Frederick Vanderbilt Field
Encyclopedia
Frederick Vanderbilt Field (April 13, 1905 – February 1, 2000) was an American
leftist political activist and a great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt
, disinherited by his wealthy relatives for his radical political views. Field became a specialist on Asia and was a prime staff member and supporter of the Institute of Pacific Relations
. He also supported so many openly Communist organizations that he was accused of being a member of the Communist Party
, and was a top target of the American government during the peak of 1950s McCarthyism
. Field denied ever having been a party member, but admitted in his memoirs that "I suppose I was what the Party called a 'member at large.'"
, Field went on to attend Harvard University
, where he participated in undergraduate life as chief editor of the Harvard Crimson
and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club
. Matriculating in 1927, Field spent a year at the London School of Economics
, where he was exposed to the ideas of Harold Laski
, the Fabian socialist political theorist, economist, and writer. First coming into politics as a supporter of the Democratic Party
after returning to the United States, he was disillusioned by the Democrats' unwillingness to take a more uncompromising position toward social reform, and endorsed Norman Thomas
, the Socialist presidential candidate in 1928, becoming a member of the Socialist Party. Having attracted significant attention as an unlikely endorsement for Norman Thomas, Field was cut off without a penny by Frederick William Vanderbilt
, his great-uncle, from whom he had been promised an estimated fortune of more than $70 million.
of the Institute of Pacific Relations
(IPR) introduced him to Y.C. James Yen, who was then in the United States to raise money for his Chinese Mass Education Movement. After touring the country as Yen's personal assistant, Field joined the IPR, a group which brought together government and non-governmental elites to study problems of the Pacific rim nations, as an assistant to Carter. Field "took no pay; he was, in fact, one of the institute's most generous contributors." He published several reference works on the Asian economy and organized conferences and publications.
As he grew older, his politics became more radical. He described the IPR as "a bourgeois research-educational organization" funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and some of the biggest corporations in the U.S., which he claimed subsidized his publication of proposals "as anticapitalistic as the articles he wrote for The New Masses
and The Daily Worker." New Masses was identified by one scholar as the "semi-official spokesman of Communist letters" He was also Executive Vice-President of the Council for Pan American Democracy, which John Dewey
's Committee for Cultural Freedom alleged in 1940 was under "outright communist control" and Provisional secretary of the Board of Directors for the Jefferson School for Social Science, associated with the Communist Party.
He wrote a memo cautioning Owen Lattimore
, editor of the IPR quarterly Pacific Affairs
, with regard to a certain article, "the analysis is a straight Marxist
one and... should not be altered." He donated money and time to Communist causes in the 1930s, 40's and 50's, and during the war generously donated money to organizations close to the Soviet Union
.
In his autobiography, Field confesses that during this period he "uncritically accepted" Soviet accounts of their political purges and that was "taken in." "Stalin
was infallible," he recalled. "[A]ll my Communist surroundings told me so. So was [American Communist Party Secretary Earl] Browder
, although on a lower level of sanctity, and so were the other CP [Communist Party] leaders." At a time when other erstwhile loyal friends of the Soviet Union were becoming disillusioned by Stalin's Great Purge
, Field defended the bloody Moscow show trials, saying, "because Comrade Stalin says so, we have to believe the trials are just."
Since the IPR aimed to be non-partisan, and in theory still attempted to include even the Japanese point of view, he collaborated with his friend Philip Jaffe to set up the journal Amerasia
in 1937 as a vehicle for criticism of Japanese attacks in China. Jaffe later pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to embezzle, steal and purloin" government property after Office of Strategic Services
and FBI investigators found hundreds of government documents — many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential" — in the magazine's offices.
In 1941 he left his position at the IPR, but served as a Trustee until 1947. Field attended the 1945 United Nations founding conference
in San Francisco as an IPR representative, and also as a writer for the Daily Worker.
(APM), a position for which he had been recruited by Earl Browder
himself. “Some time before the APM was formally organized,” wrote Field, “Earl Browder asked me if I would accept the executive secretaryship if it were offered me.” At APM, Field emerged as a committed pacifist, demanding that the United States stay out of the war in Europe — at least while the Hitler-Stalin pact lasted. His reasoning, as he would explain in his autobiography, was that "the European war in those early stages was one between rival imperialists, the British Empire and the Nazi Reich." By summer of the following year, however, Field came to a complete turnaround: on June 20, 1941, in his capacity as executive secretary, he suddenly called off the organization's “peace picketing” of the White House reversing himself to demand immediate U.S. war on Germany.just two days later, Nazi Germany would launch its surprise invasion
of the Soviet Union.
