Examines The Many Mistakes In The Fbi File On Irving Howe
Rodden, John
THE FEDERAL Bureau of Investigation file on Irving Howe (né Horenstein) discloses that the Bureau followed his activities closely for more than eight years. It searched his records extensively,...
...It observes that the middle name Arthur is added as shown in the birth records of the subject's children...
...Many of Howe's critics have argued that his 1954 essay "This Age of Conformity" reflected his hypersensitivity regarding First Amendment freedoms...
...95-96...
...His lectures and seminars were attended by Bureau agents or by informants to the FBI, his mail was checked repeatedly, and his personal information (physical characteristics, children, residence, phone numbers, car model) was monitored.' Despite this extensive and intrusive surveillance of his private life, Howe never engaged in McCarthy-baiting...
...Even if internal discussions on the Dissent editorial board considered abandoning a formal commitment to "socialism," Howe proudly and publicly referred to himself as a "socialist" throughout the 1950s—and well after...
...THE BUREAU maintained an active file on Howe during 1951-1959, including a security index on him in the Boston division...
...Howe further stated that, in spite of its ideals and some of the fanatics [who] are members ' 9 Critics of the Smith Act argued that it was an attack on the First Amendment right to free speech, but in June 1951 the act was upheld 6-2 by the Supreme Court...
...Max Shachtman and Leon Trotsky had a parting of the political ways when Trotsky advocated unconditional support of the Soviet Union and Shachtman advocated neutrality...
...Nor was this the Bureau's only important oversight about Howe's political activities at this time...
...26 See Bulik, p. 74...
...socialism must be democratic and welcome some degree of small in25 These concerns were surely heightened by the unrest in Eastern Europe after the failed Hungarian revolution in October 1956...
...Despite several background checks on Howe's agitprop activities in the 1940s, the FBI remained unaware that, not long after entering the army, Howe resurfaced in both Labor Action and New International under the pseudonym "R...
...It also shows that the FBI gained access to prominent scholars familiar with Howe's intellectual life and reference groups...
...Baker was in the university audience when Howe lectured on the theme of "Politics and the Novel" at the Christian Gauss seminar in the fall of 1952.' 5 Baker was forty-three years old and had just published Hemingway: The Writer as Artist...
...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 79 ARCHIVE biographical background for his repeated castigation of McCarthyism in the 1950s: it shows that Howe himself was being "tailed...
...But Black's dissenting opinion did little to slow the federal government's dragnet...
...Baker reportedly told the FBI that he knew "so little about the subject [that] he was in no position to provide any recommendations...
...Nor did the FBI apparently know that Howe wrote under the name "Theodore Dryden" in 1947-1948 for Dwight Macdonald's radical magazine, politics...
...The following are individuals or organizations with whom the subject received correspondence during this period: Dissent, Perspectives, [Stanley] Plastrik, Partisan Review...
...His last wartime article appeared in October 1943...
...The Newark bureau [was contacted] for marriage records and for activities in Princeton, including divorce records, and the New York and Boston bureaus [were also involved...
...2' The three lectures were delivered to the University of Chicago Politics Club (October 14, 1949, on "The Need For a Worker's Party"), to the Socialist Youth League (August 13, 1949, on "Bureaucracy in Trade Unions"), and to the ISL (September 23, 1949, on "Bureaucracy and Democracy in the Labor Movement...
...ARCHIVE dependent business...
...82 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 Boston FBI office was following his activities...
...In 1956, the Supreme Court had ruled on a California case, saying that in order to convict, "clear and present danger" must be shown...
...By 1958, a half-dozen Dissent groups in various cities (among them New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles) were meeting regularly to discuss public issues...
...Howe, during his talk, referred to Dissent magazine and its program and stated that the magazine staff had considered dropping the word 'social' or 'socialist' from its program, but had finally decided not to make any change...
...Much of the file also covers Howe's statements in public lectures on the Soviet Union and on the changing nature of Stalinism during the 1950s...
...On May 19, 1955, the Boston office decided to cancel the security index...
