New York at War (45 page)

The Cold War had set New Yorker against New Yorker well before the Russians tested their first atom bomb in 1949. By 1946, the year Winston Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain,” mistrust was beginning to freeze what only a year before had been a warm outpouring of admiration for the Red Army and its role in vanquishing Nazism. In June 1947, a grand jury sitting in the federal courthouse on Foley Square in lower Manhattan began a year of work to determine whether the Communist Party of the USA was a conspiratorial organization dedicated to overthrowing the US government.

Undaunted by the rising tide of anti-“red” sentiment and policy, twenty thousand New York Communists gathered on May 1, 1948, to parade down Broadway to Union Square in their annual May Day parade. On a midtown block, the novelist Howard Fast stood with “teachers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, actors, writers, editors, publishers—an unbelievable crowd,” stretching from Eighth Avenue to Broadway, waiting their turn to join the procession. Fast watched for at least half an hour as “each block, starting at the most uptown block, had been emptying in turn, moving out into the avenue, trade union groups carrying their colorful old banners.” For many, faith in a progressive and harmonious postwar world, a world of industrial unionism, racial justice, and friendship between the United States and the USSR, remained fervent. Most May Day participants counted on the peculiar good-humored tolerance that characterized daily life in the city that was headquarters to the American left. When Freedom House, a conservative group, challenged the party’s legal parade permit as “an insult to America,” Fast observed “a large, wise old Polish cop” explaining the situation to the Freedom House emissary: “‘Look . . . on May Day, the left wing of labor marches. On Labor Day, the right wing of labor marches. Why do you want to make trouble?’”
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Suddenly, at noon, with Fast’s throng still waiting their turn to parade, the doors of a Catholic parochial school on the block swung open, and as Fast later recalled, “about a hundred screaming, cursing, teenage students, armed with everything from brass knuckles to pens, poured into the middle of our huge crowd, their fists flying, shouting their war cry: ‘Kill a commie for Christ!’” Chaos ensued as police poured in to separate the two groups and to order Fast and his comrades to start marching. The parade proceeded more or less as planned, although two union functionaries were briefly jailed for resisting arrest, and Fast himself narrowly escaped arrest for arguing with the police. “There’s always a next time,” one policeman told him.

The remark proved prescient. In July, the federal grand jury in Foley Square would indict twelve members of the Communist Party’s national board for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the US government. Two years later, Fast himself would spend three months in federal prison for refusing to hand over papers of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, an identified “Communist front” group, to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “Don’t you see how fast things are changing?” his wife, Bette, had warned him before the parade.
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With the onset of the Cold War, New York’s Communists felt the full brunt of what would eventually be labeled McCarthyism. Many New Yorkers, and not just high school rowdies, took part eagerly. Local Republicans charged that President Harry Truman was “soft” on Communism; Tammany Democrats responded by lauding Truman’s 1947 Loyalty Program and the president’s full cooperation with FBI investigations of subversives. The wartime truce between the city’s Socialists and Communists, common foes of Nazism, unraveled as Socialists and others purged known Communists from the governing boards of local labor unions. A 1949 New York State law led to the interrogation and dismissal of over four hundred of the city’s public school and college teachers as suspected Communists. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Catholic War Veterans, and American Jewish League Against Communism picketed performances by “red” actors.

