Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report

Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report - 1996

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EVALUATION OF SELECTED CULTURAL RESOURCES
AT FORT MONMOUTH, NEW JERSEY:
CONTEXT FOR COLD WAR ERA,
REVISION OF HISTORIC PROPERTIES DOCUMENTATION,
AND SURVEY OF EVANS AREA
AND SECTIONS OF CAMP CHARLES WOOD
by
Mary Beth Reed
Mark Swanson
NEW SOUTH ASSOCIATES
Stone Mountain, Georgia
Subcontractor for Geo-Marine, Inc.
and
Rebecca Procter
Marsha Prior

June 1996

MISCELLANEOUS REPORT OF INVESTIGATIONS
NUMBER 125
Geo-Marine, Inc.
550 East Fifteenth Street
Plano, Texas evans logo

for
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Fort Worth District
819 Taylor Street
Fort Worth, Texas

The McCarthy Era, 1950-1954

As early as 1947, the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities began hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood; the following year, it began investigating Communist influence in the federal government itself. This led to the testimony of Whittaker Chambers in August of 1948 that Alger Hiss, a respected State Department official, had been a Communist party member in the 1930s. Hiss’ testimony was evasive, and he was indicted for perjury in 1948 and convicted in January 1950 (Ewald 1984:17-18).

Nearly everyone expected the election of November 1948 to be a Republican landslide. When President Truman and the Democrats won by a slim margin, this discredited the Old Guard Republicans and opened the field for more radical anti-Communist Congressional leaders like Richard Nixon and Karl Mundt (Reeves 1982:213). Nixon was instrumental in pushing the Hiss case to its conclusion, but he still only hinted at what McCarthy would later shout—that there were Communists in the government. The collapse of China in the fall of 1949 did nothing to still those suspicions.

Most damaging of all was the Rosenberg case, which unfolded in 1950. It began in Britain with the arrest and confession of German-born atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs in early February 1950. Admitting to wartime espionage for the Soviet Union, Fuchs named names, and soon security officials followed the string of contacts to the United States: Greenglass, Gold, and finally Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950. Despite the admissions of the others, the Rosenbergs refused to confess and received the death penalty for treason. Specifically, they were charged with receiving top-secret atomic bomb plans from David Greenglass at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and passing that information on to the Soviets during the war. In addition, Julius was believed to have stolen radar and proximity fuse information from Fort Monmouth during his tenure at the installation (Ewald 1984:20; U.S. Senate 1954:I:19-20). After numerous appeals, the Rosenbergs were finally executed on 19 June 1953.

During the Rosenberg trial, the Fort Monmouth connection was not particularly emphasized, but it was established that Rosenberg worked as a Signal Corps inspector at Fort Monmouth between 1940 and 1945, during which time he had close ties with the Emerson Radio Company, one of the private firms that manufactured Signal Corps equipment (U.S. Senate 1954:I:16, 1954:II:89-90, 94). In the years that followed, however, Senator Joseph McCarthy would delve more deeply into this Fort Monmouth connection, and it was this action that started the chain of events that would eventually destroy the senator’s influence and end the era of “McCarthyism.”

Joseph McCarthy became Wisconsin’s junior senator in 1946, but had failed to make a name for himself during his first few years in Congress (Reeves 1982:106). It was not until February 1950, during his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, that he discovered the theme that would soon make him a household word: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . members of the Communist Party still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The list itself was never produced and the number of party members changed over time, but McCarthy received immense press attention with this and other ploys (Ewald 1984:20-21).

McCarthy’s claims came at a time when the country was ready to hear them. The Korean War began in June of 1950, and in September, over Truman’s veto, Congress passed the McCarran Act requiring the registration of Communist-front organizations, and even authorized the Attorney-General to roundup suspected subversives during a national emergency (Ewald 1984:24). By 1951, with the Korean War in full swing, McCarthy had a long list of unsubstantiated claims: George Marshall’s handling of China after World War II had been part of a conspiracy; South Korea had been sabotaged before the invasion; Truman’s handling of the war and firing of General MacArthur was suspicious; and Drew Pearson, a liberal radio commentator, was the “voice of international Communism” (Ewald 1984:25). For two long years, from 1950 right through the election of 1952, Truman and McCarthy fought constantly in the press; during that period, McCarthy only seemed to accrue more clout.

McCarthy’s power seemed secure when the Republicans swept the Presidency and the Congress in the 1952 elections. By 1953, McCarthy presided over the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, with Francis P. Carr serving as executive director and Roy M. Cohn as chief counsel. By this time, the newly elected President Eisenhower could barely tolerate McCarthy, but realized that direct confrontation, as tried by Truman, would only help McCarthy’s career (Ewald 1984:26-38). Perhaps without realizing it, Eisenhower allowed McCarthy enough leeway in the press to hang himself, which is precisely what happened as McCarthy’s subcommittee turned the spotlight on Fort Monmouth in the fall of 1953.