According to the McCarran Committee
's IPR Report, Lattimore, along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt
's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie
(identified in the Venona decrypts as the Soviets' White House source code-named "Page"), tried in 1942 to get Field a commission in military intelligence, but, unlike Duncan Lee
(Venona code name "Koch"), Maurice Halperin
("Hare"), Julius Joseph ("Cautious"), Carl Marzani
, Franz Leopold Neumann
("Ruff"), Helen Tenney
("Muse"), and Donald Wheeler
("Izra") — all of whom got into the OSS — Field was rejected as a security risk.
In 1944, dissident IPR member Alfred Kohlberg submitted to IPR Secretary General Edward C. Carter an 88-page analysis alleging that the institute had been infiltrated by pro-Communist elements. Among other things, Kohlberg alleged that Field was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.
In 1945, former Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley
told FBI investigators that she had attended a conference in Field's home earlier that year. Also present, she alleged, were Browder, John Hazard Reynolds, head of the United States Service and Shipping Corporation (a Comintern
front organization for Soviet espionage activities) and "Ray" Elson
(Identified in the "Gorsky memo" under the cover name "Irma")
On April 22, 1948, Louis Budenz, former managing editor of the Daily Worker, advised FBI investigators, "Field is a Communist Party member." In 1949, Field identified himself in Political Affairs as an "American Communist."
, a leftist group of civil rights advocates formed from the merger of the International Labor Defense
(ILD), the National Negro Congress
, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties in Detroit in 1946. The organization concentrated on legal action and political protestnotably publicizing the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old boy Emmett Till
and publishing the 1951 document We Charge Genocide
, as well as helping to pioneer many of the tactics that would be employed by later civil rights workers. Field simultaneously acted as both secretary and trustee of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund.
to personal knowledge that Field was a Soviet espionage agent. Questioned about this, Field refused to answer on grounds of potential self-incrimination. The following year, former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers
testified before the McCarran Committee
that NKVD
"handler" J. Peters
told him in 1937 that Field was a member of the Communist underground. Herbert Romerstein, former head of the office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the United States Information Agency
, and the late Eric Breindel
placed Field in the GRU
apparat, alleging that he "was an agent of Soviet military intelligence." Yet, writers Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya
, examining the archives in an article of The American Scholar
, disagree:
As secretary of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund, Field refused to reveal who had put up bond for eight Communist Party officials who had jumped bail and disappeared after being convicted by the Truman administration Department of Justice
for violations of the Smith Act
. Convicted of contempt of court since he would not provide the names of any of his Communist friends, Field served two months of a 90-day sentence in federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky in 1951.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
leftist political activist and a great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Cornelius Vanderbilt , also known by the sobriquet Commodore, was an American entrepreneur who built his wealth in shipping and railroads. He was also the patriarch of the Vanderbilt family and one of the richest Americans in history...
, disinherited by his wealthy relatives for his radical political views. Field became a specialist on Asia and was a prime staff member and supporter of the Institute of Pacific Relations
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international NGO established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. The International Secretariat, the center of most IPR activity over the years, consisted of professional staff members who...
. He also supported so many openly Communist organizations that he was accused of being a member of the Communist Party
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
, and was a top target of the American government during the peak of 1950s McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
. Field denied ever having been a party member, but admitted in his memoirs that "I suppose I was what the Party called a 'member at large.'"
Early years
Frederick Vanderbilt Field was born on April 15, 1905, a scion of the wealthy Vanderbilt family and a descendant of several other prestigious American families. A 1923 graduate of the private Hotchkiss SchoolHotchkiss School
The Hotchkiss School is an independent, coeducational American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school enrolls students in grades 9 through 12 and a small number of postgraduates...
, Field went on to attend Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he participated in undergraduate life as chief editor of the Harvard Crimson
Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson are the athletic teams of Harvard University. The school's teams compete in NCAA Division I. As of 2006, there were 41 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other NCAA Division I college in the country...
and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club
Hasty Pudding Club
The Hasty Pudding Club is a social club for Harvard students. It was founded by Nymphus Hatch, a junior at Harvard College, in 1770. The club is named for the traditional American dish that the founding members ate at their first meeting...
