A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  “May I—?” Robeson tried to interject.

  Medina cut him off: “No, Mr. Robeson, I don’t want to hear any statement from you. I can’t find from anything in these questions that you have any knowledge of the facts that are relevant here in this case.”

  As he left the courtroom, Robeson complained about the way Medina treated him and also praised the Communist Party for playing “a magnificent role in fighting for the freedom of the American Negro.”

  Was he a communist? a reporter asked.

  The question, Robeson responded, was not relevant.

  * * *

  CROCKETT CALLED HIS summation to the jury the highlight of his life. He said everything he had done before was in preparation for this opportunity to explain how much the Constitution meant to him—and how it applied to the eleven American communists put on trial for their beliefs.

  In riding the subways in New York, Crockett told the jury, he noticed a sign that said, “Freedom is everybody’s business.” He thought it was the perfect motto to apply to the defense in this case. “Freedom is indivisible,” he said. “We cannot deny freedom of speech to communists and at the same time preserve freedom for Jews and for Catholics and for Negroes or for persons of foreign ancestry. You cannot outlaw the Communist Party because of its political theories without creating a most dangerous precedent, a precedent that may in the future be used to outlaw a religious organization or the political organization or the inter-racial organization to which you or I might belong. Once we in America forget that freedom is everybody’s business, once we accept the fascist theory that communists have no rights or that all communists should be sent to Russia or put in concentration camps, once we begin thinking and speaking in those terms we descend to the very depths of Hitlerism.”

  To defend the right of communists to speak or make known their beliefs did not mean that you had to agree with their views. “I have on numerous occasions in the past criticized communist views which I regard as contrary to my own views,” he said. “Indeed, three months before I entered this case I publicly debated a political issue against Mr. Winter, my client. I have no objection to anyone criticizing communists or communism to their heart’s content. As I read the Constitution, and especially its guarantee of freedom of speech, it is the privilege of every one of us to criticize not only the communists but any organization we please to criticize.”

  Crockett focused much of his summation on the connection between blacks and communists. He said that every time he heard the argument that communists were using or exploiting the grievances of blacks he “boiled with resentment” at the condescension behind that idea. “I resent anyone referring to the problems faced by Negroes in this country today as simply grievances, as though you stepped on someone’s toe or refused him a drink of water. Is that all the significance the prosecution attaches to the denial to eight million Negroes of the right to vote simply because they happen to have black skin? Is it a ‘grievance’ to deny employment to Negro men and women or to Negro professional people in federal government or in state or city government? And yet you don’t need evidence in this case to know that all this and more is being done, nor do we need to present more evidence in this case for you to know that the Communist Party’s position is diametrically opposed to any such practice.”

  The case against the communists focused on the assumption that their teachings advocated force and violence, Crockett stated. “Let us look at this force and violence. There is a lot of evidence of force and violence in our country these days; but it is not force and violence emanating from the Communist Party. Force and violence takes the form . . . of force and violence against Negroes in the form of lynchings and other mob actions.” One defense witness’s testimony “regarding how the Communist Party concentrated the attention of the people of Chicago on the lynching of four Negroes in Monroe, Georgia, in 1946,” along with Benjamin Davis’s recounting of the role of the Communist Party in the defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Crockett argued, were indicative of a kind of force and violence that was “intended to overthrow constituted authority.”

  The Foley Square case, Crockett concluded, was “an attempt to illegalize the party that has fought against the whole system of force and violence practiced upon Negroes. This is an attempt to outlaw the party that leads the fight against those Jim Crow curtains in our railroad dining cars which set aside Negroes as untouchables. This is an attempt to outlaw the party that leads the fight against those who would confine Negro children to the tubercular slum areas of our city. This is an attempt to outlaw the party that leads the fight against those who would keep the Negro in its place.” He hoped that attempt would not succeed, Crockett said, but if it did there would surely be another group to rise with the same mission. “And their voices will be heard.”