...Howe maintained that Draper and the ISL were living in grandiose denial about the reality of a socialist "movement," as well as about their influence beyond the suffocating "we" of their sectarian circle...
...Some members followed Shachtman and joined the ISL, which became known as the Shachtmanites and whose membership in 1943 was approximately five hundred...
...socialism...
...They were not even charged with saying or writing anything designed to overthrow the government, The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date...
...Like the Detroit FBI, the Boston agents were apparently concerned that Dissent's public forums might lead to a socialist mass movement...
...Federal prosecutors used it to put on trial native-born political radicals suspected of seeking to subvert American institutions and professions...
...The comment is quoted from Sachar's memoirs...
...19 The Boston agents continue: Subject described himself as a "Socialist" and a lifelong "anti-Stalinist...
...Surveillance of Howe intensified in 1954, perhaps because Brandeis was known as a home for numerous intellectual radicals and Marxists (and ex-Marxists...
...22 Detroit agents attended at least three of Howe's Dissent talks during 1956-1958...
...2 ' Howe's lecture, "A Crisis in the Communist World" (on November 16, 1957 at the YWCA in Detroit), was also monitored...
...Howe was already at odds with the ISL because of its failure to support the Marshall Plan and to align itself with the Democratic West against Stalinism...
...Labor Action was also specifically cited in McGrath's letter...
...He did not equate McCarthyism with the Soviet Gulag...
...It runs from February 27, 1951, to April 14, 1959, and covers reports from regional FBI bureaus in New York City, Albany, Newark, St...
...It is, therefore, recommended that he be removed from the Security Index...
...Another Boston memo added: "Interview with Irving Horenstein ok'd, so long as it must be conducted in a particularly circumspect manner, so that no embarrassment to the Bureau will result...
...9 But the specific occasion for the FBI file on Howe was the passage of the Smith Act in 1948, which justified scrutiny for national security reasons of all members of "basic revolutionary groups" committed to "the violent overthrow" of the U.S...
...Howe's treatment by the Bureau may not be a case study in political repression, but Americans today must remain vigilant about political stupidities like this one...
...Because considerable agent time would be necessary to cover these leads, the New York office will not cover the leads as set out...
...A check of this record reflected that this was not one of the subject's children...
...Reports continued to be placed in his file on his lectures to university audiences and to political clubs, and even on his "luggage lost in France" during a trip to Europe in 1958...
...The April 1955 file also includes Howe's resignation letter to the ISL, a log of his contributions to the New International between 1946 and 1952, and a summary of three of his fall 1949 public lectures, which reflected the themes of his book The U.A.W...
...But the reduced scope permitted to the FBI by judicial decisions following the discrediting of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts also limited its pursuit of young ex-Trotskyists like Howe...
...Although Howe was never again confronted directly, the FBI kept watch on him for five more years...
...but they do not, because they cannot, talk endlessly in public about the outrage of terror...
...His biographer, Edward Alexander, refers to Howe's "compulsive...
...SEVERAL REGIONAL bureaus intermittently followed Howe's activities during the late 1950s, as we have seen...
...84 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 tipped off other regional bureaus about Howe's whereabouts and coordinated surveillance with them...
...14 A colleague of hers who described herself as "casually acquainted with Irving Howe" provided Newark agents of the Bureau with some information in October 1953 about Howe's status as a full-time independent writer...
...governmenti° In a letter to the Loyalty Review Board (September Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York, 1982), p. 223...
...No mention is made in Howe's file of the ISL motion prohibiting its members from contributing articles to Dissent unless they received special dispensation...
...They condemned the Second World War as a battle among capitalist-imperialist powers, by which they meant to include the "state capitalism" of the Stalinist USSR...
...Quoted in Alexander, p. 90...
...These critics imply that Howe harbored excessive and even irrational fears about government infringement on American civil liberties and about encroachments on personal privacy...
...Nonetheless, the Boston office still conducted occasional spot checks of Howe...
...On the Dissent forums, see Lou Anne Bulik, Mass Culture Criticism and Dissent (New York, 1993), p. 74...
