The McCarthy Era - Sierra Kaplan-Nelson

During the McCarthy Era intellectuals, liberals, and anyone foreign was targeted as a possible Communist or communist sympathizer. Many were investigated by HUAC or the FBI, put under surveillance, and blacklisted. Some fled the country to avoid having their careers ruined or being followed by the FBI. Others stayed and lost their jobs. The first person I interviewed was a liberal lawyer named Victor Kaplan who represented the labor union the CIO before WWII and was later called in for questioning by HUAC. The second person was a physics PhD whose wife left him to go to Russia with her Communist lover. Because of these (and other) associations, Bruce Dayton was investigated by the FBI and blacklisted. The final person I interviewed was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, also a PhD in physics, who was thought to be a Communist spy and investigated by the FBI. He finally fled the country after several incidents with the FBI and an investigation by HUAC.


Interview 1: Victor Kaplan (June 13, 2010)
Victor Kaplan was a liberal lawyer who protested the government’s encroachment on human rights.

Before WWII I was working at a law firm in LA representing the CIO. At the time the CIO was a powerful labor union that split off from the AFL, but then rejoined it again years later. They organized on an industrial basis. The old labor union was divided on a small craft basis, while the CIO grouped everyone in the automobile industry, for instance, into one union. Their leader was very leftist, and the CIO was known for having many communists working for it, while the AFL didn’t tolerate them.

At the end of the 1930s the House of Un-American Activities Committee was going around the country forcing people to answer questions about their political preferences and other activities. I wasn’t questioned, but I was considered very leftist because of my job representing the CIO and was labeled a communist by many people. When I joined the army I wasn’t allowed to become a marine and people were told to keep an eye on me. The army’s always been a very conservative organization and they didn’t want leftists reaching positions of power.

The witch hunts for communists really reached their height during the McCarthy era though. The country almost became a fascist dictatorship. People were afraid of making phone calls, of joining any sort of organization, even of having the wrong kinds of conversations. Your livelihood was at stake. The McCarthy Era so frightened and intimidated people that the whole country was scared into becoming more conservative. I guess you could call this the “Red Scare.” The McCarthy Era terrified people; it made people afraid to deal with you because you were labeled “left wing.” The entire guild of screenwriters was blacklisted. People weren’t allowed to belong to many innocent organizations.

Towards the end of the McCarthy Era they were trying to pass a loyalty bill in California, which would make anyone who held a state job have to take a loyalty oath. This would include swearing that you had never been a member of the Communist Party. Well it would have affected me, so I went out with a lot of other people to protest. It would have made thousands of people have to lie about their pasts. It was defeated in California, although for a while it looked like it was going to pass. I know in other states it did pass, and all state employees including lawyers had to take a loyalty oath if they wanted to keep their jobs. It was terrible and unconstitutional.

A group of about thirteen lawyers and I, who had been protesting the loyalty bill, were detained by the HUAC and hauled into court to testify. The trials were held in the federal building. They asked us questions about our political preferences. Not just if we were members of the Communist Party, but also if we affiliated ourselves with other political parties or were members of different political groups in our community. They even asked us questions about our own personal beliefs. I refused to answer any of their questions, on the grounds of the 1st and 5th amendments. It was what you’d expect of a fascist dictator, like what you’d expect of Hitler. I couldn’t believe that so soon after WWII our government was trying to take away our rights of freedom of speech and thought. What they were doing was unconstitutional. It was terrifying to refuse to answer questions, although it was the right thing to do. Your career could be ruined forever. It was a real concern of all of ours.

Our entire group of lawyers gave the committee a hard time. We opposed what they were doing on the grounds of the first amendment and made them look bad on television. People’s attitude towards the witch-hunts was starting to become more negative at that time anyways, and they ended up letting us go and not blacklisting us. I still had to quit my job at my brother’s firm where I was working though, because I refused to testify as a friendly witness when one of our powerful clients asked me to. If I hadn’t quit I would have lost my brother a lot of wealthy clients.

Of course I felt threatened by the McCarthy era; I think everyone did. Your very livelihood was at stake. It permeated the entire atmosphere. People were afraid to talk, afraid to join organizations; the whole country was terrified. After about ten years the atmosphere had recovered greatly, although many top professionals never got their careers back. I don’t think anything like it has happened since, although there have been many conservative trends over the years.


Interview 2: Bruce Dayton (June 13, 2010)
Bruce Dayton was a physics PhD whose wife became a Communist, left him, and went to Russia with her communist lover, leaving him with two children and an FBI investigation.

