by I.F. Stone
Copyright 1963 I.F. Stone
First published in I.F. Stone’s Weekly on December 21, 1953 with the headline “Bleak Landscape of the Resistance” and collected in Stone’s “The Haunted Fifties,” published in 1964 by the Merlin Press, Ltd., in the chapter “A Few Who Fought Back.” Above headline ours, as is the selection of the two citations below. Our publication dedicated to Lewis Campbell, who had his students, of whom PB-I was later one, performing Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in 1975.
“‘It’s the worst witch-hunt in political history.”
— President Donald Trump, responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, San Francisco)’s announcement yesterday that the chamber would be launching a formal inquiry into the possibility of impeaching him.
“Have we learned so little?”
— I.F. Stone
CHICAGO — Walsh’s Hall at 104 Noble Street might have been the scene of the Hunky wedding in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.” The hall lies in the Polish area, one of those incomparably dreary Chicago working-class districts which sprawl out across the bare plain, miles away from the opulence of Lakefront and Loop. The building is a three-story walk-up, on the top floor of which is the “hall,” a barn of a place, with a stage at one end and a small, faintly and grotesquely Moorish balcony at the other. High columns intended to be ornamental line the wall on either side; they appear to be ordinary cast-iron waterpipe stood on end by some plumber aspiring in his spare time to architecture. The windows are long and narrow. Through them, even under a cloudless sunny sky, the wintry Chicago landscape managed to look gray and bleak — row on row of ill-matched dirty brick and unpainted façades with gaps of dismal backyard in which stood a few forlorn trees.
The hall was freshly hung with blue and white banners — “The Bill of Rights Belongs to All,” “Stop Police State Terror Against Foreign Born Americans,” “Public Hearings on the Lehman-Celler Bill.” On the stage, against the faded green trees of what appeared to be a set left over from some forgotten performance of “As You Like it,” a big benevolent Brünhilde of a woman, six feet tall with gray hair, grandmotherly expression, and one of those round unmistakable Russian Jewish faces, was reading aloud Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to revise the McCarran-Walter [Immigration & Nationality] Act. The woman was Pearl Hart, a Chicago lawyer famous through the Midwest for a lifetime of devotion to the least lucrative and most oppressed kind of clients.
This was the opening session of a National Conference to Repeal the Walter-McCarran Law and Defend Its Victims, sponsored by the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, one of the last functioning Popular Front organizations.
At that early morning hour the seats beside the long wooden tables set up in the hall were but half filled. That such a meeting should be held at all was something of a miracle. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born is on the Attorney General’s list. It is now involved in proceedings before the Subversive Activities Control Board to compel the Committee’s registration under the McCarran Act as a Communist-front organization. Its devoted executive secretary, Abner Green, a tall, lean man with the kind of long cavernous face El Greco painted, served six months in jail after refusing to hand over the organization’s records to a federal grand jury in July, 1951. The Secretary of the local Los Angeles committee, Rose Chernin, was unable to attend because she is under bond in denaturalization proceedings. The secretary of the Michigan committee, Saul Grossman, who was present in Chicago, goes on trial in Washington this week for contempt of Congress in refusing to hand his records over to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Despite this, about 300 delegates from 16 states had arrived, some from as far as Seattle and Los Angeles, and 150 more were to follow. They seemed, considering the circumstances, an extraordinarily cheerful lot. But looking at them during the day one was fascinated by several observations. The first was that the audience was a forest of gray heads, almost entirely made up of elderly folk — those who appeared young in that gathering were, when one looked at them more closely, seen to be middle-aged. This is unfortunately true of most radical meetings in America nowadays; it is as if those with their lives still ahead of them are too cautious or cowed to appear at such affairs. What struck one next about the gathering was the absence of foreign accents — with few exceptions one heard American speech indistinguishable from that of the native-born. Assimilation has done its work and relatively few new immigrants are coming in. One has also began to notice that though the deportation drive hits the labor unions hard, there were no labor union representatives present, other than men from a few so-called “progressive” locals. The left labor leaders were conspicuous by their absence; the Taft-Hartley oath made their appearance at the meeting of a blacklisted organization too hazardous.
Not so many weeks ago the case of an Air Force officer named Radulovich attracted national attention. He was about to be blacklisted as a security risk because his father and sister were supposed to have Communist views or connections. Edward Murrow put the case into a brilliant TV show and the Secretary for Air finally cleared Radulovich. But this comparative handful of elderly folk in Chicago were fighting a last-ditch battle for a thousand and one other Raduloviches arrested — as the elder Radulovich may be — for deportation. This Committee, just 21 years old, is the only one of its kind.
On the eve of the conference, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born was given the treatment. The local Hearst paper published a smear attack and telephoned the Committee’s various sponsors and scheduled speakers in an effort to frighten them off. The campaign failed. Among those who spoke at the banquet in that same hall that night were Professor Louise Pettibone Smith, Professor Emeritus of Biblical History at Wellesley; Professor Robert Morss Lovett, and Professor Anton J. Carlson, the University of Chicago’s famous physiologist, who had not intended to speak but changed his mind after a call from the Hearst press. The sight of these three aged academic Gibraltars of liberalism was inspiring, but again it was sad to note that the distinguished speakers — like the audience — were elderly.