...The Newark Bureau report is dated September 22, 1952...
...Although some individuals in America could still be called "socialists," Howe said, "We have no political significance, whatsoever...
...The Russian birth might have indicated to the FBI a possible sympathy with communism...
...When they approached him as he entered his car on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the agents were impressed by his "friendly and cordial manner," though they urged that a security index file be opened on him for longterm surveillance...
...22 This information is in the March 31, 1959, dossier compiled by the Boston office, which also included the editorial statement of purpose from the opening issue of Dissent...
...A revealing (though perhaps ' The ISL split off from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940, during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact...
...8o n DISSENT / Fall 2002 a reign of terror," he writes, "people turn silent, fear a knock on the door at 4 in the morning, flee in all directions...
...24 As we have observed, Boston agents also 24 Another FBI memo hilariously refers to "Suitable, telephonic pretext, Brandeis University," a good example of the jargon that the FBI used to make a phone call check...
...Indeed, the March Detroit file is a twenty-twopage report, including a nine-page appendix on Howe's memberships in various socialist organizations...
...4 Howe's FBI file also furnishes a valuable One FBI entry begins: "Irving Horenstein was the true name of one Irving Howe...
...It was the Boston FBI that tracked "subject Horenstein" for an interview in August 1954, near the Harvard Campus.' 8 The report of the FBI interview opens as follows: The Boston office interviewed subject Horenstein without prior notice at 2:00 p.m., August 6, 1954 by two Special Agents, on Boylston Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...His file was first declassified in August 1985, with additional material declassified in September 1997...
...Louis, Miami, Boston, and Detroit.' Most of these reports address Howe's activities in the ISL and his membership in Trotskyist organizations in the 1940s and 1950s...
...See the Boston FBI report of September 15, 1954 for the latter error...
...The highlight of the FBI file on Howe (a name that the Bureau persisted in treating as his "alias" although Howe had legally changed it in 1948) 3 is the hour-long interview that two agents sprung on him in August 1954...
...citizen in 1922, according to the records furnished by CCNY...
...1 " Formally known as the Alien Registration Act, the Smith Act made it illegal to conspire against the government...
...Such information both puts in context his radical critique of U.S...
...In a dissenting opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "These petitioners were not charged with an attempt to overthrow the government...
...founding of Dissent in January 1954—or indeed how total the rupture was between Howe and the ISL...
...Another informant was Carlos Baker, the distinguished Hemingway scholar, who taught at Princeton University...
...In See Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, Chapter Five, "The Fifties: Age of Conformity, Age of Dissent...
...Howe's ethnic background may have been a factor—the Bureau pointedly noted that "his father, David [Horenstein] , was born in Russia and was naturalized as a U.S...
...Typical of the FBI's misleading emphasis in its intelligence-gathering on Howe is its close coverage of the circumstances of his departure from the ISL in October 1952...
...The New York bureau checked under the name Horenstein for the boys' names...
...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 83 ARCHIVE of various socialists' organizations, there is no real socialist movement...
...The security flash note is also to be removed...
...The Politics Club at the University of Chicago was a Trotskyist group and had been reactivated by the Chicago Young Socialist League in the fall of 1957...
...20 The report concluded: In view of the subject's past activities and attitude at the time of interview and his denial of membership in the Socialist Workers' Party, it is believed that he should be included in the security index...
...An Albany bureau report (31 March 1955) noted that "a check of birth records, from 1941 to date, under the name Horenstein reflected only one male born during that period with this name...
...He did not return to the pages of Labor Action until February 11, 1946, usually thereafter writing as Irving Howe...
...One report from spring 1954 reported on surveillance of his home in nearby Wellesley: "From January 16 to February 13, 1954, a mail cover was maintained on the residence of the subject at 87 Parker Road...
...The main victims were left-wing trade unionists...
...25 (A 1959 forum that featured Erich Fromm, a Dissent editorial board member, drew seven hundred people...
...indictment of liberals who fail to take seriously the threat to civil liberties...
