The insider, p.33
The Insider, page 33
On January 13, two Republican congressmen decried the appointment of such “fellow travelers” as Malcolm Cowley and Joseph Lash, an intimate of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, to government posts. The next day the Chicago Tribune reported on this with the headline “Congress Hears Communist Gets $8,000 U.S. Job.” (Cowley’s salary almost never went unmentioned subsequently; “It Pays to Be a Communist” was the way one newspaper put the matter a week later.) That same day, the Brooklyn Eagle ran an item headed “Rosy Dawn in Washington,” which sneered at “Joe Lash, the pinko who’s made a career of youthfulness right up to middle age” and “Malcolm Cowley, another comrade,” and asked, “And how do you like them apples, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer?”
On January 15, Congressman Martin Dies, the notorious and long-winded chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, took to the floor of the House for a full hour to decry the hiring of government workers with a background of connections with and sympathies toward Communist causes as part of a supposed “fifth column on American soil” seeking to subvert American democracy. After warming up, Dies rounded on the day’s main target:
I regret to say that the flow of Communists and Communist sympathizers into Government positions has not entirely ceased. Only last week the Office of Facts and Figures took on its staff as chief information analyst one Malcolm Cowley, at a salary of $8,000 a year. For at least 10 years Cowley was one of the most ardent Communist intellectuals in the country. The files of our committee show 72 connections of this high-salaried Government employee with the Communist Party and its front organizations.
Dies goes on to cite twenty of those connections, which were essentially accurate. (The one falsehood was that Cowley never was, as Dies claimed, on the staff of The Daily Worker.) He ends his attack with a burst of heavy rhetorical sarcasm: “Surely there are thousands of capable newspapermen in this country with records unstained by long service to communism who are far more competent to fill the position of chief news analyst in the Office of Facts and Figures than this energetic campaigner for Communist Party candidates.”
The conservative press energetically took up the cry. Westbrook Pegler was an ardent opponent of the New Deal, a rabid anti-Communist, and a self-styled tribune of the little guy whose syndicated newspaper column “Fair Enough” reached millions of readers. On January 31, his column repeated and amplified Dies’s attack on Lash and Cowley. Mocking claims that neither of these men were Party members with the overbearing sarcasm that was his stylistic signature, he suggested, “if you want to be a dirty Quisling and a disrupter, go ahead and read false meanings into past expressions of such patriotic men, so devoted to the capitalistic system.” Another Pegler column, “Taxpayers Have a Right to Know,” took up once again the matter of Cowley’s salary and proclaimed that “the angry little guy in the barrel” has a perfect right to demand that “the government show him that his money is being spent for legitimate purposes.” Not only was the Roosevelt administration making room for filthy subversives in its bureaucratic warrens, they were paying these Reds a king’s ransom.
A more personal angle of attack was taken two weeks later in Time by Whittaker Chambers in an unsigned “review” of Cowley’s chapbook collection from New Directions, The Dry Season. Cowley’s exile from The New Republic’s office had given him more time to devote to his poetry. He had written seven poems since then, five published in Poetry and two in The New Yorker. None of them had anything resembling political content. The other poems in the book all dated from 1937 or later, and two of them, “Tomorrow Morning” and “The Last International,” were explicitly left-political. They made the book a target-rich subject for Chambers’s attack.
Chambers’s review ran not in the Books section in the back, but right up front on the first page of the U.S. at War section. It begins, “Most inopportune book of the month is The Dry Season, a slim, sage-green volume of 17 poems by Malcolm Cowley, sometime literary editor of the New Republic, now chief information analyst of the Office of Facts and Figures. Congressman Martin Dies recently charged Cowley with having had ‘seventy-two connections…with the Communist Party and its front organizations.’ Two of the poems in The Dry Season seem designed to make Dies lift his calculations to 74.” He goes on to quote some of the unfortunate agitprop-heavy lines from “Tomorrow Morning” and “The Last International” to pigeonhole Cowley as a flaming Red. The review ends by granting that the other poems “reveal sound, minor poetic talent.”
On the one hand, this was an ugly sucker punch. On the other, Chambers was not misquoting Cowley’s poems nor, in fact, mischaracterizing them. They were revolutionary in their sympathy and general intent. It did no good for Cowley to protest, as he did in a letter to Time a month later, that his book had been published late the previous year, or that “The Last International” was a fantasia of revolutions that had taken place across the world after the war, or that his lines had been quoted out of context and had no application to the American political milieu, or that “the country all of us love” was not “in grave danger of being overthrown by a determined rabble of poets and literary editors.” The damage was done.
MacLeish wrote to his old boss Henry Luce to protest this ambush. He suggested that if Luce was in search of “serpents,” he could find plenty of them at Time Inc. Like, for instance, Whittaker Chambers. The New Yorker came to Cowley’s defense in its Notes and Comments section, mocking in its tongue-in-cheek fashion the size and specificity of Dies’s accusation of “seventy-two connections” to Communist entities. “It was the ‘seventy-two’ that staggered us. We could understand that a man we might run into any time at a cocktail party might belong to one or two subversive organizations, or even a handful, but hardly seventy-two. Any man who can edit a book department, write poetry and reviews, and keep up with the meetings and various un-American duties of seventy-two subversive organizations is a man whose hand we are glad to have shaken.”
