'New deal witch hunt': the Buchanan Committee investigation of the Committee for Constitutional Government.

• Author: Beito, David T.
• Position: Frank Buchanan

Nobody was quite sure what Edward A. Rumely would say in testimony before the U.S House Select Committee on Lobbying in 1950. Would he name names, plead the Fifth Amendment, or defy the committee and thus risk possible jail time? Rumely chose defiance, declaring, "I will not give you the names of people who have bought our books. You are invading our constitutional rights" (qtd. in "Rumely for 3d Time Refuses to List Buyers" 1950). Instead of the Fifth, he pleaded the First Amendment. Even before this encounter, the chairman of the House committee, Frank Buchanan, had warned that the unfriendly witness risked a contempt resolution. He vowed not to "permit Mr. Rumely or his organization to divert this hearing into an argument over constitutional rights" (U.S. House of Representatives 1950b, 1).

Beyond these details, the story of Rumely's confrontation with Congress broke from the familiar Cold War-era mold. He was not a victim of a "witch hunt" by the House Committee on Un-American Activities or by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Far from it. Unlike the era's best-known "unfriendly witnesses" who refused to name names, he was both an ardent anti-Communist and a militant foe of the New Deal. His main critics did not come from the right but were a mixture of New Dealers and Communists.

Edward A. Rumely's showdown with Congress was the final major episode in the "Brown Scare," a name coined by Leo Ribuffo to describe how New Deal attacks of those on the right anticipated McCarthyite methods of intimidation and guilt by association. A key episode in the Brown Scare was the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, in which the federal government prosecuted more than thirty people on the extreme right on dubious charges of conspiracy. Attorney General Francis Biddle brought the case in great part because he faced intense pressure from Franklin D. Roosevelt to take action against "isolationist" critics of Roosevelt's foreign policy before the war. The defendants were charged under the Smith Act of 1940, which, ironically, many of them had supported because they thought that the Communist Party would be targeted (Ribuffo 1994). (1)

Rumely was convicted by a federal court for refusing to provide to a congressional committee the names of people who had purchased his books because it wanted to identify the financial backers of Rumely's organization. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which found Rumely to be within his rights. Similarly, Joseph McCarthy's leftist targets cited United States v. Rumely (345 U.S. 41 [1953]) when refusing to name names. This decision also helped to shape civil rights case law. For example, in NAACP v. Alabama (357 U.S. 449 [1958]), the U.S. Supreme Court cited United States v. Rumely when it upheld the NAACP's right to deny the state of Alabama the names of its members. The forced exposure of names, as the Court pointed out, was a means to suppress participation and donations.

Rumely's fight to protect the privacy of those who purchased his products is important because it demonstrates that the tactics used by McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had roots in the New Deal suppression of conservative thinkers and organizations during the 1930s and 1940s. Far from justifying these anti-Communist investigations, Rumely's story puts the Second Red Scare into a new perspective. It illustrates that both Republicans and Democrats desired to use the force of government--the Internal Revenue Service, special committees, and even the courts--to silence their political opponents. It also illustrates the perils of singling out one party or person for the political inquisitions of the period and the need to examine the institutions that enabled both parties to engage in such widely criticized tactics. Ultimately, United States v. Rumely and NAACP v. Alabama were not about right and left but rather about the rights of individuals against an intrusive state.

Unlike the defendants in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, Rumely was not a marginal figure, nor were his views on the fascist fringe, though some of his critics said they were. He was born in LaPorte, Indiana, in 1882 to a German American Catholic family. His grandfather, Meinrad Rumely, had fled Germany with future 1 U.S. senator Carl Schurz during the liberal revolution of 1848 and went on to found M. Rumely Company, a manufactory of farm implements (Dunnebecke 1987, 8).