The new Red Scare, like that of 1919, reached beyond the limits of the Communist Party to intimidate and harass countless liberals, civil libertarians, pacifists, non-Communist leftists, and ex-Communists whose real “crime” was commitment to progressive causes that could be denounced as subversive and pro-Soviet. More than any other city in the country, New York remained the hub for a wide spectrum of liberal and leftist organizations. But non-Communist admirers of the Soviet Union and enthusiasts for racial integration, labor unionism, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and international disarmament also aroused the ire of many New Yorkers, just as surely as they raised the hackles of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Many Americans believed that, like Hollywood, New York City—with its domination of the performing arts, journalism, publishing, and radio and television broadcasting—was a potential threat to national security, a Trojan horse for seducing and lulling the nation’s unsuspecting millions with subtle, red messages. As Hoover put it in 1947, leftist subversives were “termites gnawing at the very foundation of American society,” and New York was a city perceived as being particularly infested. From an office on West Forty-Second Street in 1950, an anti-Communist organization called the American Business Consultants issued
Red Channels
, a pamphlet listing 151 mostly New York–and Hollywood-based performers, writers, and directors allegedly responsible for “Communist influence in radio and television.” AWARE, Inc., an outgrowth of the American Business Consultants, advised networks, sponsors, theaters, and schools to drop tainted employees, who then endured a shadowy blacklist that few employers admitted existed. The climate of fear, of having to watch what one said and to wonder who might be an informer, seeped in everywhere. Greenwich Villager Morris Jaffe was not the only New Yorker who wrapped books about Marxism in brown paper to conceal their titles from prying eyes—this on the bookshelf in his own apartment.
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New Yorkers had more to fear than being blacklisted. To win the Cold War, the government took measures that exceeded the bounds of all but the most paranoid imaginations, using New Yorkers and other Americans as guinea pigs. During the early 1950s, the CIA and military intelligence may have sprayed unknowing New York subway riders with aerosol LSD, a drug being tested as a possible “truth serum” for extracting secrets from Soviet spies; other “vulnerability tests,” some performed as late as 1966, entailed releasing airborne bacteria in subway stations to gauge the viability of biological warfare. Such experiments remained top secret until congressional investigations unearthed them during the 1970s.
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With the start of the Korean War in 1950, and with thousands of young New Yorkers filing through the army’s Induction Station at 39 Whitehall Street and the navy and marine corps recruiting offices at 346 Broadway on their way to basic training and shipment across the Pacific, dissent seemed doubly unpatriotic to many in the city. Those who stayed home donated blood and sent packages to the troops. For most New Yorkers, the Korean War differed in essential ways from World War II. Where the earlier war had rescued the economy, New York’s prosperous manufacturing base now sailed along on domestic consumption. True, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s civilian workforce jumped from 9,600 to 20,000 during the Korean War; jobs also opened up in other shipyards around the harbor and on the twenty piers shipping military cargo. In the nearby suburbs, Nassau County’s aviation factories churned out F-84 jets that dropped bombs and napalm on the enemy and F-9 Cougars that outshot Soviet-built MIGs over Korea. At least 966 young New Yorkers would lose their lives fighting Communists in the fields and mountains of Korea or in the skies above it. Others came back with wounds; Norman Dworkowitz, who had scanned the skies of Brooklyn for Luftwaffe bombers as a young teenager, returned home from a Korean trench with a fragment of grenade shrapnel lodged in his face and a Purple Heart. Yet, except for those anxiously awaiting the return of loved ones serving overseas, the contained scale of the war compared to the all-out effort of the early 1940s made the new conflict seem more remote. At the same time, the queasy possibility that the war might escalate into a direct confrontation with Red China, and into a nuclear World War III, infused the early Operation Alert drills—and the campaign against domestic Communists—with their own particular tensions.
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For all the damage that the anti-Communist witch hunt did to individual lives and to freedom of thought and expression, the city
was
a base for clandestine Soviet activities. Even before World War II or the Cold War, the city’s centrality, its leftist sympathies, and the anonymity it afforded made New York fertile turf for Soviet moles—or worse. In the late thirties, as Stalin’s purges in Russia sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, were active in New York. After Walter Krivitsky, Red Army chief of intelligence for Western Europe, defected to New York in 1938, he charged that “Red Judases”—Soviet assassins or kidnappers—were trailing him around the city. Krivitsky died in a Washington hotel room in 1941, an apparent suicide, but friends persisted in raising questions about his death. Even more alarming was the fate of Juliet Poyntz, a founding member of the American Communist Party who had also become alienated from Stalin. Poyntz disappeared into thin air after leaving her West Fifty-Seventh Street apartment in June 1937. She was never heard from again. Anti-Soviet observers—including the anarchist Carlo Tresca, who had rallied fellow leftists against Fascism in the 1930s—charged that the Kremlin was sending forth its Great Purge to snatch victims from the very streets of Manhattan.