The McCarthy era…well it was a bad period for me. I was never called before the McCarthy committee, but my troubles were that at a time when I was looking for a job, because of my associations with the man my wife ran off with, the FBI thought I was a suspicious person. At every job interview people would run a security check, find out I was blacklisted, and tell me, “Uh, thanks, but no thanks.” This happened so many times. I wanted a university position, but at that time people were so paranoid about the Red Scare that they wouldn’t hire anyone investigated by the FBI.

I had a job offer from the Tata Institute in India, where your uncle Bernard had gone, so I applied for a passport. At that time the US required you to have a passport for foreign travel. The president had declared a state of national emergency so the Secretary of State had to approve every passport application and he denied mine. So I sued for it. It took me four and a half years to get it. First I got turned down in the district court, so I went to the US court of appeals and lost again. Then I went back to the district court and my case ended up going to the Supreme Court.

During this period of four and a half years I continued applying for jobs at different colleges. I would be forthright with them and tell them, “You know I’ve been denied a passport.” They always told me they couldn’t hire me. Finally I went to work at an industrial job. After a few months I was denied a passport again and I talked to my boss about it. A few days later I got a call saying they no longer had a use for me.

So I went looking for a job out west. I finally got one in California at a teaching college. The president needed a physics teacher. I told him I was going to sue for a passport again and there could be publicity but he told me it was OK. But when I lost at the district court again the school board got involved. They voted 5-4 to pay me to disappear for a while. They said they’d pay me a whole term’s salary if I would just go away. Well I told them no, and they fired me.

Finally my case went to the Supreme Court. They heard it with two other cases, Rockwell Kent, the artist, and Walter Briehl, a psychiatrist. All of us had been denied passports by the secretary of state. The Supreme Court ruled in our favor with a 5-4 vote. They said that denying anyone a passport was unconstitutional and that everyone has the right to travel.

So I finally got a passport, but it took so long that Bernard wasn’t in India anymore, he’d gone to work in Denmark. My wife left me and disappeared for thirty years in the summer of 1950 and it wasn’t until 1959 that I was allowed to leave the country. So Bernard and I set something up in Switzerland and I went to work in Bern. I stayed there for two years, worked in Denmark for a year, and finally went to India to work at the Tata Institute after all. After about five and a half years in Europe and India I came back to the United States. At that time the climate was completely different. Before I left the US was still in a climate of fear, but when I came back I got a job at California State in LA and worked there until I retired. I was a moderately famous physicist in Europe but nobody knew me in the US. But still, I guess you could say that everything turned out just fine.

I don’t know anything about what’s going on nowadays from personal experience, but it seems to me that what is going on with Muslims is remarkably similar to what happened in the McCarthy era. The terrorist attack on 9/11 left the country in a very similar state of fear.

A Time article from 1958 on the Supreme Court case that allowed people the right to travel can be found at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,891897,00.html

A report on Bruce Dayton’s specific case can be found at:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=357&invol=144



Interview 3: Tom Peters, on the experiences of his father Bernard Peters (via email, June 13, 2010 – June 15, 2010)
Bernard Peters was Jewish physicist and a German immigrant who worked with Oppenheimer to develop the atomic bomb during WWII. After the war he was investigated as a Communist sympathizer and regarded with extreme suspicion by the FBI. Tom Peters is a historian in his free time.

Bernard was one of Oppenheimer's two graduate students at Berkeley. The families were friends as Bernard was already twenty-seven when he started studying. Oppie's son Peter was my age and Toni, the daughter, was Susan's. Bernard worked on the atom bomb project, "Project Manhattan" at Berkeley, and we were slated to go to Los Alamos where Bernard was working. Hannah had even bought me a snowsuit when suddenly everything was canceled. Bernard and Hannah did not know why.

Well it turned out that the FBI had discovered that one of the two German-Jewish refugees working on the project was a spy for the Russians and was giving them information about the project. The other was Klaus Fuchs who worked in Los Alamos and who eventually did turn out to be the spy and later fled to East Germany. J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that it was Bernard, so he no longer had clearance to work on the project.

On top of it all, Oppenheimer came under suspicion. His brother Frank who was also a physicist, but not on the project was indeed a member of the American Communist Party as was Frank's wife Jackie, the daughter of a longshoreman. Robert Oppenheimer was something of a coward and so he badmouthed some of his colleagues, among them Bernard, was always outspoken about his political views and quite naïve in some respects. To Bernard he said that he was shielding him from difficulties and to the FBI he said that he was a "dangerous radical." The FBI never found anything bad out about Bernard because there was nothing bad to discover. The only thing that they could find to accuse him of was that he was "prematurely and excessively anti-fascist!" That was the epithet they put on his dossier. Prematurely meant before Pearl Harbor, that is before the US entered the war. Of course he was anti-fascist before then. That is why he fled Germany. After all he had been put into Dachau, the concentration camp, at the very beginning years before Pearl Harbor in 1933 and had gotten out because of his mother. What "excessive" meant in relation to anti-fascist, no one ever could explain. As Bernard later said, J. Edgar Hoover never forgave him for not being Klaus Fuchs, and he carried a grudge against Bernard until he (Hoover) died.