Cowley himself was kept busy writing multiple letters in his own defense, protesting his loyalty and proclaiming his fealty to America. “I was born in this country. I love this country, and I will do anything that one man can do to defend it…. I want to serve this country by any means within my power.” The longest of these letters, and the hardest to read, were two he wrote to one George Gould, a government investigator who had interrogated him. At the end of one letter, a long explanation of and apologia for his career as an editor and literary journalist, Cowley is reduced to pleading for his economic future. “If it were now decided that my record made me unfit to be a government employee…it would make it very difficult to for me to sell articles, get lecture dates or find an editorial job. It would mean that I and my family were paying a heavy price indeed for wishing to serve the government during its worst emergency.”
In truth, Cowley could do very little to defend himself. The attack on him was but one of many against prominent liberals, part of a wider reaction against the New Deal. The fevered habits of mind that historian Richard Hofstadter would later dub “the paranoid style in American politics,” and which would find their fullest and direst expression in McCarthyism, had already infected the body politic. Cowley was saddled with that impossible task: trying to prove a negative, that he would never have acted in any way to harm the security of the country.
It did not help matters that a good many of the facts marshaled against him by Martin Dies and others were true. He had worked actively on behalf of a Communist candidate for president in 1932. No one who has examined Cowley’s activities in the thirties can doubt that he had contacts and dealings with seventy-two Communist or Communist-adjacent organizations. He had lent his name to a great many causes.
MacLeish had actually received Cowley’s FBI file and, against protocol, showed it to him so he’d know exactly what he was up against. It was considerable, a thirty-page single-spaced document covering his political activities from 1935 to the present. Cowley was upset by the many flatly inaccurate items in his dossier—“secret” Communist Party conferences he’d never attended in cities he’d never visited—and that he’d been informed on by some literary figures whose style he recognized. It was a chilling glimpse of the surveillance state that J. Edgar Hoover had created. Deeply dismayed, he went so far as to plead directly with the FBI, the Justice Department, and even with Attorney General Francis Biddle to at least get the facts straight in his file, but all his efforts were unavailing.
The painful conclusion of this episode was essentially preordained. On March 12, Cowley wrote to MacLeish to submit his resignation from the Office of Facts and Figures. The letter contains a certain amount of self-justification in respect to the campaign of persecution he was subjected to. It also makes the point that he was but one of the hundreds of loyal government employees who had had their private lives opened to harsh scrutiny and their past activities distorted into grounds for distrust.
Cowley’s resignation became national news. An AP dispatch on March 19 ran in The New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. The piece quoted passages from his resignation letter, and MacLeish’s response that “I have not always, as you know, agreed with your opinions, but I have never doubted that you were a sincere and loyal believer in government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” In an editorial titled “Justice for Federal Workers,” The New Republic decried the harassment of government employees for, in many cases, having simply supported the New Deal programs, and quoted two more paragraphs from Cowley’s letter on the matter. Martin Dies took the occasion to crow, “After my exposure Mr. Cowley resigned his post” at the OFF and also suggested that the American people would welcome the similar resignations of his newly targeted victims. Cowley would be a recurring target of his committee’s smears for some time to come.
Seven years later, this episode and particularly his collision with Whittaker Chambers would have a dramatic coda. Chambers had made attempts to alert the Roosevelt administration to the existence of a Soviet spy ring that had penetrated the State Department and other government agencies, but he had been unsuccessful in moving it to action. Part of the problem was that, seeking to avoid his own criminal prosecution, he had been less than candid about the nature of the network he’d worked in, characterizing it as a “study group” rather than an espionage organization.
This changed spectacularly on August 3, 1948, when Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to the names of several secret Communist Party members in the New Deal he had been in contact with. The most eye-catching of those names was that of Alger Hiss, Harvard Law graduate, clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., figure of note in the Agriculture and State Departments, an architect of the United Nations Charter, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an associate of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. at the Yalta Conference, where he helped to draw up plans for a postwar liberated Europe. Chambers claimed that Hiss had been his closest friend in his underground group.
Two days later, Alger Hiss testified before the same committee that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, nor had he had any contact whatsoever with Whittaker Chambers. The whole matter might have petered out from there but for the strenuous efforts of a freshman congressman from California, Richard Nixon, who smelled something arrogant and phony in Hiss, and a chance for his own political advancement. Nixon pursued the investigation relentlessly and Chambers eventually produced evidence not just of party membership but of actual espionage on Hiss’s part, including the infamous rolls of microfilm hidden in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The end result of all this controversy, which riveted the nation for months, was that Alger Hiss sued Whittaker Chambers for libel, and the next year, Hiss was indicted for perjury for testimony he had given to a grand jury as to whether he had ever known Whittaker Chambers or been involved in espionage activities.
