgive the wordiness of my dissertation, but I had to get it off my chest.” And he wanted them to know “that it took me two days” after being handed “your bombshell to cool off to the point where I could write it.”

Again, he did not deny his IWO/JPFO membership, but reiterated that he joined only for the low-cost insurance ‒ and left when he decided he did not need it. “But since my former membership is considered derogatory to my character ‒ or what-have-you,” he noted that he left some months before the IWO was declared a subversive organization. He hastened to add the acid assurance that “I have no inside sources in Washington for advance information.”

Walter, always rather apolitical, had “never been informed” that the ALP was a subversive organization, though the suggestion “interests me.” He feared he was rather politically “inactive,” beyond voting: he did not even know where his local ALP headquarters were. Being “something of an independent thinker,” he never voted straight ticket, voted for the man not the party, and fully intended “to continue in this practice.” He stubbornly insisted, nonetheless, he did not intend to change parties for some years to come; “when I become older and stodgier I shall probably become a Republican.” He admitted he did not care for “the antics of some of the ALP leaders” ‒ “however, I care even less for the goings-on in the other parties.”

As to the newspapers, “it would have been better had your observer polished her eyeglasses” (Walter clearly shared his mother’s opinion that the informant was the nasty lady downstairs, who did wear glasses). Of the Yiddish papers, his parents bought the Morning Freiheit and The Day daily, and used to buy the Daily Forward, though he understood it was dropped when it came to resemble “a soap opera or sob story.” (Fannie, who liked the sob stories, continued to fish it from others’ garbage.) But for Walter himself, “these publications do me no good, for I cannot read Jewish.”

As to the Daily Worker, he recalled seeing it in the house “about twice in the past twelve years,” which can “hardly be construed as a daily occurrence.” He tried reading it on those occasions, and disliked it, finding it “full of catch-phrases, dogmatic thinking and opinions,” while he preferred “to form my own opinions after having the facts.” He himself read the Daily Compass, Herald-Tribune, occasionally the Times, and had “even been caught reading Li’l Abner in the Daily Mirror.” They also read US News and World Report, the American Magazine, and various technical publications. “I believe that we are fairly literate,” he noted proudly.

He readily admitted his father’s two names, always used interchangeably ‒ Isidor in English conversation, Israel in Yiddish. “No deception had ever been intended.”

Walter was aggrieved by these accusations ‒ but it was the bizarre claims against his parents, “something I cannot conceive of at all,” that truly infuriated him. “I would like to confront ‒ or have my parents confront ‒ their accuser in the presence of witnesses so that relief could be obtained in the courts” ‒ a recourse the anonymous charges of course denied them. His mother, he fumed, was known for abhorrence of war, and deeply feared a US-Russian war, in which “no one would be the winner,” as “any reasoning being would agree.”

“As to this business of being ‘sent’ here for a ‘reason’: when was this supposed to have occurred?” His parents came to the US in 1913 and 1916 ‒ “definitely before any communist regime existed in Russia” ‒ and had never since left. His father had worked “industriously” as a shoemaker; his mother left the clothing industry (sweatshops, in fact) in 1919 and had since been a housewife. “Therefore, who ‘sent’ them? For what ‘reason’? (which I note she allegedly refused to divulge) The more I contemplate these canards, the angrier I get. They are ludicrous.”

As to the political registrations of his relatives, he readily admitted them. “However,” he not unreasonably demanded, “what does that have to do with me?” There was a “tacit agreement” in their family that he would lead his life, and the others would lead theirs. “To paraphrase the saying, I am not my father’s keeper.” He admitted he did not see eye to eye with his father’s politics. Israel’s “basic tenet is that it is improper for one man to live off the back of another.” But being a realist and “a rugged individualist of the old school,” Walter saw “nothing against it if it can be done.” He planned to go into electronics manufacturing, “and I certainly intend to live off the profits derived from the work of my employees.”

But Walter, being no fool, saw the obvious implication: “that, since my father is a minor official in a small section of a Subversive Organization, he is ergo not to be trusted; and since I am his son I will promptly reveal all sorts of classified nuclear data to him, which he will comprehend instantly (despite the fact that he barely finished the equivalent of public school) and which he will communicate at once to the Russian Embassy. Therefore I am not to be trusted either.” He disparagingly noted that it all began to sound like a sensationalist spy thriller.

He called out their “errors of reasoning.” For one, he was “not interested in nuclear physics and will not be until it has reached commercial engineering status.” His sole focus was the electronic instrumentation, his current work at Columbia. Further, he did not discuss his work outside the lab “because I, too, can think.” Citing the famed “loose lips sink ships” posters of WWII, he noted he had had much practice at such discretion, before, “as a member of the Army,” he was sent overseas on such a ship.

Also, he liked his country and its way of life, and despite a lack of sentimentality was “proud of most of its history.” “I definitely would not divulge any data to foreign powers (and I am quite angry at the implication that I would) for the excellent” ‒ and decidedly unsentimental ‒ “reason that said powers might decide we were the enemy and then proceed to blow me and mine off the face of the planet.”

As to Israel’s membership in the IWO, he joined during the Depression when he could no longer afford his life insurance, and turned to the lodge for benefits. He was made recorder because, unlike most members, he could write legibly, and kept the post because it paid for much of his insurance premium. “At the moment, from what I can gather, his group seems to be working on constructing an Old-Age Home.” His brother-in-law Harry took the better-paying position of secretary; “however, I don’t know his reasoning on it because I have never asked him.”

Walter firmly insisted on his family’s right to do as it pleased without it defining him. They were “at liberty, as far as I am concerned, to join any political party they wish ‒ including the Whig and Federalist parties. The matter is for their respective consciences, not mine. I don’t try to convince them, and they in turn don’t try to convince me.”

