A Well-Read Woman

by Kate Stewart

  It was quite another thing altogether to be confronted with these thousands of books in front of me, the result of over a century of people from all over the world arguing about what it means for Jews to have a homeland. Would they be disgusted to know these books were living in perpetuity down here together? I wondered if Ruth ever came down this aisle to browse, to remember what she had seen and felt in Israel, to verify that it had all been real. Did she want to see what new theories, treatises, and screeds had been added lately to these shelves, to marvel at what had become of her “old friends” there? Maybe she never did. Maybe she chose to ignore all the squabbling and shouting in this aisle and sought out new ideas, new books, and new answers to understand her place in the world.

  Part VI:

  What Else Can One Do in This Mad World?

  PARIS, NEW YORK, AND BERKELEY, 1950–1959

  Chapter 20

  Ruth stopped in Genoa on the way to Paris and had a portrait photograph taken. In it her hair is wrapped in a bun on the top of her head to the left, and she wears a large beaded necklace and matching earrings. Although her eyes are half-closed, she appears genuinely happy. Also in Genoa, an artist named G. Giuliani drew a portrait of Ruth at the Hotel Columbia.1 She is wearing a gray suit and yellow necklace and carries what appears to be a trench coat. The artist drew her in profile and accented her severely pointed shoes. With her glasses and updo, Ruth looks like the serious librarian she would one day become.

  Guy Rosner, Ruth’s nephew, was just ten years old in 1950, but his aunt made a big impression on him during her visit. She seemed to be zooming everywhere, not just in Paris but all over the world. She was ambitious, he recalled, just like a shooting star. Ruth stayed with Clara for a few weeks, then got her own place on rue de Marignan for about three months. Many journalists and men supposedly showed up at her apartment, but it is unclear if any of them were Viktor.2 In May 1950 she left for New York and stopped in England on the way.3

  When she arrived in New York, she met up with friends she had known in Israel. She moved into an apartment on West 108th Street with Alisa Cerf, her nemesis from the PIO job in Tel Aviv.4 She wrote to a friend in Israel, “About life in the United States in general, I cannot possibly write you, as I would have to produce a book with many more than one volume.”5 But she provided a vivid description of her new life and living situation, which seemed to be similar to her life in Tel Aviv: “We have quite a bit of company . . . Around the corner from us is an apartment full of schlichim, and any time of the day or night they feel like it they drop in here . . . In all[,] I’ve kept away from organizations as much as I could, just going to an occasional party with other Israelis. There’s now an Israeli cabaret in New York . . . Every time I’m there I run into some people from Israel.”6 She explained that she was working for several clients part-time, including an art dealer and men from Israel who were in New York temporarily and needed help with correspondence and other tasks. Of one of these clients she wrote, “I am thus working for an author for whom I did research for a book he published 3 weeks ago, and very much enjoyed that job, as it was more like studying than work.”7

  On the same day, in another letter to a different friend, Ruth further explained exactly who the aforementioned author was: “If you read the papers lately you will know the name Max Lowenthal[,] [author of] ‘[T]he Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ I worked on the book all summer and am still with Max part-time.”8 Lowenthal was a Jewish lawyer with a long career in government service: he had clerked for Judge Julian Mack (and married his niece), joined on the Morgenthau mission to Spain in 1917, and worked with Felix Frankfurter on President Wilson’s labor mediation committee. In the 1930s he became one of the major architects of the New Deal, serving as research director of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He was also the chief counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission, where he became a close friend of freshman senator Harry Truman when they worked together on the Committee to Investigate Railroad Finances. Lowenthal was an informal adviser to Truman when he later became president, and was also credited as playing a major role in Truman’s support for Israel in 1948.9

  For decades Lowenthal had been amassing research on the FBI, which he considered to be a dangerous threat to the civil liberties of anyone tangentially suspected of Communist proclivities. He and his colleagues and friends had been investigated by J. Edgar Hoover’s army of bureaucrats for their real or imagined Communist associations. In September 1950, when Ruth was working for him, Lowenthal was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and questioned about various acquaintances. His son David recalls:

  Max’s responses were, in the first place, totally, even maddeningly, disarming. Time and again when asked if he had met so-and-so or knew of links to someone, he said he had no memory of that, but was happy to accept any evidence the committee might have to the contrary. “Anything the committee has that would correct what I say on this or anything else, I will accept. If it is a fact, I will accept it.” This meaningless but conciliatory throwaway line, uttered very slowly ten, twenty, fifty times in a deep, sincere tone, drove his inquisitors round the bend.10

  Hoover and his ally, Representative George Dondero, had ordered this questioning of Lowenthal to threaten the publication of his forthcoming book, simply titled The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lowenthal had trouble finding a publisher, but William Sloane had finally agreed to do it, although the company refused to promote it. Released in November to a storm of mostly negative reviews and editorials, the book was denounced by Dondero, who told Congress that Lowenthal was “a menace to America whose exposure would prove him a Soviet spy more dangerous than any since Benedict Arnold.”11 Also in 1950, Lowenthal’s son John, a Columbia University law student, assisted the defense lawyers for the espionage trial of Alger Hiss (also a friend of Max’s), likely bringing even more suspicion to his father.