...For instance, his file reports a "pretext telephone call to Brandeis University on 10/30/58, in the guise of an associate attempting to locate subject...
...The report is dated August 26, 1954, and the security index card was prepared that day...
...Howe had lectured at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria that summer...
...He stated he would be happy to sit in his own car and discuss ideologies...
...However, it sought to justify its expenditure of resources, noting yet again that "the subject registered with the Worker's Party in June/July, 1946 at which time he indicated he had been a member of the Worker's Party since 1940...
...Baker was also well acquainted with the social milieu of the Partisan Review intellectuals—a world Howe had just entered...
...Although the FBI file contains two copies of Howe's three-page resignation letter, Bureau informants in 1954 seem uninformed about the " Alexander, p. 19...
...By this time, the FBI had in effect acknowledged that Howe was no "security risk...
...The four-page report closes: "While the subject has been a member of a basic revolutionary group within the past five years, it is noted that on October 12, 1952, subject directed a letter to the ISL in which he stated he was formally resigning from the ISL, further it is noted that subject has stated that in the event of hostilities with the Soviet Union, the ISL should support the United States...
...Howe concluded with a plea for studied regroupment of socialist elements...
...In A Margin of Hope, Howe grants that the McCarthy years were no "reign of terror...
...The file continues: Howe claims that socialism could meet all the problems that besetted [sic] in our country if trends were to continue unchanged...
...The American embassy wrote on November 19,1957, to the director of the FBI that the Paris police had discovered a suitcase containing male and female clothing, and that the owner of the suitcase was Howe...
...Another report notes: "Birth records were also searched in New York for the subject's two male children [sic...
...26 For instance, the Boston office reported on "Irving Horenstein" at a Dissent forum on "The Revolt in East Europe" (December 1, 1956) at Adelphi Hall in New York and a forum in Boston (January 30, 1957) that a lieutenant of the Massachusetts State Police attended...
...He would remain at Brandeis throughout the period of his FBI file...
...The Smith Act accused members of "revolutionary organizations" of conspiring to teach or advocate the overthrow of the government by force or violence...
...It is to be noted that at no time during the course of the interview was the subject hostile, and throughout the interview he displayed a friendly and cordial manner...
...Howe's children are Nicholas and Nina...
...Brandeis president Abram Sachar apparently regarded Howe's appointment in 1953—at least in hindsight—as "a major coup...
...The file repeatedly notes that "Horenstein is his true surname" and refers to the subject's "alias" as "Irving Howe...
...it demonstrated a skewed understanding of the balance among national security, social order, and personal liberty...
...13 Nonetheless, the Bureau worried in the early 1950s that socialists such as Howe might build a movement or gain political significance...
...According to the report of the New York talk, which dealt with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956, Howe "definitely was anti-Communist in his analysis and repeatedly criticized the ruthless attacks by the Russian troops...
...But the FBI file makes clear that the so-called compulsiveness was an appropriate vigilance in his own case.' Indeed, Howe's FBI file proves that the concerns he voiced in Dissent about the sorry state of American civic life were well founded.' His wife was subject to investigation during her years as a teacher at Miss Fine's Day School in Princeton...
...17 See Alexander, Chapter Five...
...At this time, Howe was lecturing at Wayne State University...
...Supreme Court had recently defined the Smith Act more narrowly...
...9 A 1955 file notes: "New York office reports on May 11, 1955, [based] on records of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from the Bronx: Irving Howe's marriage at the age of 20, his parents both listed as having been born in Russia...
...This informant was doubtless confusing "socialist" and "Trotskyist," misunderstanding that Howe was referring to his years of membership in the ISL...
...Its stress was on the condition of civil liberties in America...
...That file cornprises twenty-six pages, including birth records, educational background, marital status, military service record, employment record, residences, political activities, speeches and writings, and even speeding tickets in Princeton and nearby Cranbury, New Jersey ("ten dollars paid on February 8, 1953, seven dollars paid on 3/23/53...
