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Mark Newgent
Baltimore History ExaminerMark Newgent is a writer and editor with a talent for breathing history into everyday happenings.
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Historical Context to the Maryland State Police Surveillance Operation Part 2
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by Mark Newgent, Baltimore History Examiner
FBI Informant Mary Stalcup Markward
This is Part Two of Historical Context to the MSP Surveillance Operation. You can read Part One here.
After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Dies Committee investigations, the FBI began close surveillance of the Maryland communists (District34 of the CPUSA). The FBI, through several informants and agents thoroughly infiltrated District 34. Copies of the FBI intelligence memos detailing the surveillance are housed in the Maryland Manuscripts archives at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland. The FBI operations would prove decisive in the post-war prosecution of many Maryland communists, especially its party chief Albert Blumberg.
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin needed to cement the alliance with the West. The Soviet war effort desperately needed American war material. On May 22, 1943, Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Comintern and refrained from urging the western Communist Parties to foment revolution. Stalin’s motive was a purely political expedient calculated to appease Roosevelt and Churchill and hasten the opening of a western front in Europe. General Secretary of the CPUSA, Earl Browder restructured the CPUSA into the Communist Political Association (CPA) to “expand their wartime alliance with mainstream liberals and the labor movement behind Roosevelt’s policies…and promote a foreign policy conducive to post-war U.S.-Soviet entente.”
However, the American-Soviet alliance was short lived. As the defeat of Germany became a reality, Stalin implemented his plans for a post-war Soviet foreign policy, where he envisioned a security zone in Eastern Europe for the Soviet Union and, as historian Vernon Pedersen said, “an aggressive political arm in the bourgeois West.” A CPA, integrated into the American political mainstream was not what Stalin needed and the American party needed to be informed. Stalin sent his message through the French Communist Party leader Jauques Duclos. Duclos published the message in an article in the French journal Chaiers due communisme, which became known as the Duclos letter, because it was hand delivered to Earl Browder. The Duclos letter severely criticized Browder’s interpretations of the Teheran Conference. Duclos castigated Browder for “erroneous conclusions in an unwise flowing from a Marxist analysis…and a notorious revision of Marxism” that led to the “liquidation of the independent political party of the working class.” The American Communists quickly realized that the Duclos letter was a message from Stalin. The CPA dissolved, and the CPUSA quickly reconstituted. Earl Browder was ousted as head of the party, and expelled.
In Maryland, Albert Blumberg, who had moved on to a national position within the party, used the Duclos letter to attack his District 34 successor, Al Lannon, with whom he had constantly feuded. Under constant barrage from Blumberg, Lannon, who said he would “go down the line with Browder,” eventually dropped his support of Browder.
I relate this episode to reiterate the very important point that Stalin exercised total control over the CPUSA.
In Maryland, the Ober Commission, named after its chair, attorney Frank Ober had recommended to the General Assembly a sweeping list of anti-subversive measures, which included loyalty oaths for public employees and active surveillance of suspected communists. The General Assembly passed the Ober law with emergency legislation. Opponents however, namely the Progressive Party and its CPUSA puppet masters, in the spring of 1950 were waging a successful public relations campaign to have the Ober laws overturned on a November 1950 ballot referendum. Events at home and abroad however, ended those efforts.
Details of Party involvement in Soviet espionage surfaced in the wake of the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, as well as the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Furthermore, tensions escalated between the United States and the Soviet Union as they faced off in a proxy war in Korea and American troops battled Soviet backed-Communist forces on the Korean peninsula. Domestic anti-communism would coalesce, around government action to crack down on the Party. The majority of the American public came to view the Party, as agents of a foreign dictatorship that was backing the enemy of American soldiers on the battlefield. Seeing these events unfold, Maryland voters rejected the repeal referendum, and the Ober laws stayed on the books for nearly 30 more years.
One of the tools used by the federal government against the Party was the Smith Act. The Smith Act, passed in 1940 at the height of American fear of Nazi fifth columnists conspiring with radical left revolutionaries (they were allied at the time) to overthrow the government, made it a crime to “knowingly or willfully the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”
FBI agents arrested Albert Blumberg on September 30, 1954 in New York City. Blumberg had been secretly working out of the Party’s national office. Blumberg’s flight into the underground even separated him from his wife Dorothy Rose, who was serving a short prison sentence, after her conviction on Smith Act charges. Blumberg was arraigned and extradited to Philadelphia where he posted $20,000 bond and was released. He was charged under the membership clause of the Smith Act that made it illegal to be a member of an organization knowing that it advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government.
Blumberg’s trial began on January 30, 1956. The prosecution’s case consisted of supplying the testimony of Mary Stalcup Markward, a former official of District 34 and former Party member George Lautner. Both were key FBI informants in previous Smith Act trials. Lead prosecutor David Harris produced four other damning witnesses, whose testimony provided a guilty verdict. George MacLeod was a wannabe communist who naively thought that Blumberg wanted gradual social change in America. In his testimony at Blumberg’s trial, MacLeod recalled a 1941 lunch with Blumberg where he expressed this sentiment. Blumberg angrily responded that he was “more pink than red” and he needed be “straightened out.” Blumberg castigated MacLeod that “we need force and to expend blood to make major social change… that major social change did not come about by peaceful means, but by bloodshed.” MacLeod testified further that Blumberg challenged him saying that if he was truly interested in change that he should be willing to take up a rifle and fight in the streets of Baltimore for it.
Lincoln J. Gerende an attorney and former Party member testified that he joined the Party under the alias Carl Brenn at the direction of Blumberg. Herman Thomas, an FBI informant who joined the Party in the 1930s, dropped out, then rejoined at the FBI’s request told the jury that he attended secret Party meetings where he identified Blumberg as going by the name “Paul” or “Doc.” Dorothy K Swan, a public school teacher in New York told the jury that Blumberg told her, “We as Communists must be ready to dedicate ourselves to revolution, the violent overthrow of the capitalistic government as it exists here in the United States. Everything we do must be aimed at taking control of the government.” The jury delivered its guilty decision in three and a half hours. Blumberg was sentenced to a short prison term but never served any time due to appeals and a Supreme Court decision, which repealed the clause of the Smith Act, under which he was convicted.
The brutal Soviet crackdown on Hungary in 1957 and the Party’s support of it was the impetus for anti-communists in Maryland to increase pressure on the Party. The Maryland Subversives Activities Unit held hearings in Baltimore in May of 1957. Like Albert Bluberg’s Smith Act trial, other FBI and Ober Commision informants revealed themselves, and offered damning testimony. The hearings coupled with an intra-Party split between pro-Soviet hardliners and those who left the Party after Hungary and the revelations about horrors of Stalinism was a death blow the communist party in Maryland. The party still exists, but it is a small group of dead-enders, who still keep the faith and a disturbing reminder to the half-life of Marxism’s twisted ideology.
Why is this important, you ask? Why were federal and state counter measures against the Party necessary? I will answer that question in Part Three.
All quotes are from Vernon Pedersen’s The Communist Party in Maryland 1919-1957.
Topics: Soviet Union , Stalin , fellow travellers , Whittaker Chambers , Espionage , Albert Blumberg , Cold War , Maryland Communist Party
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