  In the Max Lowenthal papers at the University of Minnesota, there are hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings on the publication of Lowenthal’s The Federal Bureau of Investigation and his correspondence with the publisher and friends, including Truman, who had enthusiastically read a draft of the book. Lowenthal sent a note to his publisher in August 1950 with revised galleys of the book, stating that more were coming and that “Miss Rappaport will be able to note on them any new changes in blue pencil.”12 In a response to a friend who had asked Lowenthal how he had managed to complete such an enormously detailed book, he explained:

  Some friends sent me clippings from time to time over the years. The reading of official hearings and reports I had to do myself. Probably I missed some recondite items, depending so much on myself. The biggest use of staff, in fact only one, was after the material was in galley proof. I got a number of graduate students to check on every statement in the book, against the sources. Some chapters checked four times. It was eminently worth doing that, though it took rather more energy than I could command at the time.13

  Ruth was this staff of one and may have directed this effort to check the sources and revise the book over the summer of 1950. Her initials “rr” are in the corner of many documents dated from the fall of 1950, indicating that she typed both lists of names Lowenthal planned to send the book to and the corresponding letters.14

  Lowenthal’s FBI file is over seven thousand pages long, and he was under heavy surveillance in 1950.15 In a personal letter to President Truman, Lowenthal detailed the harassment of himself and his family by a HUAC staff member:

  Some day I hope to tell you the stories of the attempts in the past week to stop the book, through the operations of the staff of a House Committee, one of whose Republican members wants to go to the Senate and perhaps fears that the book’s incidental reference to his public record may hurt his chances.

  You may be particularly interested in that Committee’s staff visit to my home late at night when my wife was alone and undressed, on an apartment floor all of whose other tenan
ts were obviously away, and how a strange man, carrying the Committee’s credentials[,] “politely” intimidated her into opening the door, tried to scare the daylights out of her, and then came back still later that night to repeat the performance, possibly after phoning Washington and getting instructions. This was followed by a daytime visit to my publishers, a showing of the Committee credentials, and “casual” comments indicating that the publishers might be unwise in publishing a book written by me.16

  In all the job applications, résumés, and lists of references Ruth would use later in life, she never mentioned working for Max Lowenthal. But working for him made a deep impression on her at the time. She wrote to her friend Lynn, “I feel what else can one do in this mad world, but to contribute one’s time, effort and limited ability to stave off the course of madness, or at least to try. The consequences are still rather uncertain.”17

  Chapter 21

  While Ruth lived in New York City, she inquired into going back to school. She knew she could not continue to work as a secretary or typist for the rest of her working life and dreaded performing these mundane tasks that had been designated “women’s work.” She wrote in August 1950 to her friend Esther Elbaum, “If nothing else pops I shall leave N.Y., as I do finally want to finish school. Have what I think are some good ideas for the future . . .”1 She asked about starting in the fall or, if she had been too late in applying, the following spring at University of California, Berkeley, which she had applied to in 1947 before going to Israel.2 She also took an entrance exam for Columbia University and passed. Notified of this on January 26, 1951, she may have already been on her way to Berkeley, where she would be able to transfer her credits from the University of Washington and enter as a sophomore.

  If Ruth thought that in Berkeley she would escape the Red Scare, she was sorely mistaken. Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California since 1930, had begun targeting and firing professors and graduate students who openly admitted to Communist Party membership. In 1949 California state senator Jack B. Tenney introduced thirteen bills to root out Communists from state government. The same year, President Sproul forced all University of California faculty and employees to sign a loyalty oath. The faculty senate voted to change the wording of the oath, and after months of negotiations between Sproul, the senate, and the regents, in the summer of 1950 Sproul fired thirty-one faculty members who had refused to sign it. Two years later the California Supreme Court ruled in Tolman v. Underhill that the university had unjustly fired these employees, and they were reinstated.3

  When Ruth enrolled at Berkeley in February 1951, the university was beginning to contract from its postwar growth in enrollment, when the GI Bill encouraged returning World War II veterans to attend college tuition-free.4 At twenty-seven, Ruth considered herself to be an older student, a square peg among the silent generation, who had been children during World War II. She had inquired about living at Berkeley’s International House but had either missed an application deadline or decided instead to live off campus.5

  At the University of Washington, Ruth had considered majoring in sociology; it seems clear she stuck with that plan at Berkeley, enrolling in two sociology classes her first semester. Berkeley’s Department of Sociology and Social Institutions was considered an upstart, having only been founded in 1946. Although a Department of Social Institutions had existed since 1923, the faculty was opposed to the concept of sociology as a discipline. Under the leadership of Herbert Blumer, who arrived to be the new chair in 1952, it became the number-one-ranked sociology department in the country by 1966.6 She received Bs and Cs in these sociology classes her first semester, but an A in French.