In October 1953, McCarthy issued the claim that Julius Rosenberg had set up a wartime spy ring at Fort Monmouth that might still be in operation (Ewald 1984:93). As proof, McCarthy produced a defector who claimed to have seen top-secret radar manuals in an East German electronics lab. The Army, assisted by the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, insisted that there was no ring then in operation and that all radar books in East Germany were due to war-time lend-lease agreements, when the United States shared its radar secrets with the Soviets (Ewald 1984:94).

This claim and counter-claim led to subcommittee hearings from October through December of 1953 on the subject of “Army Signal Corps-Subversion and Espionage” at Fort Monmouth. First held at the Foley Square Federal Building in New York City (the site of the Rosenberg trial), the proceedings were finally moved to the Capitol Building in Washington (Ewald 1984:156; U.S. Senate 1954:I:13). Among the many witnesses called to testify, the most prominent were Aaron Coleman, Carl Greenblum, and Joseph Levitsky, all former researchers at the Evans radar laboratories. Back in 1946, Coleman, a radar officer, had been caught outside the lab with classified materials, while both Greenblum and Levitsky had once carpooled with Julius Rosenberg (Ewald 1984:94; U.S. Senate 1954:II:69-73, 77-81, 93, 110).

While the subcommittee hearings were going on in New York, the Army was doing all it could to placate McCarthy without giving him any of the Fort Monmouth personnel files compiled by the FBI. Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, with Eisenhower’s approval, insisted on the confidentiality of those files, while McCarthy insisted just as strongly on their release. While this tug of war was going on at the highest levels, General Kirke Lawton, commander of Fort Monmouth, began cooperating with McCarthy, even to the extent of suspending certain civilian employees during the hearings; 10 were suspended in mid-October, and that number had risen to 33 by November, although some of these were soon reinstated (Ewald 1984:90, 99, 123, 130). Those who worked under a cloud of suspicion were detailed to a series of World War II barracks located along Watson Avenue, north of the other Evans laboratories, where they were forced to work in isolation, without access to classified materials (Sam Stine, personal communication 1995). During that period, the Watson Avenue barracks were known throughout Fort Monmouth as “the leper colony” (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995; Sam Stine, personal communication 1995).

During this same period, Roy Cohn, special counsel for the subcommittee, was having his own feud with the Army, a feud that would eventually lead to the famous Army vs. McCarthy confrontation of 1954. The feud began on 20 October 1953, when McCarthy, Cohn, Secretary of the Army Stevens, and other congressmen and Army personnel visited Fort Monmouth and walked up Avenue A, accompanied by the press, for a tour of the Evans radar laboratories (Ewald 1984:273-274; Sam Stine, personal communication 1995). Outside one of the top security buildings (probably one of the “H” buildings), the party was stopped by security; the congressmen and their entourage did not have the proper badges. Stevens made a spur of the moment decision; all elected officials of the U.S. government could enter, and all others had to remain outside. This excluded a furious Cohn and he vowed before witnesses that he would get the Army for this affront (Ewald 1984:273-274).
The scene outside the Evans radar lab was just the beginning. Back in July of 1953, David Schine, one of McCarthy’s high-level subcommittee staffers, had been reclassified by his local draft board from 4-F to 1-A, largely as a result of an investigation by Drew Pearson (Ewald 1984:69). Private Schine’s induction day was scheduled for 3 November, and long before then, Cohn and McCarthy had been pestering the Army at the highest levels for special status for Schine. In November, this pestering turned to threats, especially from Cohn, and they became so vituperative that key officials in the Army began to keep track of the nature and date of Cohn’s abuse. This was the beginning of “the Chronology,” or the Cohn-Schine documents, that the Army finally cobbled into a formal statement of attempted coercion that was released to the press in April of 1954.

The Chronology was the beginning of the end for McCarthy. Subcommittee hearings were quickly arranged in which McCarthy was not allowed to preside. Bit by bit, McCarthy’s position became more isolated as his demands became more threatening. He claimed vast subpoena rights, and in May, urged federal employees to report cases of subversion directly to the subcommittee, in direct violation of Eisenhower’s directive (Ewald 1984:358-367). McCarthy pushed the hearings into a constitutional battle between the Executive and the Legislative branches, and was soon tripped by his own excess. He denied putting any pressure on the Army about Schine and was shown to be a liar. Most damaging of all, McCarthy produced a letter, purportedly from J. Edgar Hoover, that the powerful FBI director publicly denied writing (Ewald 1984:336-343).

By the close of the hearings, McCarthy’s power and influence had collapsed, and he was formally censured by the Senate before the year was out. The brief era of McCarthy was just one of the ways in which the tensions of the Cold War and the Korean conflict impacted Fort Monmouth, the Army, and the entire nation. In spite of McCarthy’s considerable digging for espionage in the Army Signal Corps in 1953 and 1954, not one individual was ever even prosecuted, much less convicted, for wrong-doing (Reeves 1982:526).

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