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But it was as a meeting place and recruiting ground for spies that New York would play its most important role for the Soviet Union. By 1932, Max Bedacht, a leading figure at Communist Party headquarters in New York, was acting as liaison between the OGPU, Stalin’s intelligence service, and the party’s “underground” in the United States. In an apartment tucked away on Gay Street in Greenwich Village, Aleksandr Ulanovsky, an officer of the Red Army’s military intelligence division, deciphered instructions from the Comintern by dipping letters written in invisible ink into a solution of potassium crystals. Native-born New Yorkers also took part. In 1934, Whittaker Chambers, former editor of the party magazine
New Masses
, became a courier shuttling regularly between Washington and Manhattan, driving back to the city with microfilm and stolen documents collected by secret Communists working in the State Department and other federal agencies.
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Chambers handed over the materials to his Soviet handlers, meeting with Boris Bykov and other operatives at secluded spots in Prospect Park and elsewhere in Brooklyn, although as one Russian agent later recalled, the cloak and dagger precautions were unnecessary: “If you wore a sign saying, ‘I am a spy,’ you might still not get arrested.” The most useful information was gathered in the nation’s capital, but New York—where functionaries at Communist Party headquarters on East Twelfth Street cooperated with agents posted to the Soviet consulate on East Sixty-First Street—was the natural place for rendezvous, from which stolen secrets could be relayed to Moscow via ocean liner or secret cable transmission.
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World War II amplified the city’s value to Soviet spies. Indeed, New York was a useful base for various Allied spy services during the war; from offices in Rockefeller Center, members of British Security Coordination, briefly including a young naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, provided pro-Allied and anti-Axis propaganda to influential newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell well before the attack on Pearl Harbor lured America into the war. They also broke into the Japanese consul general’s office a few floors below theirs and made microfilm copies of the secret Japanese diplomatic shortwave radio code. But these British agents generally carried on with the covert support of federal authorities in Washington. Such was not the case for Soviet agents eager to ferret out military secrets from a nation that was ideologically opposed—if temporarily allied—to their own. Security was often lax in the city’s thriving wartime workshops and labs. By 1944, a German refugee physicist named Klaus Fuchs, working for a Manhattan Project affiliate firm in the Woolworth Building on lower Broadway, was meeting with Harry Gold, a Soviet agent, on downtown street corners and passing top secret nuclear research to him. (Fuchs soon moved on to the army’s high-security compound at Los Alamos, New Mexico, from where he continued to feed atomic bomb information to the Russians.)
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Uptown, a New York-born Communist named Julius Rosenberg, working as a US Signal Corps inspector in the Emerson Radio and Phonograph plant on Eighth Avenue, managed in 1944 to smuggle out one of the explosive detonators being manufactured there for wartime antiaircraft use. Rosenberg handed it, wrapped in a gift box, to Soviet agent Alexander Feklisov in an Automat cafeteria near Times Square. Rosenberg became a key figure in a spy network bent on acquiring US military secrets and passing them on to Russian agents. By a stroke of luck, Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, machinist David Greenglass, also a Communist, was assigned to Los Alamos in August 1944. Harry Gold went to New Mexico and returned to New York with Greenglass’s sketch of a component used in the making of the atomic bomb’s detonator. When Greenglass himself arrived back in the city on furlough in 1945, he brought additional information on the detonator and a list of Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos. At least some of the spies, imbued with the conviction that America should share its secrets with its Soviet ally, professed to see no treason in their own actions. “I had no idea about betraying the United States,” David Greenglass later maintained. “All I had in mind was helping a guy that was at war fighting the Nazis.”
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