Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York

5. The Lawyer

O. John Rogge, 1949. 135 5 The Lawyer O. John Rogge For three long years, a New York lawyer, O. John Rogge, assiduously defended the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC). Although he could not save its executive board from the federal penitentiary , the reputation of Rogge as a lawyer with a high public profile and an established record of activism in both legal and political circles remained intact. Before Barsky, Bradley, Bryan, and Fast were imprisoned, Rogge was an invited speaker at the Waldorf conference in March 1949, at which Dimitri Shostakovich was the drawcard. After they were imprisoned , he was again on the hustings, invited by the Joint Committee for Aid to Anti-Fascist Emigrants to speak at a NewYork rally.Yet despite W. E. B. Du Bois’ describing him as a “national figure”1 and two historians ’ judgment that he was “one of the country’s most prominent radical lawyers,”2 Rogge has been ignored by both biographers and Cold War scholars. Today he remains a forgotten figure in American history. This chapter will therefore rectify a historiographical gap in our understanding of NewYorkers and the Cold War. However, there is a more compelling reason to include Rogge in our story: unlike all the other NewYorkers examined thus far, this individual was philosophically torn. He and Shostakovich shared not dissimilar dilemmas . Rogge’s case was emblematic of the conundrum confronting American liberalism and its attitude toward communism in the Cold War. How anticommunist could a liberal become without jettisoning those bedrock principles of civil liberty? What political space was there for those, like Rogge, who finally chose neither Moscow nor Washing- 136 The Lawyer: O. John Rogge ton? Was an independent position possible in such a polarized world? In this chapter, I use the lens of O. John Rogge to see how much room for maneuvering existed for those seeking dialogue between East and West during the heyday of McCarthyism. Rogge, too, warrants our attention for the same reasons that Orwell continues to attract biographers: both repudiated totalitarianism from the left as well as from the right; both condemned Soviet as well as American imperialism; both remained committed social democrats working within but critical of the capitalist system;both attempted to find an independent path, a third way, through the geopolitical and ideological minefields of the Cold War; and both became so disillusioned with, hostile to, or anxious about Stalinism that each was prepared to assist the state: in Rogge’s case the U.S. State Department, in Orwell’s case the clandestine Information Research Department within the British Foreign Office.And as with Orwell,who remained on the left but was applauded by the right,we can ask of Rogge: where can such an individual be placed on an ideological spectrum that was rapidly being redrawn by Cold War imperatives? On the Left Rogge’s political trajectory reveals a man full of apparent contradictions. If we take the years 1947–51 as our measure, we could easily conclude that his active record on behalf of progressive causes distinguished him as a man of the left. In 1947, as we shall shortly see, Rogge became the defending attorney for the JAFRC when it was deemed a subversive organization and charged with contempt of Congress by HUAC. He often attended JAFRC executive board meetings to brief members on the legal options available to the organization and was intimately involved with preparing and conducting its legal appeals. He represented the labor leader Harold Christoffel through a series of trials from 1947 to 1950.3 He served as defense counsel in the Smith Act prosecutions that eventually decapitated the Communist Party of its leadership.Rogge’s political commitment in the late 1940s ran far deeper than his choice of legal briefs. In late 1947, he deserted the Democratic Party and took out membership in the increasingly communist-dominated American Labor Party (ALP) led by the charismatic NewYork congressmanVito Marcantonio and ran on the ALP judicial slate in 1948.4 He won sufficient votes (97,418) to split the Democratic vote, permitting the narrow election of the Republican candidate, George Frankenthaler. He was an “avowed candidate” for nomination as Henry A.Wallace’s running mate in the latter’s bid for The Lawyer: O. John Rogge 137 presidency.5 Rogge was also both the New York state chairman of the Wallace for President Committee and a National Committee member...