Category Archives: RED SCARE

Self-Discredited McCarthy Witness Pawn In Internet Battle!

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Mr. Matusow Meets The Market 

Harvey Matusow was a crucial witness in the McCarran Committee persecution of Owen Lattimore, reinforcing the tattered testimony of Louis Budenz.

Matusow’s dead, but in the long tail/netherworld of the Internet he apparently has value. Somehow his confessional False Witness finds a market, if you pay the author and publisher nothing.

Budenz’s claims of a seamless web between Lattimore’s writings and the Communist line had suffered from actual reading of what Lattimore wrote, and  of what the Budenz edited Daily Worker said about Lattimore.

Matusow providentially appeared to tie Lattimore to the Reds.  After first inventing Communist subversion of the Boy Scouts, Matusow built from his experience running a Communist book store to claim he sold Lattimore’s Solution In Asia, and that it represented the party line.

 Saluting Solution – see the title on the blackboard partly obscured by bow-tie daddy.

Later Matusow admitted he’d invented this story   and many others as he climbed to the heights of the former party-member-tells-all business.

Matusow recanting has done nothing to deter right-wing cranks replicating his old lies.

Somehow this long lost witness lives on in the Internet, with the text of his tell-all “False Witness” available in a vast array of formats. You can buy a musty old copy for $3.97,  and free online reading and downloads are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library and archive.org.  After that it gets more complicated. Two outfits sell text files of the book to read or download, and one will even print you a copy of the text, allowing you to simulate the Internet experience of no index and weird scanning generated typos:

“ a feeling of guilt— of how or when could this ever stop. However, I soon got down to rock bottom, a 29 point which made it easy for me to justify my reporting on my former friends.”

Goodreads.com is the physical book seller, and also markets ads against online texts and any reader generated commentary, so start  scribbling for the greater glory.

Onread.com is a bit murkier.  They have malware spreading accusations in their past, although Norton and McAfee find them currently clean.

Others aren’t so sure:

“Russian terms of service. Protected by a Chinese domain that is registered from FranceBoth . “Book” downloads that come with an .exe extension that install and direct you to another website. I may be just a tiny bit jaded, but somehow I think this might not be entirely legitimate…“

China’s Stories Past: Ji Chaozhu Remembers.

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Tales Of [Comparatively] Ancient China  

Inspired by the current American tour of incipient Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the  New York Times looks back to the start of the current era in US/China relations,  Nixon and Kissinger’s 70s visits with  Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

Ji Chaozhu was there for most of these events, a lead translator for the Chinese side and later diplomat.

Ji was brought up in New York during the 40s, and his family’s doings in America figured in the Owen Lattimore story.  Ji’s father edited a Chinese language newspaper in New York, and one McCarthy charge against Lattimore was defending the senior Ji against Communist allegations [He was, but that’s for another day].

Older brother Ji Chaoding was a Columbia economics PhD who worked for Chiang Kai Shek’s government in New York and Chungking in the forties, and joined China’s delegation to the founding conference of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund.  One perjury charge growing out of Lattimore’s McCarran Committee testimony was about whether Lattimore knew or should have known Ji Chaoding was a Communist.

Ji was, and by several accounts headed  the American Communist Party’s China Bureau which smuggled funds and supplies to China. While employed by Chiang Kai Shek.

Ji Chaozhu’s memoir isn’t exactly hard hitting, mostly being a chronicle of meetings and translation, sometimes for the Greats.

The best part is his discription of his father’s  role in the film “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” playing a kindly Chinese doctor patching up crash-landed veterans of the Doolittle Raid.  The film was written by future Hollywood Ten-er Dalton Trumbo, and presents China’s anti-Japanese resistance as an incredibly bourgeois affair, with resistance leaders in suits and ties.  Plucky resistance children bring tears and throat lumps to the downed fliers with a Chinese version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Chi Senior Rolls Up His Sleeves To Repair Van Johnson  

 

The 2nd Life of Super Rat Harvey Matusow

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Informer, Comic Book Star?  

Our old pal Harvey had a 2nd [or 3rd? 4th?] life in England after fingering Owen Lattimore and others, then recanting.

Wire magazine has a post up focused on this period, when Matusow became an avant garde music impresario in England.

They feature a “portal” [remember when they were all the rage!] of links to parts of Matusow’s life in this era.

Radio interviews, bits of his unpublished autobiography, and a comic about the crowd he hung out with.

 Matusow: The Later Years

Before They Were Stars: Harvey Matusow In The Minor Leagues

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“Why, oh why, oh why oh, did he ever leave Ohio?”

Dateline: Dayton Ohio, February 25, 1952

The Ohio House Un-American Activities Committee probes the Red Menace.

In the chair is Harvey Matusow, a young ex-Communist looking to get big in the burgeoning field of Anti-Communism, and hoping Ohio’s laboratory of democracy will loose him upon the world as a made man:

“Q. In addition to the folk singing, did they also use square dancing?”

Was there no aspect of America’s faux folk past safe from Communist marauders?

Fortunately yes, as the Committee’s Chief Counsel rushed to assure:

“You are not saying, and you are not testifying, or want to give the impression that there is anything subversive or un-American about folk singing or square dancing?

