“It’s impossible to explain to young people today why we in the YCL felt such allegiance to the Soviet Union. In those days it was the workers’ fatherland—the only socialism on earth.”
— Pete Seeger
“Any person who subscribes to these teachings [communism], regardless of his reason, is working against American democracy and for the benefit of international Communism’s chief leader, Soviet Russia.”
— J. Edgar Hoover
Burl Ives was on the spot. He sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee having been publicly identified as a supporter of communism and the Senators wanted answers. Ives, appearing as a “friendly” witness, had already put a good distance between himself and his old comrades saying, “I made a decision a good many years ago in regard to communism. I realized I was not a communist and did not believe in the communist philosophy.” Of necessity, however, he offered a caveat. “The only affiliation that I have had with communism was back in the spring of 1944; I went to some open meetings, discussion meetings of an organization called the Communist Political Association.” Ives was trying to slide past the point; “some meetings” was actually “six or seven,” and “a good many years ago” was only eight. As for their being “open,” they required a card to gain entrance. While willing to testify, he was not ready to be fully forthcoming.
Ives’s “cooperation” in front of the Senate was prompted by the printing of Red Channels—an anti-communist publication—which had publicly listed him as a communist sympathizer.
Being listed in Red Channels meant any chance of getting further professionally was at an end, to say nothing of being a social pariah. The only remedy was to convince HUAC and Red Channels that his communist days were way behind him. As a consequence, the tone he affected was one of asserting his fealty to America. As he told the Senators, he considered himself a “missionary” for “the American folk song,” not a political radical.
For Ives, an artist whose career, particularly in film, was on the rise, attendance at CPA meetings was more than enough to put him in the hot seat with the government.For Ives, an artist whose career, particularly in film, was on the rise, attendance at CPA meetings was more than enough to put him in the hot seat with the government; and being named in Red Channels may have been the singular reason for his turning his back on his former friends—people such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie—and appearing as a cooperative witness before Congress. That is the explanation that has been passed down. There were, however, other things that made him vulnerable.
Locked away in the FBI’s files is a dossier they compiled on Burl Ives. In it was a lengthy memo, which outlined his interactions with a man named Boris Morros. Morros had worked in the music department of Paramount Studios in the late 1930s, having done the music for such films as Café Society and Stagecoach. He had since gone on to form his own company and in 1943 had been in touch with Ives about possibly working on the Jack Benny radio show.
Morros’s fuller background is consequential. For example, alongside working for Paramount, he was spying for the Soviet Union. He had been coerced into this, in his telling, because of threats to his family who remained there. Also, according to him, in 1947 he voluntarily approached the FBI to confess his activity and in turn became a double agent.
This had dire consequences for those associated with him. Among those interacting with Morros were Jack Soble, his spouse Myra Soble, Martha Dodd Stern, and Alfred K. Stern, all of who would later be indicted on charges of espionage.
For his part, Burl Ives, not only had links to Boris Morros, but also to Alfred Stern and Jack Soble, all of which are documented in a fifty-page FBI report produced in 1949 on Morros — three of which detailed Ives’s interactions with him. Included in it is Morros’s assessment of the artist:
IVES is one hundred percent as left as can be. It looked to me like ZUBILIN [Morros’s Soviet spy-handler] sent him to me like SOBLE sent him to me. He looks like St. Louis or Iowa, but he talks red, his-talk is ultra-red. He looked to me like he was sent-to check on me. I was very uncomfortable and glad to get rid of him. He loves to talk[,] a typical propagandist more than that a typical agitator. If I would be you I wouldn’t trust him. I was scared to death.
Of course, if anyone should not have been trusted, it would have been Boris Morros, first working for the Soviets, then working for the FBI—it being no mean feat to find out where his loyalty lay beyond his own self-interest.
Nonetheless, what Morros told the FBI would have been a problem for Ives. Whether this tied in with his decision in 1952 to cooperate with Congress, while a provocative notion, is one that cannot go beyond speculation. However, the very existence of such information in his file, indeed the existence of the file at all, is evidence of forces operating in the background, aimed not only at Burl Ives, but at the larger community of left-wing folk singers. In that regard it is exemplary of the unwanted attentions and measures leveled against these artists as part of the larger effort to nullify US Communism in the last half of the twentieth century.
Folk Singers & Communists
In the decade of the 1930s and 1940s there arose a movement that tapped the rich vein of American folk music and would forever transform the US cultural landscape. At its core was a group of folk music enthusiasts, many with deep and abiding ties to the Communist Party USA—whether as members or so-called “fellow-travelers.” These were artists such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Josh White, Sis Cunningham, Ronnie Gilbert, Bess Lomax, Cisco Houston, and Alan Lomax. Their association with the Party was neither accidental nor capricious; it was rather a conscious choice borne of what these artists saw as the aching grievances of depression-era US society. This association in turn was the impetus and driving catalyst for their targeting by hard-right forces in Congress, right-wing organizations, and the FBI.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA)
The Communist Party USA formed in the United States in 1919 and spent its early years on the political fringes—though it was still nonetheless aggressively targeted by the US Justice Department and Bureau of Investigation, which in time became the FBI. Its membership, large for such a group by today’s standards, was tiny relative to the US population as a whole, fluctuating from a low of 8,000 to a high of 25,000 over its first fifteen years.