...The FBI's pursuit of Howe was intolerable and unnecessary...
...20 Today, most historians agree that the Smith Act had little to do with a legitimate fear that "revolutionary organizations" were going to overthrow the United States...
...The agent adds: "But he did notice the subject has a very bright mind, a nervous disposition, and an immature outlook on life:16 Although Baker evidently told FBI agents nothing of importance, their conversation with him indicates, at minimum, that he was willing to provide the Bureau with negative impressions of a young man whose background would certainly have been officially suspect...
...unsurprising) feature of the file—which speaks volumes about the standard data-collection methods of secret intelligence agencies—is that no agent ever seems to have read any of Howe's work in order to ascertain his political positions, except for the joint resignation letter that he and Stanley Plastrik submitted to the ISL in 1952, a copy of which was obtained by an informant...
...27 In another Dissent forum covered by the Boston office (report filed on April 4, 1958), Howe reportedly "evidenced considerable dejection over the low level of activity that now characterized U.S...
...This interview forms the centerpiece of the comprehensive file on Howe compiled by the Boston office on April 8, 1955...
...Much of Howe's energy in the late 1950s went into organizing Dissent forums around the country on various political topics, an effort that did not go unnoticed by the FBI...
...Indeed, an important reason for the Bureau's dwindling interest in Howe, along with many other former "revolutionaries," was that the U.S...
...In 1951, Howe and Plastrik tried to persuade the ISL, which sponsored Labar Action, to sponsor also a quarterly journal that would be similar in style and substance to the defunct politics...
...Subject denied membership at any time in the Socialist Workers' Party or any other group or organization which advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence...
...He continued that this was as far as he would go with the interviewing agents and that he had no intention of identifying or "involving" others in view of what he described as the "misuse" of the Smith Act by the Department of Justice and the use of Executive Order 10450 to "blackball radicals and prevent them from earning a livelihood...
...It is interesting that the American embassy chose to contact the FBI in order to get in touch with Howe...
...One report states: "Information was circulated among the Albany bureau for the marriage records of the state of New York, June 15, 1941 and April 12, 1947...
...This report was filed on June 10, 1955...
...Within a few weeks, the 14 Alexander, p. 74...
...Fahan," writing antiwar polemics...
...he left for Stanford in 1961...
...Howe was treated by the FBI as if he were still a member of a "basic revolutionary organization" throughout the 1950s...
...Several FBI regional bureaus received copies of Howe's birth records, marriage records, army records from the Veterans Administration in Boston, fingerprinting and other army records, and even photographs from the City College of New York...
...ARCHIVE Subject was affable...
...16 See Newark report for February 2, 1954...
...Indeed, Howe's marriage records, his birth certificate, his military records were all recorded...
...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 81 ARCHIVE ing in a small house financed by a GI loan...
...But he was no longer considered a security risk after mid-1955, and little new information appears in his file...
...Most American Trotskyists, including the Schachtmanites—especially after Trotsky's assassination in 1940—took a strong antiwar position...
...Howe replied to Draper in the March 15 issue of Labor Action: "I know this way of thinking, having suffered from it myself for a good many years...
...As he saw them, there would probably result in our country a low-charged autocracy, somewhere between freedom and totalitarianism...
...23 ) One informant at a Detroit talk reported that the "principal subject of Howe's talk was how sorry he was to have ever considered himself as a `socialist' and that if he had to do it over again, he would not associate himself with such a movement because he felt that it would never amount to much more than just a movement...
...and Walter Reuther and coincided with its publication...
...In a scathing attack on the inaugural issue of Dissent, Hal Draper wrote in Labor Action (February 22, 1954) that Howe's break with the ISL and his founding of Dissent signify that "those who sympathize with his 'ethos' must likewise abandon any organized socialist movement, which is to be replaced by such a center for thinkers as his magazine seeks to make itself...
...2 ' Howe taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during part of his one-year leave of absence from Brandeis in 1958-1959...
...HOWE'S UNIVERSITY activities in the 1950s—at Princeton, Brandeis, and the University of Michigan—were also monitored periodically by regional FBI offices...