Alger Hiss’s trial for perjury was not simply a personal matter between him and Whittaker Chambers. In effect, American liberalism and the New Deal itself were on trial for their possible carelessness with American security, and the word “treason” was being thrown about. The entire liberal establishment mobilized to defend and support Alger Hiss in any way it could.
A. J. Liebling, the New Yorker journalist, had learned of Cowley’s odd lunch with Chambers back in 1941, and he and Hiss’s counsel, Lloyd Paul Stryker, persuaded him, somewhat reluctantly, to testify for the defense. He later calculated that his testimony would end up costing him forty thousand dollars in lost income from jobs he might otherwise have had. If Chambers could be shown in other instances to have been a liar prone to wild and unsupported accusations, his testimony against Hiss would be undercut. The opportunity to get back at Chambers for having sandbagged him twice in the pages of Time would have been on his mind as well. His bitterness on the subject can be gauged by his assertion that “I wouldn’t convict a yellow dog of having the mange on Chambers’ word.” So on the morning of June 23, 1949, Malcolm Cowley appeared in a packed federal courtroom in Foley Square in New York City to testify for the defense in the perjury trial of Alger Hiss. One paper characterized his surprise appearance as a “bombshell” that “provided the greatest sensation of the trial to date.”
Refreshing his memory of that long-ago lunch with Chambers from his notebook, Cowley described “in a booming, ponderous voice” Chambers’s disheveled appearance (he “looked as if he had slept on a park bench the night before”) and his paranoid affect (“we were surrounded by spies, traitors and conspiracies”). Chambers had feverishly related his own history in the Communist underground and then he began to reveal the names of Communist agents in the government, Cowley said, all minor figures. In his recollection, Hiss’s was not one of them. Then Chambers “mentioned another name which I shall not mention here.” Under Stryker’s stern instructions, though, he did mention it: Francis B. Sayre, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, former assistant secretary of state and high commissioner of the Philippines. According to Chambers, Cowley testified, he was “the head of a Communist apparatus in the State Department.” This mention of so trusted an establishment figure in this context was so shocking that Stryker quickly rose to declare that “Mr. Sayre was a loyal member of the government at all times.” If Chambers could finger so unlikely a figure as a Communist so cavalierly, how could he be trusted on anything?
Malcolm Cowley’s testimony that morning was so electrifying, one reporter wrote, that Alger Hiss’s court appearance later that day was a bit anticlimactic. Stryker told reporters that Cowley’s testimony was “a shattering blow to the prosecution’s case” and it proved that Chambers was “a psychiatric rattlesnake, willing to strike in any and all directions.” Cowley’s courtroom appearance made national headlines and was reported on by Eric Sevareid on the CBS radio network. His son heard that broadcast in Sherman and was impressed by his father’s new celebrity. The next day, though, while bicycling home from a friend’s house, he became the target of rocks thrown from a culvert by two boys he’d known at the Sherman School. “Commie, Commie, Commie bastard!” they shouted at him.
Effective as Cowley’s testimony was, it was not dispositive. Hiss’s first trial ended in a hung jury. Cowley reprised his appearance at the retrial later that year, and that time, Alger Hiss was convicted of two counts of perjury and ended up serving forty-four months in Lewisburg federal prison. Thus Malcolm Cowley became a small player in a consequential episode of the Cold War. It turned out to be impossible for him to leave his political past behind him. For decades the innocence of Alger Hiss and the perfidy of Whittaker Chambers would be articles of faith among liberals. Over the years, however, Hiss’s claim of his innocence of the charges against him has eroded as more evidence has emerged from various archives here and abroad, and the consensus today is that it was sweaty and evasive Whittaker Chambers and not smooth, unflappable Alger Hiss who was telling the truth.
* * *
The Cowley family returned to Sherman, Connecticut, in an understandably low mood. Without Cowley’s “lordly” government salary, their financial privation returned. It was April, planting season, so he got to work with his hoe and shovel in their three vegetable gardens. His son remembers that this was a time when he first noticed his father’s deafness, which would only become more acute as the years passed. Cowley felt his painful isolation from the wider literary world, as he complained to Newton Arvin, in the “Hermit Kingdom” of Sherman. As some of his sorrowful letters from this time show, the political missteps that had brought him to this pass continued to gnaw at him. He dutifully resumed the chores as a weekly reviewer and essayist for The New Republic.
The next two years were a period of retreat, retrenchment, and a fundamental rethinking of a new, apolitical way for him to be an actor in the literary arena. As he wrote to MacLeish a year later, “I retired into a state of estivation last summer, something like a bear’s hibernation—but then in the fall I got back to work…. Literature has to keep retiring into the catacombs to rediscover itself.” It was not all that engaging a time for him to be a book reviewer, though. American literature was on something of a hiatus as it adjusted to the profound national emergency and a world in transformation. He discovered a number of worthy and interesting books to offer his measured praise to, but the truth was that, with the exceptions of William Faulkner’s The Hamlet in 1940 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, both of which Cowley reviewed, the first years of the forties seemed to him devoid of any truly important American fiction.
