CANYON CREEK LODGE: 1938
Neuberger, Richard L.
Canyon Creek Lodge: 1938 By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER Seattle, Wash. MIRIAM Rader is not very old. Nine years must go by before she can register to vote. But Miriam has a vague idea what Communism is....
...To sustain Hewitt, Melvin Rader had to be proved guilty of Communism...
...Glimmers of hope had appeared, yet still it was the affidavit of the woman at the lodge against the sworn word of Hewitt, ex-Communist and expert witness, The register would verify or repudiate one of them...
...Melvin Rader, 45, was a tempting target for State Rep...
...He had denounced the Communists for breaking up a Seattle meeting of the Friends' Society at which anti-Communist Bertram D. Wolfe was the speaker...
...But suppose we had not gone to Canyon Creek Lodge that summer...
...Melvin Rader, his dark-haired wife, and their four children had been just another faculty family at the University of Washington until a former Communist named George Hewitt testified before the State Un-American Activities Committee on July 22, 1948...
...For the first time it appeared that Melvin Rader was merely quarry that had been flushed quite by accident...
...Rader, a 45-year-old professor of philosophy, groped back through memory...
...The children could not help...
...A man from New York had just told a committee of the Washington State Legislature that Miriam's father had attended, all the way across the wide continent in 1938, a secret school for Communists...
...Prof...
...The books were Kant's Metaphysic and Kant's Theory of Knowledge...
...But Hewitt could not remain longer to allow sifting of the charges...
...It was at substantially the time he was supposed to be in New York attending the Communist school...
...He was "active in the...
...In others the Communists actually were dominant...
...They had stopped overnight in Arlington on their way to Canyon Creek...
...In fact," added the girl, looking directly at Miriam, "the daughter of one such person, I believe, is in this school...
...He is not bitter...
...What does Melvin Rader think...
...Now began a series of incredible events...
...If Federal men intervened in behalf of Hewitt, they evidently acted without approval of their superiors...
...George Hewitt, the ex-Communist, is in a New York hospital, one side paralyzed by a stroke...
...Lloyd Shorett, prosecutor of King County, filed a perjury charge against Hewitt and asked extradition from New York...
...What if I had never had my eyes tested or checked Kant's Theory of Knowledge from the library...
...Shorett left the prosecutor's office to become a judge and was replaced by Charles O. Carroll, former Ail-American football halfback...
...One or the other would wake at night with thumping heart and try to recollect an act done in the Northwest during the summer of 1938 for which legal proof was available...
...It literally was an instance of accuse and run...
...Some were cancelled...
...The ballot had been cast in person and not in absentia...
...Who wanted a Communist on the program...
...Although under fire from academic groups, Dr...
...Already perjury was surmised...
...There it was—Melvin Rader, eyes examined, glasses checked, and the date was Aug...
...Suddenly Rader remembered —everything...
...What if Ed Guthman hadn't helped me track down all these circumstances...
...How, then, could it be a notation of a visit as late as 1940...
...Perhaps some members of the legislative committee suspected that Rader actually had been at Canyon Creek Lodge, near Granite Falls, Wash., and not at the Communist school, near Kingston, N. Y. George Hewitt was surprisingly rushed back to New York a few hours after he had completed his second day of testimony...
...For the Rader family, the long nightmare of doubt and humiliation was at an end...
...The card also carried the Rader's 1938 home address, which they had left in 1939...
...No man who was attending a secret Communist school near Kingston, N. Y., would go to Seattle for an eye examination...
...Vern Countryman of the Yale Law School came west on a Rockefeller grant to study Un-American Activities Committees in operation...
...Tall, stooped, and slightly graying, he satisfies the politician's notion of a typical "per-fesser...
...Suppose we had gone boating on Puget Sound, with no one along to verify the voyage...
...The committee ignored a statement by an owner of the resort that "8-16-40" was the date she had written the Raders, suggesting that they buy property in the area...
...He could clear himself easily...
...What did it reveal...
...Because of his speech impediment, he appears to answer questions hesitantly...
...His patriotism, his career, perhaps even his livelihood, depended upon the answer...
...Originally, Rader believed the legislative committee wanted the facts, no matter whom they cleared or destroyed...
...She had heard her father saying he had been on his vacation at Canyon Creek Lodge at the very time he was supposed to be in the secret Communist school...
...13, 1938...
...Was this why New York had denied extradition...
...They were too young...
...A county commissioner demanded that Carroll resign for not dismissing the perjury charge against Hewitt...
...After all, Hewitt was an important witness in other cases against alleged Communists...
...Rader was falsely accused...
...The invitations dwindled away...
...The new prosecutor also claimed he had been called to the office of the managing editor of the Post-Intelligencer and offered "its editorial support if I would dismiss the Hewitt case...