With particularly cutting perception, he drew a pointed parallel between his government’s implied demands ‒ that he renounce or betray his family if their views were out of favor ‒ with the Communist police states he was tacitly accused of supporting. Whatever his own politics, he wished it “to be a matter of public record that I will not accept any position that holds among its requirements the stipulation that I disown, discredit and leave my parents… I believe that it is the fashion in Communist China and probably in Russia to denounce one’s parents. I frown on the evil practice there, and I frown on it here.”

Walter closed with a statement of his “own position on political affairs of the currently violent type”: that he was and always had been “against communism because I feel that the individual is always a more important entity than is the state. As has been said by better writers, the state is here to serve the individual.” His studies of history had reiterated the point. He believed in “a competitive free-enterprise economy,” with state control imposed only “when absolutely necessary. I am afraid I am rather conventional in this area.” He intended to advance in industry, and saw no such path “under any state socialism schemes.” He did request a hearing to “reiterate my views.”

A letter of October 8 finally informed him that his hearing was set for the 13th. He would appear before a three-man board: a New Jersey lawyer, a distinguished chemistry professor from NYU (who had worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University during the war), and an AEC representative from its New York office. He was allowed to challenge any member within 72 hours, but doubtless did not do so. He was also allowed to bring legal counsel, but of course could not possibly afford a lawyer.

Walter left no record of the October 13 hearing, and he evidently heard nothing further for over a year. Finally, a letter arrived, dated January 28, 1953. Walter cut or pulled most of the AEC letters open with relative care; this envelope was ripped open with unusual violence. The manager of the New York AEC office informed Walter of his recommendation to Washington that Walter be denied security clearance. The information provided in his July letter and his October hearing “did not satisfactorily explain or disprove” the original claims against him. The members of the hearing board had unanimously declared him a security risk.

Although he had left the JPFO before it was declared subversive, his membership was nonetheless held to be incriminating since his withdrawal “was not due to dissatisfaction” with its “political leanings or philosophy.” (The AEC accepted that he had left the group because he no longer needed its insurance policies; but the concomitant inference that he had joined for those policies, and not for the group’s “political leanings,” went unmentioned.) The AEC cited his continued registration in the ALP, which was “commonly thought to be under the control of Communists in the City of New York.” (“Commonly thought” was evidently an acceptable standard of investigative proof.)

His attempts to explain and justify his family ties were rejected; his parallel between Communist police state tactics and US demands that he renounce his family over their politics was entirely ignored. Instead, he was branded unreliable due to his “close association with members of his family” who remained in the JPFO, and “who may have supported the Communist Party.” And he was condemned for his “unwillingness to consider attempting to dissuade your family from their associations and your view that even if members of your family were Communist Party members, it would not be your responsibility and you would not attempt to convince them to withdraw.”

Lastly, the AEC censured his “refusal to consider that any action should be taken against subversive organizations prior to the commission of some overt act against the Government by such subversive organizations.” Walter wanted proof of subversive intent. The government was satisfied with suspicion.

A list of factual findings followed, declaring final views on the July 1951 allegations. His and his relatives’ connections to the “Communist-controlled” JPFO were emphasized. He was criticized for refusing to accept that the ALP was “Communist-dominated,” and for requiring “outright support by that Party of the Communist Party before you are convinced.” (Their own findings only stated that the party was “commonly thought” to be Communist controlled.)

He and his family received the Morning Freiheit (the AEC ignored the fact that Walter did not read Yiddish), “and have had the Daily Worker or Sunday Worker in your home” (sidestepping the question of how often). The AEC conceded there was “insufficient evidence” that his parents or relations were Communist Party members (in fact there was no evidence), but added that there was “little doubt” they were members of the ALP ‒ a point Walter had, in fact, not disputed. It appeared “probable” Pauline had signed a Communist nominating petition in 1948, but there was “insufficient evidence” that Harry had done so in 1946.

On the claims that had particularly enraged Walter, they found “insufficient evidence from which to conclude that Fannie... made the statements attributed to her” in the July letter ‒ hardly a ringing rejection of such bizarre accusations. And they added that “it is probable that she did tell people that conditions in Russia under the present government were better than those under the Czar.” Given her own bitter experiences of life in Tsarist Vitebsk, it is possible she held such an opinion ‒ but it remains deeply unlikely she would ever have volunteered the view outside the family. Since the government did not indicate its source, there is no way of knowing who made the claim.

It was concluded that “the probable value of your services” to the AEC “is outweighed by the possible risks involved to the common defense and security in granting you clearance.” He was entitled to request a further review of his case in Washington and to file a further brief, but Walter appears to have given up. The only further communication in the file was a letter of March 27, 1953 (cut open neatly and then set aside) informing him that the AEC’s Deputy General Manager in Washington had reviewed his full case and concurred in the recommendation that he be denied security clearance.

Walter was luckier than many others who fell afoul of early ‘50s Red-hunting. Though barred from government employment, he kept his job in the Columbia lab and his place at Brooklyn Polytechnic (he graduated magna cum laude in 1956), until he left for various electronics firms ‒ where, among other things, he designed radiation detectors for uranium prospecting.

His career survived, but his family was badly affected. My mother remembers the climate of fear and suspicion the affair engendered, as her parents and her much older siblings discussed it all in angry whispers. They knew they were being informed upon by their own neighbors, that their reading habits were being scrutinized, that Walter was tainted by the opinions and minor fraternal activities of his relations. (Harry in fact soon abandoned his far-left sympathies in growing disgust, though Israel never accepted the truth about Stalin.)

My grandparents had fled Tsarist Russia to escape persecution for their ideas and their Jewish heritage. They found a far freer nation ‒ but also reminders that freedom is not always secure, even in America.