  * * *

  OCTOBER 14, 11:24 that morning. The gray-haired bailiff issued the cry “All rise!” as Judge Medina emerged from his chambers, took his place in his high-backed chair framed by the American flag and the Great Seal of the United States, and instructed the clerk of the court to bring in the jury. Crockett sat with the defense team in front of the eleven defendants. Behind them stood a dozen deputy marshals. Led by Juror No. 8, the jury filtered in and sat down. They had deliberated for seven hours. None was smiling.

  The clerk received permission from the judge to proceed and called the roll of jurors, then asked the foreman, Thelma Dial, the wife of a bandleader, whether a verdict had been reached. Dial rose, holding a document that recorded the verdict. Speaking softly, she said the jury found each of the defendants guilty. The charges called for maximum sentences of ten years in prison. After the jurors were polled individually, and the finding confirmed, Medina thanked them and dismissed them from the room. “Now I turn to some unfinished business,” he said, asking the six defense lawyers to rise. Each of them was guilty too, he said. He found them guilty of contempt of court. He would have overlooked their actions if he thought they were taken in the “heat of controversy,” but not long into the trial he concluded that the six had conspired in a “cold and calculating manner” to try to provoke incidents for a mistrial or impair the judge’s health.

  Crockett was sentenced to four months in prison. In a statement issued after his sentencing, he called it “a badge of honor.”

  21

  * * *

  Committee Men

  DURING THE LONG and contentious trial of the eleven leading communists in the United States at the Foley Square Courthouse in 1949, John Stephens Wood was chairing congressional hearings on Capitol Hill and around the country to determine whether other citizens were sufficiently American or dangerously un-American.

  In the historical context of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Chairman Wood was regarded as a step up from the two virulently bigoted southern Democrats most associated with the committee in its earlier years. It was Martin Dies of Texas, the first and longest-serving chairman, who claimed there was insufficient evidence for his committee to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, which he described as “an old American institution.” And it was John Rankin, a committee member from Mississippi, who referred to “niggers” and “kikes” on the House floor. When President Truman pressured congressional allies to yank Rankin off the committee by revising the rules, Rankin smeared the president as a Soviet tool, saying, “The word seems to have come down from Moscow.”

  Wood was less strident. As Walter Goodman described him in The Committee, his book on the panel, Wood surprised “friends and foes by being a gentlemanly hunter of communists. He was a conservative, but he was not a red neck; and he was by no means a showy or particularly forceful personality.” The contrast was one of demeanor more than policy. His voting record was not much different from that of his Dixie colleagues, especially on civil rights and labor legislation.

  Wood was one of 116 House members who voted against a 1949 measure prohibiting poll taxes in elections for federal offices, a bill that was strangled in the Sena
te, where segregationists controlled key committees. Imposed mostly in southern states, the poll tax was used specifically as a means of limiting the voting power of poor blacks. Wood had already established his credentials as a stalwart of the Jim Crow South by voting against bills denying federal school lunch assistance to institutions that discriminated against children based on race, creed, color, or national origin and against opening immigration quotas for Asian and Pacific peoples. He also had voted against legislation raising the minimum wage to seventy-five cents an hour, and in foreign affairs had taken a largely isolationist stance by opposing the Marshall Plan and military aid to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, even though these efforts were intended to counteract the communist threat in Europe at the onset of the cold war. In opposing the Marshall Plan, Wood joined the side of the more vociferous Rankin, who said Americans should not put money into the “sinkhole of Europe” and called on “those lazy people in Europe to sober up.” He also unwittingly sided in this case with Joseph Stalin, who feared that the Marshall Plan would weaken the Soviet position in Europe and became its loudest opponent.

