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YOUNG RADICAL ON THE MAKE
Nothing about his childhood or early years suggested that David Karr would mingle with powerful politicians or industrialists, let alone become a man of mystery. Nor was there much surface evidence that he would be attracted to Communism. He was born as David Katz on August 24, 1918 in Brooklyn into a prosperous Jewish family. His father, Morris, had emigrated to America in 1892 from Bucharest, Romania, where he had been born in 1886, and settled in Brooklyn. His mother, Sophie Guttman, had been born in 1895 and arrived in New York in 1899 with her parents from Riga, Latvia. Morris began working as a clerk in a jewelry store as a teenager. He and Sophie married in 1917. By the time David was born, Morris had become a jewelry manufacturer and importer. His business prospered and the growing family, which included a sister, Florence, born in 1921 and the youngest brother, Mortimer, arriving in 1923, enjoyed an upper-middle-class lifestyle in a brownstone in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The 1925 New York State census listed the three children and a maid in residence.1
The family also had a summer home in Crompond, a small town in Westchester County, east of Peekskill, where Lake Mohegan provided recreation. The area was home to several colonies of bungalows built by New York radicals. The Mohegan Colony, founded by Jewish anarchists in the 1920s, was the oldest, but Communists and other leftists established small communities in succeeding years, along with some New Yorkers just looking to escape the heat and humidity of the city.
Morris Katz was most likely just looking for a summer retreat since, unlike militant Communists, or even many anarchists and socialists, the Katz family retained some ties to the Jewish faith. Morris belonged to a synagogue, sent David to Sunday school and Hebrew school, and had him bar mitzvahed at the Brooklyn Jewish Center. Morris had, however, strayed from the Orthodoxy of his youth. He was a mainstay of the Ethical Culture movement, a secular, universalist body, most of whose members were Jews anxious to escape from the tribalism and particularism they associated with traditional Judaism. And, unlike many Jewish socialists, Morris had sympathies for the effort to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine. While he was not an active Zionist, in later years he endowed a chair in adult education at Tel Aviv University.2
David was a sickly child, forced to miss a great deal of school because of ear infections. Deprived of playmates, he became a voracious reader of newspapers and was determined to become a reporter, no doubt influenced by the success of The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It debuted on Broadway in 1928, dramatizing and glorifying the lives of beat reporters. After he endured twelve operations for mastitis between the ages of six and ten that left him deaf in his right ear, his mother moved with him to San Antonio, Texas, in 1928 to escape a harsh New York winter. For some reason, she enrolled him at the Peacock Military Academy, where he was certain to be a fish out of water. According to Karr, after an intelligence test determined that he had a genius-level IQ, the San Antonio Light published a photograph of the school’s founder measuring his head with a pair of calipers.3
Back home in New York the following year, David’s intelligence was not reflected in his academic prowess. Overweight and unpopular, he skipped school whenever possible and barely scraped by academically. School authorities conducted numerous conferences with his parents to explore why a boy with his abilities performed so poorly. He attended Boys High in Brooklyn from 1931 to February 1936, when he was booted out for being overage. Returning a year later, he managed to graduate in June 1937 with a 65 average, ranking in the bottom 20 percent of his class with no extracurricular activities, except serving as manager of the ice-hockey team. He attributed his dismal performance to a “craving desire to escape into the world from the cloistered existence of a semi-invalid.”4
His father later explained that he “had many misgivings about David’s future until he came out of his teens.” Morris Katz attributed his interest in adult education to the realization, forced on him by David, that a set academic curriculum was not appropriate for all children. Some people like David required “learning from life for life.”5
His less-than-stellar high school career was marked by two rebellious incidents. Standing with a group of tardy students to get late passes, he suggested they all not fill out the required forms, and just play hooky. Promptly hustled into the principal’s office, he had to call his mother to effect his release. Better illustrating his burgeoning political sympathies, during the Communist-inspired Peace Strike of 1934 he was taken out of class and ensconced in the principal’s office to prevent him from participating in the demonstration.6
According to Karr, both of his parents “were conservative in outlook politically.” That claim, however—made to the State Department in an effort to gain a passport—certainly distorted the political milieu in which David started to swim. Particularly after the onset of the Depression, the world of New York Jews leaned left, and summers in Crompond no doubt contributed to his burgeoning radicalism. But it was his entrance into the field of journalism that first nudged him into the wider left-wing world.7
Karr’s undistinguished high school career was marked by only one passion, his dream of becoming a sports reporter. He covered school sports for the New York World-Telegram and the Daily Mirror. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act had inspired a wave of union organizing across the country. Heywood Broun, a close ally of the Communist Party, had founded the American Newspaper Guild in 1935 and the Guild was diligently attempting to establish a foothold in the industry. Karr eagerly pitched in, making an abortive effort to organize a unit of the Newspaper Guild at the Mirror, but he was “rebuffed by the other employees who considered him to be an upstart since he had been working for the paper such a short period of time.” When a unit was formed, Karr joined in 1937 while still in high school. He showed up at picket lines in Long Island and Brooklyn, sometimes going from strike duty to school. He even voted to authorize a strike at the Mirror, but negotiations produced a contract.8
With few evident skills to show after finally getting a high school degree, Karr earned a living with menial jobs, scrambling to find a niche. He later claimed to have written for several other newspapers, but since few had any record of his employment, it is most likely that he was a freelancer who occasionally sent in contributions. After his high school graduation he worked in the shipping department of the Mannheim Company, which bought diamonds from his father, who no doubt had procured the position for him. He bought merchandise at auctions, loaded it into his father’s car, and peddled it to retailers, pushcart owners, and Coney Island concessionaires, clearing five to ten dollars a day. For several months in 1938 he was a salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. He briefly worked as a part-time press agent for jai alai contests at the New York Hippodrome, earning five to ten dollars a week for writing publicity releases; once he even got Babe Ruth to appear as a publicity stunt.
