In Politico, Peter Duffy profiles Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish émigré from Lithuania who became a U.S. Congressman (and later a NY State Supreme Court justice) and who, as a U.S. Congressman, actively spied for the Soviet Union:
Samuel Dickstein was short and silver-haired, “a slim little man in a natty gray suit,” the New York Times once characterized him. It was said he never left his red brick home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan without his Malacca walking stick, strolling past the teeming tenements with the air of what his Jewish immigrant constituents would call a big macher.
But Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City who served in the House of Representatives from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s, conducted himself in public life with none of the refined elegance that his self-presentation suggested. At a time when Joseph McCarthy was still an unknown lawyer in Wisconsin, Dickstein invented the modern practice of naming names—broadcasting the identities of suspected subversives without the slightest pretense of due process. If anyone can be credited (or blamed) with introducing the phrase “un-American activities” into the nation’s lexicon, it is he…
… Dickstein left Congress in 1946, and served as a state Supreme Court justice until his death in 1954. In 1963, a portion of the street grid close to where he used to live on East Broadway was christened “Samuel Dickstein Plaza.” No controversy attended the occasion. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten.
That is, until 1999, when Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev published The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era, which through the use of previously unavailable KGB records went a long way toward convincing those who could be convinced that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were in fact working for the Soviet Union. The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook…
As a Congressman, Dickstein reflected the values of his Lower East Side, Jewish social milieu, that is, antagonistic to gentile nationalism (e.g., Germany) but sympathetic to utopian Communism:
Although he made a habit of denouncing Communists (“highbinders and hoodlums”), Dickstein was really out for the fascists. In late 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler came to power, Dickstein convened informal and unfunded hearings on “Nazi Propaganda Activities by Aliens in the U.S.”…
In classic, put-a-Gentile-face-on-our-Jewish-concerns form, Dickstein strategically and voluntarily slipped a bit into the background:
On NBC radio, Dickstein declared that he had unearthed “sufficient evidence to define the Nazi government here as the most dangerous threat to our democracy that has ever existed.” In March 1934, he convinced the House to pass his resolution establishing what was officially titled the “Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities.” Let history record that HUAC began principally as a hunt for Nazi spies not Communist ones. Declining the chairmanship because as a foreign-born Jew he would be subject to “unkind criticism by certain persons or organizations,” Dickstein, who was named vice chair, conceded the gavel to John W. McCormack, the Irish Catholic member from South Boston and future speaker of the House.
It’s astonishing that I am only learning about Dickstein now.
Dickstein struck a deal with Igor [a Soviet agent – Ed.], agreeing to provide the Soviet Union with materials on fascists uncovered by the committee and to steer its investigators away from looking into Communists. His pay would be $1,250 a month…
The Soviets apparently didn’t buy Dickstein’s claim that the money was solely for his investigators and “he demands nothing for himself” because of his ideological affinity with the USSR…
He continued to produce materials on U.S.-based fascists and, in at least one instance, a Soviet defector whom Moscow was eager to have silenced. (Walter Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room of an apparent, although not certain, suicide.) Dickstein denounced the Dies Committee at NKVD request (“a Red-baiting excursion”) and gave speeches in Congress on Moscow-dictated themes. He handed over “materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc.,” according to an NKVD report…
Finally, in February 1940, the NKVD decided to cut him loose because he “can’t be a useful organizer who could gather around him a group of liberal congressman to exercise our influence and, alone, he doesn’t represent any interest.”
We all know about Joe McCarthy and HUAC. We are constantly clobbered over the head with it by Hollywood.
None of us know about Dickstein and HUAC.
Ask yourself why.