. Matriculating in 1927, Field spent a year at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
, where he was exposed to the ideas of Harold Laski
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950....
, the Fabian socialist political theorist, economist, and writer. First coming into politics as a supporter of the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
after returning to the United States, he was disillusioned by the Democrats' unwillingness to take a more uncompromising position toward social reform, and endorsed Norman Thomas
Norman Thomas
Norman Mattoon Thomas was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.-Early years:...
, the Socialist presidential candidate in 1928, becoming a member of the Socialist Party. Having attracted significant attention as an unlikely endorsement for Norman Thomas, Field was cut off without a penny by Frederick William Vanderbilt
Frederick William Vanderbilt
Frederick William Vanderbilt was a member of the Vanderbilt family. He was a director of the New York Central Railroad for 61 years, and also a director of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad and of the Chicago and North Western Railroad.-Biography:A son of William Henry Vanderbilt, Frederick...
, his great-uncle, from whom he had been promised an estimated fortune of more than $70 million.
Institute of Pacific Relations and Radical Politics
Upon Field's return from England in 1928, Edward CarterEdward Clark Carter
Edward Clark Carter worked with the International Y.M.C.A. in India and in France, during World War I, from 1902 to 1918, but was best known for his work with the Institute of Pacific Relations , of which he was secretary from 1926 to 1933, secretary general from 1933 to 1946 and executive...
of the Institute of Pacific Relations
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations was an international NGO established in 1925 to provide a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim. The International Secretariat, the center of most IPR activity over the years, consisted of professional staff members who...
(IPR) introduced him to Y.C. James Yen, who was then in the United States to raise money for his Chinese Mass Education Movement. After touring the country as Yen's personal assistant, Field joined the IPR, a group which brought together government and non-governmental elites to study problems of the Pacific rim nations, as an assistant to Carter. Field "took no pay; he was, in fact, one of the institute's most generous contributors." He published several reference works on the Asian economy and organized conferences and publications.
As he grew older, his politics became more radical. He described the IPR as "a bourgeois research-educational organization" funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and some of the biggest corporations in the U.S., which he claimed subsidized his publication of proposals "as anticapitalistic as the articles he wrote for The New Masses
The New Masses
The "New Masses" was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Walt Carmon, briefly by Whittaker Chambers, and primarily by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Joseph Freeman....
and The Daily Worker." New Masses was identified by one scholar as the "semi-official spokesman of Communist letters" He was also Executive Vice-President of the Council for Pan American Democracy, which John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
's Committee for Cultural Freedom alleged in 1940 was under "outright communist control" and Provisional secretary of the Board of Directors for the Jefferson School for Social Science, associated with the Communist Party.
He wrote a memo cautioning Owen Lattimore
Owen Lattimore
Owen Lattimore was an American author, educator, and influential scholar of Central Asia, especially Mongolia. In the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963...
, editor of the IPR quarterly Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs
Pacific Affairs ' is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes academic research on contemporary political, economic, and social issues in Asia and the Pacific. The journal was founded in 1926 as the newsletter for the entirety of the Institute of Pacific Relations . In May 1928, PA adopted...
, with regard to a certain article, "the analysis is a straight Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
one and... should not be altered." He donated money and time to Communist causes in the 1930s, 40's and 50's, and during the war generously donated money to organizations close to the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
.
In his autobiography, Field confesses that during this period he "uncritically accepted" Soviet accounts of their political purges and that was "taken in." "Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
was infallible," he recalled. "[A]ll my Communist surroundings told me so. So was [American Communist Party Secretary Earl] Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
, although on a lower level of sanctity, and so were the other CP [Communist Party] leaders." At a time when other erstwhile loyal friends of the Soviet Union were becoming disillusioned by Stalin's Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, Field defended the bloody Moscow show trials, saying, "because Comrade Stalin says so, we have to believe the trials are just."
Since the IPR aimed to be non-partisan, and in theory still attempted to include even the Japanese point of view, he collaborated with his friend Philip Jaffe to set up the journal Amerasia
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
in 1937 as a vehicle for criticism of Japanese attacks in China. Jaffe later pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to embezzle, steal and purloin" government property after Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
and FBI investigators found hundreds of government documents — many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential" — in the magazine's offices.