...Rader remembered triumphantly that her husband had gone to the city in the middle of their vacation to have his eyes tested...
...Countryman told Rader that the investigators said they had no idea where the register was...
...Of course, the Canwell Committee might have looked deeper into Rader's views and opinions...
...To all intent and purposes, the lodge register had disappeared...
...She remembered one of the men running his finger down the page and whispering, "There it is, Rader, '38...
...Ed Guth-man, a reporter with a Purple Heart medal in his bureau drawer and a lot of vitality and ingenuity, was assigned full-time to the story...
...What had he been doing in the summer of 1938...
...All else— his classes, his books, his personal' life—was forgotten as Rader tried to piece together happenings of 10 years earlier...
...Naturally, Miriam couldn't give the legislative committee very much information about that summer at Canyon Creek Lodge, for she then had been barely two years old...
...Could this be by chance or was there a conspiracy afoot to keep Rader pilloried in the eyes of his colleagues and fellow citizens...
...Other avenues of detection had to be followed...
...Guthman went to the County Clerk and learned that Rader had voted in the Washington primary election of Sept...
...Hewitt had blasted a teacher's reputation and standing in the state where the teacher had been brought up...
...More than honor was at stake...
...A librarian whom the Raders nearly hugged with joy and relief produced a withdrawal card showing Rader had checked out books during August and September, 1938...
...Both Shorett and Carroll are said to have been ready to jettison the perjury case if a request to do so came from Attorney General Tom Clark...
...Still the Un-American Activities Committee made no moye toward exoneration...
...Raymond B. Allen, president of the University, was denying reappointment to faculty members he judged guilty of Communist Party membership...
...These were to involve, in the accusations against a relatively obscure college professor, a committee of politicians with high ambitions, Seattle's two powerful daily newspapers, the local prosecutor's office, the Federal Department of Justice, and the president of the University of Washington...
...Hewitt, a witness for the Immigration Service in numerous deportation hearings, told the committee Rader had been one of his students at a Communist Party training school near Kingston, N. Y. The ex-Communist set the time as the summer of 1938...
...Rader and his wife were completely preoccupied with the problem of vindication...
...Damage done the reputation of the innocent would be rectified...
...She understands it is bad and that somehow it is a danger to the country whose flag she salutes each morning in school...
...This was tangible evidence that Hewitt had accused the innocent...
...Did this not prove Melvin Rader had been at the lodge in 1940 instead of 1938...
...Perhaps Hewitt would be arrested for perjury...
...He probably never will answer in Seattle for the perjury case against him...
...The missing register was not produced...
...A powerful newspaper championed his vindication...
...The family continued its stubborn sleuthing...
...Were his accusations against others no better founded than those against Rader...
...He lisps...
...Once he had been bombarded with requests to speak before civic groups in Seattle...
...The Rader's telephone rang with threats and imprecations...
...At last his wife, daubing at reddened eyes with a handkerchief, limply said three words: "Canyon Creek Lodge...
...Perhaps in some measure Rader was fair game...
...Carroll himself charged that the statement of the county commissioner had been prepared by Fred Nien-dorff, a Hearst reporter who allegedly boasted he was the "father of the Canwell committee...
...But from the committee on the case of Melvin Rader—-only silence...
...Miriam sat up tensely when another girl in the class said people could be Communists and nobody know it...
...Canyon Creek Lodge had a receipt for its delivery to committee agents, yet the committee seemed singularly disinclined to reveal the contents of this strategic document...
...II Obviously, the lodge register should tell...
...I consider that Prof...
...In conversations with his faculty colleagues, he had deplored the Russian attack on Finland...
...Canwell was relying heavily on a card unearthed at Canyon Creek Lodge which listed the Rader's names and bore the date "8-16-40...
...New York refused extradition of Hewitt...
...Strange items began to emerge regarding the role of the Post-Intelligencer in this affair...
...Agonizingly, the Raders waited for an announcement of exoneration...
...He peers at the world through fairly strong steel-rimmed glasses...
...He had favored Lend-Lease in 1940, when the Communists were then isolationists, and he had voted for Roosevelt that year...
...Balanced against this setback was the intense interest of the Seattle Times in Rader's case...
...No such request ever was made...
...While the professor watched anxiously, doctor and nurse rummaged through the file...
...A philosopher must have a philosophy even about such incredible things," he explains...
...Of course, Miriam knew this could not be true...
...Albert F. Canwell, Spokane Republican, out to banish Communism and Communists from the campus of a University operated with taxpayers' funds...
...He was stunned to discover that the committee seemed predominantly interested in upholding the ex-Communist Hewitt...
...Because they were rarely borrowed, the cards had stayed in their pockets for a decade...