The crisis that capitalism confronted in the decade of the 1930s, and the fact that the Soviet Union appeared immune to the vagaries of a market economy—with its homelessness, unemployment, and inflation—established it and the communist ideology at its core as an alternative model. Along with this, amid the onset of the Great Depression and Hitler’s rise in Germany, the Party abandoned the ultra-left positions dictated by the COMINTERN in the late 1920s early 1930s for a more anti-fascist/pro-democratic emphasis. The Party would in turn grow exponentially through implementation of this Popular Front strategy. In particular, Party leader Earl Browder led the group in implementing the concept of “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” This slogan and the politics undergirding it was more social democracy than revolutionary communism. As a result, it created a big tent to which the Party was able to draw in thousands of adherents and supporters, as well as the ability to work with forces more in the mainstream of US politics.
The Party’s largest growth, however, would come about during the US’s participation in World War II where it achieved an estimated membership of 80,000, which included 15,000 communists in the US armed forces. That presence was facilitated by the alliance of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which garnered it a certain legitimacy, if not respect. This was a short-lived circumstance.
The ruling authorities in the US always had limited tolerance for organized communism—and its plans to suppress it never disappeared. As the US ascended to the position of the preeminent global power in the wake of the war, it confronted the need to check a newly empowered USSR. Any limited tolerance it afforded the communists in turn disappeared.
Beginning in 1947 and continuing into the ensuing decade, a multi-faceted campaign was implemented which criminalized communism organizationally, and excoriated it ideologically. In turn anyone associated with it was driven from governmental, social, and cultural institutions. This Second Red Scare—following on the initial Red Scare in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—was an anti-communist societal initiative of monumental proportions. There were trials, imprisonments, well-formulated plans for roundups, and even executions. Communists and anyone with the most tangential association with the Communist Party—who did not forcefully and publicly renounce such associations—were a potential target.
The Rise of the FBI
All this coincided with a shift in the United States’ global position from one of an ascendant power to the preeminent one. One aspect of this shift was the qualitative expansion
of a sprawling secret police apparatus which would come to include the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI would extend its reach and legal mandate, transforming it into a pillar of the US internal security apparatus.
To get a sense of the scale involved, in 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover took charge of the agency, there were 650 employees, of whom 441 were professional agents. In his first five years in charge he winnowed that number down—as part of a reorganization and redirection—to 339 Special Agents out of the total 600 employees. Over the next two decades however, the agency grew dramatically. By 1940 there were 2,400 agents and support staff. By the height of World War II, the Bureau had swollen to 13,000 employees.
The Bureau & the Artists
The expansion of the FBI in turn led to a greater investigative reach. The chief target in this period—and one which remained so—was the Communist Party. It was not, however, only the Party that drew FBI concern, but anyone seen to be actively working with it, among those being a certain kind of artist. In particular the Bureau was concerned about artists who were disenchanted by the Depression, living amid its poverty, inequality, and injustice, and who sought to use music to give voice to and stand with the impoverished, oppressed, and unorganized.
For the FBI if an artist joined the Party, wrote in its newspaper, played at a Party function, or performed or befriended those who did, it led to the the opening of an FBI file. These files were not neutral objects, but actionable ones. At minimum they embodied aggressive surveillance or the intrusion into personal lives. More the case, most of the files had the aim of categorizing their subjects as a Security Index candidate, to be detained in the event of a national emergency. Once such files were created, they existed in perpetuity. The FBI would continue to monitor the subject, only ending an active investigation at such time as they deemed the individual’s sympathy to the politics of the Party was no longer an issue; usually involving a public break with communism or if the person died, though even then the files were kept, to be referenced as needed.
One gets a sense of the unforgiving nature of this in the case of Woody Guthrie, as can be seen in the following report outlining his diagnosis with Huntington’s chorea:
The subject is suffering from Huntington’s chorea, a chronic neurological condition with occasional psychotic manifestations. It is a deteriorating disease with no known cure and is eventually fatal. A victim of this disease can live from five to twenty years and most patients have succumbed by the time they are fifty-five to sixty years old. It is noted that the subject is fourty-four years old.
The agent writing this report, noting the direness of the prognosis, and citing the “lack of reliable firsthand information reflecting CP membership in the last five years,” suggested “subject’s SI [Security Index] card be cancelled.” Guthrie’s condition being what it was, he seemed no longer in need of such a classification. That recommendation, delivered in June 1955, was not, however, the end of things. Guthrie’s New York FBI file, released in 2018, makes clear that the Bureau maintained him on their Communist Index (an auxiliary to the Security Index) and later moved to add him to their “Reserve Index.” Guthrie, in other words, remained an active candidate for detention as a communist, despite being afflicted with a fatal neurological disease.
The way the government acted in regard to Guthrie, as extreme as it was, was not exceptional. Their actions toward other folk singers, whether through the blacklist, coerced testimony, or ruined careers, were calculating and devoid of human empathy. William Sullivan, who headed the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations in the 1960s, speaking with extraordinary candor, gave voice to the Bureau’s outlook, “[W]hat the hell do people think an intelligence operation is about. Do they think it’s all milk and honey? It’s a rough, tough business.” Understanding that goes a long way to explaining the ruthlessness driving such work.
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