When we moved to Rochester, New York in 1945 (where Bernard got a job as assistant professor at the University of Rochester) the troubles moved with us. The then president of the university was very courageous, much more so than Oppenheimer, and when the FBI insisted that he fire Bernard he refused. It was during that time that a telephone company technician came to the house one day and told Hannah that something was wrong with the telephone and he had to fix it. The next day Philip Morrison, Oppenhimer's other former PhD student who was visiting us, picked up the receiver to phone someone. This was in the days before dialing and one had to wait for the operator to come on and say, "Number please?" This could take a moment or two if the operator was busy with other callers. In that pause, Phil heard typing on the other end of the line, and he realized that he was connected to an office that was listening in to our calls. This was years before reliable recording devices and a typist was probably waiting on the other end to take shorthand of what was said. Phil yelled into the phone: "If you can't even bug a phone line so that we can't hear you, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" He then took the receiver apart and Hannah photographed the "bug" as evidence should we be further persecuted in any way. The "telephone technician" – who was in reality an FBI technician – came the very next day and took the microphone out again.

Hannah also remembered, but I have blocked it out of my memory, that Susan and I were shadowed by FBI men one our way home from school. All I do remember is that I can to this very day smell an FBI man a mile away against the wind. They all acted as though they had learned to sleuth from old B-movies with Humphrey Bogart, soft fedora hats and raincoats with turned up collars and all! It sounds improbable, but it was true at least until the 1960s.

I remember Bernard telling me about traveling to Washington DC to testify before HUAC. Being rather politically naïve, he was convinced that he could explain and convince them that he was no dangerous radical. But of course, the FBI had made up the committee's minds and Joseph McCarthy was only interested in media publicity and in his career. Any sensation would do - even if it were not true.

It was around that time that Micha, Bernard and Lena's brother in Israel, came for a visit to the US. His typewriter was stolen off the ship or in customs when he arrived. It reappeared, sent back to him in Rochester with no explanation. Bernard later discovered that one of J. Edgar Hoover's agents, an eager young man named Richard Nixon, later President Nixon, had stolen it to see whether the letters matched up with some incriminating letters that had been typewritten, presumably by Klaus Fuchs. Typewriters were only manual, not even electric at the time and each had characteristic wear and irregularity in the way it hit the paper, so that the "handwriting" of each machine was unique. Needless to say, it was not Micha's typewriter. I later found a letter in the Cornell archives that Hans Bethe, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner, had written to Oppenheimer at the time, saying he hoped that what he had heard Oppenheimer had said about Bernard Peters was not true. So there were obviously others who were also outraged at Oppenheimer's cowardice.

Bernard's case finally blew up and led to Oppenheimer's famous case before HUAC and Congress. Ed Condon, another physicist who I think was in Los Alamos at the time, or at any rate in New Mexico, wrote a letter to Oppenheimer berating him for lying to Bernard about protecting him. The FBI intercepted the letter and Oppenheimer was accused of having made the whole thing up. The case, and the fact that all his former friends (including his brother) now had ruined careers, ruined Oppenheimer’s career and personal life. Kitty – his wife, an alcoholic – finally drank herself to death on a friend's yacht in the Caribbean. Peter dropped out of sight and finally got back on his feet and became a building contractor in Albuquerque. Toni committed suicide, and Oppenheimer himself died totally abandoned by everyone of cancer. Frank however, survived after having tried to be a cattle rancher in Colorado with no success for a couple of years. He became the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco; Clotilde and I knew him well and were very fond of him and Jackie, and of Frank's second wife Millie after Jackie died.

We left the US for India because Bernard had the opportunity to build up primary research there, a very attractive proposal. Also he was sick and tired of being hounded by the government and hoped to find some peace outside the country. Eventually the government refused to renew his and Hannah's passports while in India and they were forced to take back their German citizenship in the mid 1950s.

There are many more stories, of being strip searched by the French Secret Service on the request of the FBI while crossing form England to France in 1948, and so on. Bernard and Hannah had fled that kind of government in Germany and found it again a few years later in the US. I wonder why they did not become totally disillusioned with any and all governments after that.