In 1941 he left his position at the IPR, but served as a Trustee until 1947. Field attended the 1945 United Nations founding conference
United Nations Conference on International Organization
The United Nations Conference on International Organization was a convention of delegates from 50 Allied nations that took place from 25 April 1945 to 26 June 1945 in San Francisco, California. At this convention, the delegates reviewed and rewrote the Dumbarton Oaks agreements...
in San Francisco as an IPR representative, and also as a writer for the Daily Worker.
American Peace Mobilization
In 1940 Field became executive secretary of the American Peace MobilizationAmerican Peace Mobilization
The American Peace Mobilization was a peace group, officially cited in 1947 by United States Attorney General Tom C. Clark on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations for 1948, as directed by President Harry S...
(APM), a position for which he had been recruited by Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
himself. “Some time before the APM was formally organized,” wrote Field, “Earl Browder asked me if I would accept the executive secretaryship if it were offered me.” At APM, Field emerged as a committed pacifist, demanding that the United States stay out of the war in Europe — at least while the Hitler-Stalin pact lasted. His reasoning, as he would explain in his autobiography, was that "the European war in those early stages was one between rival imperialists, the British Empire and the Nazi Reich." By summer of the following year, however, Field came to a complete turnaround: on June 20, 1941, in his capacity as executive secretary, he suddenly called off the organization's “peace picketing” of the White House reversing himself to demand immediate U.S. war on Germany.just two days later, Nazi Germany would launch its surprise invasion
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
of the Soviet Union.
According to the McCarran Committee
United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security
The Special Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, 1951-77, more commonly known as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and sometimes the McCarran Committee, was authorized under S...
's IPR Report, Lattimore, along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie
Lauchlin Currie
Lauchlin Bernard Currie was a Canadian-born U.S.economist from New Dublin, Nova Scotia, Canada, and allegedly an agent of espionage for the Soviet Union....
(identified in the Venona decrypts as the Soviets' White House source code-named "Page"), tried in 1942 to get Field a commission in military intelligence, but, unlike Duncan Lee
Duncan Lee
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee was confidential assistant to Maj. Gen. William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services , World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, during 1942-46...
(Venona code name "Koch"), Maurice Halperin
Maurice Halperin
Maurice Hyman Halperin was an American writer, professor, diplomat, and Soviet spy .-Biography:...
("Hare"), Julius Joseph ("Cautious"), Carl Marzani
Carl Marzani
Carl Aldo Marzani was an American leftwing political activist and publisher. He was successively a Communist Party organizer, volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, United States federal intelligence official, documentary filmmaker, author, and publisher...
, Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
("Ruff"), Helen Tenney
Helen Tenney
Helen Barrett Tenney worked for the Comintern apparatus in the 1930s and funnelled information to the Soviet Union on behalf of the Spanish Communists where she learned espionage tradecraft....
("Muse"), and Donald Wheeler
Donald Wheeler
Donald Niven Wheeler was a lifelong social activist, teacher and member of the Communist Party, as well as an accused Soviet spy. Allegations of espionage made against him were never proved, and he was never convicted despite repeated investigations.-Education:He was a graduate of Reed College and...
("Izra") — all of whom got into the OSS — Field was rejected as a security risk.
In 1944, dissident IPR member Alfred Kohlberg submitted to IPR Secretary General Edward C. Carter an 88-page analysis alleging that the institute had been infiltrated by pro-Communist elements. Among other things, Kohlberg alleged that Field was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.
In 1945, former Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for...
told FBI investigators that she had attended a conference in Field's home earlier that year. Also present, she alleged, were Browder, John Hazard Reynolds, head of the United States Service and Shipping Corporation (a Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
front organization for Soviet espionage activities) and "Ray" Elson
Rae Elson
Rae Elson, also Ray Elson was employed in the Civil Rights Committee in New York City in the 1930s and was a very active dues paying member of the Communist Party of the United States . Communist Party dues amounted to ten percent of a member's income.Elson was active in the CPUSA underground...
(Identified in the "Gorsky memo" under the cover name "Irma")
On April 22, 1948, Louis Budenz, former managing editor of the Daily Worker, advised FBI investigators, "Field is a Communist Party member." In 1949, Field identified himself in Political Affairs as an "American Communist."
Civil Rights Activities
Field took an active role in the operation of the Civil Rights CongressCivil Rights Congress
The Civil Rights Congress was a civil rights organization formed in 1946 by a merger of the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. It became known for involvement in civil rights cases such as the Trenton Six and justice for Isaiah Nixon. The CRC...