A. That is correct.”

The Committee is interested in Yellow Springs’ Antioch College, a Pink festering sore on Ohio’s ass since the days of the Abolitionists.   Harvey was gunning for the big leagues, and Red subversion of innocent youth was to be his ticket out of there.  Shortly after this out of town production he came to Washington, started lying about Owen Lattimore, and left Ohio behind.

Matusow ran through a greatist hits of folk Commie Classics during his testimony, mangling lyrics as he went.

One of the better songs he namechecked: Banks Of Marble

Case Closure: Owen Lattimore Innocent All Over Again

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Past Time: Lattimore Re-enactors

A Re-enactment of Lattimore case highlights was staged back in May by the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, and their video is now up online.

Several veterans of the case participated, including former Judge Luther Youngdahl clerk Berl Bernhard and two lawyers with connections to Lattimore’s defenders at Arnold Fortas & Porter, Patricia Wald and Bud Vieth.  The prosecution was played by Miguel Estrada, famously  blocked by Democrats from a federal Appeals Court seat, who demonstrated the menacing skills they were so afraid of.

Red All Over: An Artist Looks Back At McCarthyism

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Sickles Sell!

MomentUs attempts to review what we used to call “defining moments,” until the phrase came to be plugged into every profile of a pol whose “compelling personal story” isn’t.

You can quibble with some choices [The Birth of The National Parks? Really?] but our favorite, McCarthyism is represented.

In there is something labeled “Hollywood,” which let’s pretend is a winking reference to the endlessly replicated fable that McCarthy had anything to do with the Hollywood Ten.

“haunting glimpses of the HUAC trial hearings with the Hollywood Ten, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy“

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McCarthy & His Ism: Who Coined The Phrase That Paid?

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Stuck On Himself    

Hats off to the kids at filmarchive.org, who’ve dug up a charming old interview with our favorite villain, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In tonight’s episode, Joe is put on the spot, asked if Owen Lattimore invented the term “McCarthyism.”

At first he agrees, but then remembers to never pass up an opportunity to slander, and wanders into claiming variously that the Daily Worker first used it, or did so simultaneously with Lattimore [gosh, whatever might that imply?] before settling on the tale that “forty top Communists” met in New York and decided the name.

This was a period when most of the CP’s leadership was under indictment, under arrest,  or engaged in mysterious missions abroad.  The idea of forty meeting in the early 50s to discuss talking points about McCarthy is laughable.

When Judges Kill [Cases] – Looking Back At Lattimore

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The Court In Unhappier Days

Washington’s Federal Courthouse was the scene of some of the final acts in the Lattimore drama, where twice the presiding judge in the case threw out the government’s principal charges, gutting the case.

On May 12th the court will revisit Lattimore, with the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit and the Litigation Section of the District of Columbia Bar staging a re-enactment of parts of the case, and an overview of its significance.  Several participants played small rolls in Lattimore back in the day:

Patricia M. Wald, former Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who was with Lattimore’s Arnold, Fortas &  Porter defense team,

G. Duane (Bud) Vieth, still with Arnold & Porter, the firm’s successor,

Berl Bernhard, former clerk for Judge Luther Youngdahl, who sank the government’s case.

Also participating will be conservative legal legend Miguel Estrada, whose DC Appeals Court nomination by George W. Bush was filibustered by Senate Democrats.  Despite his nomination’s failure, the Estrada is still in the fight, writing a stirring defense of the 2009 coup in his Honduran homeland.

I’m gonna guess he plays the prosecution.

Messing With Texas: McCarthyism Or McCarthy-ish?

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Which Hunt?

Months after the deed was done, establishment Republicans have discovered that Texas’s textbook commission made the state look foolish.

Early last year the elected body’s majority of dinosaur cavorting flat earthers and plain old Republicans provided countless hours of entertainment. They drew up lists of textbook publishers Do’s & Don’ts, banishing deist suspect Thomas Jefferson from the Founding Fathers while shoehorning Phyllis Schlafly into political science.

And perhaps most infamously, bringing back Joe McCarthy.

Texas Republican House Committee chairs are now shocked to discover all this is going on, vowing vaguely to do something about it. The conservative Fordham Institute found the Texas guidelines deficient, stirring the Public Education Chair Rob Eissler to a ringing expression of concern.


Fordham is probably right on the unwieldy tangle part, but when they get to McCarthy they distort the textbook mandate language in order to make the charge. Kind of like Old Joe!

Fordham said:

But Texas actually says this:

“… describe how McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee

(HUAC), the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions and

how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of

communist infiltration in U.S. government “

….which does not tie Venona directly to HUAC or McCarthy. And McCarthy is obviously mentioned by name in the standard, while the Fordham reviewers for some reason pretend he’s only evoked by inference.

The Texas commission has an at least defensible position: the Venona intercepts certainly cover a vast menagerie of federal employees who cozy with people provable as spies.

McCarthy Was Right cranks get in trouble when they wander into the claim that Venona vindicated McCarthy, which is a crock. Cranks almost always do, and at least one commission member wanted to.

But Texas stopped short.

Why we may never know. Maybe they meant to go all the way and the wording got muddled in the chaotic horse trading which produced the standards.

So now we have apparent unhappyness over textbooks on the part of some Republican leaders, giving wing to the disgruntled many unhappy with the adopted standards.

But given the glacial pace and murky expressions of concern they shouldn’t get their hopes up.