Not until the spring of 1938 did Karr finally discover a calling. In 1937, around the time he graduated from high school, David Katz had changed his name to Karr, presumably to avoid anti-Semitism. It was a growing menace in the United States and particularly notable in New York. Fritz Kuhn, a German immigrant who had become an American citizen, had been elected leader of the German American Bund in 1936. Originally financed by the German government, the Bund worked to bolster the Nazi regime’s image in the United States. Under his leadership, it sponsored training camps for young German-Americans, demonstrations in support of Nazi Germany, and boasted a corps of uniformed storm troopers. Karr later claimed that he had become interested in the issue of Nazi subversion as a result of a conversation with a woman working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and that he did some investigating and wrote a story about Kuhn. Although the Mirror refused to publish it, a colleague sent it to several other Hearst papers, one of which, the conservative Chicago Herald Examiner, ran it. Far from immediately advancing his career, however, the article caught the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who ordered the Mirror to have nothing more to do with him.9
Bill Mahoney, a Communist on the sports staff of the paper who edited Karr’s contributions, suggested that he should talk to Lowell Wakefield, a writer on the CPUSA’s organ, the Daily Worker. At a lunch in August, Wakefield urged him to continue his investigations, and agreed to print whatever Karr wrote about Nazi activities. Anxious to break into journalism, worried about Nazi propaganda in America, impressed by Wakefield, and, he later claimed, young and naïve about Communism, Karr eagerly agreed: “Mr. Wakefield offered me an opportunity to realize this ambition and I accepted his offer.”10
While Karr, like most New York Jews, was undoubtedly worried by the growing prominence of the Bund, this tale of how he initially connected with Communists may have been told to try to minimize his affinity with Communism. His first contribution to the Communist paper was more prosaic than a look at American Nazis; on September 11, 1938 his first piece was titled “Ambulance: How to Call One Fast,” followed on October 2 by “City Owned Water System Costs but One Cent per Day.” On October 9, “Nazi Spy Here Equals 1917 Sabotage Says Expert” got to the ostensible reason Karr had approached Wakefield. Only one of his other five contributions to the Daily Worker dealt even tangentially with the Nazi issue he later said had led him to approach Wakefield. Three concerned the fallout from a sensational fraud case, the McKesson & Robbins trial, while his last article, published on January 15, 1939, was about the boycott of goods made in fascist countries. One review of the Flatbush Players, a drama troupe of a Young Communist League club in Brooklyn, rhapsodized that they had raised more than $600 for “the party fund” and included Communist rhetoric about “the rats and parasites that fatten upon America’s youth.”11
In addition to freelancing for the Daily Worker, Karr traveled to the Yorkville area of Manhattan to buy Nazi propaganda, for which Wakefield reimbursed him, attended Bund meetings, and sat in on the McKesson & Robbins trial. Wakefield also brought Karr along to a spy trial held in New York in late 1938 (four Nazi agents were convicted), asked him to cooperate with Life magazine for a pictorial exposé for which Karr was paid, and sent him to the American League for Peace and Democracy to give speeches at public meetings as an expert on the Nazi menace in the United States, for which he was also paid.12
In just a few short months, David Karr had gone from being a part-time writer of local sports stories to a consultant to a major media institution and a paid speaker for a prominent left-wing organization—all as a result of his connection to the Daily Worker, the official organ of the CPUSA. For a young man with few discernible talents or prospects, it must have been a heady experience. Lowell Wakefield, his benefactor, was a veteran Communist who had been expelled from the University of Washington for leading a student protest against the ROTC. He was serving as the southern organizer of the International Labor Defense in Tennessee in 1931 when his dispatches from Scottsboro, Alabama, first gave prominence to what became the Scottsboro Boys case. Back in Washington State in 1932, he became a leader in the state Communist party and founded and edited Voice of Action, its newspaper. By 1938 he was a Daily Worker correspondent; his coverage of the Nazi trials was turned into a pamphlet, Hitler’s Spy Plot in the U.S.A. Wakefield surely found the enthusiastic and ambitious Karr a useful researcher, and, most likely, pointed him toward investigating Nazis. In Karr’s later telling, Wakefield knew he was not a Communist and discouraged him from joining the Party. He recalled that Wakefield sent him to a man named Berman who was in charge of dispatching Communist infiltrators into the Bund in late November or early December. When Berman learned Karr was not a Communist, he urged him to join the Party; Wakefield “told me not even to think of joining the Communist Party and I did not join the Party.”13