In 1915, Rumely made a decision that haunted him the rest of his life. Using funds borrowed from an American citizen then living in Germany, he purchased the New Tork Evening Mail, intending to make it a voice for the Bull Moose (Progressive) movement. On the face of it, this intention seems at odds with his later career as a champion of anti-New Deal conservativism but Rumely did not see it as such. Rumely later claimed that he did not know that all such loans at the time had to be funneled through the German government. After the United States declared war on Germany, the federal government charged that he had violated the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 by taking money from the German government. Even though the alleged offense had occurred in peacetime, Rumely was convicted and, after several appeals, went to prison in 1923 (Dunnebecke 1987, 12-13; Martin 2013, 92- 93). The Coolidge administration, however, granted him a full and unconditional pardon. Although by that time a majority of jurors and the prosecutor also recommended leniency, Rumely's enemies brought the case up repeatedly to discredit him over the next three decades. (2)

The Minton Committee Investigation

During the mid-1980s, Rumely formed an alliance with other critics of the emerging New Deal, most notably Amos Pinchot (brother of the famous conservationist Gifford Pinchot) and Frank Gannett. Although Pinchot had also supported Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, he, like Rumely, always showed strong antiwar and civil libertarian inclinations. He was chairman of the American Union against Militarism and a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Frank Gannett, an anti-imperialist since he had voted for William Jennings Bryan in 1900, was a wealthy pro-free-market owner of a national newspaper chain. Gannett was the only member of this group not to come out of a Bull Moose tradition (Dunnebecke 1987, 13-22; Martin 2013, 93).

One week after Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his plan in 1937 to pack the U.S. Supreme Court, Rumely, Pinchot, and Gannett organized the Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government (CUCG). Gannett, the official chairman, wrote the checks, and Rumely ran the day-to-day operations, initially as public-relations director (Dunnebecke 1987, 45-46). The treasurer was Sumner Gerard, a New York lawyer and veteran of the Rough Riders (Kohn 2014, 176). The group's advisory board members included Pinchot, Hugh Johnson (former head of the National Recovery Administration), novelist Booth Tarkington, and journalist Dorothy Thompson. The CUCG, in mobilizing against "court packing" (a term it did much to popularize), led perhaps the first successful political offensive against the New Deal and pioneered the use of direct mail to gain supporters (Dunnebecke 1987, 49-51). Over the next seven years, the group distributed more than 82 million pieces of literature declaiming such policies as expanded government medical insurance, public housing, and labor legislation. (3)

It did not take long for New Deal congressional Democrats to mount a counterattack. In 1938, Democratic senator Sherman Minton of Indiana announced a sweeping investigation targeting forces opposed to "the objectives of the administration" ("Lodge Charges Senate Seeks WPA Whitewash" 1938). As chair of the Senate Select Committee on Lobbying, Minton had succeeded his mentor, U.S. senator Hugo Black, whom Roosevelt had elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court. During his tenure as this committee's chair, Black had deployed highly controversial methods such as dragnet subpoenas of telegrams (with the assistance of the Federal Communications Commission) and of tax records (with the assistance of the Internal Revenue Service) when probing anti-New Deal business interests and political organizations such as the American Liberty League. Minton, who had been Roosevelt's preferred choice for the first open Supreme Court slot but had turned him down, was even more zealous than his predecessor in fealty to the New Deal. A decade later, however, Minton accepted an offer from Harry S. Truman, who had also once been a key Senate ally, to fill another vacancy on the Court (Ball 1996, 82-93; Czaplicki 2010, 1-77).

Shortly after Minton announced the investigation, Senate committee staffers arrived en masse at the CUCG's headquarters, where they began copying files. After watching this for several hours, Rumely ordered them out, alleging an illegal "fishing expedition" (Committee for Constitutional Government 1944, n.p.). Meanwhile, the Department of the Treasury gave Minton the previous two years of Rumely's income tax return, and the Department of Justice considered a prosecution for contempt of Congress. It decided otherwise after John B. Abt, the special assistant to the attorney general (and, somewhat ironically, a secret member of the Communist Party (4)), predicted that "counsel for the defendant will attempt to convert the trial of his client into a trial of the Senate Committee." (5) Minton's undoing, however, was his proposed bill to ban newspapers from publishing articles known to be false. The resulting public backlash over a perceived threat to free speech led to the collapse of the investigation. But Rumely's critics were not about to give up. He was subject to almost constant investigation over the next twelve years (Dunnebecke 1987, 57-65).

Throughout the 1940s, the CUCG, renamed the Committee for Constitutional Government (CCG) in 1941, was a constant thorn in the New Dealers' side. In an article for Colliers...