  The most publicized congressional controversy Wood became entangled in outside the committee involved a 1949 measure presented as a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, which had been enacted in 1947 to curtail the power of unions. This was in fact a phony repeal intended not to help unions but to further weaken them. An analysis of the new bill showed that of the twenty major provisions, it was tougher than Taft-Hartley in four key areas, with only insubstantial changes in the others. While Taft-Hartley allowed the use of court injunctions to prevent strikes, the so-called repeal bill permitted the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board to seek an injunction even before complaints were issued. It was also tougher than Taft-Hartley in outlawing all existing and valid closed shop contracts and in making it easier for employers to fire workers for striking in violation of contracts or for engaging in subversive activities.

  Wood’s role was notable not because of the side he took but because he allowed himself to serve as a front for union-bashing Republicans. His name was on the bill as the main sponsor, even though he was not on the House Education and Labor Committee and his district in northern Georgia was not known as a hotbed of labor disputes, making his involvement seem peculiar to labor insiders in Washington. Columnist Peter Edson, writing for the Scripps-owned NEA news syndicate, was so curious that he approached Wood and asked, “Who wrote the Wood bill?”

  Wood’s first response was that it was not written by the Department of Labor. When Edson repeated the question, Wood said, “The bill was written in my office with the help of a few Republicans on the House Committee on Education and Labor.” When Edson asked who, Wood replied, angrily, “It’s none of your business,” and walked away.

  “Who wrote the Wood bill may not be the personal business of any reporter,” Edson wrote. “But it most certainly is public business who writes these tricky pieces of legislation. And in the public interest, every reporter has the right to ask any question he chooses with the expectation of getting a civil answer. Congressman Wood’s reluctance to come clean on this one may be due to several factors. One is that he wants all the credit for himself. The other is that he doesn’t want it known how the bill was written, what deal it represents, or who supplied the brains.”

  Edson pursued all leads. He was a dogged reporter who three years later would break the story about a secret fund that Richard Nixon’s business pals had set up to pay his office and travel expenses. That revelation led to Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech, during which the Republican nominee for vice president evoked the family dog named Checkers in a sentimental appeal to stay on the ticket as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate. In going after the Wood story, Edson tracked down William Ingles, who organized the Committee to Save Taft-Hartley. Ingles told him that he knew how the Wood bill was written, but that “Wood’s unwillingness to discuss the subject seals the mouths of those who had anything to do with it.” What Edson called “the frankest explanation of how the Wood bill came about” was from Pennsylvania congressman Samuel McConnell, ranking Republican on the Labor Committee. “It didn’t take any brains to write the Wood bill and there is no mystery about it,” McConnell told Edson. “I could have written the Wood bill myself. . . . Scissors and paste, not genius.” The key to getting Wood’s name on the bill, McConnell said, was simply that Wood was willing to lend his name. When the final wording was worked out, Wood was not even in the room.

  Drew Pearson, author of the nationally syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, also took an interest in the Wood bill and later wrote a column asserting that the Georgia congressman’s behavior was affected by heavy drinking: “This was most important legislation. It affected scores of labor unions and millions of workmen. But when the time came for the final debate on the Wood bill, its author was so under the influence of liquor that ex-speaker Joe Martin and Congressman Charles Halleck of Indiana, two Republicans, substituted for him in arguing for his bill. When the final vote came, Wood managed to appear on the House floor to vote, though he could barely make it, and immediately thereafter retired to a couch in the Democratic cloakroom.”

  As Washington’s most gossipy and feared insider columnist, Pearson demonstrated a disdain for HUAC in general and its chairmen in particular. His columns had helped lead to the indictment and eventual conviction of one of Wood’s predecessors, John Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican, who was involved in a long-running tax-avoidance kickback scheme with one of his aides. Thomas had taken the chairmanship of the committee away from Wood for the two years that Republicans controlled the House, in 1947 and 1948. It was in that window, in October 1947, that HUAC, with Thomas as chairman and Wood as the minority ranking member, subpoenaed what became known as the Hollywood Ten and cited them for contempt of Congress for refusing on First Amendment grounds to testify about their possible communist connections.