  It appears she did not initially seek out a job to support herself. But paying out-of-state tuition at Berkeley was costly, and the following summer she knew she had to start earning money. In July she obtained a position with the army as a typist and punch-card operator for mainframe computers at San Francisco’s Port of Embarkation at Fort Mason, working a night shift. In 1947 President Truman had signed Executive Order 9,835, a preemptive measure to ensure the loyalty (and heterosexuality) of all federal employees. Truman had been accused of being soft on Communism, so his solution was to convince the public that this order would take care of the problem. Besides the creation of a Loyalty Review Board, it also led to the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, which included not only Communist organizations and fronts but also the KKK and Nazi groups.

  This executive order meant that after she was hired by the army, Ruth would have to undergo a name check to verify that she had no Communist sympathies. Over 4.5 million federal employees were investigated from 1947 to 1958 under the order. Of these, 27,000 required a full investigation, and 378 were dismissed for disloyalty.7 Perhaps Ruth was confident that despite her questionable political activities and associations, no one could prove that she had ever advocated for Communism. Her work for Lowenthal would have certainly prepared her to know exactly what was coming.

  The FBI began an investigation of Ruth, but in her file there is no mention of her work with Max Lowenthal or her relationship with Viktor. What was a huge red flag to the investigators was a brief part of Ruth’s activist life in Seattle when she addressed the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) in the spring of 1945.8 Edward Barsky, one of the founders of the organization, had joined the Communist Party in 1935, and other members may have been Communists as well. The group ended up on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations in 1947 and became a top enemy of J. Edgar Hoover. The organization refused to hand over its records to the House Un-American Activities Committee and spent years unsuccessfully fighting for its right to exist as an organization. By the mid-1950s the organization had disbanded, and Barsky and other members had served jail time; his career as a doctor was over.9

  Besides speaking at these events, Ruth had also unsuccessfully applied for a secretarial job at the organization’s Seattle branch. According to her FBI file, “The appointee was not considered for the position because it was feared her sympathies were not entirely in accord with those of the organization.” In other words, Ruth was not Communist enough, or even one at all, for this so-called front organization. Even so, FBI agents in Seattle were ordered to begin investigating Ruth for subversive activities based on her involvement with JAFRC.

  More information about Ruth’s time in Seattle trickled back to FBI headquarters in December 1951. May Goldsmith, executive secretary of the Jewish Welfare Society, provided a list of individuals for whom the society could vouch as Jewish refugees who were not Communist sympathizers. Luckily, Ruth was included in the list.10 Immigration and Naturalization Service records in Seattle were checked. The name of Ruth’s uncle, Carl Rubinstein, had been put on the JAFRC’s donor list, which had been taken from a list of donors to the Seattle Symphony, although he never gave any money to the group. Her uncle Abe was also contacted by the Seattle agents. He gave a lengthy explanation of Ruth’s background in Germany and her parents’ deaths:

  He said that as a result of this personal loss and her first-hand observation of the Nazi treatment of non-Arians and others, the appointee came to hate Fascists. He said the appointee is definitely anti-Fascist in her sympathies but certainly not in the same sense that Communists are anti-Fascists . . . He said it is altogether possible the appointee may have participated in any anti-Fascist movement or organization without knowing or considering the identity or purpose of the sponsors of that movement.11

  Her cousin Sam was interviewed and claimed he didn’t know Ruth well enough to make any statements about her loyalty. The owner of The Transcript, her coworker at the Medina Baby Home, and two acquaintances were also questioned, all agreeing that while Ruth hated Fascists, she was no Communist. The report concluded, “In view of the foregoing, it appears little basis exists for a full-field investigation.”12

  In a January 1952 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to the chief of staff of the army, he explained what had
been discovered in Seattle. Disagreeing with the Seattle office’s conclusion, he also noted that Ruth had lived in Europe and Israel recently and was born in Germany, more red flags to him. The army was to take responsibility of this full-field investigation outside the US. The FBI would take care of the domestic half of Ruth’s case.13 What exactly would this investigation entail? The number of people contacted and the breadth of locations is staggering for one lowly army base typist, and it reveals the extraordinary resources the FBI and military put into these Loyalty Board reviews. It is probably not a stretch to say that in the early 1950s, every person in the United States was either being investigated or questioned about someone being investigated.

  It all started with a search through the FBI’s Identification Division, the system Hoover had dreamed of while working at the Library of Congress from 1913 to 1917. Every US citizen would be identified in a main card catalog, with cross-references to other file groups. Without the work of careful and consistent cross-referencing, the FBI’s massive intelligence system would have never grown so large and efficient.14 When the clerk checked for Ruth’s name, it was already in this system, number 965 279 A. She had been given another number, 2374605, when she registered as an alien in 1940. A new number, 12.52.22573, had been assigned to her on October 1, 1951, likely the date that this investigation began. On every sheet of Ruth’s eighty-two-page file was another number, sometimes stamped, sometimes scrawled: 121-3452, the code for the FBI headquarters. At the bottom of every page in her file, or sometimes all across the page, was a hodgepodge of initials, stamps, dates, and signatures by who knows how many bureaucrats that had come into contact with Ruth’s file.