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C H A P T E R N I N E Anticommunism, the Dies Committee, and Espionage In June 1938, Ralph Knox walked into the Detroit field office of the FBI to complain that Communists had kicked him out of the United Auto Workers. Knox was a door fitter at Briggs Manufacturing in Detroit, and he had helped organize the Briggs local and served as its president. Knox told the FBI that after a plant shutdown, Communist infiltrators took over the local and convinced Briggs not to rehire him. The UAW was “entirely controlled by members of the Communistic group,” he said, and reporting them to the FBI was his “patriotic duty.” Knox had written a 2,500-word report explaining the entire situation. The FBI agent in charge advised Knox that “there appeared to be no Federal violation involved” and thanked him for the information. Knox was not satisfied. He “called frequently to inquire whether any action would be taken.” To mollify Knox, the FBI solicited a written opinion from the local U.S. attorney that disavowed any interest in the case. Knox persisted, continuing to call up the agent regularly and offering to “make himself available at all times” to the FBI to share “any information regarding Communistic activities.” The exasperated agent filed his report “only because of Mr. Knox’s insistence.”1 By October, Knox had found a more sympathetic audience. He testified before Martin Dies’s House Committee on Un-American Activities about the “Socialists, revolutionary workers, Trotskyites, and so forth” in the UAW, who “seemed to have the idea that when we have the revolution they are going to be the leaders. They think they are the intelligent group.” Knox listed dozens of radicals, giving their names and aliases, the plants where they worked, and whether they were “Arab or Bulgarian or something like that.” His words tumbled out. “Please do not talk so fast,” Dies asked. It was hard to get the 170 From Commonsense Anticommunism to Red-baiting story straight with so many details, and when Dies pressed Knox to explain why the union expelled him, Knox finally said, “They were just a bunch of fools.”2 Knox seemed like the fool to many observers (Time magazine dryly described him as someone “whom his former associates would like to put in a psychopathic ward.”)3 His excitable demeanor undermined the basic truth of Knox’s testimony. Briggs had been a Communist beachhead since the early 1930s, with a reputation for uncommon militancy.4 The Dies Committee offered a freewheeling arena for people such as Knox, who saw Communism and “Communistic tendencies” at work in their unions, their communities, and their government. Lightly staffed and loosely managed, the Dies Committee functioned like the FBI of the World War I era. It depended heavily on freelance antiradicals for intelligence, giving people such as John Frey considerable ability to stage-manage its activities. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, on the other hand, displayed far more rectitude in its investigation of alleged Communist activity. In several cases Hoover and his agents refuted false red-baiting claims and refused to harass or repress Communists and radicals , despite pressure from labor anticommunists like Knox and Frey. In the years before Pearl Harbor, Hoover’s FBI helped protect union activists against spurious charges of treasonous Soviet intrigue. Despite the Dies Committee’s effort to root out Communists, the CPUSA built a large espionage operation in the United States in the 1930s. Soviet and American archives definitively establish that American Communist leaders cultivated hundreds of informants to collect intelligence from well-placed posts in the federal government, scientific labs, and the left-wing and mainstream press.Given the scale of Soviet espionage, some historians have judged Hoover’s FBI insufficiently alert to the actual risks of Communist intelligence operations. Hoover’s FBI had resumed secret political surveillance in 1936 with the approval of President Roosevelt, but the bureau focused on German and Japanese suspects rather than Communists. To some historians, the FBI’s failure to detect Soviet spying was a “catastrophic” error.5 Looking at the FBI’s role in policing labor offers a new angle on this debate . With the help of Dies, labor anticommunists repeatedly alleged that CIO unionists were disloyal Soviet emissaries, using false smears to gain advantage in union rivalries. Hoover’s FBI debunked these allegations and prevented unwarranted repression of the CIO, despite Hoover’s longstanding antiradicalism . To date, the archival evidence vindicates Hoover and the...

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