  The best known of the ten Hollywood film professionals, all blacklisted from working in the industry, convicted, and imprisoned, was Dalton Trumbo, a novelist and future Academy Award winner, but the group also included Alvah Bessie, who fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside my uncle Bob Cummins and his Michigan classmates Elman Service and Ralph Neafus. Another of the Hollywood Ten was Ring Lardner Jr., the son of writer Ring Lardner and brother of James Lardner, who became close friends with Service while also fighting in Spain, where he was killed. When HUAC’s Thomas went on trial for his congressional kickback scheme, he refused to testify against himself, citing the Fifth Amendment, the legal right that he and other congressmen denigrated when it was used by witnesses called before their committee. The balding, boastful Jersey pol, a former bond salesman, found himself locked up in the same federal prison as Ring Lardner Jr.

  Chairman Wood provided more fodder for Pearson. In a column published on June 2, 1950, Pearson first described Wood as “a scholarly, dignified gentleman who looks the way you would expect a congressman to look,” then drew the knife, claiming he had irrefutable evidence that “Mr. Wood has been acting the way a congressman should not.” In that and several follow-up columns, Pearson reported that Wood’s office collected a payoff fee from the family of a young constituent who suffered crippling injuries when struck by a U.S. Army truck. Wood got a special bill passed through Congress paying the family $10,000 in damages for the accident. But according to Pearson, who had a check stub, Wood’s office collected a fee of $1,000 for the sort of constituent service that most congressmen performed routinely. Wood defended the action by saying the office assistant who charged the fee was also a lawyer back in his congressional district.

  Pearson was not done. Two weeks later he reported that Chairman Wood had brought his family maid and her handyman husband to Washington and that to pay them he had placed the husband on the committee payroll as a janitor. “The peculiar thing is that financially Wood is well off,” Pearson wrote. “As most congressmen go, he is affluent, and his
wife is a member of one of the big textile families of north Georgia.” The janitor was William Fowler, a black man who had worked in the Canton textile plant. Wood put him on the HUAC payroll when he took over the chairmanship in July 1945. Fowler’s wife had worked at the Wood home for decades for room and board but no salary. Taken together with the constituent payoff, Pearson concluded, Wood presented himself as “a pillar of good Americanism and an example to the nation. The conclusion is inescapable that he isn’t.”

  Wood responded by taking to the House floor, where he labeled Pearson a hypocrite on race. “In view of the many anguished wails which this man Pearson has mouthed about the benighted status of the Negro race in my state, as well as other southern states, his criticism of my action in giving this Georgia Negro a job, the duties of which he performed excellently, comes with poor grace.” More than that, Wood said, shielding himself with the armor of his anticommunist agenda, Pearson’s attacks on him personally and the committee he chaired made him an un-American subversive. “He has been the most effective weapon that the Stalinites have been able to use in America for the undermining of our whole constitutional system. To him there is nothing under the heavens that is sacred. He befouls and demeans everything he touches. He occupies the unique and unenviable position today of standing alone at the very pinnacle of all the slanderers and scandalmongers in all of American history.”

  Many politicians who had been subjected to Pearson’s sharp pen likely cheered Wood on, including Joe McCarthy, who by 1950 had emerged as the most eager communist hunter on Capitol Hill. Before then, McCarthy had been a source for Pearson, providing him with dirt and gossip on congressional colleagues. But as McCarthy’s charges about communists in the government grew more heated and reckless over the months since his February “I have here in my hand” speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Pearson began writing critical columns about him. McCarthy then turned his sights on Pearson, asserting that Pearson had briefly employed an assistant with connections to a Soviet spy network, a claim that internal Soviet documents, unveiled decades later, showed to be true. A few weeks before Christmas 1950, during a spat at the Sulgrave Club near DuPont Circle in Washington, McCarthy did to Pearson what Wood was perhaps too gentlemanly to do: he gave him a punch to the jaw and a knee below the belt. The cloakroom melee was broken up by Nixon, who happened upon the scene. Biographer John A. Farrell recounted that Nixon said, “Let a Quaker stop this fight,” as he pulled McCarthy away.