, a leftist group of civil rights advocates formed from the merger of the International Labor Defense
International Labor Defense
The International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
(ILD), the National Negro Congress
National Negro Congress
The National Negro Congress is an organization which was put into place by the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1935 at Howard University. It was a popular front organization created with the goal of fighting for Black liberation and was the successor to the League of Struggle for...
, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties in Detroit in 1946. The organization concentrated on legal action and political protestnotably publicizing the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old boy Emmett Till
Emmett Till
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married...
and publishing the 1951 document We Charge Genocide
We Charge Genocide
"We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People", often shorted to "We Charge Genocide", was a petition presented to the United Nations in 1951, arguing that the U.S...
, as well as helping to pioneer many of the tactics that would be employed by later civil rights workers. Field simultaneously acted as both secretary and trustee of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund.
Tydings Committee
In 1950, Budenz testified before the Tydings CommitteeTydings Committee
The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a subcommittee authorized by in February 1950 to look into charges by Joseph R...
to personal knowledge that Field was a Soviet espionage agent. Questioned about this, Field refused to answer on grounds of potential self-incrimination. The following year, former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
testified before the McCarran Committee
United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security
The Special Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, 1951-77, more commonly known as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and sometimes the McCarran Committee, was authorized under S...
that NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
"handler" J. Peters
J. Peters
J. Peters was the most commonly known pseudonym of a man who last went by the name "Alexander Stevens" in 1949. Peters was an ethnic Jewish journalist and political activist who was a leading figure of the Hungarian language section of the Communist Party USA in the 1920s and 1930s...
told him in 1937 that Field was a member of the Communist underground. Herbert Romerstein, former head of the office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the United States Information Agency
United States Information Agency
The United States Information Agency , which existed from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, USIA's broadcasting functions were moved to the newly created Broadcasting Board of Governors, and its exchange and non-broadcasting information functions were...
, and the late Eric Breindel
Eric Breindel
Eric M. Breindel was a neoconservative writer and former editorial page editor of the New York Post.He died of liver failure, having suffered from health problems throughout adulthood, as a result of AIDS, according to Michael Wolff in his book The Man Who Owns The News: Inside The Secret World Of...
placed Field in the GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
apparat, alleging that he "was an agent of Soviet military intelligence." Yet, writers Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya
Svetlana Chervonnaya
Svetlana Alexandrovna Chervonnaya is a historian living in Russia specializing in the political history of the Cold War period and Soviet espionage activities in the United States of America. Along with Ellen Schrecker, Chervonnaya is known as one of the leading scholarly voices arguing against...
, examining the archives in an article of The American Scholar
The American Scholar
The American Scholar was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to...
, disagree:
"Documents show that he was in contact with various Soviet representatives in the United States beginning in early 1935. Some of these interactions may be described as 'active measures' on behalf of the Soviet Union. Still, what we know does not prove that Field was a full-blown Soviet agent.
As secretary of the Civil Rights Congress bail fund, Field refused to reveal who had put up bond for eight Communist Party officials who had jumped bail and disappeared after being convicted by the Truman administration Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
for violations of the Smith Act
Smith Act
The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 is a United States federal statute that set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S...
. Convicted of contempt of court since he would not provide the names of any of his Communist friends, Field served two months of a 90-day sentence in federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky in 1951.
Death
He died on February 1, 2000 at the Walker Methodist Health Center in Minneapolis, where he had been living since his return from Mexico in 1983.Books and Scholarly Publications
- From Right to Left: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill, 1983)
- Thoughts on the Meaning and Use of Pre-Hispanic Mexican Sellos (Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1967)
- China's Greatest Crisis (New Century Publishers, 1945)
- China's Capacity for Resistance (American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1937)
- Economic Handbook of the Pacific Area (Doubleday, 1934)
- American Participation in the China Consortiums (Pub. for the American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations by the University of Chicago Press, 1931)
Further reading
- Frederick Vanderbilt Field, From Right to Left: An Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: L. Hill, 1983). vii, 321p.
- FBI Silvermaster FileFBI Silvermaster FileThe FBI’s Silvermaster file is a 162-volume compendium of some 26,000 pages of documents relating to the Bureau’s investigation of Communist penetration of the Federal government during the Cold War....
- Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 382