...And what lay behind more than a year of unjust accusation by a committee of the state government of Washington...
...But some of its people were commencing to suspect that a loyal American citizen had been framed as a Communist...
...This caretaker also recalled driving the Rader family back to Seattle, to an address where they had lived in 1938 but from which they had moved in 1939...
...But investigators for the Canwell Committee already had gone to the lodge and taken the register...
...Even if the girl had not been staring in her direction, Miriam would have realized exactly whom she was talking about...
...Would the eye specialist be able to confirm the visit...
...I'm grateful I didn't read Anthony Adverse," says Rader with a grim smile...
...Rader and his lawyers talked with a caretaker at Canyon Creek Lodge who had helped locate the strategic register for the committee agents...
...Friends of Spanish Democracy and the Washington Commonwealth Federation...
...The documentation was impressive...
...Hewitt claimed to have known Rader intimately at the Communist school, yet he had not been aware that Rader had a slight lisp...
...He talked with the Can-well investigators who had taken the register from Canyon Creek Lodge...
...Fifteen months after Hewitt had placed Rader at the Kingston school for Communists during the summer of 1938, the Times took the evidence to the office of the president of the University of Washington...
...15, 1938...
...Were agents at the bottom level acting entirely on their own...
...Then he and his family had gone to Canyon Creek Lodge in the scenic wilds of the Mount Baker National Forest...
...The demand received nearly as much space on the front page of Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer as had the attack on Pearl Harbor...
...The next day he advised the committee he had taught summer school at the University until July 20, 1938...
...Hewitt's veracity appeared in the clear again...
...He belonged to the League Against War and Fascism...
...The head of his academic department stood by him and cited innumerable instances when Rader's views digressed from the stratified Communist line...
...III And where was the missing register from Canyon Creek Lodge...
...Some of these groups were infiltrated with Communists...
...In a blanket denial of Carroll's contentions, the managing editor of the Post-Intelligencer, Edward T. Stone, made a curious statement: "It was reported to me that the request for dismissal of the Hewitt perjury case had come from agents of the Federal Department of Justice, whose prosecution of a number of important espionage cases was being hampered by the perjury charge hanging over Hewitt...
...As Rader seeks to return to the routine of a career shaken by 15 harrowing months of doubt and uncertainty, Alfred J. Schweppe, past president of the Washington Bar Association, has warned that a "legislative hearing must not be made a secure haven for libel, slander, and perjury...
...At the time Rader was alleged to have been studying Communism in the state of New York, he was borrowing books, receiving optical examinations, and voting in the state of Washington, on the opposite side of the U.S...
...Surely a legislative committee of the great sovereign state of Washington could do no less...
...Although public-spirited attorneys had assisted him for nominal fees, he had spent at least $2,000 attempting to clear himself of Hewitt's accusation...
...More than ever, Rader's future depended on whether or not he could show he had been at Canyon Creek Lodge...
...It was a blind lead, for the hotel had gone out of business...
...He had lost a summer school appointment...
...Canyon Creek Lodge is a comparatively easy drive from Seattle...
...But the emotional scars could be permanent, particularly on the four young Rader children...
...Would I be under a shadow today, a ruined man, my career at an end...
...His dry wit and extensive knowledge made him a popular program feature...
...The Times is a conservative paper, opposed to CVA, opposed to the New Deal and the Fair Deal...
...He could not be proved guilty of Communism if he could demonstrate he had been in the Pacific Northwest during the period Hewitt claimed he was 3,000 miles away at the Communist school near Kingston...
...These facts were blithely passed over by the legislative committee, which continued to withhold the Canyon Creek register of 1938...
...As the investigation proceeded," wrote Guthman in the Seattle Times, "it seemed that the Legislature's Un-American Activities Committee had jumped to a conclusion after an inadequate investigation, or had deliberately withheld vital evidence...
...A decade had elapsed...
...My colleagues on the faculty, my attorneys, the president of the University, one of our city's two newspapers—they justified my faith in democracy...
...Yet he was an expert witness in such hearings or the Canwell Committee would not have brought him 3,000 miles to testify...
...Events in this bizarre story now began to accelerate...
...Rader's embarrassment had gone on for more than a year...
...Rader realizes that not every accused individual has the support he mustered...
...I have examined the evidence assembled by Professor Rader and the Seattle Times," said President Allen, already under fire from liberal sources for being allegedly too hard on Communist teachers...
...What if I hadn't voted in the primary election...
...Was the Immigration Service alarmed that a star witness in many other proceedings had discredited himself...
...Furthermore, Rader is a liberal...
...When he climbed aboard the plane, a deputy prosecutor of King County, Major Herbert H. Davis, was trying desperately to contact him...
Vol. 14 • January 1950 • No. 1