...The ISL refused...
...Howe stated that in central planning even of the socialist variety, there was a danger that the concentration of powerful planning purposes would destroy freedom and to be successful and accepted, U.S...
...And such wasteful, pointless surveillance is still what anyone who "dissents" can expect—today, as yesterday...
...the names of other informants or agents are blacked out...
...His second wife, Thalia (Phillies), taught Greek and Latin at Miss Fine's, a private day school in Princeton...
...These developments rendered a third-rank former "revolutionary" from a negligible sect of little interest...
...6 Howe's statement of purpose for Dissent in its opening issue (January 1954) was titled "Does it Hurt When You Laugh...
...JOHN RODDEN has edited Lionel Trilling and the Critics and The Worlds of Irving Howe (forthcoming from Nebraska University Press...
...On June 2, Boston agents wrote: "Asked New York office to identify and check the references of some 15 correspondents of the subject...
...It searched his records extensively, interviewed numerous neighbors and colleagues to uncover information about his activities, and pursued him as a national security risk long after he had resigned from the Independent Socialist League (ISL), a tiny, New York-based, Trotskyist sect.' The file contains 148 pages15 of them partially or wholly blacked out...
...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 85...
...When the FBI began its file on him in February 1951, Howe was living in Princeton, residThe Draper-Howe exchange is discussed in Alexander, pp...
...A specialist in British and American literature who had been teaching since 1937 at Princeton, Baker was a rising academic star, soon to be appointed department chairman...
...On April 14, 1959, the Detroit office closed Howe's file, and other regional offices did likewise...
...The purpose was to curtail opposition to the cold war, whether that opposition came from organized labor, the civil rights movement, or the peace movement...
...In 1957, the Supreme Court sharply curbed the application of the Smith Act, allowing it to pertain only to people who engaged in specific insurrectionist activities or incited others to do so...
...He adds: "When we printed violent denunciations of McCarthy in Dissent during these years nothing happened to us . . . we had no sense we were taking any great risks in attacking McCarthy...
...Adopted in 1940, it was first used against American leftists in 1949, when eleven top leaders of the Communist Party's national organization, including Party chairman Gus Hall, were indicted in New York for "un-American" activities...
...s Several FBI memos repeated the caution voiced by one Bureau official: "This investigation must be conducted in accordance with the provisions set forth in the manual of instructions relating to security-type investigations at institutions of learning...
...policies and undermines part of the ad hominem neoconservative attack on his writings during the McCarthy period...
...In fall 1953, Howe joined the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts...
...Apparently the Bureau missed Howe's published exchange with the ISL two years later—his last contribution to Labor Action...
...Moreover, Howe was soon to become a well-known campus presence at Brandeis because of his frequent participation in public debates, including faceoffs with such figures as Herbert Marcuse, the Stalinist novelist Howard Fast, and Oscar Handlin (who debated Howe on Israel's capture and planned trial of Adolf Eichmann...
...Nor, indeed, that "subject Horenstein" was not "the father of two boys...
...ARCHIVE 29, 1949)—which appears in Howe's file— Attorney General J. Howard McGrath described the ISL as a "basic revolutionary group," the successor to the revolutionary Worker's Party...
...Doubtless, word was also spreading of Howe's growing stature and controversial positions as a New York intellectual...
...2 ' Dissent launched its first forum in November 1954 in New York City...
...Howe had belonged to the Worker's Party since 1940 (he was a member of the outgoing national steering committee of the party in 1946), and he had also served as editor of the weekly newspaper Labor Action, the official organ of both the Worker's Party and the ISL...
...The Detroit FBI checked up on him in Ann Arbor and also noted that he was "employed at Wayne State University in the English department on a part-time basis...
...The Detroit file for March 31,1959, notes that, on October 18, 1958, Howe "directed a postcard to Labor Action," requesting a change of address for his subscription...
...Baker's name evidently appears in Howe's file because he died in 1987...
Vol. 49 • September 2002 • No. 4