Early in January 1939, Karr claimed he was summoned to the ninth floor of Communist Party headquarters where V. J. Jerome, one of the CPUSA’s ideological commissars, called him to task for the absence of “a class angle” in his review of a movie that had appeared on December 27. When Karr seemed perplexed by the charge, Jerome asked what Party unit he belonged to and abruptly terminated the interview after hearing that Karr was not a Party member. Within days Wakefield called him at home, arranged to meet away from the Daily Worker office, and explained that he had been “hauled up on the carpet for using a non-Communist who was likely also a Hearst spy.” He had been ordered to terminate all connections with David Karr.14
But Wakefield disobeyed Party orders—or at least ignored them, if Karr is to be believed. That same month, he introduced Karr to Albert Kahn, executive secretary of the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda, who hired him to investigate right-wing subversion at a salary of between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars a week. Kahn wasn’t just another well-meaning liberal opponent of fascism, like many of the Council’s members and leaders, which included former American Ambassador to Germany William Dodd. Scion of a distinguished and wealthy family, Kahn had joined the Communist Party in 1938 under the influence of its support for the Spanish Loyalist faction (which was dominated by the Communists) and was forced out of the family firm. Under his direction, the Council was a thinly disguised Communist Party front that published The Hour, which specialized in exposés of alleged Nazi and fascist individuals and groups working in the United States.15
Karr’s job at the American Council was to investigate fascist and Nazi groups and write stories about them. An interview with Anastase Vonsiatsky, the American head of the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists, Karr said, had helped launch a government investigation that ended with Vonsiatsky’s conviction for espionage. In 1939, Karr interviewed the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and wrote articles about William Pelley’s Silver Shirts and other fringe groups that appeared in the magazines Fight, The World, and Equality. In January 1940, Equality published Karr’s attack on Martin Dies, chairman of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, forerunner of HUAC.16
This record later provided plentiful fodder for critics who said that Karr had been a member of the Communist Party and might still be one. Publishing in the Party’s flagship newspaper and associating with Communists over a number of years seemed to present a prima facie case for Party membership. But throughout his life, Karr insisted that his relationship to the Party in the 1930s was, at most, poor judgment, and at best cooperation with those who shared his hostility to fascism and anti-Semitism. The evidence is equivocal.
Like many Jews in the 1930s, the Katzes worried about anti-Semitism and the Nazi regime in Germany. Particularly in the last half of the decade, as the Communist party modified its previously revolutionary stance and proclaimed its commitment to anti-fascism and “Americanism,” David was sympathetic and attracted. No one ever proved he was a card-carrying member, but friends and acquaintances assumed he was at least a close sympathizer. Daniel Bell, the future sociologist, knew him in the late 1930s and believed he was a Communist. Arthur Derounian, who gained fame for exposés of fascist activists in the United States under the name of John Roy Carlson, met Karr when he wrote for The Hour; he assumed from the company David kept that he was in the CPUSA. Leo Bogart, a future public opinion analyst who dated Dave’s younger sister Florence, recalled Karr as a very bright, very impatient presence, seemingly out of Front Page. Already writing for several papers, to Leo he seemed very sophisticated. He wore a black fedora, cultivated an aura of mystery, and was quite open about his pro-Communist views.17
Oscar Brand, the future folksinger, knew David in the late 1930s when he was engaged to the woman who later became Karr’s first ...