An amazingly large proportion of the victims, too, are elderly. In his comprehensive report, Abner Green pointed out that of 300 non-citizens arrested in deportation proceedings, almost one third — 93 in all — are over the age of 60 and have lived in this country an average of 40 to 50 years. The kind of sick and aged folk being hauled out of retirement for deportation as a political menace to this country would be ludicrous if it did not entail so much tragedy. Two cardiac patients, Refugio Roman Martinez and Norman Tallentire, died of heart attacks in deportation proceedings. The economist and writer, Lewis Corey, long an anti-Communist, died September 16 at the age of 61 in the midst of deportation proceedings begun against him because he was a Communist 30 years ago. In California, a Mrs. Mary Baumert of Elsinore, now 76 years old, was arrested last month for deportation although she had lived here 51 years. In Los Angeles on November 4, Mr. and Mrs. Lars Berg, 69 and 67 respectively, were locked up on Terminal Island for deportation to their native Sweden; they have been American residents since 1904. One Finn arrested for deportation has lived here since he was three months old!
As in the days of the Inquisition, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [the predecessor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE] and the FBI are engaged in using fear to recruit informers, even informers against their own kin. A striking case was that of Francesco Costa of Rochester, New York, arrested for deportation to Italy at the age of 83 because he refused to provide information to the Justice Department that could be used to deport his son, Leonard, to Italy. A triple squeeze play was brought to bear on Clarence Hathaway, once editor of the Daily Worker. When he declined to be used as an informer, denaturalization proceedings were brought against his wife, Vera. Her brother, William Sanders, 55, an artist who had never engaged in politics, was himself arrested after he refused to give testimony against his sister. Sophie Gerson, wife of Simon W. Gerson, one of those acquitted in the second Smith Act trial of New York Communist leaders, was arrested for denaturalization to punish her husband.
By a political Freudian slip, no mention was made at the conference of one of the worst cases of this kind. In the fall of 1952, Earl Browder and his wife were indicted for perjury in her original immigration proceedings and in February of this year Mrs. Browder was arrested for deportation. These punitive actions followed a warning from Bella Dodd to Earl Browder that he had better show some sign of “cooperation.” Though the ex-Communist leader in lonely poverty has withstood the temptations of the rewards which would be his were he to sell his “memoirs” to the FBI and the magazines, little consideration has been shown him. This reflects the savage unfairness with which the left treats its heretics, however honorably these heretics behave.
The deportations drive cuts across every basic liberty. 15 editors associated with the radical and foreign language press have been arrested for deportation or denaturalization, including Cedric Belfrage of the National Guardian, Al Richman of the West Coast People’s World, and John Steuben of The March of Labor. The foreign language editors arrested are elderly folk editing papers which are dying out as the process of assimilation steadily cuts into the number of Americans who still read the language of “the old country.” Almost one third of those arrested for deportation are trade union members or officials. Ever since the [labor leader Harry] Bridges cases began (the government shamelessly is about to launch a fourth try), the use of deportation as a weapon against labor militants has been overt and obvious. Cases are pending against James Matles and James Lustig of the United Electrical Workers and against the wife of William Senter, of St. Louis, another U.E. official, now up on Smith Act charges.
One of the leading victims of the current drive, Stanley Nowak, was present in Chicago. After 10 years as a Democratic member of the Michigan State Legislature, part of this time as floor leader, he is facing denaturalization proceedings. This Polish-born legislator played a role in the organization of the automobile industry and was first elected to the legislature in 1938 from the West Side area of Detroit, a Ford worker constituency. Similar charges 10 years ago (“Communist and anarchist sympathies”) were dismissed with an apology by then Attorney General Biddle but have been revived under the McCarran-Walter Act.
The most numerous and widespread abuses have occurred in the treatment of Mexican-Americans. Reports to the conference from Los Angeles pictured terror and lawlessness — the use of roadblocks and sudden raids on areas in which persons of Mexican origin live, the invasion of their homes without warrants, the exile to Mexico of native-born Americans of Mexican parentage. The Mexican-American community is kept steadily “churned up” to maintain it as a source of cheap labor in constant flux. Green reported that during the first six months of 1953 more than 483,000 persons were deported to Mexico — while almost half a million others were being brought in for low paid agricultural work.
The government is using “supervisory parole” to harass and intimidate radicals who cannot be deported because no other country will accept them. Three Communist leaders convicted under the Smith Act, Alexander Bittelman, Betty Gannett, and Claudia Jones, out on bail pending appeal, were summoned to Ellis Island recently. They were told that they were being put under supervisory parole, must report once a week, submit to physical and psychiatric examination, abandon all political activity and give information under oath as to their associations and activities. They are challenging the order in the courts.
Last March 17 Attorney General Brownell made a particularly vulgar St. Patrick’s Day speech to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick — their parents once the target of similar anti-alien hysteria. In this he announced that 10,000 citizens were being investigated for denaturalization and 12,000 aliens for deportation as “subversives.” Action on this scale would dwarf the notorious deportation raids of the early twenties.
The suffering in terms of broken families and disrupted lives is beyond the most sympathetic imagination. As serious is the moral degradation imposed by spreading terror. People are afraid to look lest they be tempted to help, and bring down suspicion on themselves. This is how good folk in Germany walked hurriedly by and shut their ears discreetly to telltale screams. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born is fighting to keep America’s conscience alive.
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